 of 3x8, and all this last time where I don't know what's up with the world because this is the basic watch that we see. She is going in with development as possible ideal functional team, and now we're going to thank her. Happy to work with you. She basically just sold everything I was going to say, but I am going to talk about client management, and I am going to help work out. So my image as for this presentation was seeing a statistic at MozCon a couple of years ago, which is that believe all 7% of clients are satisfied with their growth development work, which is super classic. And I think a lot of the reason for this content isn't about the product, it's not about what we're building for them. It's more about how we're working with them and the relationships that we have. So I am going to talk about improving relationships and having more positive client relationships. So when I initially started creating this presentation, I made up this because I love being homeless. And I made a 16 page list of all the sort of tips and tricks and tools that we use at my firm to manage clients. But I realized that when I just really improved the way that we work with clients, it's just a change in the way that we think about it. So my firm was founded about 25 years ago, and a lot of the team have worked together for over a decade. I have worked with our company for over 19 years. I am a owner that I love. So it's great that we've worked together for a long time. We've been a long trade, we've done each other a very successful, but we've developed a lot of habits over time. And we realize that a lot of the things we've been doing were because we always done them that way. So over the past five years, we've made a really concerted effort to rethink every asset of the company. And what we've made huge changes is how we manage our clients. So we decided to focus on a more humane, reasonable approach to client management. And that has really ended up with us building much stronger, more positive partnerships with our clients. And it increases their satisfaction and also makes us do better on the work that we're doing with them. So one caveat before I start, I am American, many of my clients are American or Western. So some of them love works for us, some of them make sense for us, it's not going to make sense for you or your clients. And that's fine. What I like to take away from this presentation is just the openness to think about the habits that you have and the openness to change the things that are getting into where you want to be as a company. I'm also from Washington D.C. and I talk really fast. And I only live here four minutes and we're running time. So I work topically. If you don't catch all of this, I will post the presentation with my speaker notes. For you guys, I have business cards over here. I'm a really friendly, nice person and there's always I can help you please reach out. I am one of them. I can help with anything. Okay. So without approach to client management, there are three main values that we find important. And that is honesty, generosity, and openness. So the first one, honesty. In business, this tends to translate more as transparency. So obviously not lying to your clients is a great start. But more commonly, this is about thinking about how you can be up front in your communications. And this is especially helpful in setting expectations for the present process. Also being generous, this is with your knowledge and expertise. All of you are experts in what you do. And I know this because I read your blogs. You mentor, you share conferences like this. And that is important. So I reply to all some really important audience. And we want to share our knowledge and expertise without an educate on the work that we're doing. And the third one is openness. And this is being open to creative solutions. So confidence is very actual, right? You're uncomfortable. You just want to get out of that situation. But that can really lead to incremental thinking. Where you're just being the quickest way to resolve a conflict. Instead of maybe taking more time and making up the most ideal solution. So it doesn't need to be like a grand gesture or super innovative. Or just going to talk about ways to create an anchor situation. And come to all the things that are better for both your client and your remote team. So those are three values where I talk about a lot of client-oriented development. So the first one. Being honest is really about setting expectations for the clients. This applies to really all aspects. We're just a family where you go to find a pricing process. And that includes your scope of the rules. Timelines. So price transparency. What are your clients paying for? It's really useful to provide a cost breakdown. So even if you have a situation where you have a fixed budget. Freeing down where costs are going are really helpful not only to help them prioritize. But it also pays to pay some of the web development in the long term. So even in situations where you're doing sprints. It can be really helpful to look at things that many clients as well. Just to help them understand there's scope of different development projects in general. So that in the future they know what to expect. Also finding errors in pricing before price. So in this can be areas where you need to do a lot of setup work. In order to make the changes. So setting up requirements, quality control, food management research. Place works. Which are tasks where the client is seeing you make the visual changes small. But it requires a lot of work. Explaining how to set up special circumstances. So any aspects of their particular site. They're, you know, tech staff. They're using these all to take action in time. In the works that seem underpriced. So your client is probably not going to complain. They are not charging enough. But in some situations you can set really bad expectations. Like undercharging. So for instance with those space work tasks. Where the first time you did it took a lot of ground work. The second time you needed to change the screenplay. Because you've already done that in operational work. So they may wonder why