“You´ve gotta be
Cruel to be kind in the right measure,
Cruel to be kind it´s a very good sign,
Cruel to be kind means that I love you,
Baby, you´ve gotta be cruel to be kind.”… Nick Lowe
In the agency setting in which I used to work, I didn´t do a lot of the direct client communications for a couple reasons:
• I was perceived as not being particularly good at explaining SEO concepts to folks who had a difficult time conceptually grasping anything to do with search marketing.
• My direct manner of speaking wasn´t perceived to be compatible with maximizing the duration of client engagements.
When I think back upon my agency experience, clearly my bosses admired my technical ability while simultaneously being frustrated with my inability to communicate in agency-speak.
But, I wonder whether even if had I been able to master the art of agency relations, would the clients & our company revenues have been better off? Or, would the enterprise have been more of a success had I been able to communicate with the clients in my normal manner: Direct, honest and even a bit harsh to clearly put forth my thoughts.
In private conversations, when describing the SEO choices (or lack thereof) made on websites, I do tend to use the word “suck” a lot (with plenty of “WTF” and “ROFL” thrown in). While I would never use these words directly to a client / prospective client, I would have no problem imparting these feelings in a more appropriate manner.
If I were a client, I would rather be given the straight dope about my site because if somebody is telling me something I may not want to hear, they are more likely to be speaking to me with integrity.
Looking back at some of the client / potential client situations I faced, I wonder if things would have turned out differently had I been able to speak my mind…
The Situation : Client engaged our firm. Major textual optimization was needed on the home page. Most of my textual recommendations were rejected & I only was able to change two words on the home page.
The Results : I couldn´t convince the client to change their mind and SEO results weren´t what they could have been.
What I Wanted To Tell The Client : You expect top rankings but you won´t let me make changes to your home page? Not even Matt Cutts could make your SEO campaign successful.
The Situation : Niche informational site with over 100,000 backlinks & high Alexa rankings wanted to engage our services but couldn´t afford our fee (and desperately needed to earn money). A clear candidate for contextual (and other) advertising…however, I wasn´t allowed to present that as an option to them because a co-worker was afraid of how our agency would be “perceived” in recommending monetization through ads. Instead, I was asked about pushing their t-shirt sales for revenue.
The Results: We let the opportunity pass.
What I Wanted To Tell The Prospect: I absolutely would have presented various advertising alternatives (and probably would have done the work for a % of the earnings). If they resisted, I would have compared their situation to starving to death while sitting at an “All You Can Eat Buffet”.
The Situation: Industry Leader in a niche vertical approaches us about SEO & PPC. They are spending high 5-figures each month in PPC, sending all paid traffic to a poorly designed ad-laden home page where any possible conversion was several clicks away (and required use of a GPS). Also, they had web analytics that did not distinguish between paid & natural search and didn´t track click paths.
The Results: I had plenty to say about this site but couldn´t say any of it. We failed to get the engagement.
What I Wanted To Tell The Prospect: You´re wasting more money in a month with paid search than most families earn in a year. Plus, a lot of your customers who could buy from you are giving up before they can purchase.
Now, when I talk about SEO and offer opinions & advice in my articles, blog posts, twitters, or live at SEM Hot Seat events, I give my opinions without any form of self-censorship and I´ve found that people have responded very positively to me in each medium. I wonder whether my agency experience would have been more profitable for all involved had I been allowed to follow my natural instincts instead of sublimating myself to a perceived agency norm.
If I ever do any solo branding, it will be as the “Tough Love SEO”.
Todd Mintz is the Director of Internet Marketing & Information Systems for S.R. Clarke Inc., a Real Estate Development and Residential / Commercial Construction Executive Search / Recruiting Firm headquartered in Fairfax, VA with offices nationwide. He is also a Director & Founding Member of SEMpdx: Portland, Oregon’s Search Engine Marketing Association.
Todd Mintz knows PPC…knows Social Media…knows SEO…knows Blogging…knows Domaining…and knows them all real well. He runs growth marketing for )and is also a Director & Founding Member of SEMpdx: Portland, Oregon’s Search Engine Marketing Association, and he can be found here on Twitter and Facebook.
