5 Unlikely Obstacles Hindering SaaS Conversions

Want more conversions?

Well, it’s possible.

However, the first step is realizing that conversions are people. And those individuals desire a remarkable customer experience.

The key is to remove barriers in the sales cycle. This includes cumbersome checkout processes and poor follow-up sales procedures.

Your SaaS team must perform better. It’s one of the best ways to crush the competition.

“Successful sales people, and successful sales teams, exhibit a superior ability to eliminate the common barriers that would otherwise prevent their prospects from making buying decisions,” writes Bob Apollo, managing partner at Inflexion-Point Strategy Partner.

“They take pains to identify how and why their prospects choose to buy, and what they need to do to straighten the path and remove the obstacles that might stand in their way.”

Earn more sales. Solve these five obstacles blocking your SaaS conversions:

1. Too Many Steps to Sign Up

Do you remember that classic Tootsie Roll commercial? The one that challenged kids to answer the question: How many licks does it take to get to the center of a Tootsie Roll Pop?

Kids would literally waste an entire afternoon counting their licks.

Your SaaS team should ask a similar question. How many clicks does it take for a customer to convert?

People don’t enjoy time-consuming tasks. And if they’re ready to buy, prospects don’t want to spend the next 15 minutes clicking through all your useless sales steps.

“Asking your users for a lot of information even before they’ve seen your app could backfire.
Marketers tend to get greedy with information, but the more info you require, the more friction you introduce. If you’re asking for more information up front, make sure to justify each action to eliminate friction,” states Sadhana Balaji, a product marketer at Chargebee.

So, limit the number of steps it takes for a prospect or free trial user to sign up for your service.

According to MarketingSherpa, “by optimizing step one of its sign-up funnel, 1-800-DENTIST lifted conversions by 23% in less than a week.”

Moreover, as you decrease the steps in the process, consider eliminating the multiple add-on features during initial setup.

Studies show that “contrary to economic belief that more choice is better, confronted with too much complexity, we make bad decisions, or stick with what we have already got.”

Thus, overwhelmed prospects may just abandon their sale completely.

Save the customer time and boost your revenue. Remove the 12-step signup process.

2. Treating Every Prospect the Same

People are different. We don’t think the same. We don’t eat the same foods. And the needs of a 20-year-old woman are different from an 80-year-old man.

This concept holds true within your target audience. Prospects are buying your products for different reasons.Some may desire the all-in-one platform, while others love the 24/7 email support.

Use your customers’ differences to your advantage. Start segmenting.

Segmentation helps your team sell specific product benefits to different users.

“If you are looking for segmentation ideas, a great place to start is by asking the sales team about the various roles and buyers they speak to on a regular basis…Use the information you gather from sales to create segmentation strategies that will resonate with your audience,” states Anna Talerico, executive vice president of ion interactive.

The goal of segmentation is to customize the shopping experience. You want prospects to feel like you’re talking directly to them.

Graphic design tool Snappa sends targeted emails to their subscribers based on their position in the sales funnel. Here’s an example of their process flow diagram:

“Marketing leaders must have a single view of the customer that allows them to engage in two-way, personalized conversations across technologies, locations, and physical objects at mass scale,” says Joydeep Bhattacharya, author of Seo Sandwitch Blog.

Don’t get stuck selling everything to everybody. Differentiate your message.

3. Nurturing Like A Used Car Salesman

Research reveals that “65% of B2B marketers have not established lead nurturing campaigns.” Without a clear path, your SaaS team may be causing more harm than good.

Poor lead nurturing results in unethical sales practices, missed deals, and negative brand image. No one wants 10 voicemails in a day from a salesperson.

Rather, strive to educate and build a relationship with your prospective user. That means informing them about your product, not selling.

“It’s about giving the right content to the prospect at the right time, and you can only do this by watching for signs that they’re progressing through the buying cycle. This is done through lead scoring…,” says Sarah Burke, content writer and marketer at Spokal.

Learn where the buyer fits into the sales process. Then, adjust your lead nurturing efforts accordingly.

