I began writing this editorial last week from the lounge of West Ottawa Hyundai, a sales-driven business that obviously recognizes the value of customer service.

It all started earlier in the day when my car developed a rather severe shimmy on the way to a lunch meeting. After I had surrendered the keys at the dealership, I asked if there was a courtesy phone I could use.

"Yes," said the young lady behind the desk, pointing across the lounge. "It's right over there, next to the computer."

Wait a minute. "You mean I can just sit down and go to work at that computer?" I asked.

She nodded. "And if you have a laptop, we have wireless service, too."

So there I was. Rather than trudging through the snow in search of a retailer who carried bus tickets, or waiting for a courtesy shuttle, I could just pour myself a complimentary coffee, sit down, and go to work while the technicians looked at my car.

This stellar example of customer service followed a lunch with Eliot Burdett and Gillian Brouse from Peak Sales Recruiting.

Eliot is one of those guys with the kind of DNA that Ottawa needs cloned and engineered into the genetic makeup of salespeople across the city. He isn't afraid to call what he does "sales" and scorns any attempt to disguise it as "marketing" or "business development" because of some misguided stigma created by fictional buffoons such as WKRP in Cincinnati's Herb Tarlek. We talked about that old Ottawa issue that will never go away until something is done about it – too many companies led by too many executives with an engineering background who fail to appreciate the importance of investing time, money, metrics and the insight of seasoned professionals into building a topflight sales team from day one.

Such talk, of course, brings up that other word considered most foul by some people in this town – entrepreneurship. We all had a chuckle at a certain letter to the editor I received a couple of weeks ago in praise of Ottawa's reputation as a sleepy old government town. The author recommended that if I wasn't happy with that, I should just move to a city more suited to my tastes.

We agreed that the only way to have a strong and vibrant city is to have a strong and vibrant economy, and that only comes from having anchor companies that have their key decision-making happening here. If that's a concept too painful to grasp, gentle reader, perhaps you are the one who should relocate.

It all comes back to this sales and marketing thing and the utter contempt that many tech executives in this town still have toward something so trivial as sales. After all, you can't patent a database of sales leads or the soft skills needed to ferret out, qualify and close deals. So these things can't really be that important then, can they? On the other hand, how many companies in this town have floundered because they stubbornly clung to the fool's dream that all you have to do is build it with enough bells and whistles and they will come? In most cases, these companies have flopped because they refused to acknowledge that it takes a lot more than intellectual property to build success.

Eliott pointed out how the OBJ recognizes excellence in the business community with little regard as to whether a particular company on, say, our Fastest Growing Companies list, is in the restaurant business or the digital surveillance business. What matters is that a company has adopted the behaviours and habits that create success. The particular product matters much less than the lesson that can be learned from a company that has identified a niche, determined the needs and wants of potential customers, and puts a product into the market with the right marketing strategy to make sales. Should it matter that the company in question could be a chain of restaurants called The Works? I don't think so. Neither does the team at Peak Sales.

For too many executives in the tech sector, however, it makes all the difference. The fact that the product is a burger makes them turn up their nose when all that should matter is how this chain has spread across the city and challenged the big guys with enough success to make both the OBJ's Fastest Growing Companies and Employers of Distinction lists two years in a row. (And we didn't pick them. They qualified themselves by meeting stringent, objective criteria). Success is success no matter the nature of the enterprise.

As I wrap up from the lounge of West Ottawa Hyundai, I can't help but think how much stronger the local economy would be if more tech execs were willing to look past the end of their nose and see what best practices exist are out there that could drive their business to new heights.