I recently had a client of many years leave to have his site hosted and maintained by a marketing firm (why a marketing firm would be hosting websites is a topic for another blog…). Now we hosted his website and gave his company excellent support completing all support requests within the same day for years. He never waited even 24 hours for us to answer and complete requests. You can’t give better support than this. This is why RooSites is the top website management company in the US, Bar NONE.
But this client has the condition (and the title of this blog) that he listens to the last person he speaks to, no matter how poor the advice given. He is open to suggestion, and fast talkers sway him quite easily. So he is ripe to be taken advantage by unscrupulous vendors he meets at various networking events and spammers shooting arrows in the sky looking for the one sucker.
As an example, previously he had an SEO salesman sell him a bill of goods. The advice was so elementary and wouldn’t improve much. You know they type, they run a free report and tell you how they can fix it and make you #1 for everything under the sun. (charging you an arm and a leg and delivering NOTHING substantial) We had done a lot of good for this company, so I wouldn’t fight over some minor tweaks and it was easier just to make the changes (at least in this case they weren’t black hat tricks that would hurt his rankings).
Personally, I figure it is better to do right by people, as in the long run you has much better, longer term relationships with your clientele. We have a 98% retention rate, which says we are correct in this assumption.
Several months ago this client told me about this marketing firm who’s going to do some work for his company. Looking up their work, I didn’t see anything too impressive, and although he lives in a major market this company was not one of the better firms and had a lackluster portfolio at best. But, I figured that if he liked their work, perhaps they could help him as he was not very skilled at writing blogs and coming up with ideas for content.
But, as I said, he listens to the last person he speaks to, so he typically makes bad decisions rather than trusting those companies who were fair to him for many years.
Alas, there is a cure for this condition if you suffer from this affliction.
Next time some fast talking salesman approaches you and proposes a change to your website management:
Taking these 3 simple steps will save you agita down the road and money!! Having a company you can trust with no hidden agenda is worth its weight in gold in today’s world.
I thought of this expression when I received an email recently. It was from a client who I’ve had for several years. They were a bit disillusioned as their web store wasn’t getting any orders recently.
I originally met with them and we came up with a game plan which I felt would give them a very good chance to succeed with their web store.
I told them they needed to do the following:
Well, fast forward years later they never said did anything they said that they would do above. Now, I understand sometimes people busy with other things and don’t have time to spend on their websites. This is why they hire us, but we do need the participation of clients. They need to send us the products to add, blog posts (or at least subjects, we can write posts) and items to post to social media. Now of course we kept up their e-commerce software, all their plug-ins and everything else, we held up our end of the bargain.
I feel bad when a client doesn’t succeed, but it does bother me when people in business don’t even spend a minuscule amount of time. It is the whoa is me mentality. Someone doesn’t want to work hard yet they want to succeed. Let me tell you, this doesn’t work for any business on the planet.
Bottom Line: Hire a good firm to manage your website. Then put the time in and work to see your website succeeds. Treat web tasks as must do’s, not optional.
Nothing Ventured, nothing gained.
