While working for a small consulting firm I learned the difference between a sales person who understood the value of the service they were promoting and one that was just chasing a commission. Both types will open with how they have people that can implement whatever the hot technology buzz word of the moment is, to which the potential client inevitably replied “Oh, we are doing that now”. The money-chaser would then move on to the next service...and later a new job. The customer-oriented salesperson would then ask “How is that going for you?” and the most frequent reply began with “Great, though we are having trouble with [fill in the blank]”. If smart salesperson was as good at listening as at memorizing buzz words, I generally would get a new project to work on.
While having done a great deal of new development across the full lifecycle, a large portion of my career has been stepping into a project that was already running and helping to find solutions to the gotchas that occur on every project. One day it occurred to me to provide a service dealing with the pain points, both proactively and retroactively.
