MODERN SALES
Excellent Selling, With
Poor Marketing, Damages
Company Health
By Malcolm H.B. McDonald
Doing the wrong thing really well is
clearly the height of stupidity.
Don’t let the sales force “tail “wag
the marketing “dog“.
Develop an effective strategy first,
then implement it.
Failure to implement agreed
strategies costs hundreds of billions
annually.
The separation of the sales and
marketing functions organisationally
has had a major malign effect on the
reputation of both disciplines. This
28 ModernBusiness
July 2016
short piece addresses this issue.
May I please declare my own (non
financial) interest in this topic. At
Canada Dry over thirty years ago, I
was Marketing and Sales Director.
The Sales Director reported to me
and we had, as a result, a perfect
fusion of the two functions. I
involved the Sales Director deeply
in our strategic marketing planning
and he and his senior people brought
a different, pragmatic perspective
to the more structured, diagnostic
and process-driven thinking of the
marketers. The result was a strategy
for markets and customers that was
fully accepted and, more importantly,
implemented by the sales force.
Without such fusion, what tends
to happen is that the product/
market/segment/customer mix
is determined by the sales force
and the resulting revenue/profit
mix has to be used as the basis
for strategic planning - a classic
case of the tail wagging the dog!
The extreme example of the total
separation of the two functions
occurs in professional service firms.
It is clear in such organisations
that most marketing takes place
during the process of delivering the