The image below details the types of content that fit the buying cycle. Top of the funnel prospects may desire video, while the bottom of the funnel consumers may need quotes.

Image Source

Moreover, lead nurturing is built on trust. If buyers don’t trust your brand, it’s time to add some social proof to your sales message.

“Trust badges are also known to increase conversions. Getting a BBB seal can put people at ease knowing that you’ve been vetted by one of these organizations. You’ll also want an SSL certificate to show that your payment gateway is secure and trustworthy,” writes Sid Bharath, an entrepreneur and growth hacker.

Sell with the intention to build relationships.

4. Value is Unclear

Studies indicate that “91% of organizations said they aspire to be among the customer experience leaders in their industry, yet only 37% had started a formal CXM (customer experience management) initiative.”

To jumpstart your CXM program, figure out what value you offer your users. It should be clear and concise.

Aim to make an emotional connection between your product and the consumer’s needs.

Invision’s value proposition is simple. The SaaS offers people the opportunity to design and collaborate efficiently. They want their customers to design with confidence.

Kevin Dewalt, a startup founder, investor, and advisor, suggests offering incentives to portray value. He states:

“Offer additional purchasing incentives to customers who complete Acceleration events to get them to convert early. Examples of purchasing incentives are coupons, annual contracts, or special offers. Or simply tell them to enter a credit card now so they don’t lose service.”

Take control the customer experience. Show the value of your service.

5. Redesign Your Sales Page

Adobe reports that “38% of people will stop engaging with a website if the content/layout is unattractive.”

Customers want eye-catching websites. Your design must grab and hold their attention.

In addition, with loads of information at buyers’ fingertips, it is rare for someone to call a sales department.

So, if customers don’t like what they see, they may just leave. That’s why your sales page must explain your product and address your consumer’s concerns.

“As buyers spend more of their time self-educating before contacting sales…the pricing page of SaaS websites has reached critical importance in the buyers’ journey for enterprise SaaS sales..,” writes Brian Devaney, inbound marketing strategist at New Breed Marketing.

Unbounce’s sales page is an exemplary example. It tells prospects what they will receive and the prices. And the layout is clean with ample white space.

Evaluate your sales page. Is it time to change the copy or the layout?

No More Barriers

Eliminate the roadblocks in your sales cycle. Gain more users by improving the overall experience.

Ditch the multiple steps to sign up. Stop mass selling with one message. And revamp your sales page from the customer’s perspective.

Get rid of the obstacles. Start converting.

About the Author: Shayla Price lives at the intersection of digital marketing, technology and social responsibility. Connect with her on Twitter @shaylaprice.

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Un-Acquire – The Counter-Intuitive Way to Build an Early Customer Base

Churn. Lost deals.

Those are dreaded words at any stage of the company. For a very early stage company, these events are even more impactful. Behavioral economics tells us about ‘loss aversion’ mindset. As founders, we hate to lose deals. We hate to turn down customers. It’s classic ‘loss aversion’ at play. But, just as you launch your product into the market, you need to be cognizant of such biases and be courageous enough to say ‘No’ to certain kinds of customers.

By doing so, you’ll not slow down. Instead, you’ll avoid churn and bring the right customers into your customer development journey.

In your early stage, your customers have a profound impact on the trajectory of your product & your company, because:

• They can impact what gets built
• They have a direct impact on your acquisition channels, the cost of acquisition and hence your precious little runway.
• This one’s more important – Each customer is representation of a potential market segment or a niche.
• If you choose to say ‘No!’, it brings focus. You’ll spend time, money and your product bandwidth to keep the ‘Yes’ customers happy. You’ll avoid ‘spray and pray’.

Now that we’ve established that deliberately flushing out prospects from your funnel is good & even important, let’s see some of the criteria we’ve used for our own company, when picking our first 50 customers.

