marketing and sales

In the traditional perspective on marketing and sales, both departments serve customers by performing complementary activities (Malshe & Biemans, 2014a; Matthyssens & Johnston, 2006). Marketing primarily focuses on understanding markets and customers, devising compelling value propositions, developing marketing strategies for creating superior customer value and providing sales support, and sales are entrusted with tasks such as executing marketing strategies, maintaining customer relationships, and closing the sale (Homburg, Workman Jr, & Krohmer, 1999; Rouziès et al., 2005). The creation of superior customer value is regarded as fundamental to a firm's long-term survival and growth in business-to-business (B2B) markets (Almquist, Cleghorn, & Sherer, 2018; Anderson & Narus, 1998; Terho, Haas, Eggert, & Ulaga, 2012).

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To this effect, a firm's marketing and sales departments must collaborate to understand customers (Hult, Morgeson, Morgan, Mithas, & Fornell, 2017), and develop and implement effective marketing strategies (Morgan, Whitler, Feng, & Chari, 2019) so the firm can deliver superior value to customers (Guenzi & Troilo, 2007; Hughes, Le Bon, & Malshe, 2012). For example, through their daily interactions with customers, salespeople may collect market intelligence, share it with marketing, participate in development of marketing strategy (Gonzalez & Claro, 2019; Gordon, Schoenbachler, Kaminski, & Brouchous, 1997; Judson, Schoenbachler, Gordon, Ridnour, & Weilbaker, 2006; Malshe & Sohi, 2009b) and implement the strategy in the field thereby helping firms deliver superior customer value (Blocker, Cannon, Panagopoulos, & Sager, 2012; Haas, Snehota, & Corsaro, 2012).

While these activities emphasize the need for close collaboration between sales and marketing, both departments have their own agendas and different perspectives often generate tensions between the two groups (Beverland, Steel, & Dapiran, 2006; Dawes & Massey, 2005; Dewsnap & Jobber, 2002). In B2B firms “Marketing people talk to … business end-users, while salespeople typically spend their time with distributors and purchasing agents. Marketers deal with market segments and specific product groups. Sales, however, sees the world account by account” (Donath, 2004, p. 5). As a result, the sales-marketing interface (SMI) is frequently characterized by miscommunication, conflict, and resentment, and senior managers “often describe the working relationship between Sales and Marketing as unsatisfactory”, concluding that these functions “undercommunicate, underperform, and overcomplain” (Kotler, Rackham, & Krishnaswamy, 2006, p. 78). An ineffective SMI decreases a firm's performance through salespeople rejecting qualified leads, below-average conversion rates within the sales funnel, and poor efforts to generate demand, capture revenue, and gain a competitive advantage (Hobbs, 2015; Sabnis, Chatterjee, Grewal, & Lilien, 2013). An ineffective SMI at a typical $1 billion B2B firm has been estimated to cost $14 million in sales and marketing expenses and $100 million in lost revenue opportunities (Gerard, 2013).

Even though the SMI, as a critical organizational interface, has received increasing attention from scholars, the growing literature on sales-marketing interface lacks a systematic review. While the findings from published studies provide a wealth of insight, it is not always clear how these findings are related and build off one another. It is a common practice, after a domain has evolved over a period of 20–30 years, to conduct a systematic literature review that assesses, analyzes, and synthesizes the current state of knowledge (Bolander, Chaker, Pappas, & Bradbury, 2021; Lyngdoh, Chefor, Hochstein, Britton, & Amyx, 2021; Williams & Plouffe, 2007).

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With this article, we fill this void within the SMI domain by conducting a systematic review of the extant SMI literature. We contribute to this literature stream in four major ways. First, we identify 73 articles about SMI and provide an overview of the current state of knowledge about SMIs: how SMI research is usually conducted, how the field evolved, the main topics that have been addressed, and the key insights from the extant literature. Second, we identify several inconsistencies and definitional ambiguities across studies and resolve them by developing a definition of the SMI that is grounded in the extant SMI literature. Third, we present a conceptual model that integrates and synthesizes the extant SMI knowledge and serves to explain how the key concepts and variables from existing studies are related to each other. Fourth, we identify gaps in the SMI literature, which are then used to derive several promising directions for future research that will help advance our understanding of SMIs. In the next section, we start by describing how we conducted our systematic literature review.

2. Research method: systematic literature review

We studied the scholarly body of knowledge about SMI by conducting a systematic literature review – following a similar process as suggested by Bolander et al. We began our systematic literature review with a discussion among the research team members to clarify the focus of our inquiry (Nguyen, de Leeuw, & Dullaert, 2018).

2.1. Search procedure

We limited the scope of our systematic review of the extant body of published research on SMIs to academic articles published during the years 1990–2021. We started our systematic search for relevant articles in 1990 because the first publications that explicitly discuss the relationship between sales and marketing appeared in the early 1990s. Articles published before 1990 typically imply the relationship between sales and marketing without explicitly discussing the interface between the two functions. For example, scholars have discussed how industrial salespeople may collect market intelligence (Grace & Pointon, 1980; Moss, 1979) without focusing on the role of SMI in collecting, disseminating, and using market information. Our selected period of 1990–2021 has a sufficient range to study how SMI research has evolved, includes all seminal articles on the SMI (Lyngdoh et al., 2021), and is similar to the time frame used by other review articles in the domain of sales management (Bolander et al., 2021; Lyngdoh et al., 2021; Williams & Plouffe, 2007).

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We used multiple approaches to identify relevant articles for our systematic literature review. First, we conducted a manual search of the major marketing and sales journals that we identified, based on the research team's prior research in the SMI domain, as the most likely outlets for research about the SMI. To keep our search manageable, we identified a list of six journals that publish regularly about marketing and sales (Journal of Marketing, Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, Industrial Marketing Management, Journal of Business and Industrial Marketing, Journal of Business Research, and Journal of Personal Selling & Sales Management) and manually examined article titles, abstracts, keywords, and conceptual frameworks to identify relevant articles.

Second, to complement our initial list with articles published in other journals, we conducted a broad article search in online databases, including EBSCO's Business Source Complete, ScienceDirect, and Google Scholar, using many variations of SMI-related terms to maximize our reach, such as “sales-marketing interface”, “sales-marketing integration”, “sales-marketing collaboration”, “sales-marketing alignment”, and “sales and marketing”. Third, we expanded our article search by using forward- and backward-looking reference searches (Johnson & Jaramillo, 2017). For example, we identified SMI-related scale development articles and explored other articles that subsequently cited these articles.

2.2. Inclusion criteria

All identified candidate articles for our review were evaluated based on two inclusion criteria. First, articles needed to focus on the interaction or relationship between a firm's sales and marketing functions. Articles that focused on only sales or marketing or their interfaces with other parts of the organization (e.g., operations or R&D) were excluded. nature of SMIs: (1) the impact of digital technologies on SMIs, (2) the impact of national culture on SMIs, (3) SMIs in SMEs, and (4) the impact of changing roles of sales and marketing.