I’ve freelanced seriously for about 6 years, and in total about 8. Over those years, I’ve worked from hundreds of people to create, improve, or rework their online presence. I’ve found that the clients who have very clear expectations (guided by me) were the easiest to work with. It was the clients with the highest expectations (huge ROI, short deadline) that tended to be the hardest to work with and ultimately would get the least value.
Why am I telling you this?
Because as an account manager or freelance web developer, it’s your job to educate that client on realistic expecations. Now, I personally don’t like the word realistic. It just sounds average, and I don’t want any of my clients to expect average. I think the right word here is accurate expectations.
Creating Expectations
Consider this scenario. A client comes to your for a simple project, it seems feasible to complete the work in two weeks. You, an ambitious freelance web developer, bid the project accordingly and plan on working nights to beat the deadline. Piece of cake.
What you need to consider is that when you create that deadline, you are also creating an expectation. Now, the client will have an internal switch set around that expectation. They begin planning (either conciously or subconciously) around that expectation. They may have a writer get involved, or its as simple as they tell a friend the website will be done in two weeks. Regardless – the the expectation reverberates.
Well, when you get started on the project, something totally unrelated to work causes you to miss 3 days of working time. You’re behind on other projects, but it’s okay because you can work nights and catch up. A few days before deadline, you hit your first bug. Ultimately it’s going to push you back three more days. You’ve called the client and explained, but nothing will reverse the fact you failed to meet the expectation.
Every client will react differently to this. Some are willing to keep it moving and wrap the project up. You should be grateful for every client like this, and exceed their expectations on delivery. Other clients will drop you, sue you, or ultimately have a negative fallout. A lot of that is determined on their personal experiences.
Pro Tip – Client Preconditioning
You can’t control what the client has been through with another web developer up to this point. So when you create an expectation they may; A – Believe you, because they don’t have any reason not to trust you, or B. – Not believe you, because they’ve worked with freelancers who failed in the past, or C. – Have some other preconditioning like paranoia being overcharged for time based on a past conflict.
Exceeding Expectations
Here’s what I’m challenging you to do. Instead of bidding the projectly accurately, bid the project long and work according to the accurate deadline. Let’s consider the alternative scenario.
Instead of bidding the client’s simple project at two weeks, you step back for a second and think about what snags may arise. After thinking it through, you decide to bid the project at three weeks, and if anything goes wrong you’ll have time to fix it. When you tell the client three weeks, you receive a little discomfort up front, but the client agrees with that deadline and moves forward accordingly. You have just created an expectation.
So the job goes well, and you finish it in under two weeks. The client, in this scenario, is blown away by the fact he has an extra week to plan around his project. He actually decides to show a bunch of his friends and come back with a change list. Boom - more work, more money. You bid those changes long as well (instead of 2 days, 5 days), and you launch the project on time. Your client is happy because every expecatation was met and exceeded.
Conclusion
I’m telling you this because I’ve dealt with hundreds of clients in the last 5 years. Just recently, we mismanaged a client’s expectations and, although we exceeded his expectations in the product, we lost rapport by not meeting an expectation. We of course recovered this rapport by overdelivering in another area, which you should always consider when you fail.