Your product’s performance should not be affected by factors that aren’t under your control

Let’s say you are building a lead-generation software for tech sales reps. A staffing firm company may be a bad first customer because it’s a business with very little differentiation and would not excite a prospect that much. However well your lead-gen product discovers new prospect opportunities, being an undifferentiated offering, response rates are going to be poor.

You need to have an idea of the kind of customers to whom your product in its “as-is” state is going to give superior results. Only then are they going to engage deeply with your product (which is essential for you to derive insights for your product roadmap) and hopefully become your source of ‘word of mouth’ appreciation.

You should be very familiar with the industry dynamics of your first few customers

Not all prospects are articulate and vocal about their wants and needs. As a product owner, we need to fill in the gaps, instigate with the right questions and deduce insights. All this is possible only if we relate with the problem space or the industry of the prospect.

If you do onboard customers without fully understanding their motivations to use the product, you won’t know why they churned either (or at least you’d incur significant follow-up cost to just find why they churned).

No customer pilot should demand unreasonable amount of your or your team’s time

I will again take an example to drive this point. Let’s say you are building a mobile chat tool that can be integrated into any app for the app owners to provide chat-based support. There will always be a prospect that’d say that they need a web interface as well. Now, don’t rush to launch a web-client just to sign up that customer.

Why? Because you decided to launch it on mobile for a reason. You have a market hypothesis that you are trying to prove. Don’t get distracted and pick another hypothesis until your current hypothesis has proven there is not a market for it.

But then you might ask why turn down a customer if it’s just a bit of additional work. Well, in the early stages of our companies we are severely short of time, money and other resources. If one customer draws up significant amounts of your engineering, product management and quality assurance time, something else gives. Most often, it affects your original customer development journey.

Alignment beyond the current product version

Early stage customer acquisition costs are high, because the founders are involved and it’s often one-to-one selling. So it’s important that such customers don’t just hire your product today but also for several quarters to come. Your product roadmap and their expectations have to be in sync for a long time. One way you could be sure of this is by doing a customer interview to understand the reasons they’d buy your product. If your current product is a subset of the needs of your customer, you’re in the right direction. One framework we’ve used to do the customer interview is the ‘Jobs to be done’ framework. It takes another blog post to write about it. So I’d leave it to you to read up on JTBD.

If your product is a quick fix to a bigger problem for which they need more sophisticated solutions that you don’t intend to offer, your customer is going to churn out. You are better off not selling to them in the first place.

No ‘Pay It Forward’ customers. Only honest & real customers

We all have friends who can write checks just to see us succeed. Take their money but don’t make them your customers. They never had the need for your product. They aren’t going to give you insights. They are going to churn at some point. It’s better to avoid ‘nice’ prospects that are just ‘paying it forward’ or ‘returning you a favor’. If you don’t, you’d end up being that blind man whom was led by another blind man.

At the early stage you need customers that give feedback. I can’t stress the importance of getting your product hooked up with a good analytics suite from day one – start with Google Tag Manager or Kissmetrics or one such tool. But don’t postpone. Observe which customers complete what actions. Bucket the core actions of your product and find out what percentage of customers complete it. Later on you may expand such analysis to cohorts.

Before you reason out a pattern, pick up the phone and talk to customers. It doesn’t need to be a structured interview but one that will give you a good grasp of why users do what they do. Here’s a good list of customer development resources. And before picking up the phone be sure to first read this post from Chuck Liu which covers which questions to ask in customer interviews.

Remember that just adding users isn’t your goal in the early stage – The goal is to add the right kind of customers that complete core actions of your product (for them to stick around for long), give earnest feedback and are representative of a large segment.

Templates for a future customer base

You are not acquiring your first few customers to become profitable. You are acquiring them to demonstrate or experiment with ‘Product-Market Fit’. So each prospect that you convert should be buying and using your product for reasons that are common to the next cohort of customers as well. Your first few customers, as a cohort, should collectively represent your market.

Please note that I use the word ‘buying’ as some investment that’s non-trivial that shows serious intent. It could be giving their credit card information or email or even buying a few credits – whatever that fits your business. The goal isn’t revenue or price discovery – so for the early customers, move them to the path of using the product as soon as possible, even if it means removing all but bare minimum friction that validates seriousness.

