Sales and marketing as different as chalk and cheese? If you listen to salespeople, you will

❶ Sales and marketing – as different as chalk and cheese? If you listen to salespeople, you will sometimes hear them talk disparagingly about the marketing function: ‘The reason we didn’t reach budget was the lousy ad campaign!’ And, sometimes, marketing people will blame the salesforce for a drop in market share: ‘The only thing our sales team can do well is cut the price, and even that didn’t save us from losing market share this year. They don’t seem to appreciate that we make the bullets for them to fire!’ If we believed such talk, sales and marketing would seem to be two functions, rather than one. Marketing science embraces personal selling and sales management as a vital aspect of marketing communication – it is taught this way. So, why do they often seem to be so far apart in practice? (Learning Objective 1) (AACSB: Reflective Thinking)