Montgomery Scott, from the Star Trek fan site.

You remember when Scotty, the engineer on the Enterprise always came up with a solution to catastrophic damage to the ship in a third the time he told Kirk it would take? Or that he was “givin’ it all she’s got” when Kirk asked for more power and found just enough to save the day?

You can do that too for your users/customers. It’s all a function of expectation and perceived delivery. It goes something like this:

Customer Satisfaction:
Perceived Delivery = Expectations: Satisfaction
Perceived Delivery < Expectations: Dissatisfaction
Perceived Delivery > Expectations: Delight

So it’s fairly easy to manage your customer’s/user’s expectations and then exceed them as long as you make both propositions reasonable and that you deliver a quality product/service in whatever time frame you set.

Let’s say that you can build a site in 3 weeks and you tell your customer that it will take you 6. If you deliver something stunning in 4 weeks, great. But if you deliver something shoddy in 4 weeks, not so great. I’m sure that to get the business, you, your portfolio or your website made promises on your behalf regarding the quality of the product or service that you wold perform for them. Remember that expectations contains many dimensions.

A variant: You deliver a site in 4 weeks when you said it would take 6. Now you customer may have doubts on the value of the product that you delivered, thinking it was something you cobbled together. This is when you’ll have to defend the quality of the product and get them to refocus on the positives of being ahead of schedule.

It’s best to use this practice judiciously as you will have set a precedent for future interactions. The client may be inclined to give you less time to complete a project because you did such a great job beating the last deadline. Take care not to put undue pressure on yourself and your team to exceed their expectations again. You merely have to deliver when you say you will and the result will still be a net positive.

Does anyone have any examples when this worked or backfired?

Seriously.

It’s cool to take a design and develop a system around it. Right now, I am working on brand guidelines for a client that is undergoing a complete rebrand. It started innocently enough…”Hey, can you whip up a sales video for us?” “We need a new white paper design, can you help?”

Before too long, a style developed and the client decided that it was the look of their new brand. Most times, with bigger entities, there is a more prolonged process to defining the look, feel and voice (yes, voice) of a brand before it is deployed.  Small businesses tend to wing it just a little more. With the proper documentation of a project, you can define a brand based on the project at hand.

Many times, a new project helps the business owner(s) define what is important and what their brand actually stands for. When you have that information, it can be fairly easy to extrapolate to a brand standard. So it is with my new medium-sized client.

Todd Moto's Bulletproof Brand Identity Guidelines

Thanks to Todd Moto‘s posting his Bulletproof Brand Identity Guidelines, I have refined my brand guidelines to an easily digestible document that makes brand stewardship approachable and easy to comprehend.

One thing I learned early on is that the brand guidelines or style guidelines document should epitomize the best case scenario of use of the brand. Keep that in mind when you are creating a style guide. Something über modern, cool and sleek like Todd’s might not work for a more conservative organization, so keep that in mind as you are creating your document.

Something else I want to note…brand guidelines are just that. While in the corporate arena, I made my bones pushing, stretching and making the brand go places that it had not gone before. It’s a living document meant to foster creativity, not inhibit it.

I’ll post an image when the document is approved.

Here’s what it did:

• Established me as a subject matter expert
• Demonstrated that I’m interested in their success, regardless of their budget
• Indicated that I have more tricks up my sleeve

Sometimes giving information away is a great way to build trust and perhaps a client. I left the door open to them to work together if their budget permitted. I’ll keep you posted on their response.

I got a call out of the blue from a prospective client that found us on The Google. I love it when that happens. One of the most important conversations you will have with a client is the first call. Like a date, this is where you can determine whether there is compatibility between the two parties.

Here’s what I did:

Let them talk. One of the best things that you can do is listen. Most of my clients are owner/operators and have a lot of emotion wrapped up in their businesses. When you are actively listening to them lay out their business needs, you are also personally validating them. That goes a long way to establishing trust.

When you do speak, couch everything in terms of a benefit to the client. This is the time to process what the prospect has said and turn it into possible solutions. When I asked my latest prospect what his goals were, he said “I need to get some money coming in the door.” This tells me that he is price sensitive and that he is on a pretty tight timeline. I mention that the site that he has in mind is a simple brochure marketing site that will help people find him and pick up the phone to call him. I also said that based on the simplicity of his site (make sure you don’t use the word simplistic), he can be up and running fairly shortly. I also told him that part of building the site would entail search engine marketing which can help drive traffic.

