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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
Insisting that companies cannot, and should not, refer to clients as partners, is at worst toxic and at best, demeaning to all parties.<\/p>\n
Now, I’m not going to say that there are<\/em> 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.<\/p>\n But to tar all companies that sell, or integrators with that brush? Pah! Think again.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n Consult! Consult! Consult!<\/p>\n Consulting, systems integration, however you want to think about it, does not work<\/em> well when customers are treated as meat \u2013 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.<\/p>\n 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:<\/p>\n 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 \u2013 the people who think that the only company entitled to put markup on a widget, or make a profit, is themselves.<\/p>\n It’s actually a symbiotic relationship, because it recognises that a relationship can actually be of mutual<\/em> benefit to both parties. It doesn’t have to be about one “winning” and one “losing”, or “one making money” and “one spending money”.<\/p>\n\n