The Role of Marketing and Sales in Organizations and Its Impact on Performance

Götz Oliver, Hansen Ann-Kristin, Jo A-Ram, Krafft Manfred

Abstract
Increasingly, marketing is viewed less as a distinct functional unit and more as a set of organizational processes where the entire company participates in organization-wide market-oriented behavior. The question in this respect is whether marketing and sales are required as steering functions for the successful implementation of market orientation. Consequently, the following questions arise: What is the marketing and sales departments’ current role in companies? What factors drive their role? How does their power interact with market orientation with regard to business performance?
Here, authors Götz, Hansen, Jo, and Krafft conduct a cross-industry study to explore whether powerful marketing and sales departments strengthen the performance of market orientation. The authors targeted CEOs, marketing managers, and sales managers in the automotive, cosmetics, electronics, financial services, and food industries with an e-mail questionnaire, obtaining 153 responses.
Their results show that the marketing department has a significant positive effect on the relationship between market-oriented behavior and performance, whereas the sales department reveals a negative interaction effect. These findings indicate that the responsibility for marketing activities should be held by the marketing function rather than by the sales unit.
The study findings suggest that the marketing function plays a crucial role in implementing and successfully managing market orientation in companies. The results imply that market orientation and a strong marketing function are mutually dependent and indicate that top managers should strengthen the marketing function if they aim to align the whole organization with the market and, thus, improve business performance. The findings also indicate that firms should re-allocate power between the marketing and sales functions.