It’s an interesting point, and I tend to agree, but there’s a problem, and it’s a biggie.

When someone contacts you as a salesman looking to avail of your services, he’s often pretty sure of what he wants, but not very good at articulating it – he’ll know it when he sees it (or rather, he’ll know what he doesn’t like when he sees it). This is normal – as you say, our job is to work with him to get to his needs and then plan based on those.

The problem is that the client typically has two constraints – time & budget. He wants you to tell him on the phone, right there at the first meeting, how much your services are going to cost. If I can ring up Ikea and find out that the Ektorp couch is €299, why can’t I ring up my local knowledge worker and find out that the new website I want is going to be €1400?

But that’s not how it works in our world – how much and when depends on what you want, and what you want isn’t “just a website” – without realising it, you want all sorts of bells and whistles and calendars and RSS feeds and comment systems and flash ads and the list goes on.

Now, it might well be that none of this is very complicated, that it can all be done by installing a Spip or a Drupal and themeing it up real nice, but if you have to do any Javascript or xml-rpc or a bit of ROR, then you’re in a world of pain, because your client doesn’t understand that development is more expensive, slower and more difficult than “just a website” – in fact, if he knew the difference in price & difficulty of what he was asking for, he probably wouldn’t ask.

And so you have to *really* find out what he wants, the trade-offs he’s prepared to make, nail down a really good spec, and estimate how much time it will take you, all before you can tell him how much the project is going to cost. And all of that is *work* – not just for you, but for the client who just wanted a website. At the end of it, either your client will be grateful that you spent so much time explaining all of the difficulties behind the project, or he’ll hate you for having wasted his time. And you have just spent maybe a weeb’s worth of work on a project that you might never get paid for.

So we fudge – we make a ball-park estimate, and sometimes the client won’t budge after signing on the delivery date, the budget or the feature list – and so you end up delivering a poor quality product late, and losing money on it. Whose fault is it? The impatient client for not waiting days or weeks for an accurate estimate, or you, for not correctly planning?

It’s a little trickier than “all you need to do is plan & work”.

Dave.

Then there are ‘bad’ clients. The ones that make us work. Oh wait, isn’t that what we’re supposed to do — work? I think the ‘bad’ clients are the result of bad planning on our part, because we assume that all clients will be ‘good’ clients or that we won’t sell to them. Wrong way of thinking! If you want to be successful in business, you need to have a clear objective, clear goals, a vision of the outcome, and a proper work breakdown — all before selling and making a commitment to a customer. If the client relationship isn’t the right fit for your business, you’ll know beforehand and the customer will understand because you’ve shown them your true colors already.

What I find amazing is that with all the business professionals around the world is that the vast majority of them are terrible at planning like this — so we blame the customer as a way to escape.

An important lesson I learnt a while ago is that I never negotiate on price. If somone wants a lower price then I make it clear something has to come out of the product/service.

At a very busy point in our company a couple of years ago we just couldn’t take on any more business but we could’t go round saying this to people. What we decided to do was quote everything for double the price we usually did so people would just turn us down for being too expensive. Well this didn’t have the predicted effect, we found about half of people still wanted to do business with us. So in effect we’d just halved our work load but kept our revenue the same because although we were only winning half the contracts than before the price was twice as much!

In summary you don’t need clients that are just going to cause you hassle.