It’s hard to predict this, but let me give an example. If you building a mobile video startup that’s like Periscope and users have to upload short videos and put up on Twitter (core actions), your good first users are the ones that have a lot of highly engaged followers on Twitter. The bad users are ones that just have passive followers or no followers on Twitter.

If you know that the customer is not a representative sample of a large monetizable (or servable) market, you would be wise to avoid them.

Conclusion

In summary, be very judicious about picking your first few customers.

• Take your product to those customers that have a very high chance of success when they use your product.
• Choose those customers whose industries or problem spaces you know very well.
• Avoid customers for whom you’ve to put a lot of additional resources to make the pilot work.
• Pick customers who’d have a need for your future product, not just the current version.
• Choose those customers who are representatives of large enough segments that you can go after.
• And finally, don’t do your first few deals with friends who are doing it just to make you happy.

If you follow these principles, your customer base would be completing the core actions in your product at a rate that’s healthy. You’d have better insights and better demonstration of stickiness with your early stage investors and you’d have set the right base for acquiring new customers. The return on your learning will be high.

About the Author: Ashwin Ramasamy is the founder of PipeCandy – an intelligent prospecting tool auto-discovers new prospects & helps you reach out to them with the right message at the right time. PipeCandy is currently in private beta & the essay above is based on our experience with onboarding customers.

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Photoshop unveils Content-Aware Cropping

Adobe is introducing a new feature for Photoshop that designers using this software should find useful. That’s because the new feature addresses an old problem that many users have come across, but could never before deal with this easily.

According to a recent blog post by Adobe, they will be introducing the new Content-Aware Crop tool. One of the most common types of feedback for the company has been the request to apply its Content-Aware technology to cropping; users will be pleased to know that they won’t have to wait too much longer.

The Content-Aware Crop tool is smart technology. It takes into consideration all of the pixels around your image’s edges and fills in the blank space automatically with content, as you either rotate or expand said image.

Even though this tool is still being fine-tuned, Adobe has unveiled all the different ways that designers will be able to use it:

• you can move the horizon either by adding more ground or sky;
• you can fill in your corners as you rotate an image, so you’re able to keep all of the pixels that you have;
• you can alter the aspect ratio by adding content around your image’s edges.

Since this new tool is still in the works, there are likely to be additional applications that designers will discover as they play around. For example you can also utilize the new cropping feature to expand your canvas. This can be very useful if you take a picture with the subject too tightly framed.

This is another case of the company listening to its vast audience of designers and creatives and implementing feedback to improve the use of the software.

Until now, designers had to contend with simply cropping the image in order to cut out the borders entirely. Or they could try and make do with Photoshop’s Content-Aware tool, which didn’t provide anywhere near the convenience and efficiency of the new cropping feature.

Cropping and aligning images are fairly routine tasks in Photoshop, so it makes sense to finally have a feature that addresses this.

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How to Create a Winning A/B Testing Strategy

Sometimes, despite your best efforts, your A/B testing just doesn’t seem to work. You run test after test and nothing seems to improve your conversion rate in a meaningful way.

Or, worse, your new pages actually decrease your conversion rate.

In your search for A/B testing success, you’ve read countless case studies and incorporated their findings into your variants…and still, nothing.

Maybe you’ve had a few token successes, but those either didn’t reach statistical significance or simply didn’t improve your conversion rate enough to make a real difference to your company.

What are you doing wrong?

The good news is, you’re not the only one with this problem. If you’ve tried A/B testing, you’ve almost certainly had that moment when you look at your results and think, why isn’t this working?

It’s a frustrating situation, but the fact of the matter is that the majority of A/B tests don’t improve conversion rates. If you’re looking for a big win with every test, you’re guaranteed to be disappointed.

Instead, the key to successful A/B testing is strategy.

Strategize Your Way to Success

Recently, we improved a client’s conversion rate by 22%.

