One of the perks of being a freelancer or web agency owner is that you get to choose who you work with. If you have any reservations about working with a particular client, you are perfectly free to walk out the door and leave the project.
But all freedom comes with responsibility. If you suddenly abandon a client mid-project, you can be sure that people are going to hear about it. Your professional reputation is at stake with almost all of your projects.
Unfortunately, a problem doesn’t have to be your fault for you to be the one who suffers from it. Difficult web agency clients have an uncanny ability to turn their problems into your problems. Work for long enough in the web development industry, and you’re virtually guaranteed to run into problem clients.
The key to keeping your business running smoothly without sacrificing your reputation is following a client qualification process and choosing your clients wisely. If you pay attention to early warning signs, you’ll know how to choose your web agency clients whose projects are most likely to align with your goals.
In this blog, we will first discuss what you should consider when choosing the best web agency clients. We will then walk through the signs that you should avoid a client.
So, let’s move on.
Things to Consider When Choosing an Ideal Client
Most beginning web developers start out enthusiastically accepting almost any project that comes their way. This is a perfectly acceptable way to gain experience and a great playing field for learning how to deal with clients.
If your web agency is less than two years old, you’ll want to spend this time carefully observing your clients’ behaviors and considering how those behaviors match your personal workflow. Just like marketers use buyer personas to figure out who they are selling to, you should flesh out a semi-fictional “client persona” that fits the type of person you wish to work with.
Over time, you’ll learn to associate incoming web agency clients with a particular set of attributes. You’ll instinctively know whether you’re dealing with a serious professional or not.
This is because great web design clients tend to have a few things in common. If you see any of these character traits in a client, chances are you are dealing with someone who is not going to let you down:
- Committed: Commitment comes in various forms and for multiple reasons. Ambitious, revolutionary creatives can be as committed to a project as highly driven, passionate executive types. On the other end of the spectrum are bureaucratic middlemen who don’t really care about anything other than their own paycheck.
- Communicative: Web development projects are complex, multi-tiered processes that involve different people performing detailed tasks. Even the best projects can fall apart due to communication problems. Web agency clients who are responsive, aware, and involved tend to be the best communicators.
- Solution-Oriented: Clarity is essential, but there is a difference between being fixated on a particular feature and on a specific outcome or goal. The best clients are the ones who ask for solutions, not features.
- Organized: Where communication skills lead off, organization skills take over. You will get farther with web agency clients who enthusiastically use project management platforms than those who insist on listing desired features on the phone.
- Clear Goals and Expectations: All good web agency clients have a clear objective set in mind. They can even define their goals and expectations from the web development agency. Hence, it becomes easier for you to set proper guidelines and timelines for the project. It even enables you to streamline the entire web development process.
- Realistic Budget: Great web agency clients have a proper budget for the project. They understand the value of your web development services and the high-quality work you deliver. These clients are ready to invest an appropriate budget for the project as they trust your services and work. Moreover, they believe in building a long-term relationship with your agency. In the end, a realistic budget helps an agency plan effectively and allocate sufficient resources.
- Long-term Potential: Clients who love to deal with your agency in the long term provide some of the most notable benefits. Primarily, these types of web agency clients believe in establishing partnerships where both parties think about growing together. Hence, the client doesn’t look after small hurdles in the project and has faith in your quality of work. Secondly, long-term clients help you to build a stable revenue stream and allow you to grow along with establishing client’s business. Thirdly, it helps you to build your portfolio. Lastly, if these clients love your services, they will recommend your agency to other people and thus help your agency grow.
After looking at the essential factors for choosing the ideal web agency clients, we will walk you through the red flags you should consider when working with any client and steer clear of them.
Recognize These Bad Client Warning Signs and Avoid Them
For many website building agency owners, identifying a great client is easier than picking out a bad one. It can be tempting to overlook warning signs, especially at the beginning of a web development career.
Not all warning signs are grounds for terminating a client relationship. Most clients are well-intentioned people who really want to get things done. It’s up to you to establish an environment that makes project success possible. Here are some of the most common characteristics you’ll run into:
- Lack of Clarity. Not every client knows what they want, but good clients at least know exactly what problems they want you to solve. Be wary of clients who ask endless questions without committing to anything specific. If things drag on too long, recommend a per-hour consulting contract or paid project discovery.
- Unavailability. Life can get in the way of anything, and web development projects are no different. But if a client consistently is unavailable – missing calls, dropping email threads, and disappearing for weeks at a time – then you are better off dropping the project altogether. Sometimes, you can save the project by agreeing to strict contractual terms, but it won’t always work.
- Penny-Pinching. Everybody wants to get more for less, and every project is likely to come with a bit of haggling and negotiation. But when a client seems overly fixated on cost – to the exclusion of the actual value of your work – you should be concerned. Be clear about how much your work is worth, and put it in terms your client understands. You’ve got to spend money to make money.
- Constant Stress and Urgency. Organized, communicative clients generally don’t suffer from emergencies very often. If a client tends to need everything done RIGHT NOW, you need to put a robust system in place for documenting your interactions and use the principles of project management to keep things going at a steady pace.+
- Excessive Revisions: If the clients repeatedly come to you for the project changes, it is a red flag. How? These clients don’t have clarity on what they expect from the project and cannot make effective decisions. Even this kind of thing leads to stretched project timelines, and increased costs of resources. To handle this, it’s always better to set a clear revision policy before project initiation to avoid the endless loop of project changes.
- Mismatched Values and Ethics: If there are many differences in the client’s business and personal values, it could result in various dilemmas and issues in the operations. Consider this: if a client doesn’t give much importance to the legal rules and regulations and anticipates you following the most relevant practices in the market to achieve the desired results, it could directly affect your reputation in the market.
Lead Your Clients By Example
In most cases, the relationship between a client and a web agency is easy to categorize. Clients have technology-related problems they wish to solve, and agencies have the skills and resources to solve them. As a result, agencies typically have expertise in this sort of problem-solving, and clients are well-advised to benefit from it.
This means that in order to attract committed, communicative, solution-oriented clients who are well-organized, you have to be committed, communicative, solution-oriented, and organized in your approach to life and work.
People with these attributes tend to find one another in the world of business and commerce. The better example you set, the more likely you are to attract precisely the type of client you value most.
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