You can never make friends when...

You can never make friends when... 

it comes to business and work related matters.

I dont know whether those of my friends who work as sales person/product specialist/business executive (or anyone who has interaction with customer/ vendor / business partners) agree with me on this or not. When i first started in the business line, i was the forever sincere and accommodating person. I will try my best to fight for customer rights or benefits (even though it requires me to face my boss head-to-head), working late hours and all means to cater to business partner's need (although sometimes its ridiculous and trivial matter such as printing 100 copies of the same documents and send to their office in person ) and the list went on. If you want to laugh at my naiveness after reading all this, by all means. Because sometimes i laughed at my own stupidity as well.  

Sadly, being 4 years in the position had taught me a hard lesson that no one appreciate you being sincere when it comes to business, in fact the client will try to take advantages of your courteous; boss will scold you for being too nice with the vendors and not squeezing till their last drop; business partners will said can you make another 100 copies of the same for the other client of his as well. 

As the result of the bad experience, i have try my best to stay professionally when it comes to business, there is no i-friend-friend-with-you, cuz its all about business. I don't wish to befriend you but its nothing personal because business is all about being mutually beneficial. Decision is made and actions are taken based in the context of mutual benefits and not feeling. You have a business request, and i have the solution, we agreed on the working relationship and the price tagged along with it. Therefore we shake hands and the work begin. When the deal is done, we say all the best and hope to work with you again in future. There is no "lets go out for a drink next time", or "lets continue to be friends although the business is over". 

If the client is asking for sponsorship or a meal, i will comply the request if my boss said yes, its not that i friend-friend with you. But frankly, I hate the business luncheon, business dinners and whatever meals which the intention is not to fill the stomach but to fulfill the business objective. Sometimes when the setting is out of office, suddenly everything is let loose, people will start to bitch about their boss, their company, competitors and they expected you to either nod your head and agree with every words they said or you should offer them equally juicy news. And to make it worse, sometimes you are forced to talk about the topics which you only talk to you friends, just to keep the conversation going. "Oh, where do you live? where do you usually hang out? oh i like that restaurant as well". blah blah blah. Its as though for that 60 minutes, you have to psycho yourself that the person is somewhat you friend.

Unequivocally, that everyone who treat me as the person with title "Product Manager", and not the "Susan" i am, will be "unfriended" when the business/ work is over. Opps, maybe thats not the right words, as there is no friendship to start off with. Maybe 'dissociated" is a better words but i like the word "unfriend" more. Its like you can unfriend a person from your facebook's friend list when you (wish to) no longer in contact with them. 

Today, i have the urge of 'unfriend' a person so much that i wish i can dig out his facebook account, purposely add him then unfriend him just to release my dissatisfaction. He is my company's distributor, and i have constant interaction with him as sometimes we will go to see customer together. I will do technical explanation and he will do whatever necessary to close the sales. We are in good terms but again we never went cross each other's line, so there is no reason for me to dislike him. This morning, my company hosted a discussion for a group of clients, and since he is the appointed distributor for that particular client so he came as well. The sales manager asked me whether i wanted to join the lunch with the client after the discussion. I said go ahead without me, as the distributor can handle (aka entertain) the client (anyway that is why he was being appointed anyway). To be frank, i used the sentence "He pandai-pandai handle them la". But this is not an insult by all means, this is supposedly how Malaysians talk in a non-formal setting. 

Then my sales manager open her eyes widely and mouthed to me: "he-is-sitting-there!!" and i know at that instance i'm dead on the spot as he would have overheard our conversation easily. Well, the conversation ended and i pretend nothing happened and went back to my work. You would have thought that the story ends here, but this is just the beginning of his "annoys-susan-plan". He purposely went and sat beside me, asked another colleague of mine who sits in a cubicle away from me about some product related questions, when he knows exactly that i have the answer for it. I don't know whether he did it purposely to belittle or annoy me, but i remained poised.

Then before he went out for the mentioned luncheon, which i told my sales team to go ahead without me, he delivered the final blow and ridiculed me infront of my colleagues, "But we need you to handle the client ma". I nearly puke blood when he said that, but i just put on a poker face as though i dont know he is being sarcastic. Please tell me, how to have a "friendly" relationship when the distributor do this to the product manager of the principal company? I'm not trying to imply the differences in  positions here, but in business, isn't professionalism is the least of the expectation? 

So the insight if today is "do not initiate friendship when it comes to business as 100% of the time, you will regret it eventually, worse still, immediately".