Authors: Maja Makovec Brencic; Wim G. Biemans
A key characteristic of a market-oriented organization is harmonious interfaces between the variousparts of the organization. One of these interfaces is the marketing-sales interface. While bothmarketing and sales are focused on serving customers and designed to play complementary roles,recent studies conclude that in practice marketing and sales often work at cross purposes. This paperpresents an exploratory investigation of the marketing-sales interface in Dutch and Slovenian B2Bfirms. The Slovenian firms are generally less developed than their Dutch counterparts and lack a truemarketing capability. Most of the Dutch B2B firms recently implemented marketing in theirorganizations and managed to develop effective marketing-sales interfaces. Nevertheless, there is stillroom for improvement. Our findings emphasize the need to both create a distinct marketing functionand develop a supportive organizational culture characterized by a continuous open dialogue betweenmarketing and sales aimed at creating superior value for customers.
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Publish Year: 2005
Conference: Rotterdam, Netherlands (2005)