Marketing needs sales, and sales needs marketing. Yet in many firms, senior marketing executives have little or no sales experience so interactions between the two functions are less than optimal. The purpose of this blog is to educate marketers about what senior sales executives should be doing. That way, inter-functional conversations can be more productive. The basis for what follows is a new book based on extensive research with sales leaders in corporations with the most successful sales forces, Sales Eats First http://www.axcesscapon.com/book-store/sales-and-account-management/sales-eats-first

Q & A with Noel Capon

Noel Capon talks about how firms can retain and grow their most valued customers by shifting from country-based account management to global account managment.

Professor Noel Capon has something in common with his students: he thinks the price of textbooks has gotten out of hand. “It’s a serious social issue,” he says.

Capon likens the landscape of the textbook industry to that of the airline industry in the 1950s and ’60s, describing it as a “cozy oligopoly” in which the different players “compete for authors and over the quality of the books but not on price.”

Want to have a hand in the success of Manchester United, the world’s preeminent soccer franchise? Forget traveling across the pond or even tuning your television to the next big match — all you have to do is pay your taxes.

The economic downturn has done what even David Beckham could not: transform professional soccer into an American institution.

Just take a look at the jersey of star center forward Wayne Rooney (pictured). In addition to the Manchester United logo and the Nike Swoosh, the famed red uniform prominently carries the logo of AIG, the insurance giant famous for paying out bonuses to its top executives after receiving a multi-billion dollar bailout from the U.S. government.

Everyone has his or her own choices for the top marketers of 2007, so I don’t expect you to agree with me. And my choices are not the result of any scientific study — I did that a few years ago when I wrote The Marketing Mavens — they are informed by my experiences and biases, just as I’m sure that yours are.

Dateline: London

I think to really understand the ramifications of what happened, you just had to be there. At London’s Heathrow Airport that is.

On Thursday March 27, I took British Airways’ (BA) day flight from JFK to Heathrow. On Saturday I was due to talk about customer value to a group of high-level strategic account directors at a global software company. I planned to tell them that success in value delivery would guarantee customer satisfaction and enable them to retain and grow their customers, increase profits, and lead to greater shareholder value. I relaxed in my Club World backward-facing seat and concentrated on the task ahead.

On Thursday evening I landed at Terminal 4; little did I know what was unfolding at Terminal 5.

Terminal 5 was BA’s long-planned new $8.6 billion state-of-the-art facility at Heathrow. CEO Willie Walsh was on hand at 4 a.m. when the first flight arrived early from Hong Kong.

Barack Obama did not go to business school, but he will win the U.S. presidency because he understands the core principle of developing a market strategy - the positioning statement. Similar to how L'Oreal became an industry leader by telling a consistent story to its customers ("Because You're Worth It"), Barack Obama has offered voters a consistent message: "The Change We Need." It's everywhere: in his speeches, in the advertising, and in the placards held his by supporters at campaign events. By contrast, John McCain's message has been inconsistent and confused.

During the past 35 years, FedEx (formerly Federal Express) has grown from the U.S.’s largest venture capital start-up to a global leader in shipping and logistics. Under CEO Fred Smith, many people have contributed to FedEx’s success, but few are aware of the role played by someone who was not even employed by the company.

The Net Promoter Score (NPS) is a valuable tool for companies seeking to understand the degree of customer loyalty they enjoy. In part, NPS's appeal is its simplicity; customers answer just one question. NPS is simply the percent of customers that actively promote your product less the percent of customers that are active detractors. In a similar spirit, Capon's Customer-Centric CEO Index (C4I) is a simple measure of your firm's degree of customer orientation.