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The purpose of this paper is to explore the sales and marketing interface and to identify some of the elements that may influence collaboration between sales and marketing and provide a framework demonstrating how these elements may interrelate.

This paper explores the sales and marketing relationship through qualitative research using one‐to‐one, tripartite interviews with senior executives and sales and marketing managers of three, UK‐based business‐to‐business organizations.

The paper indicates that there are two types of factor that affect collaboration between sales and marketing. Those that are out of the control of sales and marketing staff – management attitudes to coordination, interdepartmental culture and structure and orientation, and four that are internal to the interface – inter‐functional conflict, communications, market intelligence and learning. The paper also identifies that senior managers play a critical role in influencing this interface.

Improving collaboration in the sales and marketing interface should be a focus for senior managers. The paper is limited by the number of cases.

The factors identified may be used by organizations to improve collaboration between sales and marketing.

The identification of factors that may improve collaboration between sales and marketing, and provide a conceptual framework for further study. The paper increases the understanding of the sales and marketing interface by identifying two additional factors that may influence the interface – learning and market intelligence, and demonstrates how the various factors may interrelate to create improved collaboration.

The study seeks to explore the antecedents and implications of collaboration between sales and marketing and further to identify whether there are benefits in terms of business performance of improving collaboration between sales and marketing.

Three exploratory case studies and a review of the literature are used to examine the antecedents to collaboration between sales and marketing. The case studies allow this fuzzy and undefined area to be clarified and existing theories to be empirically tested.

The study identifies that there are three types of factor influencing collaboration between sales and marketing: integrators, facilitators, and management attitudes towards coordination. The exploratory case studies establish that senior management plays a pivotal role in creating and improving collaboration between sales and marketing, and that there is a positive correlation between collaboration between sales and marketing, and improved business performance.

The limitations of this study are that it is qualitative in nature and the conceptual framework needs be tested through a large‐scale survey. In addition, the study considers only large UK organisations and, therefore, future research should consider expanding the study to overseas organisations.

There appears to be an established relationship between the level of collaboration between sales and marketing and business performance. Further, the attitude of senior managers to improving coordination is critical to influencing collaboration between sales and marketing.

This study contends that sales and marketing need to collaborate rather than integrate and uses exploratory case studies to support the development of the framework.

This paper aims to study discursive dynamics in place marketing collaboration, which has the potential to construct common ground between stakeholders or provoke discursive struggles emerging from competing accounts.

The paper applies a discursive perspective to collaboration and uses the discursive model of the collaboration to analyze dynamics between stakeholder representatives in two regional level place marketing projects carried out in Eastern Finland in 2011-2014. An analysis of 23 interviews focuses on how stakeholders construct shared understandings of project issues and interests, and discursive struggles that emerge from competing accounts and heterogeneous spaces.

Identified issues in the projects related to the competitiveness between regions, peer pressure to carry out place marketing and a lack of budget resources for marketing for gaining visibility. Broader discourses of competitiveness and promotion provided shared discursive resources for the collaborators. An analysis of the interests of specific organizations revealed discursive struggles that relate to the spatial content of place marketing activities and also the symbolic content of the image of the region.

While the paper underlines the embeddedness of collaboration within broader discursive contexts and cultural sensitivity attached to communication, it does not cover how broader discourses constrain communicative processes or how cultural context influences them.

The paper presents an original perspective on stakeholder collaboration in place marketing projects by highlighting the discursive aspects of communication, and especially the construction of shared understandings as a central element in collaboration. This is useful for facilitating and coordinating stakeholders’ communication, which has been considered important for the success of place marketing and branding activity.

Previous research focused on open innovation (OI) suggests that enterprises benefit from adopting the journey; however, the relationship among OI, marketing journey and knowledge-intensive innovation marketing activities (KIIMA) remains unclear. The present study proposes a conceptual model of the marketing journey linking heterogeneous modes of marketing collaboration to knowledge-intensive activities.

The conceptual model was tested via ordinary least squares (OLS) linear regression based on a sample of data drawn from the Eurostat database.

The results indicate that strategies are a robust proxy for evaluating KIIMA, and partnerships, heterogeneous sources of knowledge and different marketing modes for collaboration among European knowledge-intensive firms are core antecedents of KIIMA, such as new-product development and marketing innovation, as well as firms' sustainable competitive advantage.

This study fills the gap by tracking the role of the journey within marketing collaborations on KIIMA, and it intervenes in the debate about interactive marketing innovation mechanisms. The study contributes to OI, knowledge management and the marketing literature by identifying the heterogeneous modes for marketing collaborations under which the marketing journey enhances knowledge-intensive activities such as those for marketing innovation.

Several studies have proposed that small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) lack resources and experiential knowledge to internationalise to distant markets. The authors argue that SMEs can handle the lack of these tangible and intangible internal resources through external collaborations; they can achieve success in international markets by collaborating with business partners. The role of inter-firm marketing collaboration and its impact on internationalisation efforts has not been thoroughly studied, particularly in the context of SMEs. This study will thus advance our understanding of SMEs’ inter-firm marketing collaborations and how they influence performance in international markets. In this chapter, authors conceptually develop this line of arguments through an extensive literature review and develop some hypotheses and a framework that can be empirically tested. The authors believe this framework will serve as a starting point for further studies on this topic. Theoretically, we endeavour to contribute by showing that firms can enhance their level of international performance through inter-firm collaboration. The authors believe this type of study would have considerable theoretical as well as managerial implications in this important field of research.

