Introduction

In today’s competitive business environment, salespeople’s collaborative efforts play a major role in building and sustaining buyer-seller relationships (Darmon, 2004). Importantly, efforts to build productive buyer-seller relationships and to execute customer-centric tasks require close collaboration between salespeople and members of other functional units within the organization; to the extent that achieving customer satisfaction demands collaborative exchanges between a diverse set of organizational members (Enz & Lambert, 2015; Steward, Walker, Hutt, & Kumar, 2010). While collaborative efforts between salespeople and members of other functional units may help create greater customer satisfaction outcomes, the nature of the sales function mandates that salespeople operate beyond the borders of their organization, which consequently limits their involvement in internal organizational social exchange processes (Dubinsky, Nataraajan, & Huang, 2004). As boundary spanners committed to forming and nurturing relationships with external customers, there is a risk that salespeople may become alienated from internal organizational stakeholders, potentially jeopardizing smooth collaborative exchanges between salespeople and members of other functional units (Tanner, Tanner, & Wakefield, 2015). Despite its importance to sales organizations, scholarly understanding of how and when internal collaborative exchanges between salespeople and other organizational members is developed and leveraged for customer satisfaction remains under-researched. To address this gap in the sales literature, this study draws insights from the intra-firm knowledge, social identity and social exchange literature (e.g. De Clercq & Sapienza, 2006; Floyd & Lane, 2000; Tajfel & Turner, 1979) to propose that customer satisfaction is enhanced when firms leverage resources across functional units to aid salespeople’s efforts to address customer needs. However, the process of satisfying customer needs is surrounded by evolving uncertainties with respect to the level of the resource contribution of key internal stakeholders. The knowledge exchange literature suggests that the resources under consideration (e.g. sales knowledge, market information, customer database, knowledge on competition) required to reduce this uncertainty about customer satisfaction creation is often dispersed across different functional units, usually used as a source of power, and therefore not readily shared among functional units (Kim & Mauborgne, 1998). Leveraging such dispersedly distributed resources to create a superior market offering requires collaborative exchanges among all organizational members in possession of such resources (Nonaka, 1994). On this front, this study proposes that internal marketing (IM) may play a vital role in fostering collaborative exchanges between salespeople and members of other functional units. The study argues that a firm’s ability to align and attain compatibility in terms of customer satisfaction goals across functional units is a channel through which IM can lead to customer satisfaction. Furthermore, following social identification and social exchange theories, this study argues that the effect of IM on customer satisfaction via cross-functional goal compatibility is strengthened when salespeople are effectively connected to other organizational members outside the sales function.