Marketing - Sales interface and the role of KDD

Abstract

The phenomenon of less-than-harmonious organizational interface between marketing and sales is not news. Cespedes (1995) seminal treatment of "concurrent marketing" provided strong evidence of customer suboptimization due to the inability of marketing, sales, and (Cespedes argued) also customer service to properly integrate people, processes, systems, and strategies such that both the customer experience and return-on-customer- investment (ROCI) are maximized. The topic reached the "boardroom level" with the publication in 2006 of a special double issue of the Harvard Business Review on sales. The majority of the articles therein were focused wholly or in part on the marketing/sales problem, providing insights for executives on how to break down the barriers to create a more customer-centric enterprise model. © 2010 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.