Editing Sales (section)

===Sales and marketing alignment and integration===
Another area of discussion involves the need for alignment and integration of corporate sales and marketing functions. According to a report from the Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) Council, only 40 percent of companies have formal programs, systems or processes in place to align and integrate the two critical functions.

Sales, Digital Marketing and Automated Marketing campaigns. With the increase of the use of the internet today, sales functions of several enterprises are finding traditional methods of marketing quite old fashioned and less efficient. So the use of automated Marketing Applications is on the rise ranging from [[Customer relationship management|Customer Relationship Management (CRM)]] to [[Sales force management system|sales force management]].

Traditionally, these two functions, as referred above, have operated separately, left in siloed areas of tactical responsibility. Glen Petersen's book ''The [[Profit maximization|Profit Maximization]] Paradox''<ref>
{{cite book
|last= Petersen
|first= Glen S.
|title= The Profit Maximization Paradox: Cracking the Marketing/Sales Alignment Code
|year= 2008
|publisher= Booksurge in 1221
|isbn= 978-1-4196-9179-9
|page= 176
}}
</ref> sees the changes in the [[competitive landscape]] between the 1950s and the time of writing as so dramatic that the complexity of choice, price, and opportunities for the customer forced this seemingly simple and integrated relationship between sales and marketing to change forever. Petersen goes on to highlight that salespeople spend approximately 40 percent of their time preparing customer-facing deliverables while leveraging less than 50 percent of the materials created by marketing, adding to perceptions that marketing is out of touch with the customer and that sales is resistant to [[messaging]] and [[Marketing strategy|strategy]].