Marketing & Sales Organization

Purpose of a marketing & sales organization.

Marketing mission and changed understanding of roles

We are currently experiencing a significant change in the understanding of the roles of marketing and sales organizations. Both areas are moving even closer together in their joint responsibility for the entire customer experience; in digital sales channels, marketing, and sales tasks can hardly be distinguished anymore. In addition, the two divisions have become much more technical in recent years with topics such as programmatic advertising, dynamic pricing, and customer data warehousing. Marketing and sales are increasingly responsible for coordinating with internal technical and commercial departments and, if necessary, with interdisciplinary external service providers.

In parallel, complexity has increased significantly simply due to the sheer number of customer touchpoints that need to be coordinated – and the demands on existing tasks have risen accordingly.

For these reasons, we consider the question of the purpose of marketing and sales in the sense of a marketing mission to be indispensable; it should be clear to both management and every employee as the orientation framework of their tasks and the alignment with the overarching goal. In practice, the situation is often different: In many cases, employees in marketing and sales do not have a uniform understanding of their role and that of their neighboring areas. This creates irritation and leads to friction losses and errors in the processes.

The following figure schematically shows possible role characteristics of a marketing organization. It illustrates that the current and future marketing role can vary greatly depending on the industry, orientation, and history of the company.

verschiedene Rollen von MarketingorganisationenFigure 1: different roles of marketing organizations

 

WHY A VISION OF THE FUTURE MARKETING/SALES ROLE IS SO IMPORTANT

If an organization is to be changed, a viable vision of the future role is particularly important. The details must be clarified BEFORE the changes are conceived:

  • Is there a formulated sales or marketing mission?
  • How should/must the role of marketing/sales within the company change in the coming years?
  • Which tasks will be added as a result, and which should be abandoned?
  • In companies with different business units: Is the role of all business units the same? Particularly about business units outside the core business, it must be clarified which meaningful role marketing or sales should take on.
  • How is the new role divided among individual units or locations? For example, what should be handled centrally, while what should be decentralized?
  • With which adjacent areas will cooperation intensify? WHERE are dependencies building up?
  • What goals are derived from this and how can the achievement of goals be measured?
  • What competencies need to be developed or expanded for this purpose?

 

Depending on the vision for the future role, a different target organization will be the appropriate one. That is why this definition of the organizational framework is so important and directional for sales and marketing optimization.

DERIVATION OF THE TARGET SYSTEM

The purpose can then be used to derive the objective of the organizational area and the underlying departments and teams. Precisely because measurable goals are so important for the orientation of managers and employees, the establishment of a goal system and the tracking of individual goals should be part of the overall context of the marketing or sales role. In our projects, we have found that the establishment of transparent and consistently tracked goals on the employee side ensures clarity regarding their tasks and their contribution to the overall goal, thus improving cooperation and motivation.

In this respect, the fundamental trend is also reflected in the organization: marketing and sales have become much more measurable in our digital age, and this opportunity must be seized!

Have we piqued your interest? We would be happy to support you with our project experience in tackling this opportunity. The best thing to do is to contact one of our experts directly. We are looking forward to the discussion with you!

We support you from analysis to sales training

Would you like to learn more? Then simply get in touch with one of our contact persons and arrange a non-binding meeting. Also, read our PURPOSE article on how to define your marketing department’s mission and anchor it in your goal and control system.

 

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    Dr. Nicolas Nasner
    Dr. Nicolas Nasner
    Managing Partner
    +49-177-8785293
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