Marketing-Sales Alignment and Business Practices: An Abstract

Coordination between marketing and sales departments is a recurrent managerial problem and represents a major performance issue for companies (Homburg and Jensen 2007; Inyang and Jaramillo 2020; Pal 2019). Difficulties encountered in coordinating the two services are long-standing (Malshe et al. 2017; Pal 2019). Moreover, digital transformation has also redefined the sales perimeter and the sales profession, has generated new objectives for the teams such as mass lead generation for marketers versus customer conversion at the best conditions and expectations of qualified prospects for salespeople (Pöyry et al. 2017; Sabnis et al. 2013).

In this context, the objective of this research, conducted in a French context, is to understand the development and implementation of alignment between the marketing strategy and the sales department, and to identify the solutions put into practice by managers to solve the coordination problems encountered. A content analysis conducted with three types of respondents of French firms (marketing managers, sales managers and consulting firm managers) identified various critical practices such as the absence of regular meetings involving the heads of the departments, the absence of internal procedures determining the respective objectives or the absence of collaborative projects.

These results lead to the recommendation of coordination mechanisms and modalities to be mobilized and to identify those to be avoided to maximize the chances of success. The digitalization of companies impacts the relationship between marketing and sales departments and creates new constraints in their coordination, new tensions, a restructuring of their missions and new needs (in terms of data, digital tools, training or recruitment). Therefore, critical practices are identified such as the lack of regular meetings involving department managers, the absence of internal procedures determining respective objectives or the absence of collaborative projects. Managers, and in particular sales managers, must use pedagogy and communication skills to explain, reassure and legitimize strategic choices, and finally get their teams to accept these changes. Therefore, from the outset, sales managers must also be aware of the issues and be convinced of the strategic choices they make, and to do so, their involvement must be worked on.

The results show the importance of formalizing communication, creating trust between services (Malshe et al. 2017) through the valorization of successes, co-construction of value. It is essential for managers to push sales and marketing teams towards common and shared customer-oriented objectives.