How to stop overservicing (and underwhelming) clients
Making your agency turn a profit requires knowing what you are good at, and what jobs you should send to someone else. Here’s how to know when to say “no.”
It doesn’t matter how clear your proposal was or how beautifully you designed your scope of work. You’re going to get clients who seem to have bought something totally different than what you sold.
Whether they didn’t communicate what they needed well, made assumptions about what you do or asked for things that you don’t have expertise in (yet), the problem of over-servicing comes up with surprising regularity.
You’ll be tempted to just give them what they want.
If there’s a tiny bit of scope creep, or maybe you’re not perfectly up to date on that skill just yet, you can fake it until you make it. Right?
Don’t do it!
When you do, there are two things that can end up happening, whether it’s because you knowingly took on too much, or because you felt obligated once you started working with a new client.
Let’s take a quick look at each of these and how they end up happening.
Overservicing isn’t really helpful.
This is probably the more common mistake, because it comes from a really, really good place. You want to deliver the best possible customer experience, and you want to add so much value that your clients never even dream of working with another firm.
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