Dealing With Negative Clients And Customers
Yesterday I wrote about how to dispel negativity from your business dealings. It’s a very important skill to develop, because if you get it wrong, then being in business for yourself can be a stressful experience indeed. If you get being in business for yourself correctly though, it’s pretty great.
We want it to be great, which is why you should read yesterday’s article.
I didn’t touch yesterday on dealing with negativity from clients.
In the site articles, we’ve dealt with a lot of client issues before. You can take a read of some of them here:
- Dealing With High Maintenance Clients
- Dealing With DIFFICULT Customers
- When Clients Don’t Respect Your Time
- When Clients Keep Asking For More
But what do you do on the occasion that you get freelance clients that don’t take you for granted, don’t try and get away without paying and value you as a client… in other words, they don’t do anything wrong. They’re just negative?
Let’s find out.
Why Are Clients Sometimes Negative?
Sometimes your customers or clients will be negative. This is true especially if you’re doing particular business to consumer business; you’re solving people’s problems and in a lot of cases, these problems are massively affecting their brains.
Think about selling a simple fitness or health product; most people are happy enough and are looking for “an edge” but then you’ve also got the people who are chronically overweight or underweight, the people with body issues and the people who have some illness who are desperately seeking what they think is their last shot at happiness.
(Side note: These are the stakes you’re playing with. I hate when people try to scam their way to a quick money-grab because you never know when your scammy attitude is going to be the last straw for someone who has a single shred of hope left. Don’t be a dick.)
In short, you can have customers who are perfectly nice to you. They’ll pay and be grateful for your service, but inevitably their problems crowd their perceptions.
To a lesser extent, in business-to-business transactions, there are the hustlers with bad businesses that we talked about yesterday. There are the people struggling to make money. Then there are also the perpetual doomsayers who are gentle enough but always see the glass as half empty.
Here’s how to deal with them.
Their Problem, Your Opportunity
There are two things you should look for when someone is negative. The first of those is the opportunity.
If people keep talking about how expensive everything is, they’re looking to cut costs. That seems simple, but it’s an opportunity people will miss or fluff up. The key thing is not to cut your costs. It’s to provide a simpler, “more economical” solution.
As another example; people might talk about how the gig economy is stealing their jobs. If you work with other freelancers, you’ll have heard a billion variations on this. Upwork is driving the price down, Indian freelancers are flooding the market and the robots are coming to get us all.
An easy solution to offer those people are differentiation strategies… or point them to my excellent guides on navigating the freelance economy of the future. Your choice.
In any case, when people are telling you their problems, you’re getting a tip-off on potential problems to solve later. The keyword in that last sentence is later.
Here’s the second thing you need to look for.
Extract Your Job, Get On With It, Get Out
Dealing with negative folks can be draining. Here’s the ultimate way to avoid letting it get to you though; filter out everything you can.
Let’s say with a huge amount of imagination that you’re a freelance writer. You’re working with a guy who specialises in offshore wealth protection stuff. If you’ve worked with any of those guys, you know it can get negative pretty easily, what with the government trying to steal every penny everyone has and the litigation brigade just waiting to sue you for sneezing.
Anyway, you’re writing a sales page for their offshore banking guide and they frame the research as something that everyone needs to do because of the impending collapse of the dollar – and by the way – are you using encrypted drives for all this work?
All of the above is noise. As always, your job as freelancer is to deliver your project on time and to a high standard.
You don’t have to believe in the same things your clients do. It helps to smile, nod and agree but as long as you get on with the job and do it well, their negative thoughts and beliefs don’t have to affect you.
By concentrating on doing a good job, you limit their negativity, and you also decrease it over all.
“Hey, the world is falling to pieces but you know what? I really wish that guy I hired did a worse job that didn’t solve my problem as well as he said it would!”
Nobody has ever said that. Remember, if you’re in any business then you’re in the problem solving business by default.
The more problems you solve, the better life gets for everyone.
Bonus Points to Finish
Those are the two steps to a plan to deal with negative clients and customers. The rest is empathy and general social skills.
If you want to go a step further, then you can.
If a client has a simple problem that it’ll take you two minutes to solve with no trouble (i.e. you wouldn’t charge for it) then you could just do it.
Again, nobody ever said, “Hey… I wish that guy didn’t take it upon himself to recommend some solution that fixed my problem forever.”
In general, you can’t lose by helping people out, and again, you decrease people’s negativity overall by helping them out with little things.
But to summarise:
- Look for opportunities within the problems
- Extract your job and get on with it, regardless of the negative context
Mix that with general social skills – empathise and help people – and you create a positive base for future interactions.