Creating Effective Sales and Marketing Relationships

Introduction

The operation of the sales and marketing interface remains a critical and topical dilemma for executives. Sales and marketing functions have the capabilities required to assist the organization to adapt to rapidly changing environments through focusing on customer needs and the activities of competitors (Malshe 2010). To gain the maximum benefits for the organization, sales and marketing need to collaborate as this has been found to have the potential to affect the bottom line (Le Meunier-FitzHugh and Piercy 2007). Sales and marketing functions also have the common goals of understanding customer needs and solving customers’ problems in a way that is superior to their competitors. Consequently, to achieve these and other common goals, ...