Marketing Strategy and Competitive Positioning pdf ebook

The signs of poor marketing/sales integration
The pioneering study by Strahle et al. (1996) noted that sales managers frequently do not set 
sales objectives consistent with the strategy developed by marketing executives for a product, 
through poor communications and incompatibility between marketing and sales goals. They 

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CHAPTER 16 STRATEGY IMPLEMENTATION AND INTERNAL MARKETING
note also the attempts by marketing executives to mislead sales managers about product 
performance in an effort to manipulate their behaviour. Unsurprisingly, the result is feelings 
of distrust and resentment towards marketing on the part of sales managers. Other research 
also suggests that changes in marketing strategy do not lead to consistent modification of 
sales operations (Colletti and Chonko, 1997).
A checklist of signals that marketing and sales are not well aligned is provided by the 
following statements, which may be assessed by marketing and sales executives in their 
own operations:
● 
Your marketing strategies fail to affect sales operations, impeding effective 
implementation.
● 
New marketing strategies ignore customer and competitor insights developed by the 
salesforce.
● 
Managers in other functions misunderstand what sales can and should achieve.
● 
Conflicts between sales and marketing managers frequently spill over into acrimony.
● 
You are experiencing serious salesperson retention problems and escalating replacement 
costs.
● 
There are serious mismatches between the tasks that salespeople must perform to 
implement marketing strategy and the ways in which they are organised, evaluated and 
rewarded.
● 
Career paths for salespeople take the best performers away from customers and place 
them in administration or management.
● 
Your salespeople struggle to cope with the ambiguous roles they now play.
● 
Your company offers little support for salespeople to make the transition from transac-
tion to relationship selling.
● 
Your salespeople are hostile to your other routes to market, such as the Internet.
● 
Your customer relationships are getting weaker, not stronger (Hulbert et al., 2003).
Careful assessment of these statements may be useful in identifying the beginnings of 
marketing/sales rifts that would otherwise remain hidden until becoming serious barriers 
to effective cross-functional working.