Yeah, how about if you change that color to green and make the logo bigger, oh and I don’t like the photo of the girl or the background, could you use something else? And could you have it ready by tomorrow?”
Sounds familiar? We’ve all heard this kind of speech. OH THE FRUSTRATION! Lots of time spent trying to achieve a perfect balanced composition and all the elements are in place and you are satisfied with the work, and it looks great BUT the client doesn’t get any of your ideas and he/she insists on making tons and tons of alterations until you end up with a mock up of the original idea and you die a little inside.
TYPES OF DIFFICULT CLIENTS
The But
This is the type of client that will always praise your work, put you in a good mood and immediately after that starting with the criticizing. He/she clearly doesn’t like what he/she sees but he/she has learned in the self help book he/she has read that it is better to highlight the pros before the cons BUT what this type of client doesn’t know is that this tactic is actually very very annoying.
What’s So Difficult About Your Job
This is the type of client that thinks he/she can do your job much better than you and he/she acts like he/she doesn’t need you. His or her standards are usually too high and often he/she doesn’t even know what he/she wants. Maybe he/she has some basic knowledge or is a frustrated artist. They also make sure you know and appreciate their artistic skills because their self esteem needs to get some extra points.
Do Something I’ll Tell You If I Like It
This is a very common type of client. He/she doesn’t know what he/she wants. He/she gives you no indications but when you show him/her a version he/she suddenly knows what he/she doesn’t want and is ready to critique everything.
I Know What I Want And It’s Awful
This is the type of client that comes from the very beginning with examples of others people work (nor rarely his/her examples look plain dreadful). And he/she often wants you to copy them or create something very similar to that. He/she is of course often very reticent to any new ideas.
The Tight Deadline
He/she always makes you work under pressure giving you a very close deadline. He/she comes in the last moment all agitated and frustrated demanding an absolute priority for his/her project.
The Other People Decide For Me
It’s the kind of client who likes your proposal when he/she first sees it, just to call you later on to tell you that …he/she has thought about it…and well his wife says it’s too… The advantage is that this type of client is easy to convince that your version is what he/she is looking for. But the disadvantage is that after he/she leaves your office he/she goes home again.
The Needy
This client will take all your time, send you tones of e-mails, call you for hours in weekends and whenever he/she feels like it. He/she is under the impression that if he/she hired you, he/she owns all your time and is entitled to disturb you for any small thing.
The Indecisive
Make you do lots of changes and then change them again, just to decide in the end that your first version was the better one. He/she is never satisfied and just because he/she likes something today doesn’t mean that he/she can’t hate it tomorrow.
The Always Looking For A Deal
He/she will always require a discount, minimizing the value of your work. Also this type of client requires you work for a smaller fee promising that this will lead to more work in the future. This is just the type of collaboration you are going to regret sooner or later.
The One That Doesn’t Pay
This is actually the worst case scenario, when you find out that all your hard work was for free. That’s the reason that led to contracts being invented and you always have to take good safety measures to make sure that this doesn’t happen.
Finally it is very important to keep in mind that your clients will never ever change. They have no interested in doing so. So the only good thing to do is that you change how you approach them. Observe them, learn more about their real needs and maybe you will find a new way to communicate with them.
