Early in my career I was assigned to create a website for a major client. As far as I knew, this would be the first online vehicle ordering system in the automotive industry. At the time, I was young and had limited experience leading large projects; nevertheless, I was given the task and entrusted with a large budget.

One key piece of the project was acquiring the computer equipment to host the service. For assistance I consulted with the experts at a well-known hardware manufacturer, which was a preferred vendor to my client. The manufacturer made an aggressive recommendation that my engineering team and I thought was expensive. We challenged the vendor, but its SMEs responded with haughtiness and condescension. We went ahead and accepted their recommendation and made the large purchase.

When the website was launched a few months later, we learned that the equipment did not match our needs. We had purchased far more gear than was necessary, only confirming our suspicions about the proposal. The vendor had taken advantage of a well-funded project and my lack of experience.

Fortunately, we were able to reallocate some of the equipment to other projects and eventually grow into the remaining servers. Within twelve months, the excess capacity was properly allocated. The website was a big success for me, my teammates, and the client.

There was one loser in the project. Because of the behavior of the vendor’s SMEs during the project, they gained a reputation for being scammers and blowhards. They became known as exaggerators at best and liars at worst. They lost their ongoing relationship with the company, and because of that they lost out on other large equipment purchases. They secured one large sale on my project but lost far more business going forward.

Experts can feel pressured or tempted to exaggerate at times. This might manifest as overstating the size or complexity of a problem, overplaying the effort required to complete a task, or overstating the skills needed to resolve a problem. An SME might be incentivized to propose a larger sale than is prudent. Regardless of the circumstances, effective SMEs don’t coerce the customer. They don’t apply undo pressure on clients to do what they themselves would not do.