Wow – I totally relate to what you’re saying. I find it very frustrating to not be able to speak my mind with clients when they just don’t get it. In the past, sometimes harsher words meant better results in the long run, and that’s what most clients really care about.
Sphunn!
I’d have to question the agency you were working with. Granted, telling a client something sucks isn’t the way to go, but the best clients want tough love when things are wrong. We subconsciously use a good cop/bad cop in my current position, and clients react very well to it.
Hi Todd,
I too work for an agency – and my sometimes incredulous responses to client requests has gotten me in hot water in a few different instances.
I guess learning the “nice” way to say “that sucks” is the key – fortunately I dont have to do that much – I make the account managers “soften” the tone of my replies before they go to the clients 🙂
Great piece, I think my record is 28 “WTFs?” in one day!
~Carrie
I worked at a company where a customer overheard a joke while walking through the hallway. One programmer said to the other “What’s more stupid than a user?” And the other programmer answered “Two users!” Not exactly the attitude that upper management wanted to show to the customer.
Client communication is a skill you pick up with experience. It takes a lot to learn how to tell them what they don’t want to hear in a way that they want to hear it. It’s not about who is right from a technical standpoint, but how the communication can occur given the constraints the customer operates under. Tough love may not work — it all depends upon the context.
Clients and prospects don’t always want to hear what they should hear. This isn’t logical, but that’s the way it is sometimes. I think those of us that are more of the problem-solving mindset want to dive in and fix things, while some folks just want to feel warm and fuzzy. Of course, I’d argue that there’s nothing more warm and fuzzy than a profitable web site 🙂
By the way, there’s something wrong with the way you’ve got the Sphinn button set up. No votes are showing here.
I think that you should have been allowed to communicate directly with the clients – agencies sometimes miss a trick by not being completely honest with their clients.
Taking your first example – wherein the client rejected your proposed text changes on the homepage of the site. I would have been inclined to open up a dialogue with the client re this. OK, so they didn’t like some of your proposed changes – no problem; but surely a middle-ground could have been found.
If you were allowed to explain what you were trying to do with the text changes, and the reasons why the changes needed to be made, then alongside the client you may have been able to create some text which the client was happy with AND benefited the client in terms of rankings.
Great piece, Todd. I definitely fall at your end of the spectrum, other than using the word “suck” in front of clients 🙂 I am quite blunt about the need to eliminate Flash navigation, weak title tags, etc., and clients seem to appreciate it. Maybe it is the difference between old-school agency and new-?
I have a new client today. 🙂
This client has spoken to me before about SEO, but I have previously lost out to other people he had hired to work on his site, some two and four years ago…
Now, the client has come back to me, because:
– what the other people had delivered in the name of SEO wasn’t good enough. it dodn’t lead to any significant increase in sales.
– More than thirty companies had given the same promises and mentioned the same methods. he tried two for two years each and got no significant results.
– my “tough love” approach was very different to the other 30+ design/SEO companies/agencies the client had previously spoken to.
– I was the only one to highlight problems like: splash page, same title on every page, same meta description on every page, www and non-www duplicate content, poor internal navigation, not enough textual content per page, no use of CSS, all javascript embedded in the HTML page, and so on.
It seems like the others were only interested in bulding links, and stuffing the meta keywords tag. So, 1998-style SEO is still alive in many parts of the world.
Heck, he was paying 50 quid per month for search engine submission services (for the last five years, plus) up until last week! Fek!
With the HTML code completely rewritten, the navigation improved, and a myriad of other changes implemented, I think things will change quite a lot very quickly. Most of the URLs on the site will stay the same, except for a few with spaces in them which will be redirected to new URLs (about 3% of the site is affected by that problem).
Heck, the first job is to get some analytics on the site, as he has no record of visitor numbers or conversions for the last year or more. The previous SEO charged a monthly fee simply to let him see the awstats stats pages on the site. Double fek!