eThesis - School of Business electronic theses

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This study focuses on the interacting performance effects of marketing and sales activities. Literature review draws together relevant research relating to this topic and thus, concentrates on marketing performance and marketing-sales relationship. Both of the fields have received only limited attention in the earlier literature.

A fresh approach called Fuzzy Set Qualitative Comparative Analysis (FS/QCA) is used as an approach and as a methodology in this study. FS/QCA assists in explicating the causal link between marketing and sales activities and performance. Configurations of marketing and sales activities can affect marketing performance in various ways, as it is demonstrated in this study. The case company is a Finnish company called Aalto University Executive Education Ltd (Aalto EE), which offers executive education services. This study focuses on the business area of Open programs and Forums. The data for the empirical part is obtained mainly through interviews, observation, and by collecting data from the case company’s electronic data sources.

The most important contribution of this study is that it disentangles the relationship between the performance outcomes and the configurations of marketing and sales activities at Aalto EE. This study also demonstrates that FS/QCA can be implemented in marketing context and it can explain marketing outcomes. The results confirm that a single activity can affect the examined outcome differently when it’s part of a different configuration. Sales e-mail campaigns represent an important marketing activity for the case company, which is why there is a separate ‘mini-study’ on these.

Depending on the type of the examined program, some configurations seemed to be more effective than others in reaching the sales targets; and thus, the cases were divided into two separate groups. The success of the sales of the programs in one group was highly contingent on the success of various marketing activities. Especially high sales effort done by the program manager and the success of the info session were identified as crucial activities. In the second group high sales revenue was reached through an exceptionally low amount of marketing and sales activities. In these cases program manager’s or program partner’s high sales effort sufficed to cause high sales revenue for the program.