“We get it. But our clients would never understand.” It’s a frequent rebuttal to our Getting Real philosophy.
Read between the lines and there’s a disturbing undercurrent to that message. It’s really saying, “I get it but these other people could never understand. They don’t have the wisdom and the understanding that I do.” It’s like the way some LA or NYC people sound when they talk down about the masses in the flyover states. It’s insulting.
The truth is folks can usually handle a lot more than these wizards think. Are their clients really imbeciles who couldn’t possibly understand why they’re foregoing a spec to build something real ASAP? I doubt it.
A lot of times people are just stuck in patterns. Process gets done a certain way because that’s the way it’s been done in the past. Sometimes the arteries of work get clogged up simply because no one stops it from happening. Inertia happens.
Set a new course
Instead of looking down at your clients, look for ways to convince, educate, and guide them. That’s part of your job.
Start off by agreeing on your common goal: to create the best final product possible. Agreeing on a common goal is an old Dale Carnegie technique that works well because it gets everyone to realize they’re on the same team and fighting for the same thing. You start getting “yes” immediately.
Then steer them in what you think is the best direction. Take the initiative. Set expectations. Explain why you want to do it a new way. Tell them how you think the project should go.
Will this approach lose you the job? If it does, maybe it’s a bad fit in the first place.
But you may be surprised by the results. This kind of effort shows you’re someone who genuinely cares about the final outcome. And a lot of clients would love to work with someone like that. They’d love for you to tell them there’s a better way. They’d love to know that you want to do more than just phone it in.
Don’t assume ignorance. People live up to the expectations placed upon them. If you assume intelligence and flexibility from your clients, you just might get it.
Jared
on 30 Jul 08A bit of a tangent but. . .one challenge we’ve run into in trying to get away from a spec with client work is determining when a project is done. This becomes especially hard with clients who love control and love to tweak and revise endlessly if we would let them. How you protect against feature creep and endless tiny changes when those might make a better final product but just weren’t accounted for in the budget?
GeeIWonder
on 30 Jul 08I get it but these other people could never understand.
Sickening self-congratulatory nonsense. And it’s everywhere.
Matt Brown
on 30 Jul 08Great post. I agree wholeheartedly—education is really the largest component of any client-designer relationship. I’ve been positively amazed that as I’ve involved my clients more and more in the design process (moodboards, iterations, experimentation, etc), and summarize my thinking to them as I progress, they really open up and accept the work much more readily.
Treating someone as a peer is not just good business though, it’s a healthy and humane way of collaborating. It just feels better to work toward consensus, rather than establishing a petty, design dictatorship.
Tomash
on 30 Jul 08@Jared: a good way to handle it is to do it like in Scrum and charge customer per programmer-hour. Make him aware of the fact that any feature they want to add will cost them proportionally to amount of time required to implement it. And if they change their mind about given feature, they are losing their money.
Actually doing a project using whole Scrum methodology is probably the best advice I could give ;)
sloan
on 30 Jul 08Yeah, I get frustrated when time and time again clients are treated like blithering idiots. They know their business better than I do, their jobs are usually the ones on the line, and listening to them is way more productive than writing them off. If you think something your client says or does is off base, more often than not, you are only getting part of the story. The real, deeper motivations for their actions or words are something you have to dig for because to them, it is self-evident or they simply don’t know how it influences what the solution should be. Do not assume they are stupid or crazy. Try to understand why they react to your “brilliant” ideas negatively and you will be much more successful.
Lou
on 30 Jul 08Wow … I must be getting really bad clients because I cannot educate them to save my life. I even got one interested enough to buy and read “Getting Real” only for them to tell me they disagreed with most of it.
Ouch.
In other cases, I’ve succeeded in persuading/educating them on one point, only for them to revert back to their original thoughts later on.
Honestly, in my experience, I think there are far more “customer is always right” clients than “tell me what’s best for me” clients.
Any advice on getting the former … or educating the latter?
John
on 30 Jul 08The flip side is what Carloa Segura so BRILLIANTLY points out:
http://www.businesspov.com/article/315
Sometimes you will get fired or they won’t come along with you. That’s okay, it’s not their fault, it’s just a function of deciding you will have an opinion and be committed to doing good work.
(but really, if you have that much trouble getting work, you have to be humble and honestly ask your self why)
ML
on 30 Jul 08How do you protect against feature creep and endless tiny changes when those might make a better final product but just weren’t accounted for in the budget?
I agree with Tomash. If you’ve delivered the scope you agreed upon and now there’s more work to be done, charge them by the hour for these additional changes.
Honestly, in my experience, I think there are far more “customer is always right” clients than “tell me what’s best for me” clients. Any advice on getting the former … or educating the latter?