Only promise things that you can control. Too often to get the sale, business over promise and then inevitably, under deliver. Make sure that you don’t fall into that trap. Tell him about your experience with similar clients. Tell her about the results of the project in emotional terms “You’ll have a site that you can be proud of”, “you’ll be well-represented on the web”. Specific numbers or results or dollar figures are out of your control and you’d best avoid giving them any specifics there.

You can offer information about past projects, but be careful to inform them that their results may vary.

Take them through the process. Your diligence and thoroughness as a creative professional is an asset. Briefly take them through the process and let them know how much thought will go into producing their web presence. Communicating your understanding of strategy and audience sets you apart from the run-of-the-mill designer.

Don’t weaponize your knowledge. Using acronyms, professional terms or idioms will only alienate your client, especially over the phone.

Give them a ballpark price. That’s the real reason that they called. The whole time that you’re talking, they are thinking, “This sounds great, but how much will it cost?” Prepare their expectations for what’s to come. If they want a proposal, then you’re looking good. Why blow it with sticker shock? Give them a ballpark and let them know that it is a ballpark figure. Chances are while you were talking, you had already formulated a price in your head. : )

Avoid yes or no questions. When I gave him the ballpark price, I asked, “How does that work with your budget?”. It implies cooperation and doesn’t put him/her on the defensive. Open-ended questions require more thought and you’ll get more information about how this project is going to work for both of you.

Recap and thanks. Tell them what to expect next and do it. Then thank them for calling and smile when you do so!

Hopefully, you can work these principles into your next First Contact conversation and generate a very favorable result.

This prospect has a great concept to take their brand’s product to the next level and wanted to discuss with me how to go about getting into the mobile app arena. They said that they have ideas that they wanted to keep secret. No problem, I responded, I will bring along a standard NDA (non-disclosure agreement) so everyone can speak freely. After a nice preliminary discussion and a few moments of wrangling over just what the NDA was supposed to protect, I finally said, “This document is designed more for your protection than it is for mine. ” When I began to volunteer advice about how best to tackle their problem, the owner of the company set the NDA aside and said “I don’t need this. I trust you.”

The reason for this post is that, yes, in the information age, information is power. Many people then guard information so closely that they come off cagey, vague and shifty. Not the best way to build trust with your client.

Establishing your expertise is one of the best ways to build user/customer/confidence in your brand. So how better to establish your expertise than giving away some information for free. Demonstrate that you have expertise to spare by being free with your knowledge. Don’t be threatened by sharing what you know because the implication of sharing is “what can they do if they really tried?”

So if you have a client that needs some free advice on a subject you know a lot about, do them and yourself a favor and just give it to them. You’ll be helping to win over a new fan and perhaps sales and referrals down the road.

Buuuuut, sometimes I get too wrapped up in seeing the person succeed that I forget that it’s not MY business. It can be easy to lose sight of what the client wants and instead try to impose what you want for the client. It’s a tough space to find yourself in and then have to re-establish the professional distance between client and vendor. It’s good to push a client to look at possibilities outside of their comfort zone, but at the end of the day they are the client and it’s their final decision.

Here are some questions to ask yourself:

Do you find yourself helping the client to make internal business decisions that are not related to your role as a creative advisor?

Do you find that you are talking to your client as much about nothing as you do about projects?

Do you ever appeal to anything other than his/her business sense to sell a project?

Has your client ever hurt your feelings by saying no?

If more than one of these answers is yes, you may be too close to your client. You won’t be doing you or your client any favors by using emotional appeals, manipulation or trading on your buddy status to force projects through that may not meet business goals or limitations (budgets are key here).

Take a step back without jeopardizing your working relationship and ensure that what you are pitching is best for your client’s business as it is now, not as if YOU were running it. They will respect your professional distance and objectivity. That said, clients using personal relationships with their service providers to influence projects do themselves a disservice.

The client/service provider should be one of mutual respect and camaraderie. Just make sure that all the fun you’re having doesn’t interfere with the job at hand.

Please share your stories!