Avinash Malshe

•Examines marketing agility in high power distance culture.•Identifies cultural challenges impacting marketing agility’s core pillars.•Proposes strategies to enhance agility in high power distance contexts.•Contributes to understanding agility’s boundary conditions in emerging markets.•Offers practical insights for embedding agile practices in hierarchical firms. Marketing agility drives organizational growth and competitive advantage by enabling firms to sense and respond to market changes. Yet, how firms navigate agility within different cultural conditions, particularly in high power distance environments, remains underexplored. This study examines marketing agility within Saudi Arabia. Through 36 in-depth interviews with marketing and sales personnel, this research explores the culturally ingrained challenges impacting marketing agility and the strategies firms employ to mitigate those barriers. Study findings reveal that high power distance cultures impede customer-facing personnel from enacting each of marketing agility’s four core pillars. The authors further identify targeted strategies that firms can implement to address these contextual challenges. By situating marketing agility within a unique socio-cultural landscape, this study advances theoretical understanding of its boundary conditions and contributes to empirical generalization in emerging markets. Finally, strategic implications are offered for marketing managers seeking to embed agile practices in high power distance cultures.

•The marketing function is dispersed in many healthcare organizations.•Non-marketing employees (NMEs) may engender strategy implementation impediments.•Marketers use varied tactics to mitigate NME impediments to strategy implementation. To keep pace with various demands, marketing activities are often distributed outside the confines of a centralized department. Marketing dispersion is particularly prevalent in healthcare organizations, where market challenges and internal pressures call for non-marketing employees (NMEs) to play key roles in marketing strategy implementation. What remains uncertain, however, is how marketing being dispersed to NMEs impedes implementation. The authors gather and leverage multisource qualitative data, including three in-depth interviews for each of the 40 healthcare organizations sampled (n = 120), to examine the involvement of NMEs in marketing strategy implementation. Findings identify three types of marketing strategy implementation impediments associated with marketing dispersion, as well as the NME-related drivers of these hindrances. The findings conclude with tactics that can help marketers to mitigate the mechanisms at play between the emergent drivers and impediments. The results offer contributions at the intersection of marketing strategy implementation, marketing dispersion, and healthcare marketing literature.

With the widespread practice of using digital tools to work from home (WFH), it is not clear how this impacts innovation. While some scholars argue that digital tools limit the spontaneous conversations that are essential for innovation, others consider them the solution for innovation in a hybrid work environment. We suggest that the current confusion about the impact of digital tools on innovation is due to researchers (a) treating innovation as a homogeneous activity, rather than focusing on specific innovation activities, and (b) ignoring the nature of specific jobs of employees participating in this process. This study explores how marketing and sales professionals use digital tools during innovation ideation. The findings show that various digital tools are used for idea generation, assessment, and development. During each of these stages, marketing and sales personnel use a different mix of digital tools – serving different purposes – and face different challenges. Study findings contribute to our understanding of how digital tools impact innovation and help managers to improve innovation ideation in hybrid work environments. •In hybrid work environments firms use digital tools for innovation ideation.•Use and impact of tools vary across idea generation, assessment and development.•Each ideation stage focuses on specific tools resulting in unique challenges.•Firms must stimulate psychological safety, norms for tool use, and digital skills.

Optimizing complex service partnerships requires an understanding of multilevel value co-creation processes in a customer-supplier ecosystem. Such strategic business-to-business relationships impact supplier costs and revenues, necessitating dedicated personnel across hierarchical levels to co-create value. The authors study the customer-supplier ecosystem intra-organizationally across firm levels to understand value expectations and orientations, and extra-organizationally to identify supplier harmonization strategies for managing multilevel value co-creation. Empirically, the authors conduct a multilevel-multisource qualitative case study within a strategic partnership, with a service contract valued at over $100 million per year, that includes senior- and frontline-level interviews in the key account customer organization (32 participants) and supplier organization (22 participants). The analysis focuses on how institutions, spanning contracts, and behavioral norms within the business-to-business customer-supplier ecosystem, govern actions and aspirations. Findings typify the nature of divergent value expectations between customer hierarchies along with level-specific co-creation orientations. As future prognosis hinges on harmonizing practices and institutions to address discrepancies in value visibility across customer levels, such an assessment also enables actionable strategies to enhance reengagement. The findings collectively offer theoretical implications for key account management (KAM) research, influencing areas such as professionalization of KAM, effectiveness in KAM, and network dynamics within KAM. Graphical Abstract

Potential challenges in conducting international sales research, coupled with the lack of systematic guidance currently prevent western sales scholars from conducting research in emerging market contexts. The authors draw upon (a) their decade-long experience in conducting qualitative sales research in the Middle East (ME), as well as (b) depth interview data they collected specifically for this paper from eleven academics engaged in doing sales research in that region to propose a three-step framework for conducting qualitative sales research within the ME. The exclusivity of this framework to the ME context is rooted in its responsiveness to the unique elements and idiosyncrasies inherent within the ME culture. In addition to offering a systematic guidance, the framework implies that it is not the research expertise of the western scholars, but their ability to understand and respond to cultural nuances, and cultivate and employ soft skills such as communication, trust, relationship building, and/or mutual respect that may make or break their foray into conducting sales research in the ME markets.

