 to break up session number two. Here we have Mitch Bridge with us, and he's going to be talking about translating tech talk into English. Mitch is the owner of Bellingham-based web agency, Gold High Media. He uses WordPress to help businesses on keyboards and non-profits stand out online. Today, he'll be sharing some tips on how to translate talk so you can be on the stage with your clients. He's also one of the lead organizers of Bellingham and WordPress. Can you join me in welcoming Mitch Bridge? Thank you. It's good to show our hands who in this room has a client-facing role. Okay. Who's ever got lost in translation with a client? It happens. We're going to talk a lot about how to try to minimize that. Who's ever gotten frustrated because that client did not understand what you were saying? This talk is for you. This talk has been appealed to freelancers, designers, developers, and pretty much anyone in the creative space that's doing client-facing work. If you're doing client-facing work, you're also on sales. They don't really tell you that when you sign up for the job or you become a freelancer, or even if you're dead, it all of a sudden has to talk to clients. Part of sales has been able to communicate with the client to understand their needs and how to best help them. Another part of working in a client-facing position is being able to translate jargon, but can also mean translating what they're telling you to your technical team. You know, you have that client that said, oh, just do that, you know, just fix the little widget. And then you have to figure out what they're actually saying. Either you're doing the work and you're translating, or you need to translate it to somebody else. One of my clients told me of that, that typically when she talks to techies, as she put it, she feels like they talk at her instead of to her. And so I kind of asked her, what do you mean? She said, well, a lot of times there's talking in jargon and a little technical talk, and I kind of leave that meeting with my eyes glazed over and I feel like I have no idea what they just said to me. That's not a good feeling for anybody. Part of the client communication is taking the customer on the journey with you and making them feel included. So that's one of the number one reasons why you're translating. So they don't be like, okay, we're doing this website, we're doing it for this reason. Today I want to share some tips on client communication and translating tech talk, or jargon, into easier terms that your clients will understand. The thing to remember is that people do business with people they know, like, and trust. My name is Vicks Britt, and she said, as she said, I don't know their media, a little way they didn't agency up in Bellingham. We focus on being, helping businesses and managing the process so they don't have to do it. A lot of businesses are very busy, so I try to take that off their plate. And you can see that I chose, like some others, they just choose a picture of themselves. I actually chose a picture of my wife and I. I did this because without her support, I would not be as far as I would today. Many of us creatives have significant others that we don't necessarily think that they are part of the business. Well, when they're supporting us in our journey, they really are part of the business. Just because they're not writing code, writing content, designing, doesn't mean they're not helping us. I spent many years after college working in just basic HTML, CSS sites. A client wanted to make a simple change one day. All it was was updating business hours. And they said, okay, well, that's something at that time we can do really quickly. So I said, I can get you that the next day. This really was not very convenient for the client or the task they were even done because they needed to change those hours and make it easy. After this, it started looking for a solution that would be more client-friendly so that I can have them do some of these small tasks, like maybe change the picture, change the business hours, or change or edit a little piece of content. After spending a small frustrating stint with Juma, I found WorkPress, and I've never looked back since. The last part of my journey to get here was I was working a full-time job while I was building the business. A lot of us have to do that. This year I was able to transition out of that big job and work full-time on full-time media. So if you're on this journey and you're going to get frustrated, you're going to get burnt out, but the real drive if you are on this journey is to keep going because one day you're going to find that freedom of your schedule and your time. So I found, as I was putting this presentation together, I found this quote, and it was perfect. Speak to your audience in their language about what's in their heart by Jonathan Lister. One of the best ways to get through to a potential client or even a current client is speaking in their language. This doesn't always, obviously, have to always be in English. You could be in their native language, but it's also really just pulling it down so you understand what we're talking about. You know, not talking to them, you know, oh, this is PHP or CSS or things like that. I'm really making it client-friendly. This helped keep everyone on the same page, but it also helps with buying it. If you're trying to sell to somebody and they don't know that they're buying, but the next person that they are talking to, the other web agency is translating, they're like, oh, okay, I know exactly what I'm buying and they feel that relationship. So that's another part of this communication. So if you don't, if you can't communicate with them, how are you going to know what their goals are or even how to communicate with them? I'm going to share some tips on everything from web terms to translate and also some of the ones not to translate. We also cover some features of the website build and some examples of those translations. I will also share some tips about processes that make everyone's life easier. Lastly, we