Getting to Objectives

  

Image by Mark Vitullo via Flickr

 

Knowing what a client wants to achieve is a basic need for an agency developing digital solutions. Yet, this is very often difficult to achieve in the fast moving world of digital design and development.

It is tough enough sometimes translating a designers web site design into something which a web developer can make work behind the scenes in a web solution.

A client may not be able to give their objectives for several reasons. For instance, they may not want to reveal their budget for what they are asking you to do so that you don’t bill up to their budget for something that might be achieved more cheaply.

Or the client may have a whole string of ideas which they would like to have included in their project which, in fact, is a ‘wish list’ rather than a brief and they are looking for some guidance on how to make it work.

It could be that the client does not know what they want to achieve but they are being forced into a position where they feel they need to catch up because their competition is ahead of it.

In the end, our job as an agency is to understand a clients’ objectives for their project. Of course, we can build their ‘wish list’ but it generally makes for a bad project which takes a long time to build, it may not do what they hoped for, it may cost them a lot of money and time, as well as causing business relationships to break down.

Finding a client’s objectives makes our job so much easier. For example, an agency will need to know how much revenue they would like to generate. Or how many people they want to reach, money they wish to save and so on.

And it takes trust from the client that we will keep their objectives confidential. It is all about trust. Trust takes time to build (as well as a few contracts!). But, objectives are the basis for delivering a good project for a client.

Get beyond wish lists and get to objectives.