•This study investigates marketing strategy implementation impediments and remedies.•Multi-level multi-source sales-marketing interface data used to study firm dynamics.•Inter-/intra-functional activities foment implementation impediments.•Findings explicate both level-specific and cumulative effects of impediments.•Findings reveal prescriptive remedies to stabilize the implementation process.
Why do marketing strategies fail? This persistent question attracts significant attention and resource investments given its associated performance implications. Existing research suggests that most marketing strategies suffer due to poor implementation; however, the nuances of strategy implementation impediments and their accompanying remedies remain underdeveloped. To contribute to this line of inquiry, the authors use multi-level qualitative data to capture cross-functional dynamics that traverse the organizational hierarchy and are critical to marketing strategy implementation. The data collection procedure consisted of depth interviews with 48 informants within eight organizations, constituting sales-marketing dyads at three hierarchical levels (senior, middle, and frontline) within each organization. Findings suggest that sales and marketing personnel’s varying self-interests at different hierarchical levels motivate them to engage in a distinct set of inter- and intra-functional activities that foment implementation impediments. In turn, findings explicate not only the individual effects of these impediments but also their cumulative between-level (trickle-down) and within-level, within-function (trickle-around) impact as the strategy moves through the hierarchy of the sales-marketing interface. The authors then offer prescriptive remedies embedded in the informal organization that may stabilize the implementation process. Viewed holistically, this study contributes to marketing literature by inductively deriving a theory of marketing strategy implementation within the sales-marketing interface.

How sales and marketing come together in the pursuit of satisfying customers and achieving organizational objectives is of key concern to both academics and practitioners. Researchers have investigated many aspects of the sales-marketing interface (SMI). This paper provides a systematic literature review of the SMI domain. Based on a systematic assessment of more than 25 years of SMI research, the authors review the major themes discussed in the literature, identify and resolve inconsistencies and definitional ambiguities, and develop a comprehensive conceptual model that integrates and synthesizes the current body of knowledge about SMIs. In addition, they identify four directions for future research that will have a major impact on our understanding of the functioning and nature of SMIs: (1) the impact of digital technologies on SMIs, (2) the impact of national culture on SMIs, (3) SMIs in SMEs, and (4) the impact of changing roles of sales and marketing.
•The sales-marketing interface (SMI) is critical, but often also problematic in firms.•The SMI literature provides insights, but needs a clear definition and framework.•The SMI encompasses structural and role linkages, and interactions and perceptions.•Future research is needed to better understand the nature and functioning of SMIs.

Purpose
The purpose of this study is to understand one portion of the sales ecological system. This paper focuses on the mesolevel or intra-organizational system that includes the sales and marketing functions. This paper examines distinct tensions at three levels of the firm's hierarchy and the mechanisms used to manage the tensions.
Design/methodology/approach
The authors use a qualitative data collection. A discovery-oriented process is used to understand the interconnections that exist among marketing-sales dyads at three organizational levels across several firms.
Findings
This paper uncovers distinct tensions and defenses exhibited by managers at each hierarchical level and this paper presents mechanisms that can are used to reduce the tensions.
Research limitations/implications
The multi-level perspective demonstrates the value of examining the intra-organizational aspect of the sales ecosystem. This paper uses a qualitative approach to highlight that sales-marketing tensions are unique to each of the hierarchical levels. This paper demonstrates that the tensions are a function of the unique roles each sales and marketing executive has within the organization.
Practical implications
To make the sales and marketing interface more effective, managers need to view tensions across the sales-marketing interface as complementary versus opposing forces. Managers must balance these tensions, rather than fight them and/or select one of the alternatives over the other. This paper suggests that paradoxical thinking may be a valued skillset for managers at each level of the organization.
Originality/value
The study uses a unique qualitative data set that examines the sales-marketing interface across three levels of an organizational hierarchy. Through this approach, this paper delineates specific tensions between marketing and sales within each level of the firm. This paper also describes mechanisms to manage the tensions common within the sales-marketing interface.

Practitioners have touted sales enablement as a prominent solution to the challenges of the evolving buying and selling environments; however, empirical research on this concept is nonexistent in extant literature. Furthermore, while the pervasiveness of sales domain scholarship suggests that salespeople will continue to influence sales practice through expanded opportunities, firms must also blend the art and science of engaging customers in a profitable and sustainable manner. To address these scholarly demands, the authors designed an empirical study that conceptualizes sales enablement and offers an in-depth perspective on how organizations enable their sales force. The authors employ an ethnographic inquiry comprising various data sources, including 41 depth interviews with professionals responsible for sales enablement architecture and/or execution. Findings offer a multi-dimensional conceptualization of sales enablement and introduce a process model which explicates how firms develop sales enablement as a dynamic capability. This study expands current knowledge by offering foundational insights and advanced theories of sales enablement, while also providing strategic implications for sales organizations responding to evolving customer demands and selling environments.