I periodically see indignant tweets and comments by people that if you sell something to a client, then you’re at worst being unethical, or at best being idiotic to say that you like to consider customer relations as partnerships.
This has reached the point where I’ll no longer sit back and listen to cynics who think that as soon as you start selling you either cease being human, or cease being unable to think symbiotically.
Insisting that companies cannot, and should not, refer to clients as partners, is at worst toxic and at best, demeaning to all parties.
Now, I’m not going to say that there are instances where some companies jump on the bandwagon and like to insinuate a partnership but stick to a traditional “stick whatever badge you need on that widget to sell it” sales approach. Of course that is going to happen.
But to tar all companies that sell, or integrators with that brush? Pah! Think again.
I’ve worked in some form of consulting pretty much all my career. I started as a trainee consultant, and when that programme was dying I transferred across to a Unix system administration team. Even as an “end customer” I still had my own customers, and as the company I was working for started taking on outsourcing contracts, I started being a consultant again. That was followed by a brief stint in the less than compatible world of finance, and since then I’ve remained in consulting.
Consult! Consult! Consult!
Consulting, systems integration, however you want to think about it, does not work well when customers are treated as meat – as paying clients to service the next bill. That leads to a succession of one-off engagements and implementations. Rape a company of budget, move on to the next and pillage that, too. It’s not a sustainable model. Or rather, unless you’re a global company and trade on some pre-established name, that model doesn’t get you very far. Pretty soon you get a crap name in the market and you start driving yourself out of business. You’ll blame the technology you’re using, and switch to another product, or another vendor, exhaust a new set of customers, and move on again.
There’s only one sustainable model in consulting and systems integration, and that’s the model where you engage with clients in a partnership. I’m not talking about looking for joint ventures; I’m talking about basic recognition of fundamental business cooperation, viz:
- I want to help you succeed at what you do;
- If you succeed at what you do, you’ll be able to help me succeed by buying things from me.
Symbiotic? Or parasitic? A cynic would say parasitic, and they’d be wrong. Or they’d come from the “everything should be free except for what I do” school of business. You know – the people who think that the only company entitled to put markup on a widget, or make a profit, is themselves.
It’s actually a symbiotic relationship, because it recognises that a relationship can actually be of mutual benefit to both parties. It doesn’t have to be about one “winning” and one “losing”, or “one making money” and “one spending money”.
The absolute basis of my belief in this is covered in my “13 traits of a great consultant” post. In particular, point 11 sums up exactly why a customer/client relationships should become a partnership:
Solve the problem, don’t answer the question – From an IT perspective, I use this example: an engineer, if asked a question by a customer, will do his or her utmost to answer the question as exactingly as possible. A consultant will look past the direct question and aim to solve the problem that led the customer to ask the question. Or in other words: if it doesn’t have a yes/no answer, no question is asked in isolation.
If you just have a customer/client relationship, then all you get is an engineering relationship. “Yes we can sell you widget X? What, you thought widget X did Y? But you didn’t ask? Thankyou for shopping, no refunds!” Do you really want that sort of relationship? Going down that path, you get a plethora of situations where technology is blamed for non-technical issues – and indeed, it happens at both the client and the sales side.
Form a symbiotic partnership though, and the relationship is far more wholesome and useful. From the sales side of it, satisfied customers whom you consistently deliver expected results to are repeat customers; repeat customers form the basis of predictable sales and earnings, and as time goes on provide valuable feedback to your growth as a company, too. From the client side, you get solutions that are tailored to your needs by people who you know and trust – and you know and trust them because they’re very much aware of your business requirements, constraints and operational models. A partner in fact will be able to help you through the rougher times – regardless of whether that’s unexpected staff changes without handover, or simply when needing a leaner approach that sacrifices scope only, rather than quality and scope. A partner will have the experience of working within your organisation and be able to deliver faster, more efficiently, and with less impact to your operational processes.
So, the next time someone suggests to you that you can’t have a partnership in a sales/client model, or that consultants/system integrators can’t form symbiotic relationships with your business, consider this one question:
Do you want a supplier you can trust, or a box dropper?
Rarely, if ever, will the answer be the latter.