I often mention Phil Kotler’s Harvard Business Review article Ending The War Between Sales and Marketing when talking to clients and potential clients. It’s a great piece about the evolution and co-existence of sales and marketing in an organization. Most importantly to me, it lays out the key responsibilities of each function and how they change over time as an organization matures.
Using the article, I developed this tree diagram to explain how marketing evolves and Argentum’s role in it:
In the beginning (the tree’s roots) it’s all about sales, and sales = marketing.
As the organization grows, the sales team typically adds a marketing support function (the little branch to the right of the trunk). The person is typically junior, responsible for execution, and reports in to sales.
In the third and final stage of the evolution, marketing splits off from sales and acquires a separate budget (the two big branches at the top). It’s at this point that marketing typically takes on a more strategic role in the organization.
This is an excerpt from the article’s abstract: Curious about [the] disconnect between Sales and Marketing, we conducted a study to identify best practices that could help enhance the joint performance and overall contributions of these two functions…To read the full abstract, or to buy the article for the low, low price of $6.95 from the HBR website CLICK HERE