Improving Sales and Marketing Collaboration: A Step-by-Step Guide

This book discusses the often problematic relationship between marketing and sales in B2C and B2B firms in terms of the inherent (and the ones that crop up from time to time) problems, causes and solutions. The book presents the material in five short chapters. The target audience for this book is primarily sales and marketing managers in corporate settings as well as graduate business students who will eventually end up in managerial roles. Therefore, this book is focused on being as managerially relevant as possible. Accordingly, we use language easily accessible by managers and limit references to scholarly marketing literature, presenting it non-intrusively, when needed. We illustrate the major issues covered in each of the chapters with material from four or five high-profile cases of well-known US firms.

About the Authors

Avinash Malshe is Associate Professor of Marketing at University of St. Thomas, MN. Over the past eight years, Avinash has extensively researched the interface between sales and marketing functions in multiple organizations, which has resulted in the publication of a number of scientific papers in leading marketing and business journals. He is passionate about translating the findings from his scientific research into implementable solutions for companies. He frequently speaks in executive seminars and also consults with sales and marketing executives on this topic. While engaging with managers, Avinash focuses on employing his deep insight into this area and helping companies to optimize the functioning of this interface so that they can develop and implement winning marketing strategies.

Wim G. Biemans is Associate Professor at the Faculty of Economics and Business of the University of Groningen. He has 25 years of experience researching, teaching and consulting about B2B marketing, market-focused organizations and innovation management. His research has resulted in more than 100 scientific papers and articles and he is a member of the Editorial Board of several leading academic journals on B2B marketing and innovation. In addition, he has (co)authored or edited several books, including B2B Marketing (McGraw-Hill, 2010). He has also taught as guest professor at universities in Europe, Asia and the US (Ghent, Aarhus, Manchester, Beijing, Pisa, Ljubljana, and Minne-apolis) and is a frequent speaker in executive training programs, where he consults companies on improving their B2B marketing and innovation processes.