Beyond the “war”: 20 years of research on the sales and marketing interface

13th March 2026 |   Dr Belinda Dewsnap

20 years on from HBR’s seminal “Ending the War” paper, how can business leaders align sales and marketing to maximise market performance?

When Philip Kotler, Neil Rackham, and Sujay Krishnaswamy published “Ending the War Between Sales and Marketing” in Harvard Business Review (2006), they gave managers a language for an enduring organisational tension. Sales and marketing, they argued, were structurally misaligned. They were divided by time horizons and professional identities. 

Two decades on, a substantial body of research has both confirmed and refined that diagnosis. Sales-marketing conflict is not an anomaly to eliminate but an interdependence to govern. Integration improves performance, but only when it is designed around incentives, decision rights, and processes – and calibrated to strategy and organisational/market context. For sales leaders operating in increasingly complex buying and operating environments, the competitive advantage lies less in ending the “war” and more in designing disciplined coordination that converts friction into market performance.

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