Setting customer expectations

Posted on 23. Jan, 2010 by Craig Killick in Marketing & Sales

Nine times out of ten, it’s not whether what you deliver is any actually any good or not, it’s whether it’s in line with any expectation your customer had.

It’s the same for any business – B2B or retail. Take shops like Wilkinsons and Primark – no pretensions (like BHS I’d suggest) allowing them to make great progress on the high street – we all know what kind of shops they are.

One thing I find though, time and time again, is that in B2B it’s hard to pitch the expectation right, especially with the loose canon of social media and opinions of people with a commercial motivation. Your clients already (think they) know how what you do works… “it’s just a simple case of… right?”

SEO (search engine optimisation) is a good example. Clients want “to be number one in Google” (whatever that means) and they don’t want to pay too much because their understanding is that it’s easy…. “it’s just a simple case of keywords right?”

That’s the point where I can now suggest they go off and do it themselves. And, most (if not all) of them fail. Boo hoo.

Ultimately though, it’s not their problem. We need to make money and we need customers to make that happen. That starts with sales and marketing -  we need pitch our offering realistically, setting appropriate expectations so that our customers become so much more willing to accept success for what it should be.

Last thought. If you are one of those people who keep getting shitty clients time and time again. Perhaps it’s not something they are doing wrong…