I think a big part of it is setting expectations upfront. Go in to the pitch meeting (or proposal) and tell them how you want the project to go and why you think this is the best way. If it’s not a good fit, you may have to walk away.
Of course, if you’re hard up for cash, that’s easier said than done. On the other hand, what’s the cost to your soul if you constantly work on shitty, dead-end projects for inflexible clients?
Roger Wilco
on 30 Jul 08Interesting, yet totally naive, post. It’s hard to take advice on how to treat clients seriously from a company that, technically, doesn’t have any clients.
That’s a huge assumption to make. It’s also an assumption that agencies don’t understand clients, they demean them. I find it interesting that I am insulted by your attempts to prove that we are insulting to our clients.
The truth — from my experience, anyway — is, the “Getting Real” approach works well on clients who can adapt to it. But most clients aren’t adaptable. Most clients aren’t single entities. Most clients are organizations — are large groups of people working together, with an established hierarchy and a pecking order; with a process of undertaking and completing projects that’s worked for them for any number of years and oh, look, here comes this young hip web designer who’s going to shake things up and not make us expect things like multiple iterations and spec sheets.
If you want to work on a project that uses a “getting real” approach, then maybe you should work with clients who are capable of doing so. But saying that all clients are adaptable to your working methods is completely ignorant of the client’s working methods, and is insulting them in a whole other manner.
nate (in NYC)
on 30 Jul 08But I don’t get it… you are the masses in the flyover states.
Hal Siegel
on 30 Jul 08Within the agency/client relationship, it’s all too easy to forget that your clients have little or no idea as to how you do things. Chances are, you’ve been doing it so long that it seems second nature to you. I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve been in a meeting and, at the very end, the client has innocently asked “So, what happens next?”. Oh, right.
In fact, a few years ago, my office worked on a project for a large and rather intimidating managment consultant company. After a wobbly start, it dawned on them that they just didn’t get our process and weren’t clear ast to what they should expect. So they very politely asked us to draft a document explaining things. It proved to be incredibly useful, so much so that a version of it is still on our site today. To Matt’s point, we find it’s a really useful way to set expectations.
JL
on 30 Jul 08This is the same sort of thing I remember reading when web standards was trying to get footing. I learned from it then that it applies to all areas, not just web standards.
I hope to see more people learning to apply things from one area of their life to other areas with relevant contextual translations.
Roger Dilco
on 30 Jul 08@Roger Wilco: No. Please both reread the post and read up on this imaginary company with no clients you think exists.
Jane Quigley
on 30 Jul 08@Hal – completely agree. Most clients have no idea how to “manage” an agency, let alone setting expectations.
During the pitch process you really need to be as clear as you can about the process and how you work with people. And make sure that they know what’s flexible and what isn’t. That way, the ground rules are set, and people can decide if they really want to work with you (and they will – clients like having boundaries, they’ll test them, but most will understand the push back). Get sign-offs on everything.
BTW – I think it was Jason at a recent Chicago event who said something like “In LA people talk about getting things done, in NY, well they get mostly Financial stuff done…in Chicago we actually get stuff done”. Sounds like bias against the coasts to me ;)
Charles
on 30 Jul 08Can I be a flyover mass?
Marc L.
on 30 Jul 08Hmm… I think both Matt and Roger Wilco have some valid points.
Assuming your clients will never understand is condescending, but even more so its a defeatist attitude. On the other hand, there are plenty of clients who are too comfortable in their own bureaucracy and office politics. They have their way of doing things. You can try your best to educate them or push them in the right direction, but instead of being open and listening, they just push back. (BTW…these are also the companies who will probably go out of business within the next 5 years.)
So the question becomes, do you adapt your own process to work with these inflexible organizations or do you limit your client base to only those willing to work on your terms?
Hal Siegel
on 30 Jul 08@Jane Quigley: I completely agree about being direct and specific in the pitch process, but I’ve found that where things tend to really break down is once the job has been won—the reason being that it’s unrealistic to expect clients to remember everything you covered in the pitch/proposal, whereas you (the agency) aren’t likely to forget your own process.
This is an uncanny thread, because just this morning I was tinkering with a little tool that we use to manage this exact issue with our clients. After bumping up against this problem again and again, we finally had the idea to create a status graphic that we send out with all communications (wireframes, email status reports, etc) and we post on our extranet. It’s just an information graphic that explains to the client in a very simple manner where we are in the lifecycle of a project. It’s a lot like “slugs” that graphic designers and printers used to put on mechanicals (anybody remember those?).