Seeing results like that, your first impulse might be to say, “Wow, that’s an awesome case study! What did you do to get those kinds of results?”

The answer to that question is actually fairly simple: we got rid of the testimonials.

Exciting, right? The moral of the story is, testimonials kill conversion rates!

Except…that’s not really the moral of the story.

In fact, testimonials often improve conversion rates. To be honest, when we started working with this client, I never would have guessed that their testimonials were hurting their conversion rate.

So, if we thought this client’s testimonials were helping their conversion rate, why did we decide to test a page without testimonials?

Well, we didn’t pull this idea out of thin air. As you can see below, we tested a lot of other hypotheses first.

Although not every test improved the client’s conversion rate, every test taught us something about our audience and what they were looking for in a landing page.

Building an Effective Testing Strategy

The secret to successful A/B testing is creating a great testing strategy—one that teaches you something with every test. This takes planning and documentation, but it saves time and significantly increases the effectiveness of your tests.

Essentially, an effective A/B testing strategy has 4 parts:

1. Buyer Persona

Before you even build your landing page, you should create a detailed buyer persona.

Basically, your buyer persona is your testing blueprint. It gives you the information you need to come up with testing hypotheses and a framework for understanding your results.

At a minimum, you should know the following about your audience:

• How old are they?
• Are they mostly male or female? Or evenly split across both?
• What are their responsibilities?
• What is their budget?
• What are their goals?
• Why are they interested in your product or service?
• What is their pain point?
• How does your product or offer fix their problem?

To get at this information, it’s often a good idea to talk to your sales team or even interview some of your current customers. It’s a bit of extra upfront effort, but it can cut a lot of time off of your testing learning curve.

In the case of this client, we knew a lot about their audience. In general, we were targeting middle-aged men and women with money to invest. They knew they needed to be smart with their money, but they also knew they needed someone to help them through the process.

2. Define Your Goals

To test effectively, you need to understand what you’re really trying to accomplish with your test.

After all, if you don’t understand what you are trying to achieve with your test, it will be very difficult to create variants that produce meaningful results.

Consider the following:

• What is your overall goal? (if you answered, “To increase sales,” give yourself a gold star).
• What does your ideal customer look like?
• How does a visitor become a customer? (what steps are involved?)
• How will your test help you to achieve your overall goal? (increase form submissions? purchases? email signups? phone calls?).
• Are you trying to increase conversion volume or conversion quality?

If you want your page to be successful, you need to understand what your company needs to succeed and be able to track the metrics that matter most. Otherwise, you’ll never know if your test was a success!

For this particular client, the overall goal was—of course—sales, but we were testing this page to try and drive more qualified leads for their sales team. Since the client had a lot of different options, our page also needed to identify which option the leads were interested in.

3. Create Your Hypotheses

Based on your understanding of your audience (ie, your buyer persona) and your business objectives, it’s time to start coming up with testing hypotheses.

The primary goal here is to identify the points of friction between what your buyer persona wants and what your business wants and come up with ways to reduce that friction.

Here are some potential reasons why your audience might not be converting:

• The offer is wrong. Your audience is looking for something specific and you aren’t giving it to them.
• The next step is unclear. Your call-to-action may be hard to find, ambiguous or uninteresting.
• You have a copy-offer mismatch. If your audience is looking for a simple solution and ends up on a complex page, that will create friction and confusion. On the other hand, if your offer is complicated and you don’t address an important point, that can create unnecessary doubt.
• You aren’t evoking the right emotion. A funeral services page filled with images of laughing people at a party probably doesn’t match the audience’s emotion. If you don’t stir the right emotion in your audience, they won’t feel like you are a good fit for their need.
• Your content is confusing. Poorly written, hard-to-read content or awkwardly designed pages can make your page too difficult to bother with.
• Your page doesn’t seem trustworthy. People are very wary of marketing, so over the top claims, poor design, lack of social signals or trust seals can seriously damage your conversion rate.
• You have the wrong traffic. Even the most effective site won’t convert uninterested traffic. This isn’t exactly a CRO problem, but improving your traffic quality will dramatically improve the effectiveness of your A/B tests.

