Dr. Ravi Sohi, professor and chair of the UNL marketing department, is presenting a paper at the Academy of Marketing Science’s World Marketing Biennial Conference held in Reims, France from July 19-23. The Academy of Marketing Science is one of the premier marketing scholarly organizations in the world. Their aim is to promote excellence in the creation and dissemination of marketing knowledge and furtherance of marketing practice.
Sohi’s paper was co-authored with UNL marketing alums, Dr. Avinash Malshe and Dr. Mike Krush. The paper is titled “A Motley Pack of Sales-Marketing Integration,” and focuses on issues related to the integration between the sales and marketing functions of organizations.
“The sales and marketing departments play a crucial role in generating revenue for business organizations,” said Sohi. “Yet, there is considerable disharmony between the two functions. Both scholars and practitioners are interested in understanding the nature of integration and what needs to be done to bring the two functions together.”
To investigate these issues, Dr. Sohi and his colleagues used a qualitative research design and conducted 48 in-depth interviews with sales and marketing executives from different industries. Their findings revealed that the nature of sales-marketing integration varies across different industry contexts.
Sohi pointed out that some industries, such as pharmaceuticals, marketing owns the product life cycle and the major marketing activities center around managing products through their entire life cycle.
“In such contexts, integration with sales is very important, and requires key sales personnel to be extensively embedded in the entire marketing strategy process from conceptualization to implementation.
“In other contexts such as IT or engineering, integration is less important as marketers are mainly engaged in creating key messages and supplying the sales force with communication material.”
The findings in the paper also suggest that it may not be productive for managers to invest in all integration mechanisms that are commonly used such as functional, cultural, communication and people-processes.
“For example,” said Sohi, “if an individual marketing manager may be able to achieve greater integration with his or her sales counterpart, even when the firm has not been able to achieve functional integration. Thus, companies must understand the context they are operating in and choose specific levers to achieve integration.”
Sohi, who joined the UNL College of Business Administration in 1991, was named chair of the marketing department a year ago. Some of his key research interests include business-to-business marketing, e-commerce marketing, international marketing and marketing channels management.
Published: July 20, 2011