How do you avoid working with the ‘wrong’ client?

We’ve all had them. We do the dance, start working together, it’s all smiles and then, bam, there’s the moment of realisation that your instincts were right and that things are going to be difficult.

Bad clients are bad for business. They suck our time away from good clients. They have a habit of making requests that make no sense and they seldom trust your judgement. The project grinds on, nothing is ever good enough and by the time you deliver, you’ve stopped caring.

The biggest issue is the effect they have on the team. Their garbled feedback can make your team doubt their abilities. Worst case scenario, they bully your staff, you stop sleeping and people start bailing.

It’s very tempting to think that you can ‘fix’ a bad client. I must admit I have a tendency to think ‘I can save them! We will prevail were many other agencies have failed’ and ‘They are just a lion with a thorn in their side, if I fix their problem we will wield the beast and turn them into a brilliant client’. That’s not to say you can’t but is it worth the risk? I would say not.

What makes a client ‘bad’? Often at the foundation, there is a lack of trust. If the client has had bad experiences in the past you may be battling emotions and beliefs that will be very difficult to overcome.

It’s not all drama though; some clients show their bad traits in a far more subtle manner. They may never complete their tasks, or can’t commit adequate human or financial resources or fail to deliver feedback in a comprehensible and timely fashion. All these things added together also make a client ‘bad’.

Alarm bells

What are the universal signs that you should look for? It’s very easy when you are pitching for work to ignore these but I would argue that is the kiss of death:

• They don’t seem to trust you or your opinions
• They are evasive about committing to tasks or gloss over complex things such as content or timeframes
• They want you to complete important tasks for free to prove your worth
• They tell you in detail how awful the last agency or agencies were
• They don’t admit to doing anything wrong on previous projects
• They have an unrealistic budget or timeframe for the project scope
• The team structure at that their end is undefined, you are unsure who will be your day to day contact or who has authority to sign things off

That is why we at the Digital Blacksmiths don't work with yearly contracts. If a client is not happy they are allowed to leave as the relationship will never work. As we are free to go as well. Looking at the picture above, it is sad to see they didn't value our efforts of getting a lot of traffic for free and now basically don't have any online visibility and lose ground to the competition. #clientsatisfaction  #clientappreciation #clientrelationship