Understanding your potential friction points can help you set up an effective testing strategy. By testing variations that address your friction points in different ways, you can figure out exactly what works for your audience.

4. Document and Learn

The last step is to actually run your tests, document your results and then use what you learned to create new hypotheses and tests.

Your documentation can be as simple or as complex as you want, but it is critical to document what you were testing and what your results taught you.

Here is a simple example of how you might document a CTA test series:

If you don’t document and learn, you might as well not use A/B testing. However, if you are documenting your results, you can greatly improve your conversion rate.

For example, while working with this client, we progressively discovered that our audience responded best when they felt like they were in the driver’s seat. The less we sold ourselves, the more effective our page was.

Ultimately, this led us to use a simple CTA that invited our audience to identify what they were looking for before we asked for any personal information.

In addition, we discovered that our users wanted a simple and straightforward experience. So, we spoke to that in our headline and body copy.

But, we didn’t see our best results until we applied all that knowledge to our overall page design.

In an effort to create as focused of an experience as possible, we got rid of the testimonials and created a streamlined landing page that focused on how we could help our potential clients succeed.

As a result, the new page outperformed every previous variant. But, at this point, that was hardly a surprise.

We knew our audience and we knew what they were looking for in a page. And, as we discovered increasingly better ways to meet their needs…our conversion rate improved.

Conclusion

Most successful landing page A/B tests aren’t lucky one offs—they are the result of a great, methodical testing strategy.

It might take a few tests to yield the kind of results you’re looking for, but with the right testing strategy in place, you’ll get there eventually.

You’ve heard my two cents, now I want to hear yours. What sort of results have you seen with your testing efforts. Has a strategic approach helped you improve your conversion rate?

About the Author: Jacob Baadsgaard is the CEO and fearless leader of Disruptive Advertising, an online marketing agency dedicated to using PPC advertising and website optimization to drive sales. His face is as big as his heart and he loves to help businesses achieve their online potential. Connect with him on LinkedIn or Twitter.

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Finding the right design solution for your client

Have you ever been caught in a revision loop? Where you’re stuck in an endless cycle of revisions, edits and corrections? If you’ve gone through this, you know it’s a disaster.

A client, your boss—someone wants you to make a few revisions. You make them, then they come back with more revisions. You fix those, but they’re back again with more.

This cycle repeats itself over and over and over again. Best case scenario, it’s plain frustrating. Worst case scenario, it’s a never ending nightmare, where the client ends up frustrated and angry.

Some designers feel it’s inevitable. They want to keep their clients happy and they know clients typically want revisions, so they feel pressured to offer “unlimited revisions.” If you’re able to create a design your client is happy with, the first time, it can work.

But what if you can’t? Is there a way to keep clients happy while dramatically reducing revision requests?

As it turns out, there is…

The process I’m about to share is one we’ve used to reduce revision requests by 96 percent, year after year in our own business. We used this process to turn over projects quickly and more importantly, make our clients very, very happy.

But before we talk the perfect design or making clients happy, we need to talk about revisions.

Why clients ask for revisions

When it comes to decision making, personality definitely plays a big role. But there are two important factors that play an even bigger role. Optimizing your process around these two factors can create a dramatic increase in client happiness and a reduction in the amount of revisions you receive. 

So what are they?

1. Temperament—your client’s nature, disposition or behavioral habits;
2. values—this is more about their worldview and (much) less about morality or ethics.

Let’s look at temperament first. When it comes to temperament there are lots of different rating systems. I’ll keep things simple and focus on four temperaments, as it relates to what you do.

There are 4 basic temperaments

Controling temperament:

• are natural born leaders;
• preoccupied with being in charge;
• a love for challenges and problems, they gain energy from conflict;
• often feels threatened by questions;
• want it now, get to the point, give me the bottom line.

When you’re working with these clients, it often feels like they’re bulldozing their way over you. They don’t ask, they demand. These clients are more likely to assume they’re smarter or more capable than you.

