You are here: Home › Articles › What makes a great client?

Aug 15, 2011 Bookmark and Share

What makes a great client?

There will be a few things that come to mind when people ponder the question, ‘What makes a great client?’

A few obvious answers like paying invoices on time will spring immediately to mind, but what else?

Everyone wants to have great clients, so how can you spot them?

When you meet a (potential) client for the first time, you will usually, pretty quickly, get a feeling for being a good fit or not. If you are a good fit, then you will usually have very similar attitudes towards the project and maybe even have similar work place cultures.

For example: if you are a company that values business layers, values planning and values functional specifications, then a client who tells you to cut these out of your proposal clearly doesn’t value them – this could be an early warning sign that your approach to a project and theirs will be different.

Trust is another big factor in a great relationship. At Itomic, we have clients that (quite rightly) trust us with our estimating and our invoicing, this means that we can spend time working efficiently and quickly on their website development. Many clients take advantage of our pre-paid support plans that not only gives them great rates but keeps project management to a minimum giving them very speedy service.

By contrast a client that doesn’t trust you? Have you ever had a client that makes you spend longer quoting for work than the actual work takes, often because they are constantly changing the scope to bring the estimate lower and lower? Neither party enjoys this approach.

Value the work. At Itomic, we value the work we do. We assign the best available resource for a task every time. If you have a client that does the same, it is likely you will be a good fit. If a client assigns junior members of staff to oversee the web work, it is likely they are not placing the same value on it and could signal a mismatch.

At Itomic, we always strive for the win/win outcome. Great clients will do the same. Sometimes projects do not go to plan, so a client who is able to work with you to resolve issues will almost always get the best results. This is often because constructive dialogue produces good outcomes.

The list of signs could go on and on, but from recent experience: Itomic (UK) are currently working for a local Cambridge client. After we won their business, we all remembered thinking that we were very proud to be chosen. This was because we very much respected the client and the work they do. This was a very promising sign that we had a great client.

Bookmark and Share

Other web articles...

Article tags

Our articles are tagged so you can find what you are looking for more quickly. To filter articles in this way, please select a topic from below to reveal articles that relate to it.

 


Testimonials

I needed a transfusion of ideas to enliven a...

John Bryant, Bryant Media