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Ending the War Between Sales and Marketing www.hbrreprints.org

Ending the War
Between Sales and
Marketing

by Philip Kotler, Neil Rackham, and
Suj Krishnaswamy

Included with this full-text

Harvard Business Review

article:
The Idea in Briefthe core idea
The Idea in Practiceputting the idea to work

1

Article Summary

3

Ending the War Between Sales and Marketing
A list of related materials, with annotations to guide further
exploration of the articles ideas and applications

14

Further Reading

In many companies, sales
forces and marketers feud like
Capulets and Montagues
with disastrous results. Heres
how to get them to lay down
their swords.

Reprint
R0607E
Ending the War Between Sales and Marketing

page 1

The Idea in Brief
The Idea in Practice

C
OPYRIGHT © 2006 HAR
V
A
R
D
BUSINESS SCHO
OL PUBLISHING C
ORP
OR
A
TION.
ALL RIGHTS RESER
VED.

In too many companies, Sales and Market-
ing feud like Capulets and Montagues.
Salespeople accuse marketers of being out
of touch with what customers really want
or setting prices too high. Marketers insist
that salespeople focus too myopically on
individual customers and short-term sales
at the expense of longer-term profits.
Result? Poor coordination between the two
teamswhich only raises market-entry
costs, lengthens sales cycles, and increases
cost of sales.
How to get

your

sales and marketing teams
to start working together? Kotler, Rackham,
and Krishnaswamy recommend crafting a
new relationship between them, one with
the right degree of interconnection to
tackle your most pressing business challenges.
For example, is your market becoming
more commoditized or customized? If so,

align

Sales and Marketing through fre-
quent, disciplined cross-functional commu-
nication and joint projects. Is competition
becoming more complex than ever? Then
fully

integrate

the teams, by having them
share performance metrics and rewards
and embedding marketers deeply in man-
agement of key accounts.
Create the

right

relationship between Sales
and Marketing, and you reduce interne-
cine squabbling, enabling these former
combatants to boost top-

and

bottom-
line growth, together.
How interconnected should

your

Sales and Marketing teams be? The authors recommend deter-
mining their existing relationship, then strengthening interconnection if conditions warrant.

WHATS THE CURRENT RELATIONSHIP?
THE RELATIONSHIP IS
IF SALES AND MARKETING

Undefined

Focus on their own tasks and agendas unless conflict arises
between them.
Have developed independently.
Devote meetings between them to conflict resolution, not
proactive collaboration.

Defined

Have rules for preventing disputes.
Share a language for potentially contentious areas (e.g., defining a
lead).
Use meetings to clarify mutual expectations.

Aligned

Have clear but flexible boundaries: salespeople use marketing
terminology; marketers participate in transactional sales.
Engage in joint planning and training.

Integrated

Share systems, performance metrics, and rewards.
Behave as if theyll rise or fall together.
The Idea in Practice

(continued)

Ending the War Between Sales and Marketing

page 2

SHOULD YOU CREATE MORE INTERCONNECTION?

Strengthening Sales/Marketing interconnection isnt always necessary. For example, if your company is small and the teams operate indepen-
dently while enjoying positive, informal relationships, dont interfere. The table offers guidelines for companies that

do

need change.

IF THE CURRENT
RELATIONSHIP IS...
AND...
THEN MOVE THE
RELATIONSHIP TO...
BY...

Undefined
Sales and Marketing have
frequent conflicts and compete
over resources.
Effort is duplicated, or tasks fall
between the cracks.
Defined
Creating clear rules of
engagement, including hand-off
points for important tasks (such as
lead follow-up).
Defined
The market is becoming
commoditized or customized.
Product life cycles are shortening.
Despite clarified roles, efforts are still
duplicated or tasks neglected.
Aligned
Establishing regular meetings
between Sales and Marketing to
discuss major opportunities and
problems.
Defining who should be consulted
on which decisions (e.g., Involve
the brand manager in $2 million+
sales opportunities).
Creating opportunities for Sales
and Marketing to collaboratefor
example, planning a conference
together or rotating jobs.
Aligned
The business landscape is marked
by complexity and rapid change.
Marketing has split into upstream
(strategic) and downstream
(tactical) groups.
Integrated
Having downstream marketers
develop sales tools, help
salespeople qualify leads, and use
feedback from Sales to sell existing
offerings to new market segments.
Evaluating and rewarding both
teams performance based on
shared important metrics. For
instance, establish a sales goal to
which both teams commit. And
define key sales metricssuch as
number of new customers and
closingsfor salespeople

and


downstream marketers.
Ending the War
Between Sales and
Marketing

by Philip Kotler, Neil Rackham, and
Suj Krishnaswamy

harvard business review julyaugust 2006
page 3

C
OPYRIGHT © 2006 HAR
V
A
R
D
BUSINESS SCHO
OL PUBLISHING C
ORP
OR
A
TION.
ALL RIGHTS RESER
VED.

In many companies, sales forces and marketers feud like Capulets and
Montagueswith disastrous results. Heres how to get them to lay
down their swords.

Product designers learned years ago that
theyd save time and money if they consulted
with their colleagues in manufacturing rather
than just throwing new designs over the wall.
The two functions realized it wasnt enough to
just coexistnot when they could work to-
gether to create value for the company and for
customers. Youd think that marketing and
sales teams, whose work is also deeply inter-
connected, would have discovered something
similar. As a rule, though, theyre separate
functions within an organization, and, when
they do work together, they dont always get
along. When sales are disappointing, Market-
ing blames the sales force for its poor execu-
tion of an otherwise brilliant rollout plan. The
sales team, in turn, claims that Marketing sets
prices too high and uses too much of the bud-
get, which instead should go toward hiring
more salespeople or paying the sales reps
higher commissions. More broadly, sales de-
partments tend to believe that marketers are
out of touch with whats really going on with
customers. Marketing believes the sales force
is myopictoo focused on individual cus-
tomer experiences, insufciently aware of
the larger market, and blind to the future. In
short, each group often undervalues the
others contributions.
This lack of alignment ends up hurting cor-
porate performance. Time and again, during
research and consulting assignments, weve
seen both groups stumble (and the organiza-
tion suffer) because they were out of sync.
Conversely, there is no question that, when
Sales and Marketing work well together, com-
panies see substantial improvement on im-
portant performance metrics: Sales cycles are
shorter, market-entry costs go down, and the
cost of sales is lower. Thats what happened
when IBM integrated its sales and marketing
groups to create a new function called Chan-
nel Enablement. Before the groups were inte-
grated, IBM senior executives Anil Menon
and Dan Pelino told us, Sales and Marketing
operated independent of one another. Sales-
people worried only about fullling product
demand, not creating it. Marketers failed to
Ending the War Between Sales and Marketing

harvard business review julyaugust 2006
page 4

Philip Kotler

is the S.C. Johnson & Son
Distinguished Professor of International
Marketing at Northwestern Universitys
Kellogg School of Management in Evan-
ston, Illinois. This is his 11th article for
HBR.

Neil Rackham

is a visiting profes-
sor at the University of Portsmouth in
England, the author of

Spin Selling


(McGraw-Hill, 1988), and a coauthor of

Rethinking the Sales Force

(McGraw-Hill,
1999).

Suj Krishnaswamy

(
sujk@
stinsights.com
) is the founder and a
principal of Stinsights (www.stinsights
.com), a Chicago-based business strate-
gy and market research firm specializing
in salesmarketing interface.

link advertising dollars spent to actual sales
made, so Sales obviously couldnt see the
value of marketing efforts. And, because the
groups were poorly coordinated, Market-