We buy from our vendors because we like them and they do great work. We sell to our clients because they like us and we do great work. There’s something about the nature of these relationships though that does not encourage direct cross communication. If these two spokes on the wheel of commerce are allowed to cross sometimes the wheel can just fly off. I forgot this basic truth yesterday and in an innocent seeming act of expedience I sent a status reply to a clients question about their website to both the client and our programmer. Within minutes a full-on email brawl had broken out.

After a few emergency phone calls and a settling of dust, I got the following email from the programmer in question: ”Can I use this as a testimonial on my site?: Our Work Evokes Emotions: “The scrolling made me so nauseous, I had to go throw up.”

In his phone follow-up he said: “Why should all the testimonials be positive. It’s unrealistic.”

Never Let Clients Speak to Vendors.