Overview

Customers Win, Suppliers Win: Lessons from One of IBM's Most Successful Strategic Account Managers by Noel Capon and Gus Maikish vividly draws account management best practices from IBM's up and down fortunes since the 1970s. In the process, it also offers an illuminating insider perspective on Big Blue's best and worst times - as experienced in day-to-day interactions with some of its most important customers. The book's most provocative takeaway: IBM's services-led sales strategy has often hindered, rather than helped, efforts to achieve a fruitful long-term synergy of high margin hardware and software sales with low-margin services sales. The 1990s breakup of the salesforce to serve rival line of business organizations and the 2002 acquisition of PwC Consulting emerge as culture-shaking events for IBM that could only be turned to advantage by great account management. In this new book, Capon and Maikish provide an A to Z of account management excellence, including its significant intellectual capital demands, leadership requirements, and under-appreciated ethical dimension as keys to achieving win-win outcomes for suppliers and customers. The book does this through case studies of three extended account management engagements that were highly significant for IBM in the 1970s and 1980s, the 1990s, and the 2000s. Along the way, it presents a provocative look at what really fueled IBM's success in its best times, including its 1990s resurgence under then-CEO Lou Gerstner, and what caused the firm to struggle in its worst times, including the 2010s. Anyone who wants to understand why IBM is once again in rebuilding mode will find much food for thought here.

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9781737766445

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Noel Capon is R. C. Kopf Professor of InternationalMarketing and past Chair of the Marketing Division, Graduate School of Business, Columbia University.Educated primarily in Great Britain, Professor Caponearned B.Sc., Ph.D. degrees in Chemistry from UniversityCollege, London University. He also received degrees inBusiness Administration from Manchester (Dip. BA), Harvard (MBA), Columbia Business Schools (Ph.D.).Professor Capon joined the Columbia Business School faculty in 1979.Previously he served on the faculty of and received tenure from the Universityof California - Graduate School of Management, UCLA. He has taught and/or held faculty positions at Harvard Business School; Australia - MonashUniversity; England - Bradford Management Centre, London BusinessSchool, Manchester Business School; France - INSEAD; Hong Kong -Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST); China - ChinaEuropean International Business School (CEIBS - Shanghai); India - IndianSchool of Business (ISB - Hyderabad); Mexico - TEC Monterrey.Professor Capon has published more than 60 refereed articles and bookchapters and is editor for sections on Marketing, and Sales Management andDistribution, in the AMA Management Handbook (1994). He has publishedmore than 30 books plus three video books.Professor Capon teaches on Columbia's full-time MBA and Executive MBA(EMBA) programs and its partner program with Hong Kong University, LondonBusiness School. He is a pioneer in developing video teaching materials andteaching via the flipped classroom. Professor Capon was Founding Director ofManaging Strategic Accounts and the Global Account Manager Certificationprogram in conjunction with St. Gallen University (Switzerland). He is a directorof the Strategic Account Management Association (SAMA). He foundedthe Advanced Marketing Management Program in conjunction with CEIBS.Professor Capon also designs, directs, and teaches in numerous customprograms for major corporations globally. In 2001, Professor Capon cofoundedThe Chief Sales Executive Forum, offering multiple educational opportunitiesfor sales and account management leaders. Capon is Chair of Wessex Press, Comply First, and the venture capital firm Lunacap Ventures. GUS MAIKISH has over 40 years of experience in IT, sales, business strategy and management. Hewas at IBM for 37 years working primarily with financial services firms. For his last eight years at IBM, he was the IBM managing director for Citigroup with the global responsibility, including revenue andprofit, for IBM's largest financial services customer. Prior to this assignment he was vice president ofsales for the financial services sector. He had management responsibility for the largest 300 financialfirms in the United States and over 200 sales professionals. Gus was promoted to that position aftersuccessfully managing the Merrill Lynch account team as a certified client executive. Gus managed the IBM MerrillLynch sales team for eight years. He also held sales and sales management positions on other financial servicesaccounts including JP Morgan, The New York Federal Reserve Bank, Irving Trust, US Trust and National WestminsterUSA. Gus also worked at the corporate level of IBM as an internal marketing consultant. There he was responsiblefor reviewing strategies for a number of IBM product sets as well as IBM sales in Asia. Prior to joining IBM in 1972, Gus worked in application development, served in the US Army, and completed an MBA degree at Pace University.He is currently a guest lecturer at the Columbia University Business School on the subject of Global AccountManagement. Since retiring from IBM, he has provided coaching and development for IBM's sales teams in Vietnamand helped to establish business relationships with bank executives there on behalf of IBM. He has also worked onaccount management transformation projects at Xerox and several other firms as a part of the Insight Groupconsulting team where he is a managing partner.

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