Fun temperament:

• they just want to enjoy themselves;
• will ignore details and fine print;
• love the spotlight but avoid confrontation;
• struggle with respecting boundaries;
• they want choices and options, but loathe limits.

Fun clients struggle to think things through. They start a project full of energy but struggle to finish. They’re easily distracted,  struggle to anticipate events and rarely weigh the consequences of their actions. 

Perfectionist temperament:

• keep their emotions close to their chest;
• singularly focused on making it perfect or getting it right;
• they’re careful, methodical and deep thinkers;
• they’re logical, often using facts, statistics, data to convince others;
• they have very high standards, love rules and crave consistency.

Did I mention perfect clients have very high standards? They’re only satisfied when things are perfect to them. They’re obsessed about how their project should be done. They’ll lose sleep over that single item that’s out of place. Try to rush things along and they move even slower.

Peaceful temperament:

• are loyal—once you’re in, you’re in;
• are relationship experts, they’re loving, kind and compassionate;
• they don’t like change;
• they will avoid confrontation at all costs, regardless of the medium;
• struggle with indecisiveness and procrastination.

While peaceful clients are great at relationships, they struggle with decision making and changes. It can be difficult to get a response from them; they’re more likely to agree with you to avoid conflict, even if your decisions is not what they want. Often times they’ll hold things in until they explode.

Then there’s our value systems

Eduard Spranger, a German philosopher and psychologist identified the six value systems that determine how we view the world.

Theoreticals are people who have an intense desire to search for, absorb and share knowledge:

• driven to learn;
• love to teach and share knowledge;
• lifelong learners, viewing the world as one big classroom.

Utilitarians are focused only on the bottom line. They want a return on any investment made, whether it’s their time, money, resources or relationships:

• singularly focused on the return, “what’s in it for me?”;
• every decision is analyzed through the lens of “what’s the payoff?”;
• obsessed with measuring success.

Aesthetics are focused on beauty, form and harmony. They view the world through the lens of beauty and presentation:

• interested in and focused on beauty, regardless of the medium;
• their definition of beauty tends to be highly subjective;
• how it looks, how it’s presented, is their first priority.

Socials love people and thrive on relationships. They choose to invest their time, money and resources in helping and serving others. They focus their attention on relationships, helping others achieve their potential:

• focused on how every choice or decision affects others;
• they’re “other” focused, with little to no focus on themselves;
• driven to “do good” for others.

Individualists crave and pursue power. They have a strong need for significance, choosing to use their position to influence and guide others:

• spend their time on activities that feed their ego and desire for significance;
• want the credit for anything noteworthy; crave awards, recognition and status;
• they’re driven to achieve and are often perceived as arrogant.

Traditionalists crave unity and utopia. Their hope for the ideal pushes them to pursue tradition, spirituality and systems for living:

• believe objective rules and standards must be followed without question;
• focused on “the right way” and “the wrong way” of doing things;
• want what they perceive to be the best for others but may come off as harsh and judgmental.

Clients aren’t happy until things fit with their temperament and value systems. You could give your clients exactly what they’ve asked for, but if it clashes with their beliefs, temperament or value system they’re more likely to reject your work.

Get it right and clients feel you “get them.” All of a sudden you’ve gone from just another designer or developer to a trustworthy adviser they’ll fight to keep. When this happens their trust in you skyrockets as revision requests fade away.

We’ve seen how temperament and values affect client happiness. How do we use that to create designs they’re happy with each and every time?

Step 1: Ask the right questions

High quality clients love thoughtful questions. As it turns out, these clients are also the ones who spend lots of money on repeat projects. So what kind of questions do you ask?