The study explores structural devices designed to enhance collaboration between sales and marketing groups. The paper aims to develop a conceptual framework of how such integrative devices link to higher levels of sales‐marketing collaboration and also to higher levels of business performance.

A total of 20 in‐depth interviews and a review of the literature are used to examine the nature and effects of sales‐marketing integrative devices in UK consumer packaged goods firms.

The study identifies two main types of integrative device in operation: trade marketing and category management. The exploratory interviews highlight how these two types of integrative device operate, respectively, at operational and strategic levels. All of the organisations were found to operate some kind of integrative device. However, the organisations studied manifest different levels of collaboration between sales and marketing groups. The conclusion drawn from this and subsequently included in the conceptual framework is that it is the effectiveness of integrative devices, rather than their mere existence, that differentiates between higher and lower levels of sales‐marketing collaboration.

The effectiveness of sales‐marketing integrative devices appears to have positive effects for collaborative sales‐marketing intergroup relations. The results therefore support the development and effective use of such devices to enhance collaborative relations between sales and marketing.

This study reveals the importance and dimensions of effective sales‐marketing integrative devices and uses in‐depth interviews to support the development of a conceptual framework for future empirical testing. Specific hypotheses to test are developed, together with suggestions regarding the measurement of constructs.

The purpose of this study is to assess the effect of three key inter-firm orientations often regarded as central and challenging capabilities within the marketing literature namely (i) market orientation, (ii) entrepreneurial orientation and (iii) brand orientation and their effects on the business performance of a focal international SME.

The study is based upon a sample of 104 Swiss international firms and a questionnaire is used to capture their inter-firm marketing collaborations. Existing, well-established scales for market, brand, and entrepreneurial orientation were used and modified to capture the inter-firm dimension. The data was analysed using regression analysis.

Inter-firm market and entrepreneurial orientation have a significant positive influence of both market and financial performance. However, no significant impact was found for inter-firm brand orientation.

We show that collaboration within the marketing area is of critical importance for international SME in order to enhance their performance. Dealing with the increasing complexity and uncertainty in the global environment, we argue that international SMEs are especially dependent on improving their marketing collaborations in order to strengthen their competitive advantage. One main contribution is also to conceptualize and operationalize inter-firm marketing collaborations into a measurable empirical phenomenon, including scales that can also be used by other researchers in future studies.

This article illustrates how, during the COVID-19 pandemic, emerging market exporting firms can adopt differentiation strategies using composition-based capabilities, which, in turn, will enable them to strengthen their images and market shares, i.e. their strategic marketing performance in advanced markets.

This study is based on survey data obtained from 86 Pakistani firms exporting to advanced economies.

The study found that compositional collaboration capabilities positively influence the differentiation strategies and strategic marketing performance of emerging market exporting firms conducting business in advanced host markets. Furthermore, the findings indicate that differentiation strategies mediate the influence of compositional collaboration capabilities on the strategic marketing performance of these firms.

By taking a new compositional based theoretical perspective, this study examined the underexplored phenomenon of how emerging market firms can differentiate their offerings in advanced export markets in order to achieve a better strategic performance during external shocks such as the COVID-19 pandemic. Given that export growth is a strategic priority for many emerging markets, including Pakistan, due to their substantial trade deficits, this study provides important contributions from both the theoretical and practical perspectives.

The purpose of this study is to investigate the influence of digital transformation on the intersection of marketing and sales departments.

This area has received little attention in academic literature while considerable amount of research exists surrounding the marketing and sales integration, the influence of the trend of digital transformation on both departments and how it affects their collaboration is not investigated in-depth and is therefore studied by qualitative research via semi-structured interviews in six German organizations.

By considering the findings the collaboration between the marketing and sales departments in German organizations is perceived as good. However, generation-related conflicts occur due to different demographic structures of employees. The study provides evidence that the digital transformation affects the marketing and sales integration and thus, the overall organizational performance.

Moreover, it is crucial that organizations face the challenges that occur in terms of interdepartmental relationships and be aware of the huge potentials which arise due to digital transformation to improve the marketing and sales collaboration.

Despite long‐standing interest in the quality movement by marketing scholars, marketing managers have not seized opportunities to provide leadership as the quality movement has centered attention on customer satisfaction. Significant corporate investments in quality programs suggest that the recent revision of the ISO 9000 standards to focus on collection and use of customer satisfaction data may provide marketing managers an invitation to meaningfully enter the quality dialogue. Collaboration between marketing and quality management is problematic because the two functions are highly differentiated. This article draws on work in organizational learning and organizational behavior to identify criteria for successful collaboration between marketing and quality management and to propose a process for meeting the new ISO 9000 requirements.