will cover some aspects of meetings, proposals, and even some tools that help you along the way. So as creators, we run into a pitfall. A lot of times we let the client steer the ship. And I don't know if you've ever been on that ship when it hit rocks, but it is not. Other times you can get scope creep or you can get to a bad point of the relationship where they either just want to quit it or go find somebody else. So we're the captains of the ship. It is our job to make sure we don't run into rocks. And sometimes it's creative, sometimes it's tough for us to stand our ground and say this is the process, this is what works, and this is what we're going to do. So I was saying, if you let the client steer the ship, you're about to run into rocks. So try to avoid that. Does this mean don't build a solution the client is asking you to build? No. This means that stepping in when the client has a bad idea, such as leaving sliders on your website. There are times for sliders, yes, but metrics do show that sliders are not the best thing in the world. And they slow down your website. So sometimes you might have a client that's really insistent on a slider. And it's our job to educate them why that's not a bad idea. You don't just say, I'm not doing that. That's a horrible idea. You say, I'm not doing that because. And then show them, even sometimes maybe even show them an article and then do that. It's also explaining, so we're, as part of our job, we're the tour guide of guiding them through this WordPress wilderness. If a DIYer kind of goes and try to build a website on WordPress, it's kind of overwhelming. You have all these different options. It's our job to guide them through the darkness. So a lot of times the client asks us to do certain things. Maybe like a certain piece of posting, you know, a certain tool, or something like that. I use an example of, do you go to the mechanic who's fixing your car and ask them to use a very specific wrench when working on your car? No. You are paying them and the shop for their process which includes the tools that they use. So don't be afraid when you're doing client work or anything that there's certain tool. Maybe there's a certain posting company that you like or a certain theme or certain plugins. That is part of your process. There are many parts of the website built that we should translate so the client feels included. Some of these elements are vital to the success of the project. Number one is hosting. I don't know if any of you have experienced lots of different posts out there, but it is treacherous. There are times where it can go perfectly great but there are times you want to pull your hair out. The best thing when you run into those situations the ones that pull your hair out and never want to do business with them again. And if the client says, I want to use this company to say, sorry, I don't do business with them. And then if they dig their heels in that might be a red flag of not working with that client. It is okay to say no to clients. Sometimes it's okay to say no to turn on the job and you can get the whole world a heartache. Hosting is one of those things that we do have to translate because many times we're not lucky enough to get them without hosting. You get that client, oh I already got GoDaddy and I got this and I got this. So you need to either educate them on keeping them in that environment or moving them to your environment. But you have to give a reason. You can't just say, oh that thing that you just paid for so you have to explain why I use, for example, I use Flywheel. I use Flywheel because it's part of the process, this is part of the package. When someone asked what it is I typically say, hosting is where your website lives and what makes it run. And that if it's not built solid, it is down to either fail or something bad will happen. I have recovered many hashtags on certain specific hosting companies instead of deciding that to business to them. And I explain that to them. For me, I handle the hosting as part of the package. It is a build plus support. So I kind of take that out of the conversation a little bit. Say hey, I'm here to take care of that for you. This has helped immensely reduce the problems that involves dealing with multiple different hosts. Because you don't have to figure out what each of the back ends look like, what all the nuances are, and everything. The sooner that you move to a process where you're always on one environment, the more in your life it's going to be better, and you're going to be able to communicate that with your client easier. And you're going to spend less time on some of those kind of media tasks of trying to get a hosting to work. Everyone has their own preference. So if you ever get on, you know, Facebook, Twitter, Slack, whatever, and you ask what's the best hosting, you're going to get about a million replies. So don't worry about that. A lot of times it takes experimenting with that hosting and seeing if it works with your workflow. Domain registrar. Sometimes you get to a point where you have that client that has an idea, but they don't have a domain. So sometimes you have to go and try to find that for them. So when you talk about a domain registrar, you typically say you're basically paying for the right for that domain or .com, and you're paying for it yearly. Another part when I talk about domains is always by who is privacy. Because if you don't, you are bound to get at least 100 emails and at least a couple hundred phone calls because people see these lists of these new domain names and they say, oh, you're building a new website and you want my help, and they will bug you. So, and when you don't do the domain privacy, you can go and look up this .com, and you can say, oh, this is who you are, this is where you live, and this is your phone number. I'm pretty sure you don't want that information out the loud. Custom email addresses. I talk about this just because I talk about the whole spectrum of things, but we're definitely in an age where having that at gmail.com