Sales and Marketing, and Customer Relationships: A Structured Abstract

This research investigates the impact of sales and marketing collaboration on the customer’s propensity to purchase and customer value, thereby extending the current research into the sales and marketing interface. Prior research has established that sales departments may fail to support marketing initiatives and that marketing been known to fail to communicate marketing objectives effectively and to exclude sales from decision-making. This lack of coordination may become visible to the customer and consequently influence their relationship with the supplier. We suggest that internal sales and marketing relationships can impact on relationship quality and consequently the customers’ propensity to purchase. Customers demand greater value from their suppliers and consequently a relationship-building approach to marketing has been more widely adopted by many organizations (Harker and Egan 2006; Biggemann and Buttle 2012). Further, sustainable long-term relationships benefit the supplier by reducing costs and increasing sales (e.g., Hennig-Thurau et al. 2002). It has been suggested that relationship quality encompasses the concepts of satisfaction, trust and commitment related to the selling organization (Crosby et al. 1990; Palmatier et al. 2006). The study was conducted through a series of semi-structured, hour-long interviews within the sales and marketing personnel from four B2B organizations in the UK, and with a selection of their customers. This approach produces rich qualitative data on the participants’ attitudes and experiences of the interface between buyer and seller. The customer respondents were selected randomly from the organizations’ databases. The study highlights that conflict or collaboration between sales and marketing is visible to the customer and affects the different dimensions of relationship quality. Collaboration creates customer satisfaction and operating through the dimensions of trust to improve customer commitment, and creates customer value in the relationship and leads to an increased propensity to purchase