Will Sales and Marketing Become One in 2009?

Andrew Rudin

Effective Leadership and Common Goals Help Mitigate Infighting

Hi Alan: The title of your blog got me thinking! All organizations have specialized component parts, so feifdoms seem an inevitable byproduct. The resulting problems can be particularly difficult between sales and marketing--two teams that must work closely and often have blurry boundaries.

Although I haven't read Mr. Herbold's book, it seems that providing effective leadership and creating a common vision so disparate teams can collaborate in a meaningful way would be preferable to simply collapsing departmental boundaries and expecting everyone to play nicely in one big sandbox.

Feifdoms have been present in every company I've worked with. The successful companies have leaders who understand how competitive drive and collaborative skills can be leveraged to achieve the company's strategy. It's a fine line--too much internal competition saps an organization's energy and prevents knowledge sharing, and too much collaboration stifles agility.

--AR

Graham Hill

Planned Collaboration Through Organisational Networks

Hi Alan,

A very thoughtful post. As per normal.

I do see some evidence of sales and marketing increasingly being merged into a single group under a single C-level executive. My belief and my experience is that sales and marketing are more similar than they are different and that bringing them together into a single group offers big organisational benefits.

Like all things, the devil is in the details. Sales and marketing groups that are just rolled together without much thought often leads to two different sub-cultures within the same merged group. Sales and marketing end up merged in name, but not merged in nature.

One way to increase post-merger integration that I have found very effective in my own organisation development work is to carry out a social network analysis to identify key individuals who either are already helping to broker the merger of the two culture, or others who should be helped to do some brokering of their own. SNA is quite easy to do using surveys and the results of the analysis is easy to apply organisationally. The results of SNA-driven integration ore often nothing short of amazing.

Take a look at Rob Cross‘ website if you want examples of how merger-integration has been successfully driven using SNA.
http://www.robcross.org/

Even if you haven't merged sales and marketing together into a single group, you can still use SNA to understand how to drive more effective collaboration across the organisation.

Graham Hill
Customer-driven Innovator

PS. I agree with you that the Chief Customer Officer is a red herring in the majority of cases. Installing a new CCO to drive collaboration is unlikely to be effective unless they have a deep understanding of the existing organisational networks, the different sub-cultures across the organisation, and have sufficient insight and authority to drive real collaboration forward. It makes you wonder whether the whole CCO thing is just another part of the US business press' obsession with 'leadership', at the expense of building high-performance work organisations.