• Desires: most of the time, clients have a deeper reason or desire for the things they want; they want to expand their business, more time with family, freedom, launch a new product line, etc.
• Goals: what do they have to do to achieve their desires? Double sales by 23 percent, hire 10 new employees? Increase web traffic by 117 percent in 6 months? Whatever it is, it’s specific.
• Fears and Frustrations: are they afraid customers will hate the design they’ve paid you for? That their offer will fall flat? That the site won’t perform well?
• Vision: what does the end product look like? How do they see it working? What do customers think and feel about it? What do they see?
• Outcome: how does their new design perform? Do they overcome the fears and failures of the past? How is this change received?

If they’re okay with it, it’s a great idea to record or write down their answers. A recording gives you the word choices, verbal cues, emotion, temperament and value systems behind their answers. It’s something you can refer back to and it’s something you can use to hold them accountable.

Step 2: Compartmentalize decision points

“Control” clients want you to get to the point. “Perfectionist” clients freeze under pressure. “Peaceful” clients struggle with indecisiveness. How do you deal with these challenges?

You compartmentalize. Ask clients to approve/work on the tiny decisions.

First the standard stuff:

1. create a top 10 list of features (e.g. must haves for launch);
2. credentials and access info;
3. sitemaps, wireframes, etc.

Next, the moderately challenging stuff:

We ask clients to choose between two or three mood boards; each one is designed around their answers to our questions as well as the temperament and values criteria we’ve just discussed. It’s the key point most designers miss.

Compartmentalization gets the micro-commitments you need to move the project forward.

Step 3: Combine decision points to create the “perfect” design

The right design blends everything from steps one and two together in one cohesive look. And that’s the catch, the perfect design should be filtered through their temperament and values.

 

Can you spot the temperaments and values in the design?

Utilitarian + Perfect

Utilitarian + Control

Aesthetic + Perfect

Theoretical + Perfect

Individualistic + Control

These designs convey professionalism, but there’s more being communicated. Can you see how the temperaments and values, intangible details, shine through? These are the skills top tier clients want.

Skill is the starting point, knowledge is mandatory, but wisdom makes you invaluable.

Step 4: Use the right temperaments and values to share the design

This is the part where things get off track. You’ve created the perfect design. You’re excited, the client is excited. They’re ready for the big reveal.

You share it with them, and they’re unhappy: “I mean, it’s ‘nice’ it’s just that something’s missing.”

What. Just. Happened?

When we share anything with clients we speak their language. We use their dominant temperaments and values as the filter for anything we share.

Have a Utilitarian client with control tendencies? We run everything through the “return on investment” filter. We stick to the facts, and avoid gushing about the new design we’re proud of.

Aesthetic client with perfect tendencies? We frame everything using the language of beauty, form and harmony. We introduce designs using lofty and high level concepts.

Theoretical clients with social tendencies? We teach them about the design, explaining how it’ll bring them closer to their clients and improve morale.

Doing this gives your clients closure. Presenting your work this way ties up loose ends. If there are any unanswered questions they’re flushed out. This is the part where clients feel gratitude. They feel understood and at peace. They’re ready for the next step and they’re ready for you to lead.

What if they ask for revisions anyway?

It doesn’t mean you’ve failed, it just means you’ve missed something. It could be a loophole, a missed question or a tiny detail. You’ll need to find and fix the problem.

What if my client just wants control? Give it to them, with controlled decisions. Do you want A or B, this or that? When they push for something you don’t offer, maintain a strong front: “I’m so sorry I’m not able to do that.”

If they’re still hammering you for control, tax them. Make it painful (financially) for them to get what they want. This financial motivation is great for the “let’s just see what these 15 additional versions would look like” clients.

What if you don’t speak “client”? If you’ve asked the right questions you have your translator. Go back over their answers to find what you’re looking for (e.g. values, temperament, goals, etc.).

Unhappy clients create revision loops

You won’t be sucked into an endless cycle of revisions, edits and corrections if you speak their language. 

Ask the right questions and your client will tell you who they are. Take the time to listen and they’ll give you everything you need to create amazing work on demand.

Do that and your portfolio will be filled with happy clients who see that you understand them. Continue to serve them and repeat clients become the norm. You’ll avoid revision loops and the never ending nightmare of unhappy clients.

Client happiness guaranteed.

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