“Good teams may win, but great teams love each other!”
I have said those words as a father, a coach, an employer, an employee, and most importantly, as a teammate. Before I embarked on what is now a 35-year career in the services industry, I had the wonderful opportunity to be a professional baseball player and teammate with the Expos and the Red Sox. Looking back, I can say with certainty that “teammates” have not simply defined my journey; they have shaped who I am, both on and off the field.
In 2010, my family suffered a terrible tragedy, with the loss of our beautiful fifteen-year-old son Will, to mental illness and suicide. Almost immediately, my old teammates came to my rescue. They showed up, stood beside me, and helped carry me through the darkest period of my life. They gave me hope. In fact, they dared me to hope, and to this day, I am forever grateful.
About a month after Will’s passing, I was back at work, but I was struggling. I decided to attend an important trade show because that was my job and I did not know what else to do. While I was there, Customers, with tears in their eyes, came up to me and hugged me at the booth. Until then, I had not realized how much those business relationships had come to mean. In that moment, I learned my customers were my teammates. People who show up, when nothing requires them to.
That defining moment is at the heart of this message, because it reminds me how often business gets the idea of excellence wrong. We talk about it like it is a solo pursuit. Work harder. Be smarter. Outperform. I spent seven years on pitcher’s mounds all over America before I ever built a service relationship. In the thirty-five years since, the last 23 of them with Source Support Services, I have never once seen real excellence delivered by one person alone. Excellence is a team sport, and every team runs on the same invisible infrastructure: trust, teamwork, and the simple belief that you matter to the people standing next to you. That belief is not a soft idea. It is the thing that holds a customer relationship together at 3 a.m. when a system goes down and somebody has to answer the phone. It is what determines whether a field engineer who has never met the customer, still shows up prepared and ready to represent that brand as if it were their own.
As Chief Customer Officer, I think about this from a different angle. My job is not to manage accounts. It is to build relationships that hold up under pressure, the same way great teammates do. The customers I have served the longest are not defined by the size of the deal, but by the strength of the trust we have built together. At Source Support, our teammate mindset is what lets us build reliable, compliant, repeatable service programs around people committed to helping our customers grow. We talk a lot at Source Support about our vision to orchestrate the world of work at scale. People hear that and picture platforms and automation, but orchestration was never just a technology idea to me.
Long before we had a Unified Services Platform, we had people. What I know is this. You cannot orchestrate a service event, a field engineer network, or a customer relationship at scale unless you first orchestrate trust between the people doing the work. That is what our Unified Services Platform, powered by Source Central, is built to do. It orchestrates real time dispatch, credentialing, parts logistics, and case visibility so that every technician walking into a job site is wrapped in the support of a full team, even when no one else is standing next to them. The technology does its job, so our people can do theirs.
The real measure of any teammate, however, comes in helping the people around you feel supported, prepared, and valued when the pressure is highest. Everywhere I go, whether I am speaking with a customer, a coach, or a room full of parents, I ask the same question: how many people on your team, and how many of your customers, only feel like they matter when the numbers are good? The best teams answer that question before pressure exposes it. They build relationships strong enough to remind people they matter in every season, not just when performance is easy to celebrate. Here are three things I’ve learned about building strong, teammate based customer and partner relationships, and why I believe it’s the true competitive advantage in our industry.
In baseball, I learned that you’re not going to last long if you’re not a good teammate. I was the last man on the roster more years than I want to admit, yet I stuck around because I understood the power of being a great teammate, a motivator, a friend who added value not just on the field but off. As a result, teammates covered for me and expected the same from me. That lesson never left me. In our world, showing up looks like a mentor staying on a call to walk a teammate through a repair they have never seen before. It looks like an operations leader picking up the phone during a high stakes OEM escalation instead of letting it sit in a queue. It looks like Source Central lining up the right parts, the right credentials, and the right case history before a technician ever knocks on a door, because showing up prepared should never be left to chance. It looks like me showing up in person for a customer during their hardest week, not just their easiest renewal. It looks like leaders modeling presence instead of just issuing direction from a distance. That is true in the dugout, and it is true in a service center. When people know their teammates will show up for them under pressure, they perform differently. They rise with purpose, put the mission first, and give others the confidence to do the same.
