Strategic and Operational Alignment of Sales-

Marketing Interfaces: Dual Paths Within an SME

Configuration
Article review

Nama: Niken Larasati

Class: 3C English for Business
 INTRODUCTION
In a business firm, sales and marketing are customer-facing
functions that perform distinctly different activities. While
insightful, the current understanding of how sales and mar?keting
may overcome the various challenges they encounter to achieve
strategic and operational alignment is not fully developed. Extant
SMI research overwhelmingly samples from firms that embody the
‘living apart together’ SMI configuration
 INTRODUCTION
.This configuration is characterized by a structure wherein sales and
marketing have their own identities and well-defined roles and
responsibilities, which leads to coordination, collaboration, and integration
challenges within SMIs. Specifically, firms with a ‘hidden marketing’
configuration are characterized by a lack of separation between sales and
marketing functions, with sales-related tasks making up most of the strategic
and tactical activities.
 LITERATURE REVIEW

Sales-marketing Interface
Models
Extant SMI research has emphasized the fact that sales and marketing are the two primary
customer-facing functions, which means they are the two primary revenue-generating
functions within an organization. Over the past two decades, significant research efforts
have been devoted in response to a call by Montgomery and Webster (1997) to study and
improve the interface between sales and marketing.
 LITERATURE REVIEW

Sales-marketing Interface
Within the first area of focus, a number Models
of factors have been explicated in the literature
which outline the social, cultural, and worldview-related differences between sales and
marketing that present obstacles to successful alignment and support. The second area of
research focus has examined mechanisms that may counteract the sources of SMI conflict
via enhanced integration, communication, and collaboration, thereby building stronger
alignment between sales and marketing.
 LITERATURE REVIEW

Small and medium-sized

enterprises
Leaders' high level of involvement within SMEs offers resources, such as greater access to
the business networks in which they are embedded, which are critical to marketing
performance and the SME's overall access to complementary organizational resources. At
the same time, leaders' high degree of involvement within SMEs means that marketing tasks
are often derived from the experiential knowledge of leaders and that the subsequent
strategy making power remains with leaders.
 LITERATURE REVIEW

Small and medium-sized

enterprises
Our study focuses specifically on contexts in which the sales and marketing roles are separate
within the SME. As such, SME marketers have the primary responsibility to implement
leadership's strategic agenda and it is imperative that they get salespeople onboard; as they need
of all the help they can receive from field personnel to make strategies succeed. SME’s also
tend to have fewer internal resources necessary to servicing customers and therefore rely on
maximizing gains from available resources in order to realize their full potential
 METHODOLOGY
Sample Data collection Analytical rigor
All depth-interviews were audio-taped
Sample for this study consists Data were collected through in-
and transcribed verbatim. Further, we
of sales and marketing depth interviews. The interviews
managed our interview data, field notes,
professionals from B2B SMEs were discovery-oriented and
and interview transcripts using the
in Saudi Arabia lasted between 50 and 75 min. NVivo 10 software.
 FINDINGS
Marketers' Offorts to
Legitimize Proximal Authority
• Being a part of the leader's inner circle
• Being an exclusive link to the field
• Gaining the ability to access leaders'
personal and social networks
• Securing monetary and non-monetary
favors
Signaling clout
One of the major reasons marketers want to signal
clout to salespeople is that they want to make it
known that their proximity to company leaders has
implicitly made them leaders' trusted lieutenants.
We explicate two specific mechanisms marketers
use to signal clout:
• Top management connection and
• Gatekeeping.
 FINDINGS
Signaling camaraderie
The reason marketers aim to maintain solidarity with salespeople is that they are keenly
aware that they need salespeople's cooperation in implementing marketing strategies;
therefore, they do not want their clout-signaling efforts to make salespeople feel estranged.
we explicate how marketers signal camaraderie through two mechanisms
• Opening doors
• Being invested
 DISCUSSION
Theoretical Implications

Our findings show that for marketers within SMEs that have relatively
limited resources, yet significant. accountability for implementation
success, achieving strategic and operational alignment with field sales
personnel requires a delicate balancing act between seemingly opposite
activities signaling clout and signaling camaraderie.
 DISCUSSION
Managerial implications
While our findings address the specific challenges that may
be particular to an SME context;
• First, the unique distinctions in SMEs create a
circumstance
• Second, marketers' lack of authority and control over
strategic initiatives
 DISCUSSION
Limitations and future research
This study employs a qualitative inquiry in order to understand how
marketers within an under-studied SMI configuration overcome key
contextual challenges that limit the utility of the previously established
mechanisms for achieving strategic and operational alignment. Another
limitation in which future studies could focus on is that this study
represents a snapshot aimed at capturing a specific point in time.
 THANK
Author Article: YOU
Avinash Malshe, Scott B. Friend, Jamal Al-Khatib,
Mohammed I. Al-Habib, Habiballah Mohamed Al-
Torkistanid