Page 184 - HBR's 10 Must Reads on Strategic Marketing

ENDING THE WAR BETWEEN SALES AND MARKETING
Idea in Brief

In too many companies, Sales and tackle your most pressing business
Marketing feud like Capulets and challenges.
Montagues. Salespeople accuse
marketers of being out of touch For example, is your market
with what customers really want becoming more commoditized or
or setting prices too high. customized? If so, align Sales and
Marketers insist that salespeople Marketing through frequent,
focus too myopically on individual disciplined cross-functional
customers and short-term sales at communication and joint projects.
the expense of longer-term profits. Is competition becoming more
complex than ever? Then fully
Result? Poor coordination between integrate the teams, by having
the two teams—which only raises them share performance metrics
market-entry costs, lengthens sales and rewards and embedding
cycles, and increases cost of sales. marketers deeply in management
of key accounts.
How to get your sales and
marketing teams to start working Create the right relationship
together? Kotler, Rackham, and between Sales and Marketing,
Krishnaswamy recommend and you reduce internecine
crafting a new relationship squabbling, enabling these former
between them, one with the right combatants to boost top- and
degree of interconnection to bottom-line growth, together.

• Companies can take practical steps to move the two functions
into a more productive relationship, once they’ve established
where the groups are starting from.

Different Roles for Marketing

Before we look closely at the relationship between the two groups,
we need to recognize that the nature of the marketing function
varies significantly from company to company.
Most small businesses (and most businesses are small) don’t es-
tablish a formal marketing group at all. Their marketing ideas come
from managers, the sales force, or an advertising agency. Such busi-
nesses equate marketing with selling; they don’t conceive of market-
ing as a broader way to position their firms.

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