Your Loyalty Is Required

The deal is good for your prospect. The prospect will receive all the value you promise and more, but at a price that makes it impossible for your company to generate the profit necessary to serve the client and sustain a responsible margin. The deal is great for your prospect, great for you, but bad for your company.

Your client has terms and conditions on their paper (read: contract) that shifts the liability so far in your direction that any profit you would stand to make would come at too great a risk. You want the deal, and your dream client wants the deal, but the risk-bearing party does not.

The demands your prospective client is going to make on your operations is unlike anything anyone in that role has ever experienced—or anything any other clients has ever expected. It’s not that the service level agreements are going to stretch the operations team, but rather that they’ve been set up to fail with impossible demands that would break the laws of physics. The prospect really wants what they want, and you really want the business, but it will harm people responsible.

A great company makes for a great prospect. They are financially strong and stable, and one of the ways they have such amazing cash flow is by stretching the companies that serve them with payment terms that are beyond the pale. Worse still, even though they have the money to pay and pay promptly, they make their suppliers ask for the money over and over before they pay their bills. They need your help, and you want the logo. Your company, however, doesn’t believe it is a bank.

You serve your clients, and you need to care about them. They also need to believe that you create enough value to treat you like a partner, not a supplier or vendor. The best relationships are built on mutual respect and trust, something that is difficult to do with people who have a low moral intelligence (MQ).

The company you work for is your house. It never makes sense to burn your own house to the ground.