The Antidote for Clients Who Can’t Decide
One of the big pet peeves of freelancers — especially creative ones — is that they hate the client who decides one thing one day and the exact opposite thing the next day. Or they tweak something endlessly because they can’t decide what they want. The funny thing is that most freelancers will blame the client for this situation and not themselves.
I’m here to tell you: if you can’t produce what your client loves, it’s your own fault for not spending enough time to figure it out what the client wants and to help crystallize it in the client’s mind.
How do you do this?
Spend more time in the early stages of the project probing the clients wants and needs.
If you work in a creative visual medium, find examples of what the client likes and dislikes and find out why the client likes or dislikes them. If you are writing an application, create a written specification of detailing everything that the client wants and then let the client provide feedback on every single item in the specification.
By spending the time upfront, you are saving yourself time and effort later and helping to ensure a smooth completion to the project.
Clients will know some of their wants and needs, but not all of them until you probe. You have to ask questions, listen, ask more questions about their answers, and so on until you and the client both thoroughly understand each piece of the project.
Once you do this, you will have a clearer view of the project… and so will the client. When both of you have the same clear view, there’s no way that you can get stuck doing endless rounds of revisions.
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April 29th, 2008 at 10:46 pm
On the one hand, I completely agree with you. Since I’ve been freelancing I’ve had very few problems doing the up-front work that it takes to provide solutions that my customers are completely happy with.
But…I will say that before I started freelancing I worked for a consulting firm. And I ran into a couple of customers who were, quite frankly, nutty. For example, in one case the organization (a governmental agency) was so completely focused on butt-covering instead of accomplishing the objective that no one could ever make a final decision. The design was written and re-written and re-written ad nauseum, and no one would ever sign off because that meant a level of responsibility they were unwilling to make. (That project went through more than 3 consulting firms, millions of dollars, and never implemented the system. Yikes!)
But I think you are absolutely right that when there is a problem, it is more likely that the freelancer hasn’t done a good job walking their customer through the process.
Good post!