or Outlook or Hotmail or MSN or Yahoo is not very professional. Are you going to want to do business with somebody that emails you from Yahoo or Gmail? Less likely, if you don't know that. It's a respect factor. There's a lot of spamming going on right now with email hacking and things, so people look at that really closely right now. Is this real? So having a branded email address, it's a big respect factor. It's easier than ever to do it. I myself prefer Office 365, just because I like having everything under one roof, but that's just my preference. SEO, the big, big buzzword. Nowadays, clients are asking more and more and more about SEO because they hear it like crazy. A lot of times, I just say, it's optimizing your website and margin efforts to be found on Google. And then I try to also explain to them that there's no magic bullet. Sometimes, they just say, oh, you're just going to get my website on number one. Yeah, I wish I could. It's not just, you know, it's, you know, flipping our answers, you know, fingers. But I'm not going to dive too much into that. Robert's actually got multiple talks this weekend on the topic. Google Analytics. You may not get clients asking about it, but it's a good thing to talk about because how are you going to know that something is successful unless you're measuring it? So a lot of times, I explained, okay, I'm going to be sending you a report monthly, and I'll even grab a simple report and kind of go through what these things mean, you know, the balance rates, the visits, you know, things like that, so we can actually measure them the other day. There are definitely going to be some terms that are best not to translate or even bring up, because you might look like this woman on the left. You might look across the table with your client and they look frustrated, their eyes are glazed over, and they're lost. You do not want to be in that situation. So there's things like PHP, Amazon Web Services, HTML, CSS, maybe even specific plugins. They don't need to know that you're using gravity forms. They need to know if you hand off the site how to use it, but that's not very important. It is our job to help them, but not overload them. I think the biggest thing that sometimes we forget, no matter what we're doing, whether it's social media, websites, whatever, that a lot of times the clients that we're helping it's probably the first time that they've asked for help for this, and they're going to be overwhelmed. So sometimes it's best to kind of slow down and kind of maybe even have multiple meetings so they don't get burnt out. Because why are they going to want to hire you if they're just getting burnt out and frustrated and they feel like they need to go take a nap after talking to you? When we're talking to clients, we're even putting together a proposal. There's going to be a list of features that are going to go into the scope of work. And we already talked about, and this last talk a little bit, about content management systems. In the CMS or content management system, when I talk to a client, I say it makes it easier for you to edit your site. I have many clients right now that we're moving them to WordPress just to make their lives easier. They can have, you know, maybe it was Joomla, maybe it was another CMS, and they're just frustrated because they can't do it or it's too frustrating for them. I like to say once the site is built, it'll be just as easy to edit as a Word document because most of them have used Microsoft Word or something here or there. Another aspect of a CMS to explain it when we're talking to clients that it is a piece of software with apps, or in this case, plugins that need to be kept up to date. I was using an example of you ever even go to use your Facebook app on your phone and it doesn't work. And then you realize it needs to be updated. It all works now. Well, it's the same thing with the WordPress site except it's even more extreme of that's your business. I actually talked to a company at a WordPress meetup, a very good company in our community. Their design team ran a company and wrote the website for four hours. For some businesses, that's not a big deal. For this business, they probably lost a couple hundred thousand dollars in opportunity. And that's where daily backups come in as part of that. I was a big fan of daily backups. They're an insurance policy or piece of mind that's in case something happens to the website that it can't come back to the next day. Daily backups. So when I explain it to a client, I say daily backups take copy of your website in case something happens. This isn't talked about much but displaying reviews. Reviews are very important as a trust factor when choosing who to do business with. So a lot of times when I'm helping the client, I want to see if they have any testimonials, any Google reviews, Facebook reviews, Twitter, anything, any good. Raving fans. And something I like to do and explain that, okay, we're going to take and put this in an easy place for your website and help those potential customers in the buying decision. So lead capture forms. Most contact forms that you see are name, email, phone number, and maybe contact. Well, if you have a lead come through and you just know Bob is emailing his phone and he just said help you please, is that very helpful? No. All you need to do is at least ask a couple of qualifying questions from the lead form. Do you have a current website? What is it? What's that dot com or that dot org or whatever it is? So you can actually look at it. So when you get that lead through, you're more qualified. The same goes with any type of business and they get a lead in. Just take a little extra time and ask at least a couple of qualifying questions. For me, I like to on lead forms and every intake form is asked some of the three major goals of the project and maybe even budget. And I know that pricing you know it's kind of the oh we don't want to talk about that. But sometimes it's good to feel out if they have a budget if they don't or even what that budget is. Because