3 Top Tips For Spotting Great Clients… Before You Work With Them!

• August 26th, 2010
• Articles

We’ve all got great clients we love to work with. You know the ones that you look forward to seeing and you get excited when they mention a new project on the horizon? Well a few months ago I was thinking about adding to my client list and obviously I wanted to attract more of these types of clients.

So I gave it some thought… what makes my great clients so fantastic to work with? Are there commonalities between them and if so, are they things that can be spotted before taking them on? The answer is yes there are several traits that all my best clients have and below are my top three. So next time you’re thinking of taking on a new client, try running this checklist and see how they measure up – it may save you some headaches!

1. They’re experts in their field

This is a key one; someone who has achieved expert status is established and knows their subject. They have a proven background and tend to have one specialism. This person will be focussed on what they do and will respect your expertise and experience, that’s why they’ve hired you. They want results and you’re the one to tell them how to achieve it online. Basically, they’ll want you to explain your strategy and ideas but they’ll have no interest in what programming language you plan to use.

In my experience it’s best to avoid like the plague anyone with a little bit of web design/SEO/programming knowledge who says things like “I want you to build my web site with [fill in the blanks] because I’ve read a book about it so I can tinker with it myself” or “What can I do myself to save money” or “My [Friend/Sister/Boyfriend] has done an evening class in web design so they’ll be helping out”. Just politely excuse yourself and run for the hills at this point.

These clients are difficult, energy draining and time-consuming to work with. First they want to learn from you, nothing wrong with that, but they usually expect you to provide expert 1-to-1 tutoring at no additional cost. They’ll bombard you with emails starting with; “Can you just tell me how to…” and you end up spending more time providing tech support than doing what you were hired to do i.e. fire-fighting rather than designing fab web sites!

If you do choose to work with a client like this, because we can’t always be so choosy, then just make it clear from the outset what’s included in your fees and what’s an additional extra at what price. Of course that’s always easier once you’ve identified them!

2. They know their product/service offering and audience

This sounds truly bizarre I know; why wouldn’t someone know this about their business? But if you meet a new client for the first time and they can’t explain to you what they do concisely i.e. they don’t have an elevator pitch; then the alarm bells should be ringing.

I’ve been caught out by this a couple of times recently, where a potential client hasn’t been able to explain clearly what it is they’re trying to sell and to whom. Essentially what happens is you try to extract this information, you think you’ve got it and then throughout the project they just keep changing their mind. Basically it boils down to the fact that they are not yet an expert in their field and so they make it up as they go along.

Of course you can charge them extra every time they re-brief you but that’s a fast way to erode the relationship leaving you and they frustrated. The best thing is to avoid the situation in the first place, so either always take a comprehensive brief and get the client to approve it before you start work, or don’t take the project on.

3. They own the business or at least have decision making control

It might seem obvious to say that a web site project will run more smoothly if you’re dealing with the decision maker. That doesn’t make it any less true. What’s more likely is that you won’t end up being the victim of Chinese Whispers – you can get instruction from the horse’s mouth so to speak.

By decision maker, it boils down to someone who has authority to sign off your invoices for payment. If that person is happy with the job then you’re home and dry. I’ve recently had a job where I was working with a marketing executive who’d been assigned to run the web site project, unfortunately she didn’t know much about web sites or anything related to them. What happened was that we went round and round in circles for quite some months; she briefed me, I carried out the work, her boss said it wasn’t right… that we hadn’t understood. I did my utmost to help her to learn but it turns out that her boss didn’t know that much about web sites either so she was hung out to dry really. The client ended up paying additional money to cover the re-works and the girl got moved off the project. It was hard work and unnecessarily stressful.

At the end of the day, if you’re dealing direct, you can question and suggest ideas and the whole process is just much more gratifying for everyone.

Some other things to look out for…

Of course there are other things that can indicate whether someone is going to be good to work with; positive, enthusiastic and upbeat people are always going to be a joy to be around, they create a buzz and inspire you to come up with great ideas for them. Entrepreneurs and innovators are very exciting to work with but they’re often strategists and not so hot on the detail – make sure you are!

Busy people are usually very precious of their time and so will be less inclined to waste yours. Organised people plan and prepare – again they make great clients because they’ll have done their leg-work and you can hit the ground running with the project. Always rejoice in the client that takes time to prepare and send you a well-thought out brief before you meet them – they’re like hen’s teeth.

And last but by no means least; it seems that if you consciously think about and associate with the positive types of clients you want to work with, then mysteriously they seem to turn up.

Reputation is our most valuable asset and it’s much easier to provide a top-notch service when you’re working with people who value you and respect you. These clients will reward you by recommending you to everyone and anyone who’ll listen and your business will soon be flying.