Customers Win, Suppliers Win

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.