Aberdeen Group discovered a very strong and mostly unnoticed correlation between the degree of collaboration within a company and the effectiveness of that company’s sales force. This finding supports the idea that selling is increasingly becoming a team rather than individual activity. Collaboration is particularly critical between the sales and marketing departments of organizations. Again, Aberdeen discovered that companies that had strong collaboration between the two functions had higher sales effectiveness, and this was especially true where there were structured processes and systems in place to support this collaboration.