Are you ready for this person?

Years ago, I was the Concierge at a resort hotel in California. At this hotel, the Concierge is essentially the person who “knows” things and can answer questions for guests. One day, a businessman asked the front desk clerk to make change for a twenty-dollar bill. The guest then walked up to me with a stack of one-dollar bills and said, “We’re going to play a game: for every correct answer, I’ll give you a dollar.” I’ve never enjoyed the game of “20 Questions” more than on that day. In under five minutes I made 17 dollars in tips from the guy, missing only three of his 20 questions.

I spent the next hour looking up the answers to the three missed questions and called the guest in his room with the answers. Three days later, when he checked out of the hotel, he handed me a five-dollar bill, and said the extra two dollars were an advance payment for the questions he would have on his next visit. I still owe the guy two dollars.

“Chance favors the prepared mind.” - Louis Pasteur

Whenever we’re interacting with people we don’t know that well, we need to be open to the unexpected. This is never more true than when we’re pitching ideas, whether they be related to products or services or something else.

Here are three of my favorite examples of interactions with potential clients that I could have been better prepared for.

These examples have been edited so that they protect the privacy of the actual clients involved while representing the actual experiences I had pitching web services.

The Ambush: This typically involves a very passionate person who has had nothing but coffee to drink in the last 12 hours, missed the meeting when your firm was selected as a finalist, has never heard of you and didn’t take the time to review any of the materials you sent ahead of the meeting. Oh, and he was late to the meeting because his son, who’s studying web design at a local college, wrecked the family car late last night while texting a friend.

Are you ready for this person?

The Albatross: This typically involves a phone call from a pretty wound-up person who has just fired his web designer/developer/master and really wants to tell you what a [expletive] that person/firm was and how he can’t believe anyone would treat a client like that. He needs to hire you right now so that he can get “a couple of things” on his old website updated—”shouldn’t take you more than a few minutes to do.” He’s a little tight on money right now though, and would like to pay you with a credit card for an hour’s worth of your time up front. This is really urgent too, and if there is any way you could make these few simple changes today that would be great.

Are you ready for this person?

The Home Run: This typically involves a very savvy person who has been researching you and your firm for months, she already knows what you’re charging for your services, has checked your references, visited every site in your portfolio in detail and just finished reading four books on website design and development. She works for a pretty high-end company, and is waiting for you at the front desk when you arrive 15 minutes early for the meeting. You’ve prepared a 20-minute presentation, leaving 10 minutes for questions and answers. The meeting starts 10 minutes early, and within five minutes, she tells you that your references all check out, the quality of your work is outstanding, your software has been reviewed by her IT staff, and she has already prepared the site strategy, target audience and evaluation metrics for the site, and hands you a stack of wireframes. Oh, and if you have a contract with you, she can have a down payment check ready for you by the end of the meeting.

Are you ready for this person?

If you’ve been in the web business for a while, then you’ve likely been in meetings something like these where your carefully and skillfully prepared presentation is suddenly about as useful as an animated image of a dancing cow for improving your Search Engine Optimization. If you’ve not yet experienced meetings like these, stick around: your turn is next!

I don’t have the perfect solution for what to do in situations like these. I’m not that smart, but I did survive all of these and managed to come out of them reasonably intact, even if a little rattled. I think the reason I made it out alive is that I was somewhat prepared for the unexpected, although not well prepared for these people.

Let’s consider the first example, The Ambush. My first instinct was to crush this guy. Maybe it’s the old U.S. Marine in me, but I wanted to just pick him up and remove him from the room. Let’s assume that wasn’t an option though, and this situation needed to be handled in a more um. . .professional way.

First I listened; I let him vent. He tried to engage me in an argument with language and statements that escalated along with the pitch and volume of his voice, until he was nearly yelling at me. I waited until everyone in the room (20 of us) had stopped what he or she was doing and started watching this guy. After several minutes, he paused just long enough for me to make my move.

Rather than respond directly to his accusations and misstatements, I stated that I really admired this man’s passion and concern for the success of the project, and that I was open to working with him to see that all of his concerns were addressed once we actually start work. I said I was confident that when the metrics for measuring the success of this project were outlined, my company would meet or exceed all measures. Also, my company would be so proud of our work on this project, we’d put our name on it, so we could guarantee him that we were just as passionate about its success as he was. My response was a little longer than that, but that’s the “executive summary.”

The guy sat down, his friend gave him a pat on the back, two folks in the group winked at me, everyone in the room relaxed and I got the contract. During the interaction, I had these concepts rolling around in my head:

• Seek first to understand.
• Make your client the hero.
• Always try to focus passion, avoid fighting it.
• Identify a shared goal.
• Talk about the goal as if you’re already on the team.

