**5.1. Research implications**

Despite growing interest in understanding the drivers of the innovation process [3, 4, 26] and more recently by Wiebmeier et al.(in Ref. [5]) introducing the relevance of sales, the deployment of innovation based on the cross-functional marketing-sales relationship has not been previously studied.

Second, extant research consistently reported sales and marketing as a key cross-functional interface to enhance business performance and to create superior customer value (e.g., see [1, 2, 7, 8]). However, empirical research has been conducted in emergent geographies like South America.

Results show that both—amount and quality communication—influence the perceived effectiveness of marketing-sales relationships during innovation deployment. The amount of shared communication and its quality also enhance the positive effect of joint planning on this variable, but only the frequency of communication affects the formalization of the process. The findings also suggest that joint planning strongly influences the perceived effectiveness of sales-marketing interface, unlike the Stage-Gates formalization non-significant (negative) effect on this dimension.

These results are consistent with the findings of Lovejoy and Sinha [24], stating that efficiently innovative organizations do not look like standard formal organizations with strict and unchanging lines of communication. The strong and positive relationship of communication with salesmarketing effectiveness is consistent with past literature [19, 20]. Nevertheless, according to the interaction point of view [20] and contrary to previous research [3], the amount of communication has a positive effect on the relationship effectiveness between sales and marketing.
