What's this Win/Win thing about, anyway?

If you have read through the material on our website, you may have noticed that we emphasize the win/win business paradigm.  This term may be new to you, and I wanted to share some background and detail with you about the intentions behind it.  In a nutshell, the idea is that if we can help your business win, we will win as well, so our intention is to do all we can to position our customers' business to win. 

If your experience in the Information Technology industry has been anything like mine, you have probably found very few vendors who you could completely trust based on their true intentions and approach to business.  Instead, you may have often found yourself concerned whether they were really serving you in their interactions with you.  You may have felt lied to, manipulated, coerced, betrayed, or abandoned at various points as it became obvious that your vendor placed their own interests ahead of your needs, often without even letting you know this was the case.  I personally have been responsible for large IT projects in which (of course) a few days before rollout one of my vendors suddenly announced that their deliverable was significantly different from what we'd agreed upon.  They had interpreted a portion of the contract in their favor without telling me, never putting the learnings they had gained from months of contact with my organization together with a sincere desire to support my success by working out any details that were uncomfortable for them.  The result was that my project was late and I was forced to pay them much more than I'd budgeted in order to close the gap.  I felt quite betrayed, and certainly didn't want to use or recommend them again.  This was definitely not an outcome in which we both came out ahead.  In fact, despite their getting more money, in the end both of us lost out because they didn't build the goodwill that they needed to grow their business.

After numerous such interactions, I realized that my personal and professional life was only going to be meaningful to me if I could embody a different way of doing business based on a genuine respect for anyone I established a relationship with - starting with myself - and a sincere commitment to finding a way that the relationship could support both parties in equality.   I don't take this commitment to building a win/win business lightly: it means in many cases reinventing every part of my business and avoiding some of the quick paths to success that I learned in the past.  Figuring out some of the hows and whys definitely keeps me up at night!  But it's also exciting: my entire experience of being in business is fresh, new and uplifting, and I'm seeing that the vendors and customers who I connect with begin to feel as excited as I do as they slowly start to understand what this means.  But this understanding takes time, for all of us.  In many cases we have to allow that the way things have always worked in the past isn't the only way that they CAN work.

I'd like to share a few of the insights I've had on my journey in this article, but I'm sure that there will be opportunities to share more of them with you in the future.  For example, I've had to redefine what sales means for a company committed to win/win relationships.  Traditional sales techniques theoretically revolve around finding a need and filling it, which seems like a win/win activity.  But all too often they involve creating an artificial need, subtly or overtly coercing buying decisions, using discounts as a means to get the customer to ignore their own business need, creating a personal relationship just to get a sale, and so on.  Even more confusing is the fact that something like a time limit or discount may be grounded in a legitimate business requirement for the vendor, but ends up being coercive because of the intention behind it.  So I've come to the conclusion that bringing sales into the win/win paradigm is really a matter of intention. My intention is my commitment to win/win and equality in relationships which is reflected in Enki's charter with statements like  "...to create wealth for our clients and hence for ourselves."

While this statement of intention is simple, some of the differences in my behavior with respect to sales that I want to see are quite complex and nuanced.  I don't even begin yo claim that I have all the answers yet.  For example:

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