The other night, I was standing in a long line at an ice cream parlor. I wanted a small vanilla cone – not very imaginative, but this place makes great ice cream, and I knew that I’d love it when I got it.
The same could not be said for the young man in front of me. After making his father read the lengthy list of flavors to him (he was about six years old, and flavors like “Callebaut” were a bit beyond him), he decided that he wanted something called Saffron City. “Daniel, you’re not going to like that,” Dad said. “I do like it,” insisted Daniel, who had almost certainly never tasted anything saffron in his life, let alone saffron-flavored ice cream.
So Dad ordered Saffron City for Daniel and chocolate for himself. The ice cream came. The kid hated the Saffron City. The kid ate the chocolate, and Dad ate the Saffron City.
Sound familiar? Your clients aren’t small children, but sometimes they want things that you know they aren’t going to like. Sometimes they get locked in on something that you know they’re not going to care about down the road. You know that you shouldn’t just go along with everything your client wants – unless, like the father in the ice cream shop, you’re okay with eating the results of their bad decisions. But how do you manage a mystery shopping client so that they can successfully implement their ideas?
Don’t blue-sky in a client meeting
Workshops on better communication tell you that you should ask open-ended questions rather than closed-ended questions: “What do you like to do for fun?” as opposed to “Do you like to play sports?” Open-ended questions are great for establishing rapport on a human level…but if your objective is to come up with a set of client requirements, asking open-ended questions like “What do you need from a mystery shopping program?” is asking for trouble. Here’s why:
- They won’t decide on anything. Parents of toddlers learn quickly not to ask, “What do you want for dinner?” Unless the toddler is really focused on one food that they want all the time, they’re likely to fall headfirst into the bottomless pit of “what” and all the possibilities that it represents. Your clients are intelligent adults, but even intelligent adults can fall into that pit. They’re afraid that if they choose something, they may be missing out on something even better – and so they become paralyzed.
- They’ll ask for things you can’t deliver. Back to the parents: asking, “What do you want for dinner?” implies choice and sets no limits. It’s not the right question to ask if all you have is lasagna and chicken soup. If the kid comes back with, “Grilled cheese!”, then where are you?
Always go in to a client meeting with an idea about where you think they should be going. Present that, and back it up with your experience (“We’ve found that these are the key areas that people in your industry try to measure”). Your clients aren’t mystery shopping experts. Thankfully, most of them are smart enough to know that, and they’re willing to be guided by you.
At the same time, don’t develop your idea too much before you go in – leave room for your client’s ideas, too. Base your proposal on your knowledge of your client: is this a client who always has their own ideas developed, who knows what they want to do and why, or is this a client who wants to be guided and will do better if you give them a more concrete proposal? You want the client to feel that the program reflects their ideas and goals, so use their ideas as inspiration and fill in the details in the areas where they need guidance.
Give them options
Just as you don’t want to present your client with that wide-open “what”, you also don’t want to tell them that they can only have one thing. If your client has only one choice, they’re more likely to reject it; if they have multiple choices, that encourages them to think about the choices and tradeoffs that they’ll have to make. Don’t just offer a choice because you think it’s theoretically possible to implement, though – it’s theoretically possible that a meteor full of platinum will land on your lawn tomorrow, and you’ll never have to work again, but you wouldn’t bet your financial future on it. Make sure that the choices you offer are ones that you can successfully implement, and that will help your client to achieve their goals.
Know your stuff
Understand the parameters of the features you’re selling. Your client will believe whatever you say about your system’s capability, and will expect you to deliver on it. If you tell them that your software can read the minds of their customers, wash windows and make a perfect cup of coffee, that’s just what they’ll expect it to do.
Prune down the wishlist
Imagine a world where clients have it together. Each client has a staff member who gathers and vets requirements before your meeting. They sort requirements into categories: “Must have”, “Important but could live without”, and “Nice to have”. They understand how each requirement contributes to their corporate goals, and they bring all that information to the meeting. This is also the world where unicorns walk along misty forest paths on their way to Candy Mountain. It is not the world that you and I live in.
In this world, clients come to meetings with lengthy and undifferentiated wishlists. It’s virtually guaranteed that you won’t be able to meet all of their “requirements”, so you need to separate out the true requirements from the “nice to haves”. A good way to do this is to state up front what you can’t do, even though it feels scary. If it turns out that your can’t-do items are nice-to-haves for the client, this is an opportunity to take them off the table right away. If, instead, you simply take down every item and say that you’ll investigate, the whole wishlist stays on the table, and the client starts to envision their project based on having every item on the list. The longer it sits, the more they become invested in each item – including ones that really aren’t that important.
So, back to the ice cream…
On that particular night, Daniel’s dad would have been better off if he’d just picked chocolate. The best long-term outcome would be for Daniel to develop an educated palate: willing to try new things, with enough experience and imagination to judge what might be pleasing and what might be a waste of an ice cream cone. As you use the tips in this article to manage your mystery shopping clients, think also about how you can help them develop this sort of judgment about their programs. Every successful program is something you can use to educate your clients and create a foundation for future success.