Client-Facing Soft Skills

People ultimately buy from people. This is a profound yet simple and accurate statement. Despite the technical complexities of a high-technology solution set, pricing differences, organizational factors, and corporate politics, in the end, if you build a great relationship with your customers, they will want to work with you. Most technical administrators in the enterprise space would confide that they would happily spend a little more in order to work with a vendor team they trust and enjoy working with. Furthermore, they may even accept minor feature losses if it means working with a vendor team that is very responsive to their needs and easy to work with, especially if something goes wrong and technical support cases are open and being actively resolved. This is one of the reasons so many vendors exist…because in the end, people buy from people, and that means they buy from people they like!

If we take everything we learned in the previous chapter...