Your Client Doesn’t Know What They Want...
And That’s Actually Your Superpower
“Something like what we saw at that conference, but a little more us” is a sentence that has launched a thousand vague email threads, and if you’ve been doing this for any length of time you’ve gotten some version of it more times than you can count, and you probably have feelings about it. We know you do.
We get that we're not the ones in the room with your client, but we are the ones making the thing that ends up in their hands, so we see a lot of orders come in and we notice patterns. And one of the patterns we notice is that the orders that turn into real relationships tend to start with exactly this kind of brief, which we find interesting even if we can't fully explain it.
Here’s our take on the idea that we firmly believe in: your client doesn’t actually know what they want. But, that’s great for you.
The vague brief as a good sign
When a client says "I don't really know what I want," they haven't already decided on something and locked you into executing it, which leaves a lot of room to be genuinely helpful in a way that goes beyond sending a quote and crossing your fingers. And a client who feels like you genuinely get them doesn't shop around next time, they just call you. That's the difference between competing on price every quarter and being someone's person, and the vague brief is weirdly one of the better ways to get there.
Three questions worth asking
We know you know your clients better than we do, so this isn’t us telling you how to sell. It’s just what we’ve seen work from our side of the orders.
Who is actually receiving this and, as simple as it sounds, what is it for? A client gift for an event lands completely differently than something going in a new hire kit, and the product should reflect that.
What does this brand actually feel like day to day? Not the website version, the real one. The answer to that question changes everything about what product is going to feel right to them.
What happened the last time they did something like this? Did people use it, did it sit in a drawer, did anyone say anything about it? That context is genuinely gold.
Those questions get you better information and they also signal to your client that someone actually cares about their situation and not just their PO number, which is a thing people remember.
In our humble opinion…
We're going to be upfront here because we're friends: we want you selling our products, so yes, we have opinions about how that goes. But a client who comes in vague and leaves with something they're genuinely proud of is a client who comes back, and probably brings a friend, and that's good for everyone in this cycle.
So to recap, turns out 'I don't know what I want' is just 'I trust you to figure it out' with less confidence, and that's a pretty good place to start.
That’s pretty much all we’ve got. Go get ‘em.
Oh, one more thing. We just launched The Bodega, and it's basically built for exactly the client we've been talking about this whole time, the one who comes back and turns into a quarterly order. Half the lowest listed MOQ, locked pricing for 12 months, no repeat setup fees. More on that soon, but go take a look.