Sales & Marketing Study 2018: Organization

Taking the '&' Out of Sales & Marketing

Of all the fortified walls separating business units in the typical consumer goods organization, none has been thicker over the years than the one between sales and marketing.

The division has proved to be dysfunctional at times, with a lack of communication often leading to counter-productive, even conflicting activity at retail, where sales-side trade promotion programs would overlap with (and possibly nullify) marketing-driven consumer promotion or mass media campaigns. Such misalignment would work back through the supply chain, too, leading to poor inventory planning.

“In an age when sales channels and marketing tactics are more numerous and complex than ever before, alignment has never been more critical,” says Lora Cecere, founder of Supply Chain Insights. “Yet alignment is still elusive for most companies.”

Among the reasons are conflicting performance incentives, according to Cecere. “The sales department is focused on volume and effectiveness, while marketing is incentivized on market share. Meanwhile, the supply chain organization is focused on cost mitigation.”

However, every recent appointment of a chief growth officer or chief demand officer (by Coca-Cola, Mondelez International, Kellogg and Colgate-Palmolive, among others) has created another crack in that historic wall, as consumer goods companies increasingly acknowledge the fact that sales and marketing need to have the same marching orders.

A big reason why is that e-commerce has blended the two roles more than ever before by eliminating the distinction between consumer and shopper, closing the gap between the onset of a consumer need and the completion of a purchase designed to fill that need. While the traditional purchase funnel is still there in theory, a consumer can now get from start to finish in a few seconds and a couple of clicks.

A Cultural Shift in Yogurt
“How can you not have sales and marketing integrated,” asked Peter McGuinness, who after four years as chief marketing and brand officer at Chobani was named chief marketing, commercial and demand officer last summer. The new position (if that isn’t obvious) signaled Chobani’s decision to align sales, marketing, product innovation, insights, analytics and category management into a single, integrated “Demand Creation” unit.

“We’re combining all of those people and all of those budgets to [create] a large, connected, non-competitive demand budget. So it’s pretty cool,” McGuinness explained to CGT soon after taking on the role. “We’re developing things at the right time for the right reasons, based on consumer and customer feedback.”