Last week Olivier Rubel from Graduate School of Management, University of California Davis (US) have presented his latest research in our Research Seminar Series.

For most firms the big part of staying in business and generating profit comes from acquiring new customers. Companies actively engage in numerous activities that should lead potential customers down the “purchase funnel” to the act of purchase. Marketing teams work on attracting customers by participating in tradeshows, advertising and staying active on social media. In B2B sector these activates generate “leads” that are further passed to the sales teams. The sales teams in turn: set-up calls and meetings with the goal to convert the potential customers to the actual one. Yet, quite often, in practice the joint work of marketing and sales teams does not go smoothly. The sales team may not deem the leads the marketing is generating as valuable. In turn, marketing teams might have reservations about the success of the sales teams in closing the deals on the hard-earned leads.

How should firms organize their structure and conversion incentives to optimize the joint work of marketing and sales? Should marketing and sales be integrated as one organizational unit or rather split? How to decide whether incentives should be based on sales, leads or both? Olivers’ research provides some insights on how firms can efficiently resolve these tough questions.

Many thanks to Olivers for the interesting talk and the seminar for our doctoral students.