you're in charge of these a little last time. The first time I asked for this. You know it's way more expensive. So just make sure you're communicating that. And also sometimes you over-surface clients intentionally. You're excited about their mission. It's an opportunity for you to learn something new. So whatever the reason. Let them know that they are giving them free work. So then they don't expect the change at all. So they appreciate that for you. Price is often the area where you get into the most authentic clients. So try to be as honest and transparent as you possibly can. Because if you're going to have a disagreement with your client for money. He wants to do that before you do work for them. So process transparency is really about being outside of how you work. And it's often your first opportunity to educate clients. Especially those who are new to what the development process is. So we want to explain the process when you're getting with them. What, and this would be part of your either introduction with the client or their proposal or their contract. Work it in whatever you can. What are the phases of steps involved in your work? Is your client going to have a base site to look at? Are there costs to look at? Are you working in sprints? They explain to them what the rules would be and what your process is. What tools are you using? Do you need them to review costs and admission? Are there multiple production environments? Are you doing project management? What do you use? Let them know how they're going to be working with you. Your scope is the most important expectation you can set with clients. You want to explain every single thing that you can think of. But you also want to talk about what's next to you. So your scope may be, for instance, if you have a redesign that does not include parts of the agency's site. If they issue the RFP and part of the RFP is billed over to the project. Or sometimes, you know, content development and migration can be an area where maybe your team or theirs might do it. Just make sure those things are really clearly outlined in your scope. Deliverables. This is a word for them you would think. So clients may literally not know what a copper wire frame is. They should just describe what these things are. What should they expect? How many of each deliverable are there? How many rounds of edits? What are the review versions? Is it in faces? Will it be made in fan products? And then there's the client goals. So tell them what you're expecting from them. Should they give you feedback? Do you expect edits? Do you need approval from them? What role do they play? Timelines. So this is a bit of a difficulty already. So as you guys I'm sure know, timelines are really hard. It's really hard to know. It's going to take those longer than you've ever built before. So our proposals are our contracts literally say this timeline is going to get thrown out. This is a tentative timeline. And you think your project really creates people like months. So really we think it's like a nine-month build or whatever, but this is not real. So it's good to set the expectations of how long overall we will take. We all know that things change as we go. And also you apply the speech deadlines too. So when you set that deadline, make sure to say when you need feedback from them, when you need approval from them. And also help them understand that sometimes if they delay their deadline, your deadline is, the reciprocal deadline for you is going to be delayed even more. So let's say your client is supposed to get you approval for a call by Friday. If they take an extra three days, you may need an extra two weeks to meet your next deadline because you have other workbook then. So you may not be that tired to maybe be wide open and it's totally fine, but make sure to set that expectation just because they're a day late. Does it mean they only change your work more time and time again? You know, their time and time again. So being clear about how you work helps your clients know what to expect and it brings up any gaps in the process between how you work and how your client works or between how you work and your client being their client's previous vendors worked. So we're going to do a little story about being transparent with our clients. So we had a new client to get a really complicated UI and this is not it. We spent a lot of time in the separate phase talking to them. We had really good talks with them and we felt like we were on the same page. So we were really surprised to what we said about work work. They said, can this make any color? Can we have our logo on this link? Click on anything. So our team was like so being the instinct here is to say oh my god the client is so stupid they don't even know why our client is but honestly we are the experts and it's our job to explain to them who they got the process. So we not only really accept the client we sent them what they thought was eating I didn't even know what they thought they thought it was a broken sign that I didn't even imagine what they thought you know in that situation and it took us about three weeks to smooth that out and we got the whole process back on track. So it is really worth doing that kind of education for clients we need to know. So we talked talking honest we are going to go on to the second value which being done this is educating your clients all about development and how to work out of it. So your clients do not know what you do even if you get it quick. Having true partnership with your client does start with sharing your knowledge so break down what is called technically the way that they can understand this is not the people to feel included in the process it also helps helps to make important decisions at the end of the day to get a product that they have to make decisions and they make poorly enforced ones if you are all your software going to be guaranteeing them. So when you first engage your client and talk to them about money they are going to tell them all the information on that they are going to be like this is everything but that is what you should win and it can be months before you are actually