Juggling client comms & meeting notes from 9th October 2024
Posted by Paul Silver
On 9th October, thirteen freelancers in the digital sector met in the Battle of Trafalgar in Brighton to talk freelancing and tech. This is some of what we talked about:
- “PHP bad” – competitiveness in programming languages
- Stopping smoking (congrats!)
- Slim PHP microframework
- Juggling clients and their foibles
- Having enough clients that if one stops you’re fine financially
- Communicating with cuttlefish
- The expensiveness of vets
- Drilling holes in a Tesla
- “It’s hard to talk to people when they’re wrong”
- Epic vs the Google Play Store
- Breaking up Google?
- Is the Cybertruck coming to the UK?
- Home improvements
Highlight: Juggling clients and communication styles
Having multiple clients is a good thing, but it can be hard to juggle communication styles (this came up last week as well.)
If you tend to be a blunt and to the point person, let’s use the word “direct” rather than “rude”, then having some clients who are fine with that and others who prefer a more… wordy response including justifications, mentions of how your weekend went and so on, can be a problem as you have to remember what style people talk in and prefer. While it is not incumbent on you to always fit in with your clients, it does very much help build a long term relationship if you can communicate in a similar way to them. They like short, to the point emails? You do your best to match their style. They prefer much more explanation and rumination in messages, you aim for that. It’s similar with the balance of email or Slack messages vs calls.
I tend towards be long winded, and have needed to place a post-it note on the side of my monitor reminding me to be brief and cut out the detail with one of my clients. They liked the high level view and will ask if they need to know more.
Generally, everyone cuts everyone else in a project some slack when it comes to this, but over time it can be the sort of difference that grates. (I know this because of clients complaining about someone else on a team project.) This can come out in strange, hard to detect ways. Always short and to the point? You don’t find out that people think you’re rude because they’ll hide it from you, but you may be left out of calls or sub-projects because people don’t want to deal with you. Like long emails with lots of explanation and everyone else is a terse communicator? Don’t be surprised if it becomes clear everyone else is not reading to the end of your messages.
For the lengthy, try to at least break your information down in to a bulleted list of points rather than paragraph for each. For the terse, have some examples of common openings you don’t use but others do that you can copy in. There’s a reason recruiters always hope you’re well in the start of their emails.
If you find it hard to adapt your style to what your clients use, over the long term I suggest trying to find clients that match to your style. It will help them become a repeat client, and both sides of the relationship will be happier.