Why you use experts

I had the meeting with my $68,000 client this morning. He’s obviously rather happy with how everything is going. He’s a client whom I’ve worked with for a few years now and we get on very well. We play golf together, he drags me along to any networking functions he has and he is a very strong advocate for the business.

He thanked us profusely for all the work we had done on the site to make it so successful. But I had to confess. I couldn’t take the credit. The reason the site is so successful isn’t really due to us. He’s the one who should take all the credit. But why, Brendon??

Excellent question!

Well, he’s the guy who identified us as being experts. He’s the person who gave us his brief and then got out of our way to allow us to get on with it. He is the clever one for figuring out who would be best for his web site. He made the right decision in selecting us, sure. He’s the one who should take all the credit.

The point of all this? There is a point here somewhere!

The point is that, as experts, we sometimes underestimate the benefit or value we provide. We often have well developed briefs from clients who, without any Internet expertise, insist that this is how their site will be developed. And it is tricky sometimes to give the client the absolute best solution because, frankly, the client won’t always know as much as we do.

And there is a part of me that thinks, “Okay, to keep the client happy we need to do exactly what he wants.” But you need to find a balance of what works and what meets the clients’ wants.

People choose us for our expertise and the very significant competitive advantage we provide through running our own Internet businesses. We know what works. We know that a site has to look nice, but that it is absolutely critical it loads onto a computer screen within 10 seconds for a person using a 56k modem (lots of people know that, but few ever practice it).

For every 1 second you can remove from the load time, the more sales you will make. Our newest shop takes 4.82 seconds to load!

If you are paying for expertise, let the expert do his or her job. You will get a much better result.

As businesspeople, maybe we need to better communicate our expertise to ensure the client doesn’t take our skills for granted.

Either way, it’s about providing the absolute best solution for our clients. And that’s the bottom line.