33 replies to this topic

[Scottie]

ROFL

[torka]

What do you put in the background?

Everything.

See? I was right...

--Torka

[mcanerin]

Now I do a 10 page report, and send 250 pages of "background".

Damn - I only send 150. Are you including ranking reports? Because otherwise I need to add some filler....

I'm amazed at what some clients will pay just to verify that they are indeed doing things right.

I get a lot of that too. In my case they are often reporting to their boss and require some sort of independent verification. The usual way they put it is that "we want to verify what needs to be improved, and to know what we are doing right."

Which is fine. I remember being in a management training course when I was just starting out many years ago and as part of it they showed a video of an employee doing a task and then told us to describe her performance.

So we all made a list of what she was doing "wrong" I put that in quotes because there wasn't a lot. It was a very solid performance and we had to nitpick to find anything at all.

Afterward, the trainer pointed out that NOT ONE of the manager trainees had mentioned anything that the employee did right! Every single one of us focused on what she did wrong. He pointed out that it's human nature to focus on the bad, dangerous or unusual, but that a good manager should also focus on what people are doing right, and give praise and positive feedback where deserved.

It was quite an eye-opening experience. Each of us had been victim of someone overlooking our good work and focusing on the negative (and hated it), yet given an opportunity we had done the exact same thing to someone else!

I don't believe it's a consultants job to just tell people what to fix - they should also be told what they are doing right, and encouraged to continue doing so. In practice, I also find this helps with client retention, lowers resistance to your recommendations and makes the client happy.

I'm not saying to just write angel dust and fluff - but you should give credit where credit is due. It's good management, good inter-personal relations, and good business.

Ian

[Jill]

Good parenting skills too!

[janell]

Good parenting skills too!

lol, I'm listening to a book on tape right now about being a good supervisor/manager, and I keep thinking about how these skills can apply to my being a mom too!

Janell

[Raphael]

Ron's absolutely right. It's all about "percieved" value.

Ferrari could probably sell their cars at $35,000 a unit and still make a profit on each one, but where would the percieved value be then?

People are contradictory creatures and suspicious if something looks cheap. A couple of well-known old sayings spring to mind..

"You get what you pay for"
"If it looks to good to be true, it probably is"

But on top of that, people are always looking for the "best deal", but inherent in the "best "deal" are many other factors that don't involve an actual monetary value.

[projectphp]

Damn - I only send 150. Are you including ranking reports? Because otherwise I need to add some filler....

It's all in the clever use of spacing

Good call on the positive re-inforcement stuff. The joke of that is that people will usually be supremely loyal, work for less and work harder witha little tiny bit of positive re-inforcement, yet many companies seem to want to punish people for choosing to work for them, and promote mean spiritted people over good people managers.

And perceived value isright. One sentence can change a life, but a report most likely won't, yet people would be miserable if you gave them just one sentence!

[cline]

Scottie,

It looks like there's a disjoint between what you advertise and what you deliver. Some headlines from your website:

In-Depth Web Site Analysis
A Comprehensive Blueprint for Improving Your Site

A short report would not seem to be in-depth nor comprehensive. No wonder you're getting negative feedback from your customers.

[Big Bill]

It's funny, but people are happier when I throw in some complicated gobbledy gook that they can't understand.  Lots of charts, comparisons, and long words.  Then boil the recommendations down to simpler terms.  Then they feel like they've gotten their "money's worth".  It's all real data (and adds a lot of tediousness to the project) but nothing they need to improve their site.  There's definitely a "that-makes-perfect-sense-so-why-pay-you-to-tell-me-that" mentality.

They don't really want the job done, they want their egos massaged. Same thing with organic SEO and PPC, umpteen studies have shown that folk actually use and get better results from SEO than they do PPC but your average CEO doesn't want to associate their great and wonderful selves with underpanters, never mind that they actually get the job done better.

BB

[cline]

One thing I occasionally find myself telling clients is that some of the really important stuff I tell them will seem obvious -- but only after I've said it. And if I really do well, you'll want to kick yourself, saying "why didn't I think of that?!" because it will be that obvious. Having a great website starts with getting the basics right.

[Jill]

A short report would not seem to be in-depth nor comprehensive

It might not seem it, but what it if is?

[cline]

It might not seem it, but what it if is?

Perception is reality.

[janell]

One thing I occasionally find myself telling clients is that some of the really important stuff I tell them will seem obvious -- but only after I've said it.  And if I really do well, you'll want to kick yourself, saying "why didn't I think of that?!" because it will be that obvious.  Having a great website starts with getting the basics right.

We call that "greasing the skids" but I forget where the term comes from.... When you give people a heads up about something that could happen before the fact, they are much more likely to accept it when it does happen.

[Tom Philo]

"The phrase "greasing the skids" comes from the same origin -- loggers greased the skids with oil to help move the trees faster. "

from

http://ask.yahoo.com/20030819.html

[projectphp]

In-depth: anything that covers something in sufficient depth

A man probably needs an ocean to drown, but a toddler mere inches. If you run eBay, the depth will be masive. However, a small site migth need very little.

I did a report for a bank once, and the final conclusion was: there is nothing you can do except one thing: start again. They had a server-side redirection of frames, i.e. if the request was for a frame with a referrer other than the frameset page, the request was redirected to the home page. There is no way to fix that site short of redoing the server side redirection.

One recommendation. Enough depth to drown in in that case!