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Can doing the right thing in business get you ahead or be a detriment?

I had lunch yesterday with a good friend of mine who is the head of sales for a systems integration company here in Orlando. He told me a story about how a vendor of theirs had asked them to do an install job for some equipment sold by a competitor. They agreed. When the install tech called the client to request some vendor-required paperwork the client blew up at him, and then called the vendor who pulled them off the job. When my friend called the vendor to find out what happened he was told that there was a problem with the install tech and his lack of people skills. That was funny considering that this same tech sold a large amount of equipment not a few weeks previous to a very large client. So what was the real story? It was the end of the quarter and the vendor’s sales person was trying to get their numbers.

When I first had Atlantic Dominion Solutions up in Washington, D.C. I remember a client telling me that I was going to have trouble in business because I was too honest. I also remember how, less than two years ago, I was incredulous that even with signed agreements clients still wouldn’t pay for services they had received. And in more recent times, a client we are no longer working with agreed one day to work within a development structure (weekly deploys and reviews) and the very next day broke out of that structure saying, “I don’t understand why it is a big deal.”

That is just the tip of the iceberg.

I have never been one to sugar coat estimates for clients or tell them it will take less time when in reality I know it will take much longer. We have clients come to us all the time that were told by a company that it will take x hours and the project took twice as long or more. We have had projects run longer than expected but we didn’t lie about it nor did we honestly expect in the beginning that they would take as long as they did.

What do you think? Can a business succeed without using deceptive marketing techniques and business practices, or is it just business as usual? I’d love to hear from you.

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