Conflicts between marketing and sales functions concerning customer acquisition process in business-to-business firms hurt profits. Marketing claims that sales disregards qualified leads; sales questions lead quality. To address such conflicts and avoid threats to profits, we consider several...

Many business-to-business (B2B) selling situations involve outside sales (OS) representatives (reps) interfacing with customers and inside sales (IS) rep largely supporting OS reps. Put differently, OS reps are linchpins, while IS reps generally have auxiliary roles. Perhaps for this reason, the...