In the second example, The Albatross (yes, as in Monty Python), I was fortunate enough to have a very long-winded person on the phone who didn’t seem to require much interaction from me at all. He was quite happy to recite the well-rehearsed gripes about all the past things that his last web person never did right, or fast enough, or at all. This gave me some time to think and ask myself a few questions:

1. If the past web person was really as bad as this person is saying, why did this potential client stay with that web person for so many years before dumping him?
2. Do I want to surround myself with clients who thrive in dysfunctional relationships?
3. Do I want to surround myself with clients who derive this much enjoyment in telling others about the faults of their vendors? What happens when this person tires of me? Will this be good for my long-term word-of-mouth marketing?
4. This client is having financial issues already, and can’t really afford my services. Do I enjoy collections from clients who live beyond their means?

In the beginning, I would listen to these folks for up to an hour, then tell them our hourly rates, that we have a four-hour pre-paid minimum, that we are booked out two weeks and that I could have a contract to them within five days if they are sincerely interested in working with my firm. That seemed to clear out about 99% of these folks, and I didn’t have to hurt their feelings. Also, everything I told them is clearly documented on our website, so it was always an honest answer.

These days though, I quiz them to see if they’ve read our website and actually done any research at all on us before they dialed the phone. If a caller has, then I’ve got someone on the other end of the phone who has some learning skills, and I’ll give him a little more of my time. If a potential client hasn’t even been to our site, she just dialed our number in a search engine result page, then I let her know she needs to read through our site first, decide if she thinks she is a good match with our client service model, and then if she decides her project is a match, give me a call back.

This worked for us because I made the time a few years back to spell out how we work with clients on our website, and I have held firm to those expectations. If a potential client didn’t like, understand, or accept our service delivery model, then he or she was not a good match with us, and that person wouldn’t have had a good time working with us. I didn’t accept the business.

Also, I’ve become better at saying “no” to people. “Thank you for your interest in our services. Sounds like you’ve got the beginning of a thriving business on your hands, but I just don’t think we’re the web firm you’re looking for right now. Good luck to you with your web project.”

In the third example, the Home Run, I was caught completely off guard. I was shell shocked, bamboozled and probably looked like a deer frozen solid in the headlights of an on coming car. Hey, success happens; be ready for it!

I nearly botched this one, because I had been preparing for the presentation in my mind for hours, and had been rehearsing it in my head all morning. I wasn’t about to waste all that effort; I was there to make a presentation!

About a minute into my presentation, the woman interrupted me and said, “Excuse me. We’re hiring you, you’ve got the job, you can stop selling now, and can we talk about the website you’re building for us?”

“Doh! Shut up, Deutscher; let it go. All you need to do is walk the bases. Save it for the next client.”

I had been working so hard for so long at selling my company’s services, I couldn’t even imagine a client that was pre-sold, prepared, and thrilled to have us as a vendor. Imagine it: it could happen to you, and when it does, pinch yourself and start taking notes about that site you’ve just been hired to build.

Finally, know your product, your service, and your client’s industry and/or company inside and out. Research your client before the meeting and go into that meeting expecting something out of the ordinary to happen.

As you get asked tough questions, make note of them and when you get out of the meeting, write out the answers you wish you would have thought of in the meeting. This should help you create smoother responses next time; and there will be a next time.

Just for fun, how would you answer these questions when pitching the use of ExpressionEngine to a prospective client?

1. Why do they charge for it, isn’t it open-source?
2. What happens to it three years from now when we’ve moved all our resources into it and you’re out of business?
3. We just pre-paid for two years of hosting and got a really great deal at a huge well-known hosting provider. Are you saying that your software won’t work there?
4. My nephew is a professional web designer and he uses Xippty, and Xippty is free and is used by a lot of people, and he says that your software is kind of difficult to use and he doesn’t know anyone who uses it.
5. How long have you been in business anyway?
6. The other CMS we’re looking at is only $100 per seat. Look, we can’t afford $250 a year for every person in our office, do we look like that kind of operation to you?
7. It will work just like MS Word right?
8. Has your firm ever worked with a company our size before?
9. Look, I don’t have a lot of time. This is going to be easy to use right?
10. I don’t like the idea of someone else having our data. Why can’t we keep the data for the website on our computers?

Note that some of these are not EE questions at all. That’s on purpose. Note that these questions tell you upfront that someone doesn’t have a clue how EE works, so he or she doesn’t even know how to ask the right questions. That’s on purpose too. These are all actual questions I’ve been asked over the last few years, and they all caught me of guard. I’m prepared for these now though. Are you?