in the middle of the phase separating your design and so if I had to be really helpful to reiterate process parts as they come up like we are starting to design these now with the word tether you are really going to have some information here we are going to send you this or you are going to exit through the goal and tell them as you go as well basically but with new clients sometimes you don't really have that trust in place and they may not understand that the recommendations are really going to be an informed professional place so I think it is helpful to share your reasoning and explain to them why you made decisions you have for their project and it also helps to feel included and it also draws on situations where you actually didn't understand the requirements you have for the information and it makes you personally to the level of support so some clients have no idea about what they all have some of them have a site on their own site or do it as a hobby some of them like to work professionally and develop in some capacity in the past get to know them a little bit and make sure you are talking to them on their own share your mistakes you I would guess it I've made a lot of mistakes in the past and there are times when not all of this experience so let them know you know if you see them you will want to actually let them know and I think it is helpful to make the context of the story and also kind of internalize your advice and make sure that it is all turned off so make sure I'll put up a story about engineering clients so this is a long-term client who worked with us for over a decade and they are having their very very very large site and special to about 10 months and in our office we work with them and they are very involved so after months of work we signed over to the beta site and we didn't leave their feedback here is our content why don't you pick up the homepage on the old site you can see everything on the homepage the font is too big we like to add it on the old site the forms are too simple can you make it like the old site and our team was like so this client had approved quiet comps they reviewed sprints I mean they had seen this 19 million times and they reviewed it all and we were kind of mad to be honest and we didn't feel like it was fair so after complaining for a few minutes we took a step back and we thought maybe they would understand why we made these changes so we called them and we explained to them how to make everything on the homepage for the belonging to users so we improved the navigation and we simplified the location and we talked to them about increasing their font size to make it easier for the users to read but for them we had to really text many sites so it's even more important and then we talked about how long these forms increased user abandonment and so we were trying to improve the conversions by some client reports and after we explained everything to them we know what they said okay so that's all that's all that was missing was that we needed to take more time during the process to explain our rationale to them this brings us to our third one which is being open to great solutions like whether your client is really about solving problems that is why I hired you but the daily client is working the clients can hear you down a little and sometimes you say okay or say no to get it over with it's being a great client management oh my gosh to be a great client manager you do need to be a little more deliberate you do need to take the time a little bit to make sure and try to bring more clear solutions so as I said before this doesn't need to be for innovative or huge gestures it's more about being thoughtful and I think most most of the clients are really about the view of the client and so we're going to screen some scenarios in those terms and talk about how to deal with them so the first one the client is worried that you were going to do whatever you want and how would they want discovery really helps here so in America we have this TV channel where it's called HGT it's on the large television and I was watching a show called so you hire someone they come in your house and make a critic so on this episode I was watching there were three teams competing with each other so each team was going to redecorate a client's room and then the client was going to basically decide their winner and the first step was for each team to interview the client after that part after the interview the discovery the TV show talked to the client level and they said how are you feeling about this process and the couple said we are so excited about team number three they asked us how we use the space they asked us about our aesthetic they really cared about us and our lifestyle and that really stuck with me because think about this for a second this team had not done any work whatsoever and then the client was already invested in their success imagine your client once you twin they wanted to separate things from you all you didn't have a conversation with them that is the power of the discovery process that's the power of talking to them and when they talk listen so they don't say that your client is business better than they do your client should obviously write down their problems and your job is to rephrase what you think they are saying and make sure to get it and this is another area where I think this backs this show on every single one of these because in proving documentation reassures the client that they are going to get what you guys agree on we think visual tips is really helpful especially for clients who are not really experienced with developments they may not have the right words to use to even have some of these conversations with you so starting with something visual starting with some things they like maybe is a good way for you to have these conversations where they don't have the technical terms using so even if you're that adult using some sort of some sort of innovative process where the client is seeing progress as you go helps them not really make sure that they go on track but it is really the way to not build an entire website that they have not linked the