I unfortunately had to turn down a customer last week and politely decline the work they were offering. It’s an interesting socio-economic situation (with some big words to boot).
Theoretically, it could be argued that I have just declined an opportunity for my business to be more successful and could have left a negative impression on a prospective customer which could affect the business longer term. We have had to provide timescales in the past due to heavy workload and they have had time-based requirements that we couldn’t fulfill. In each of those situations in the past, they have greatly appreciated the honesty and awareness of our planning which has led (in some cases) to them coming back to us for other work in the future. This is however, the first time we have had to turn someone down for other reasons.
This company (we’ll call them ACME Inc) are a local company who approached us for some SEO work recently. We provided an honest appraisal of their current rankings, backlinks and SERPS as usual and talked them through some of the simple first steps before they started down the route of investing heavily in advertising. As is becoming the norm for sites we appraise, the biggest issue was that the site had been developed in frontpage using tables with no seperate stylesheet and a very distorted view of standards.
ACME Inc decided that although they would like to increase their search engine positioning, they would like us to manage a search engine portfolio for them with their current site design and that as this “obviously” meant less work for us, they would expect a decreased quotation. This was unfortunate and took some weeks of to’ing and fro’ing to explain. For those who don’t see the pitfalls of this…. A successful website is very much like building a house. The success of the build is almost entirely reliant on the foundations, these are the fundamental steps you have to introduce before you can worry about the roof. For SEO to be successful you really need to have a stable, well developed and focussed site, otherwise you are almost doomed to failure from the start.
So we moved on, until ACME Inc read an article online describing SEO’s as the devil and that all you need is a certain piece of software which will submit your site to eleventy million search engines and the users will come flooding in. To fast forward, I felt that ACME and I would ultimately struggle to work well together. I realise that posting this may further negatively affect future relationships with other customers but I think it is a really key point that must be made.
I didn’t suggest to ACME that they pursue their preferred design and SEO approach without us because they read something contradictory and asked questions about it, the difficulty I had was that despite strong evidence, many discussions around quality rather than quantity and even an offer to try it their way first before resuming our suggested ways forward, they maintained that we were wrong. This was really unfortunate and to that end, I have done everything I can to make sure that our door is decidedly propped open and that if they do go in another direction, we are always here to offer some advice and/or future services if they find that the route they have chosen is not as successful as they expect. This I think is the right approach.
So, to get to the point (I know it took some doing to get here), here are my thoughts on a successful relationship and some things that are needed to forge such a relationship:
- Good communications channels
- A good single point of contact (both ways)
- A basic level of understanding of the technologies/services OR someone able to pick up that understanding relatively quickly (Failing this, you really are relying on blind faith, which is dangerous for the customer).
- A clear plan, costs, resources and timescales
- Realism - Much as we would all like a top 3 result in Google for the most used keywords, it wont happen overnight and it will cost more than your daily bus fare.
If any of these things are missing, working together may be difficult or lead to misunderstandings over requirements, achievements, quality of work or value for money.
Have you had similar (or vastly different) experiences? How have you dealt with them? Ive been lucky not to have to ever deal with outright conflict in a professional capacity - have you? I’m genuinely interested.
