Fostering Cooperation and Eliminating Competition

In seeking to resolve these hindrances to efficiency, businesses must focus on two goals: fostering cooperation and eliminating competition between the two departments. The Marketing versus Sales cultural divide must be replaced with a cohesive “culture of the firm.” This culture must consist of a universal language, methodology, and sense of purpose that unite the efforts of multiple departments under a common banner. In the end, all efforts within a business lead towards revenue generation; the means toward that goal is what separates a Sales person from a Researcher or a Marketing expert. A loose common culture is enough to mitigate the differences highlighted by Oliva above. This can be analogized with the idea that it means many things to be an American—it is a culture loose and diverse enough to foster countless interpretations of the meaning, but yet has a commonality of purpose, language, and methodology of culture. Businesses must adopt this philosophy if they seek to overcome harmful differences within their personnel.

            To overcome the strict separation of processes and responsibilities, Sales and Marketing departments must recognize that they are simply two sides of the same coin: Marketing creates demand, while Sales capitalizes on demand. Therefore, both departments should be in the business of demand generation; Sales should inform the work of Marketing to further improve on the process of demand generation. In serving two different ends, both serve a single greater end that must at all times be the end goal: revenue generation through demand generation. As Oliva notes, “The strongest practices—and those who seem to be producing the best (and incidentally most measurable) results—had well-defined processes for ‘demand generation.’ In best practice cases, advanced process tools and techniques such as Six Sigma had been applied to the whole ‘demand generation chain… to craft an efficient, and effective process’” (2006).

            Six Sigma is a process improvement method that seeks to quantify all aspects of a business, recognize relationships and interconnectivity, and identify methods for maximizing output while minimizing input. Six Sigma methods recognize the interconnectedness of every element in a business, every activity and result, every input and output, every function and person. Some people believe that a butterfly in Beijing can cause a hurricane in Honolulu. Yet many people fail to see the effect of poor product literature on winning potential customers. Process improvement makes these connections explicit by making the activities in the process, and their results, explicit (Gorman and Webb 2006). It requires an extraordinary effort to implement a Six Sigma method because it requires a thorough analysis of every factor within a firm. It typically takes one of two forms: (1) Define, Measure, Analyze, Improve, and Control (DMAIC) and (2) Define, Measure, Analyze, Design, and Verify (DMADV). DMAIC is more frequently implemented to improve business practices, while DMADV is often used to develop new products or processes entirely. Because this dissertation discusses process improvement and alignment within the Information Technology context, it will focus more heavily on DMAIC.

In addition to the Six Sigma methods, some businesses have implemented other strategies in order to improve the relationship between Sales and Marketing Departments and consequently to improve profits. One such strategy is known as “strategic selling with marketing.” This approach recognizes that Sales and Marketing departments utilize many of the same key approaches and methodologies, and thus aims to open communication lines between the two departments in order to improve the execution of these methodologies.  

Furthermore, proper training is of the utmost importance in establishing successful Sales and Marketing Departments. Anderson (2007) states that “most sales managers (are) not being trained adequately… (and) most are not being formally trained at all.” The perception of sales training by sales leaders has been statistically proven to be negative. Therefore, companies are seeking new methods to train sales representatives in a manner that will produce results. Many companies are integrating aspects of their marketing departments into training sales representatives; accordingly, many marketing departments are incorporating aspects of sales departments into training as well.

            Overcoming structural barriers is a less complicated matter. Greater alignment is a significant factor in reducing or eliminating structural barriers. A study conducted by Aberdeen on sales effectiveness, which examined over 200 executives from the executive, sales, marketing, and IT management functions, found that companies that had strong collaboration achieve higher sales effectiveness. (Patterson 2007).