maybe you have a minimum and they're under that minimum. Image optimization is something that's a little technical to talk to them about. Because sometimes people are taking pictures with their cell phones and they're like oh this would be so cool to put them on a website. And they don't realize how big those photos are. And they do this every day. And all of a sudden their website is a 15, 20 second website. And they freak out and they call you and say well why is my website so slow? Well, that's because they were uploading images. So part of that education is saying don't do that. Or putting an image optimization plugin on there that can be running optimization staley or what have you. Or maybe even say hey how would you send me those images I'll optimize them and go about our business. There's things within Wordpress obviously you can take and resize it from 5,000 pixels down to 1,000 or what have you. And maybe that's part of the educational decline. There's also some other features within the website build. And obviously we talked about content internal links can be very, very important. Whether it's a naked button that can just be a link to the text. But it's good to explain why that's there and where it's going. Because a lot of times to get a client that says well I just want everything really easy to find and they just want to throw it all on the menu or all on the home page because I think there's no other way to get there. So you have to kind of explain that and kind of explain the flow. And you can even do a flow chart for them. This is how you get to this place. This is something that's relatively new but live chat is becoming even more important and we're getting used to using it. So I kind of let them know that in a lot of websites they're just connected with you through a piece of communication software similar to text messaging because there is an app on your phone that you can use to communicate with them. And that can be helpful. You can even automate and do certain questions or common questions and get those answered readily for a customer. Donation button. Everyone's small and I work with nonprofits and they're trying to find easier ways to collect donations. Now a nonprofit can create their own donation pages and not rely as much or heavily as on GoFundMe. If you're interested in learning more about this, go talk to GiveWP or create their sponsor here. They're one of my favorites when it comes to donations. All you can do is simply a donation form. You go in, it takes about 3-4 minutes and the customer all they have to do is type in their name, email address and their donation amount hooks with PayPal and they can start collecting donations. Obviously they have to collect that 2.9% but they're not losing 20, 30, 40% to some of these other options. Portfolio. Portfolio obviously something we use as creatives but it can be more of recent projects if you're working with a construction company. A lot of times they don't think they matter but if you're going to go hire a contractor you want to know what they built and what they worked on and so sometimes it's hard to pry that information out of them. I have a current project right now that we're 90% done but for the last 3 months I'm waiting for them to give me projects and they will not launch without these projects on there. So yes, there are certain pieces that are very important. They can be as simple. The best thing when you're having a portfolio, recent projects, any of these things is to have a formula or a recipe. Just do one sentence and for the construction company it was a quick overview of the project. The budget in this case and the square footage and some of the things that they did. This is coming up even more about premium fonts or branding fonts. We're finding that people want to get more creative but they're also wanting to make everything match. You know, you don't want to have a nice logo and all of these things with like Helvetica content, Helvetica headings. You may want to actually have whatever that Google font is or that Typekit and branding and craft designers are starting to use that as a best practice and give that information to the client or even you. I use Typekit whatever it was and this is what it is so it can be nice and branded. It's always good to keep the process simple when working with clients. I've found that it's good to have a process and kind of try to repeat that every single time. It's going to help the communication and help the efficiency. One of the best decisions I made in my education so far was going through the WP elevation loop train course. Part of that, a lot of that was about processors. You know, templates. Other things about talking with clients. Proposals. You have certain repetitive tasks like onboarding or certain questions that are common. You have templates saved somewhere even if it's in Word or whatever just so you can copy and paste it because you're going to get a lot of the same questions. Reduce stress. The simpler your process is to lower the stress will be for everybody. You do not want to finish a project and have a client to say well that just stressed me out. You want to have the one say that was so easy. You did not stress me out and you needed done. With the process, it's always good to tweak as you go. Sometimes you also have to read the room if you're working with an instruction company. They might not want to go through your website worksheet or your intake form or whatever. They may want a little more phone time or hand molding. The meeting. When your meeting was a client for the first time the number one rule is to listen. In client meetings it's always good to listen but it's also good to let them know that you have their attention. For me, I like to actually take my phone out turn it on off and sit on the table down so they see okay my phone is on the ring you have my attention. Take notes. This is the biggest thing with meetings. If you go and do meetings it's tough to remember everything. So take those notes but take the notes in the language of the