Anyway, I was working on a revision to it, and I suddenly thought it would be something others might like to see. I was planning to post it to my personal site after I dealt with some other unfinished business. So now I will steal my own thunder and give you a sneak peak at our incredibly simple but oh-so-handy “project status slug”. Here is the first one you’d get if you were a client. We’ve found it to be really effective, although I admit its not a cure-all.
ps You can’t really blame Jason. I think Laurie Anderson once said that when she lived in Chicago “I always felt like I was an hour behind New York.” ; )
Grace
on 30 Jul 08Interesting point of view but I wonder if it isn’t just a little bit naive.
GeeIWonder
on 30 Jul 08On the other hand, there are plenty of clients who are too comfortable in their own bureaucracy and office politics.
Hmmm, well there’s plenty lot of consultants who overestimate their reach and area (not to mention level) of expertise too. If my company is successful enough to hire you for your expertise in one are (e.g. graphic design), do you really think I have any interest in having you ‘educate’ me on your views of how to manage a project? Do you really think you, as the graphic designer, are qualified for that?
Marc L.
on 30 Jul 08@ GeelWonder
If I was being hired as just a graphic designer, then I’d agree with you. But I’m being hired as an overall consultant for a particular site including development, design and overall strategy.
That’s the other issue I have with this post though. Matt is talking about doing consultant work, but Getting Real is written with an intended audience of a business owner and more specifically an entrepreneur of a startup. And the readers of this blog range from entrepreneurs, designers, developers, consultants, employees, business owners. If I’m a developer who’s an employee, my “client” is my boss. And my voice in decisions and leverage is significantly different from a consultant my company has hired.
As a consultant, I don’t really get paid to advise my clients on how to run their business, but I do get paid to advise them on strategy for their web site. When those two things come in conflict, that’s when a project gets more difficult. The issues I’m being asked to resolve go deeper than just the web site, their core issues with how the business is operated.
GeeIWonder
on 30 Jul 08If I was being hired as just a graphic designer, then I’d agree with you. But I’m being hired as an overall consultant for a particular site including development, design and overall strategy.
Works for me. Wasn’t really talking specifically about “you” when I said “you”. Sorry if that wasn’t clear.
Jane Quigley
on 30 Jul 08@Hal – this looks great. I also find that making the client sign-off on each deliverable has been important – they can’t ask to revisit something that’s already been sign-off on without expecting that it’s outside of scope. The clock starts running.
Thanks for sharing the status graphic. And my love of Laurie Anderson.
Mark Sigal
on 30 Jul 08More in the bucket of truism than a direct response to your point is the axiom that “If you want to see how it ends, look at how it begins.”
Generally speaking, during the set up stage of a client engagement (think: pitching, demoing, defining requirements, negotiating contract, etc.) a clear pattern emerges.
The client consistently makes, misses or regularly re-schedules meetings. They haggle over minutae or better yet, don’t sweat peripheral details. They treat you like a trusted partner or they treated you like a contractor. They treat each other with respect and practice honest, clear, constructive communication. Or they don’t They have a clear sense of requirements, use cases, etc. or not.
My only point is that repeatedly, I have found myself many months down the road looking at a given client’s footprint with us, only to conclude that everything we know now about the client (good or bad) today, we pretty much knew then.
Its the proverbial what you sew is what you reap.
Cheers,
MarkRead – Three Steps on the Path to Success http://thenetworkgarden.com/weblog/2008/03/three-steps-on.html
SB
on 30 Jul 08In a word: Bullshit.
Not everyone is capable of learning everything, nor are they willing in many cases. I think this post severely understates the power of experience and expertise, not to mention talent. I don’t think my brain is particularly huge but I do choose to occupy it with knowledge pertinent to what I do. I make terrible coffee and I’m sure my Barista would make a shitty web app.
It’s not all about ability. There’s a lot to do with will. Most of us, if were honest, simply have certain things we really just don’t care to understand. I want to spend as much time with my family as I can and the rest is about being proficient at what I do. I don’t care about how to make coffee. I’m happy to pay someone else who has experience, expertise and in some cases true talent to do it for me. (this is f’ing great coffee!)
One of two people who will be our next president refuses to use Email. They’re out there folks. Being overly self critical and unrealistically optimistic is not going to change that.
This post does make me even more curious as to the decision by 37Signals to switch from servicing clients to creating products.
Eric G
on 30 Jul 08its pretty funny, the folks calling this post naive, rather than hopeful. In actuality, they are the ones who have already given up.
You may not get to throw all their processes out the window, but the folks saying its naive don’t even sound willing to try.
This blog talks a lot about how designers should be more like programmers and how programmers should be more like designers. But they both should be good at SALES, i.e. selling yourself, your ideas and methodologies.
Dylan
on 30 Jul 08When doing client work I’ve found it’s actually worth forking out for an additional copy of “Getting Real” and making the client promise you they’ll read it. If they’re a corporate it opens their mind immediately to a way of thinking that’s more in line with how our company works. $25 well spent!
