The email line that's client repellent
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The email line that's client repellent
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Re: The email line that's client repellent
#2Good writing. When we say "Let me know how I can help", we are asking the other person to do work because then they have to think about what/how they need help with. Most of the times, people are lazy and you might be surprised but the fact is that they don't want to do work even for their own requirements. Instead, They want to hear solutions.
This even applies to environments at very big companies. At my current client (Fortune 100), we work with distributed global teams and we have those dreaded meetings all the time. In those meetings, we in IT will ask business for requirements which makes sense. However for projects that need quick turnarounds with tight deadlines, we sometimes don't have the luxury of getting detailed requirements. In fact, the more we discuss requirements, the more we are stuck. Asking "how I can help" usually gets a response of "Sure. what are you proposing". You cannot keep going back and forth with "depends on what you want". The reason is that even though we all would like the best solution with all features, it just does not work that way in real world because time/resource/budget is limited. Instead of asking "how can we help", we analyze the current process and then propose multiple options. So in essence, we say "Here is how we can help". It then makes it really easy for business to say "Yea we like Option 1 and if that's the best you have for now, let's go with it". Boom, you just got a decision maker to agree and you are on your way. You are also that guy who got shit done.
I used to think that we get big bucks as consultants because we are awesome devs/designers/PMs/BAs whatever. But after a decade in the industry, I got wiser. You are valued as a consultant because you get shit done by taking the initiative to propose solutions to clients. Then you deliver it to them. No one gives a shit about anything else. Really.
Re: The email line that's client repellent
#3>> Could I really boss the client around and tell them what they needed to do?
Yes, that's exactly what they are paying you for.
We had a disaster recovery project that sat on a todo list for 6 years. It got passed around from person to person, discussed at every other meeting we had, but nobody ever did a single thing about it. We brought in a consultant who did no magic other than delegating tasks to a few people, and the project was completed in 4 months.
We paid a guy to come in and tell us what we already knew we had to do. I'm not sure if we did it because now we were spending money on it, and it'd be wasteful not to follow.
Re: The email line that's client repellent
#4Good point, and well articulated. Nice.
Re: The email line that's client repellent
#5"A good rule of thumb is: if a client can just reply “sounds good” to your email, you’re right on"
Fantastic summary and advice. I try to apply this not just at work but also when proposing activities with friends and family.
Re: The email line that's client repellent
#6I'm just wondering, are people on the other side of the mail "actively" rejecting you when you say that kind of stuff, or is more of a subconscious thing?
Re: The email line that's client repellent
#7Interesting; I ran essentially the exact same experiment a while back (June to August 2012) and had a different conclusion!
-- 68 incoming consulting leads
-- group A: responded to 34 with "let me know how I can help"
-- group B: responded to 34 with "would work to discuss this further?"
-- group A: 20/34 (59%) responded, 14/20 (70%) led to contract negotiation stage
-- group B: 6/34 (18%) responded, 5/6 (83%) led to contract negotiation stage
So "let me know how I can help" outperformed (p There's a few possible explanations for the discrepancy:
* The kind of clients I had are different than Robert's clients. At the time I mostly did software engineering consulting and pair programming, and my clients were small units in mid-to-large size companies.
* I only ran mine on incoming leads, not outgoing (solicitation) leads. It sounds like Robert did it for everything.
* Content of the e-mail matters, not just the last line. Perhaps the way I write my e-mails is such that kicking the ball back to them is better for me, whereas Rob's style means a different strategy works better than him.
* Something changed about how people read e-mails in between my experiment and Rob's article.
Re: The email line that's client repellent
#8I've done a fair amount of freelancing and this blew me away in that I had never thought about it. I guess I had developed a sort of instinctive understanding that clients want solutions not just another employee to manage, but I never thought about how common (and often vacuous) this phrase is. Excellent insight.
Re: The email line that's client repellent
#9And the natural corollary is that if someone is attempting to stitch you up with a crappy piece of work that they're trying to get out of doing, if you respond to their attempt to palm it off to you with a question about the work that forces them to engage with it before they can respond, you will find that the crappy piece of work quite often never comes back your way.
Re: The email line that's client repellent
#10I'm just wondering, are people on the other side of the mail "actively" rejecting you when you say that kind of stuff, or is more of a subconscious thing?
Probably impossible to know.