With developments in technology allowing for complex sales funnels and nurturing campaigns, the line where marketing stops, and sales starts is becoming increasingly blurred. Although not all B2B companies have products suited for e-commerce, more and more transactions can be handled online and the traditional set up of marketing providing leads to hand on to sales to develop is becoming less common.

Since the technology is there, is seems that a closer integration of sales and marketing departments is on the cards. But does this mean that two departments are better off being combined into one?

The question is not a new one. Indeed, over time – and across organisations – marketing and sales have had differing relationships.

I came across the Harvard Business review’s 2006 article by Philip Kotler, Neil Rachman and Suge Krishnaswamy called ‘Ending the War Between Sales and Marketing’.

Although it’s over 15 years old, and taking into account the massive technological changes since, it’s actually still relevant. Although it predates the smartphone and the regular use of AI, coming from a time when social media was in its infancy, the tensions between sales and marketing were still a hot topic.

A key idea Kotler et al base their arguments on is the evolution of marketing as a business function. Way back at the beginning of the 20th century, the focus of a business was obviously on selling because you need customers to survive. But as competition grows, this is not enough.  Your business needs to differentiate (offer a better value proposition) and attract more potential customers (advertise and promote).

Marketing grew out of sales to meet these two needs, allowing sales to focus on selling.

But as with any evolution, it happens in different ways in different places.

In small organisations, for example, many of the marketing ideas may come from senior management. Or ‘marketing’ will be a support function for sales. This set-up works well, as the customer-focused side of the business is fully integrated.

It’s only when a company reaches a certain size that marketing appears as a separate entity. And this is when the war between sales and marketing can start. Instead of an integrated unit, there are two customer-focused departments each competing for budgets and recognition.

In today’s companies, data will also be a common sticking point. Full and accurate data are essential for marketing automation to work, but often the data is owned and managed by sales. Their focus is on securing a sale, not capturing data: they are rewarded for orders booked, not fields completed or updated. Marketing’s demands to keep data clean is seen as a distraction from them doing their job of securing orders.

Obviously, this state of affairs is not helpful for anybody.

The authors suggest the next stage of evolution is actually re-integration, but along different lines: Upstream and Downstream.

The Downstream marketing team takes a more sales support role, working closely with them to work on lead generation, nurturing campaigns and building the feedback loop.

Upstream marketing focuses on a product support and development role. This is looking at the bigger picture of market data and customer knowledge, and how these can feed into developing a superior offering.

What next in the changing landscape?

Maybe we have now reached the next stage in the evolution of Marketing: a point where the function should be integrated across the whole company and cease to exist as a separate department. This is possible because technology has developed in such a way as to create mass access to communication platforms. Just as the printing press increased access to knowledge, social media platforms mean that many (most?) people can now publish and curate their own content streams.

There is also a blurring of the lines between personal and professional life. People not only post about work on Facebook and Instagram, but will also happily post personal messages on their LinkedIn feeds. However, your ‘personal’ LinkedIn account becomes a channel for corporate communication when you need to post an advert or job vacancy.

Never has it been more important to make staff aware of their role as company ambassadors (and possibly never more difficult to control).

If everybody in the organisation has access to social media, everybody has the potential to become part of the communications team and needs to recognise that part of their role. In this way ‘Marketing’ needs to integrate not only with Sales but have more integration throughout the organisation.

While a nice idea in theory, there is an obvious problem with this model. If the marketing function is integrated into sales, product development and every other customer-facing function, there would be no unifying element to keep everyone on a single message.

Therefore, final part of the full integration of marketing within an organisation would have to be at board level. In this idea scenario, the top-level decisions made by the board would not only have a customer-focus but would then filter throughout the organisation to keep everyone aligned and on-message.

But as we all know, organisations don’t work like this in reality (I did say ‘ideal’). In reality, communication between directors and the middle management is not perfect. People at all levels of seniority have their own agendas, levels of engagement and competence which can easily distort messages as they are passed from team to team. Perhaps there is a technological solution waiting in the wings to help keep everyone on message – although there is something quite Orwellian about the idea.  

Change and chaos

What this thought experiment shows is that there is no simple answer as to how marketing might evolve next. Although the evolution of systems and process is a much faster process than biology, its hard to see how things are developing from the inside. Afterwards, it’s easy to see a neat pattern for how things were developing but from the inside as the changes are taking place, it’s not that clear cut.

Change is very often chaotic. No matter how carefully guided or planned, there is resistance while unplanned secondary effects can easily ripple out and change the entire landscape.

To me, it’s pretty certain that marketing is on the cusp of a major change – and it will be interesting to see how it unfolds.