client so that you can repurpose those later in the proposal and meeting recap and things like that. At the end of the meeting I like to repeat the main points. It could be the goals it could be particular design but when I'm wrapping up those notes I'm putting in the proposal that we're on the same page. So there's no surprises and we kind of go off into the loadiness. It's always good to use those notes and goals. For me, I always ask what's the top three goals of the project. Here are some examples of questions that I ask in a meeting with a potential client. We already went over this but what are your goals? After going through the WP elevation blueprint we'll go deep. Part of this method is to ask what the top three goals of the project are. Let that run through but then ask which one is the most important and why. So then you know their number one goal is maybe to be number one on Google or maybe it's just to make their life easier and be able to make it easy to edit because their website is hard to edit. For your competitors it is always good to know who their competitors are. One you might want to see what those competitors are doing. We also want to know how they're ranking but the client's going to tell you also about design. How they like the designs of those competitors' websites or maybe they're going to tell you flat outs or they hate about it. So then you know not to do that. One of my favorite questions to ask is how are you going to measure the success of this project? Some people might say oh so I can have Bob edit the website once it's built. Maybe it's the whole number one on Google thing. That's a totally different thing and that's something to pay attention to a lot in the scope of work. Because that's going to change the price of the website or the project or social media whatever you're doing. Sometimes this gets a little technical but I'd like to ask are there any specific features you would like to include? This is good because you're also going to get it in our language. They're going to say oh I wanted to do this really thing or whatever and like okay what do you mean and then you transfer it to make sure they're on the same page. The proposal is probably one of the most important parts of the process of the client. Obviously the first impression is the meeting but the proposal is very important because that's going to either say landing the job or not. It's always good to repeat notes from the meeting to translate any of those features that you talked about. Include the scope of work. Make it digestible and easy to read. You send them a 20 page document they're probably only going to read a couple of pages so it'll make it easy. Include your process. So if you have a six week process that are in six different phases explain that to them because they're going to want to know what's the ETA and the launch date what they're going to need to do on their side of the fence for their kind of client homework and that's part of getting the buy in to show how professional you are. All these tips, communication, there's some tools that make my life easier. Evernote. It's very very simple but it's a great piece of note taking software. Sometimes I take the next client meeting notes and put them in there and then pop those into better proposals. Or even working in ideas with the client I'll just pop those in there. Better proposals is my proposal software choice and has many great templates so you can spin up a proposal really fast. Very easy interface. Content snare. Parts of gathering content of what type of project is gathering content. If you ever have these issues and almost all of us do check that out. The other last two are client portal and active campaign. Client portal is an easy dashboard plugin and an active campaign is an email marketing software. Any questions? The chapter was built in and do you want to get a new developer? How much do I need to pay and just have somebody look at it and see if they can do that. I think that the best it's part of the conversation of starting to work with an agency or a financial developer. Typically I would say most of us aren't going to really charge for that. Some will. If I'm looking at a website that's currently built and I'm rebuilding it or tweaking it or something I like to do that to know what I can quote because it's hard to have a line quote that so you should spend 20-30 minutes getting in there and looking at it. There will definitely be some people that will charge for that hourly rate or things like that that are in point of the conversation with a designer or developer and also kind of because the thing with that is get your ducks in a row of what you hate and what you like in the current situation so that you can help the person on the set. You were talking about daily backups and I was wondering which plugin you use for that. Sure. I personally have multiple layers I use Fly Wheels that has backups but I also use Managed WP because I'm managing many different websites. As far as a plugin I recommend Vault Press is a great one. UPDraft Plus is also a good one. That one's free. UPDraft Plus The one thing I like about UPDraft Plus is it's really easy to restore. There's things like Backobuddy and other things but they're not as easy to restore. One thing that he provided the proposal that I found really helpful was what did not in the scope of work and became really clear what it was and if I wanted to add that what kind of outlet that would cost I was wondering about so I can also recommend it. Yes. It's good to and obviously it's good to do that but the reason why I usually do that is sometimes it's things that are an idea that's either up in the clouds or something that they're not ready for yet but it's good to do that so they know the reason why you want to put any of these things in your proposals or even communication back and forth so in case you as the client go back all I thought this was intuitive I'm sorry it's not but we can add it things add-ons or things in your proposal to know what's available in the future.