Victor Chernetsky

Despite their joint responsibility for creating, communicating, and delivering customer value, relationships between marketing and sales (M&S) functions are often suboptimal and fraught with conflict. Yet, the complex nature of M&S conflict, as well as conflict management techniques, have been insufficiently explored. We collect data from 252 M&S managers at large US firms to test a moderated mediation conceptual model. This study explores M&S latent conflict and manifest conflict and empirically tests the link between them. We also examine flexible conflict intervention (FCI) as a mitigating factor in a conditional relationship between task conflict and firm performance. We find that both competition for resources and relative functional identification positively predict M&S task conflict, while divergence of goals has no such effect. Moreover, FCI attenuates the harmful effects of task conflict on firm performance. This study benefits practitioners and researchers with new insights regarding conflict management solutions at the M&S interface. •Senior managers should help manage conflict between Marketing and Sales functions.•Flexible conflict intervention helps mitigate the negative impact of conflict.•Competition for resources and relative functional identification positively impact task conflict.•The impact of divergence of goals on task conflict is not statistically significant.

This paper summarizes nearly four decades of research focusing on the relationship between the marketing and sales (M&S) functional units within a firm. As the M&S functions are among the most influential in the firm and have a strong impact on firm performance, the M&S interface literature continues to grow but remains fragmented. Based on a review of 89 marketing articles covering a 37-year period, the authors provide a synthesis of M&S interface research from thematic, theoretical, and methodological perspectives. Twelve managerial insights emerge from the review. The analysis also leads to a holistic future research agenda derived from observed gaps in the M&S interface literature.