I got more involved in the sales aspect recently and I find the part about trust especially true. Company size and references has a disproportionate effect compared to the reality of their reliability. A lot of big service companies fail to deliver, yet it doesn't seem to have an impact on future buyers. We all heard the phrase "nobody ever go fired for buying <market leader>" but only recently it started to resonate for me, and experiencing first-hand that when you are buying software in a bureaucratic environment you are not incentived to buy the best solution, but to minimize your responsibility in case of failure.
Weirdly enough, one little-stated aspect of that dynamic is that as a client you can sue a major consulting or services firm for delivery failure and expect to get something out of it, whereas that option is rarely available for smaller firms that can’t absorb the cost of a single lawsuit.