next one the client is they are really ready to work so having a single point of contact having a client in terms of really building that relationship and how they are going to work those are communicating so the clients don't really know what you are doing so sometimes taking a couple minutes to write a manual deliverable that is something that is really reassuring especially for the clients who seem a bit nervous but even if you're playing having check-ins set those expectations so that they are not going to let your job talk to them so that they don't have to take you from larger or more less projects for hours, hours, hours, hours, hours that is that short using project management software in multiple ways, you have JIRA something that they can be involved in progress just talking with them to sort of check out how things are going I love when the clients hear that so educating them on the things they are doing to make sure they are going to work is leaving your postage or technology staff, security, monitoring or SLA, your QA process let them know the things you are doing to make sure that their product is going to stay it helps to explain them how to not bring the site so I don't know if you guys have heard of something some of these crazy concepts but plan deployments regularly updating your sites monitoring living access not everybody needs to be in the app all perception is also important so making sure clients understand how things are supposed to work it's not fun when you send a birdie finished product and they think it's broken because they don't understand how it's supposed to work also having station sites is really helpful having somewhere where they can look at their products without watching you doing work at the same time and also if you fix problems at the build like let's say you build a new site or a new site, you offer a bug fix as part of that contract or you are going to fix things that you might for a certain period of time after you have done that so that they would be able to make sure or ongoing support if you offer maintenance of the sites talk to the client about that well before it's needed and let them know that you have this it's not so unstable that you'll support them this is really the biggest one I think everybody has experienced the client is worried about the expected so this is yet another situation where your detail scope is really reassuring it's going to let them know that they're ready to work they expect the price that they've already agreed on and over to people so even if you're in a situation where you have over to these people who have already worked over over a slot in the back of the sprint or whatever hours they have that don't get so afraid it seems obvious but just letting them know that whatever your limit is that they're going to be over charges is really important so that they don't get pushed in situations where locking down the budget is risky we found it really complicated so this is really helpful in troubleshooting clients don't understand a lot of the time that if you don't know what's wrong you don't know how long it's going to take to fix it so we normally say the reason how it looks like if you give us 3 hours or something to look into and then maybe in 3 hours we fixed it maybe if you have a better idea of the problem maybe if you have no idea maybe 3 more hours doing it incrementally is a better way than agreeing to some budget that you have no idea of this after all also things that come out of scope so if you're working in an alcohol process obviously you have a bad love situation but in any case make the bluebacks phase 2 list deal with these things in a separate timeline in a separate budget to keep it really clear for the client about where their rent is going so you were honest with the client from the start you said reasonable expectations you were generous with your client you shared your knowledge of expertise you were open and proper made of solutions but no relationship is perfect and sometimes you still end up having to disagree with them so we want to apply these same 3 principles to managing content things aren't going well so the first one is jump in front of bad things usually works better to be proactive and offer a solution instead of kind of pretending that everything's okay in case you're applying the opportunity to be understanding there are people doing a lot of the time you can tell them something's wrong they can please understand them completely with it and be sure to if you have tons of experience solving these problems if you can't or won't do what they want explain to them why alternative so we have a lot of people that come to us with what we think are unreasonable requests and we can try to try to find something to compromise so perhaps we're like no we can't build you a new website in 2 weeks no we can't make you a landing page and we have a 2 thinking about things differently we have to reframe that relationship so do try to be flexible and accommodate small unexpected needs but let them know really clearly and immediately if you don't and some relationships are genuinely meditative or unhelpful so you do need to think about whether it is possible to have a positive relationship with this client and whether that relationship is worth when it is new into your team and make your own mental alright so being generous and being open whether you're getting to know a client for the first time or working through an already troubled relationship be as honest and transparent as you can to set clear reasonable expectations train the client as a partner by sharing your knowledge educating them on the work they're doing together and both everyday colleges and at times the conflicts take a moment and open yourself up to solutions for both you and the client and happy strangers that's being recorded I as a business partner feel free to take one and you know me anytime does anybody have a question anybody who's not my husband has a question yeah I saw that I'm going to try nobody alright cool thanks again for coming good to see you guys enjoy the rest of your day and thanks to all of my volunteers you guys are awesome cool