The “Best of” Harvard Business Review article “Major Sales: Who Really Does the Buying?” is the best $6.50 I’ve spent in a while.

It argues that it’s much harder to identify the real decision-maker in a major B2B sale than you might imagine – and recommends the account team works with marketing to understand buying motives. He adds that this requires a psychologists’s eye – something marketing teams are well placed to offer.

The first page of this article is free to read on HBR’s site from the link above. In reading it, I felt a strong case for further marketing and sales alignment.

Account-based programmes designed to increase revenue from existing customers are already paying dividends. We’ve already seen that IT companies who align their sales and marketing teams benefit from increased revenue per customer and better relationships. It looks like the benefits of taking an account-focused approach to new business development can result in higher bid win rates too.