"Being present beats being impressive."
Your job does not love you back. Your teammates do. Our goal has always been to be our customers’ teammates first. A vendor relationship ends the moment the contract does. A teammate relationship does not. The OEM’s and data center operators we serve need to know somebody at Source Support understands their business well enough to lose sleep over it when things go wrong. That is why we own outcomes, not just tasks. Our platform can schedule the visit and track the ticket. It cannot build trust on its own. That still gets built one relationship, one job, one teammate at a time. A teammate does not clock out when the ticket closes, and neither do we. At Source Support, we create belonging on purpose, so every engineer, dispatcher, partner, and customer knows they are seen, supported, and part of the team.
"None of us is as strong as all of us."
I first heard this quote many years ago during my baseball days, and since then, sharing that message has become part of my mission as a leader. That connection often becomes a lifeline during the hard weeks, the ones with too many cases and not enough hands. People stay, and customers stay, because somebody has their back. I learned this on baseball fields all over America, but I experienced it again in sales. Success came from listening to our customer teammates’ goals and finding ways to make “their way” more successful, rather than insisting on our way. Listening without judgment is what creates that trust. It lets a customer hand you a hard truth that is received with curiosity, not defensiveness. Good coaches love their players; great ones show it. I believe the same about customers. Listening is how you show it.
The teams that listen the best, and the customer relationships that last the longest, are almost always the ones built by people who catch small problems before they become big ones. When my wife and I started The Will To Live Foundation, we challenged teenagers to recognize the teammates in their lives and rejoice in those relationships. “These are your Life Teammates®, be there for them, they need you just as you need them.” I learned in my baseball days that the best teammates rejoice in the success of their teammates. It is the same truth I build into every team at Source Support, and every customer relationship I am part of.
Our field engineer network, sales, and operations teams are at their best when people trust one another enough to ask for help, share what they know, and celebrate someone else’s win as if it were their own.
They are a gifted and talented group that I am immensely proud of, but what makes Source Support great is our ability to orchestrate the world of work around our field engineers, as we work together with our customers to deliver on our shared Service Promise. We rise by lifting each other. That is not a slogan. It is the only way I have ever seen sustainable and long-lasting excellence built.
Customers often ask what makes Source Support different. My answer is simple: we do not see the companies we serve as accounts; we see them as teammates. That means showing up prepared, staying present under pressure, and answering the call at 3 a.m. just as readily as we do at 3 p.m.
We orchestrate the world of work at scale 24/7/365, but orchestration is not just about technology. To me, orchestration is really a promise between teammates. It is how we deliver on a service promise that is consistent, reliable, scalable, compliant, and protective of our customers’ brand, because that promise only holds up if the people behind it trust each other. Where expertise meets orchestration, is when teammates deliver for teammates. It is also where technology is utilized to provide every technician with the dispatch, credentials, and real time visibility they need to deliver world class service.
If you are an OEM, a data center operator, or a channel partner looking for a service partner who is a teammate that will get in the game with you instead of just filling out a ticket, I would love to talk. Reach out to sales@sourcesupport.com to start the conversation. Come find out what it feels like to have a teammate in this business, not just a vendor.
Chief Customer Officer, Source Support Services
John Trautwein is Chief Customer Officer of Source Support Services and Founder and Board Chair of the Will To Live Foundation. He is the author of the acclaimed memoir, The Will To Live, How One Family Turned Tragedy into Healing, Hope, and Purpose. For more than 35 years he has built customer and workforce relationships across global service organizations, guided by a philosophy he first learned in professional baseball: excellence is never a solo act.
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