Competitiveness and Sustaining Performance : Integrating Sales and Marketing

Sales and marketing integration is important in reducing inter-functional conflict, creating customer trust, satisfaction and improving overall performance of organization. Hence, there is need to integrate sales and marketing by enhancing collaboration between them. A lack of cooperation between sales and marketing has the potential to damage the overall success of the organization. Sales and marketing research should not only focus on analyzing factors that detract sales and marketing integration, but also to establish symbiotic relationship between sales and marketing and identify facilitators of such integration in terms of necessary resources and capabilities required by the organization. This research works in this direction, and provides in-depth insights for enhancing sales and marketing integration by identifying major issues in sales and marketing relationship; studying various facilitators of sales and marketing integration and then suggesting two-stage research framework of sales and marketing integration