Matt
on 31 Jul 08This is good for the client and your own team as well. I feel as a consultant, far too often our only mission is to make the highest margin possible on the project. Setting the mission upfront to the client and your team gives everyone a destination to reach and once you’re there, you’ll know it.
adria.richards
on 31 Jul 08@Hal – I work in the world of computer networks and while I can share a folder and verify DNS resolution in my sleep, I am aware that if I show my clients how to do it, they gain much more than a completed task; Empowerment, trust, curiosity and increased comfort level follow. Remote support and screencast videos have become powerful tools in my business to build to this type of relationship.
I got my boss to buy “Getting Real” in 2006; I then got real and quit my job! It was the best employment decision of my life. I started to build my dream business from the ground up. Not everyone is a good potential client. This year, I started selecting clients who I think are on board with forward thinking solutions. I am able to “see” this through talking with them and observing their workflow.
@Mark – I agree that people show you what’s to come
@Matt – Wasn’t it Dale Carnegie who said telling someone was less effective than showing someone and that that you can “tell leadership”? By taking that time, the person feels the value.
Brian D
on 31 Jul 08I’m the salesperson and the post sale project manager for projects in my company. In my experience, every client has a different personality and therefore requires a different approach to keep them and us on the same page from start to end. Some great extra reading to help with this struggle up front is Solution Selling by Michael Bosworth. A great point made in his book is that we often get way ahead of our clients and visualize solutions differently than they do without realizing it. Getting in synch and staying in synch with each client is what we have to strive for. Every client is different in my opinion, and you have to develop a “good bedside manner” to keep the client happy with you and also stay in synch regarding scope and expectations. It takes great patience sometimes. We have a client in process now where we had to stop everything twice and review the entire scope until they understood and agreed. We may have to do it again soon.
So in closing I agree with Matt’s general idea here. But getting in synch takes patience, strong interpersonal skill and a proposal that includes the best possible plain English description of your scope. We do our best to keep people on scope and declare a change order if they want anything additional outside of that scope.
Tim Jahn
on 31 Jul 08This is an important point but one that I think a lot of people overlook. While part of your job is to do what the client wants, the other part of your job is to advise the client on whether or not what they want makes sense and is the right thing to do. You can’t just be passive with your clients; you need to be active and caring.
Matt Balara
on 31 Jul 08Actually I think with many of us (and I’m guilty here too) it’s less an insulting attitude towards the client than a lack of belief in one’s own powers of persuasion, and fear of the time and effort involved in breaking out of your own boring (but tried & true) habits, and helping your clients break out too.
Jimmy
on 31 Jul 08Easy enuff for a company who doesn’t have actual clients to say. If I were in that situation I could persuade people to use my ideas as well… cause well they don’t really have any choice!
jamesk
on 31 Jul 08I came to a similar conclusion a while ago.
I’m working with a creative agency at the moment, a corner of the industry where turning a profit is almost impossible, according to the MD.
Given that we’re less than completely up-front with the client, it’s not surprising: hiding facts about the work we do devalues the client, the company, and the work.
Let them know how much is involved in their requirements, and they will respect us and pay for the work done, or go elsewhere (and that’s not always a bad thing).
Catoosha
on 31 Jul 08I skipped some comments, so perhaps someone addressed this issue.
I’m a relatively naive to some of our clients’ businesses and objectives. Instead of reading (on my free time) every damn techy-businessy magazine to know the realm of corporate business, I choose to ask the client about their structures, their goals, their needs.
I’m astonished when they don’t have answers, or the answers are oblique and mercurial. Because I don’t work with a team of experts, both parties appear to spend the majority of the discovery phase, groping like teen virgins in the closet. The budget is never rich in this phase, as we know. So…half sentences and assumptions lead the march…I’m not afraid to ask The Dumb Questions, but there are only so many hours for me to get them out, before we set the work.
Some projects turn out spectacularly because the client and we both think and grow together (insert Michael Landon and sunset here) to make a kick-ass launch. Other times, I know we could have served the client better by knowing their industry.
But how to pull this rich knowledge from the client? So we don’t get uppity about their ignorance?
Custom Logo Designer
on 31 Jul 08Well to answer some of the questions that Catoosha has raised, as in hot to pull knowledge from the client, At our company we tend to have a set of questions that are standard for any client who chooses to work with us. We take a traditional RFP and have them fill it out. It asks all the questions such as market analysis and covers the depths of details that we are looking for. Some clients get lazy to fill it out, but we have found that clients enjoy it not just for our use but their personal as well, as it helps them place a retrospect on their business…
Bryan
on 01 Aug 08Nice. I really enjoyed that.
This discussion is closed.