Organizations are turning to the collective knowledge of selling teams in order to manage increasingly complex customers and solutions. One specific cross-functional unit that organizations are commonly using when selling to business-to-business customers is a team of sales and marketing personnel. While the interface between sales and marketing has received attention in the literature, which notes the inherent advantages and challenges of incorporating both roles on a team, opportunities remain to examine sales and marketing selling centers (SMSCs): instances where sales and marketing jointly and directly interact on a relatively temporary basis in customer-facing situations. The authors utilize a discovery-oriented, theories-in-use inquiry to better understand customer-facing SMSC processes, facilitators, and outcomes. Based on insights captured from 29 in-depth interviews with informants who each served on SMSCs in both sales and marketing roles, this study extends sales research by providing a dual perspective of those working on SMSCs, thus enhancing the utility of such malleable selling teams.

Introduction

Rapidly changing and increasingly demanding customer preferences require alignment between marketing and sales in order to source customer insights and implement customer-centric strategies (Biemans, Makovec Brenčič, & Malshe, 2010; Malshe & Sohi, 2009a; Rouziès et al., 2005). Additionally, increasingly large customer organizations and buying centers require sales organizations to roll out sales and marketing teams when selling complex solutions to strategic accounts (Arnett & Badrinarayanan, 2005). Each of the above marketplace conditions illustrate the critical importance of sales and marketing personnel working together to successfully interface and develop strong relationships with buying center members within business-to-business (B2B) customer organizations (Jones, Dixon, Chonko, & Cannon, 2005). However, sales-marketing teams face a number of challenges as firms struggle to (a) retain sales and marketing functional distinctiveness while simultaneously coordinating efforts around organizational goals (Le Meunier-FitzHugh & Piercy, 2011); and (b) to balance externally customer-focused activities and internally team-focused activities that can hinder (job demands) or help (job resources) customer value creation (Sleep, Bharadwaj, & Lam, 2015). Empirical focus on sales teams represents an important analytical shift occurring both within academic literature (Brown, Evans, Mantrala, & Challagalla, 2005) and in the approximate 75% of firms that use selling teams (Cummings, 2007). A team consisting of sales and marketing personnel is one specific cross-functional unit that organizations are widely utilizing in B2B customer exchanges. For example, sales and marketing practitioners are increasingly working closely to implement account-based marketing (ABM) strategies and drive revenue across their businesses; “marketing strategy that partners with sales to focus your combined energy on a more targeted approach to finding, engaging, and closing the accounts that really matter naturally aligns to the C-suite and the organization’s strategic goals” (Marketo, 2016, p. 2). Strategies such as ABM allow organizations to employ targeted account-based approaches utilizing both sales and marketing. As a result, 208% more revenue is generated by the marketing in companies that have aligned sales and marketing teams (Marketo, 2016). Team selling achieves such firm-level performance results by leveraging what is referred to as pooled intelligence, which capitalizes on varied functional experiences and abilities across departments to increase the speed of learning, enhance coordination, improve strategy implementation, and offer better solutions to customers (Arnett & Badrinarayanan, 2005; Deeter-Schmelz & Ramsey, 1995; Mengüç, Auh, & Uslu, 2013). Sales-marketing teams therein collect complementary skills and insights inherent to each function’s unique customer-centric role. Such capabilities include marketers’ strategy creation skills, long-term foci, end-user insights, and market segmentation vantage points, as well as the parallel capabilities of salespersons’ strategy implementation skills, opportunity-based foci, purchasing agent insights, and account-by-account vantage points (Biemans & Makovec Brenčič, ۲۰۰۷; Dothan, 2004; Homburg, Jensen, & Krohmer, 2008; Rouziès et al., 2005). That said, despite the numerous gains that collaboration between sales and marketing personnel offers for customer opportunities, such efforts are often suboptimal for myriad reasons (Kotler, Rackham, & Krishnaswamy, 2006). The most common explanation is that sales and marketing personnel are frequently at odds (Smith, Gopalakrishna, & Chatterjee, 2006), which impacts their strategic outcomes (Malshe, 2011).