What does a bad client look like?

High demands, missing when it's time to pay the invoice, some might even come up with excuses as to why they deserve more than what was initially agreed upon.

For years, as a service provider, we have learnt to place red flags for those bad clients. Some friends would tell me "not to miss any golden opportunity" but the trust of the matter is, knowing what to avoid, stay away, would help us save both time and money.

Also, we have learnt to stop doing free proposals to clients that ask for "what is your rate-card looks like". Well, we definitely have a basic ala-carte price but if we do not examine about your product or your brand in order to provide the suitable solutions to you, whatever rates you receive is just expensive to your marketing budget. We are here to create value (and yes, to earn money from client, but rest assure if client is to shop around using our proposals? thank you!)

NOTE: Placing red flags to those clients that do not make an effort to forge a relationship with you. They are likely to demand you for some extra effort then scoop your ideas to shop around with other service providers. As a digital marketer, we understand well enough that there isn't any the BESTEST plan for your start up if we do not know about your projected marketing plan; Worse, some clients came to us and demand us to run through other competitors proposal and asked us if we could do better than this result, whereas the clients are not even clear with their own SWOT analysis.

• General and the simplest question we will ask: "Who is your target audience?" and if you client answer this: "this product is for all market, all age group, every ethnic and race." You can kindly ignore the client for good. Because they are not ready to launch their product. I have once a CMO told me this such answer and that company didn't last for 6 months.

During this pandemic where the economic is taking their own sweet time to warm up, we do not mind to have more free pitching as a training ground to my other new staffs, or in fact, to keep them occupied so that they have a sense of direction-in-life. However, some clients would just approached us blinkly and said "hi, I would like to know more about Tiktok and Xiaohongshu. However my company is start up and we do not have an internal marketing team, as a boss, I do not have all these platforms, I do not play all these young-yet-childish platforms so I do not know much about them, could you please share us about your proposal for a start up? Or, rather share me your suggestion on what is best for company like us to onboard to your service."

Ladies and gentlemen, did you see the pain-points here?

1. The boss mentioned the company is a start-up; means they are not going to fork out marketing budget. (to clarify here, the word start-up in Malaysia means small business from their family siblings; not the Start-up like Grab or any Fintech company...sadly)
2. No internal marketing team; means the boss is not going to learn about what is the importance of brand awareness, what is traffic engagement. And all he wants is to answer his own questions of "We heard Tiktok has good number of fans and how much conversion of sales would I be getting if I go onboard with your campaign?"
3. Boss is not interested to know about the latest digital marketing trend. This is the huge point. We always encourage our clients to know and be hands-on with those digital media platforms, why? so that you gauge the feeling whether your brand/product is suitable on this platform. You need to know what your competitors are working on, what your target audience would like to see, and why this platform is interactive enough that your target audience is talking about it. If you yourself is not making an effort to learn and to explore; Dude, forget about it and do not burn a hole in your wallet.

Furthermore, sometimes there might be a good reason for clients to express their pass experience with other service providers, but more often than not, voicing only the negative impressions means the client is likely going to be difficult to satisfy. Clients leaving negative reviews vs a service provider sign less one client up, we shall opt for the latter. Harming the company's reputation in the long run? Nah. Whilst we understand that onboarding process is a timely progress, clients need to come to an understanding that as a service provider we are here to assist; We might not need to agree with client in every situation (I always encourage my colleagues to say "no" if there is any problem persists. Without a mutual understanding of one another and the way and style of running service/business, both parties will suffer. End things in good terms perhaps, just explain that the service we offer might not be the best fit for what clients need right now. Good bye and let's have a drink next time!

And yes, clients are always shopping around, and it is not wrong. However if client himself has no idea with their own plans and projection, things will not work. Irregardless the service provider gives you the lowest rate possible or even to provide free services; it is all about creating value. At the end of the day it is not about how much you have spent in marketing cost, but about how much value your brand/product has created the impression & traffic to catch more target audience's attention towards you.