Have you been told that clear communication is the key to improving client results, but are still struggling with client expectations? Don’t know why some clients become raving fans and others are never satisfied with your work? 

Discover the secrets to clear  communication, effective decision-making, well-defined scope of work, and goodbye to the frustration of unmet expectations and hello to a thriving partnership with your clients.

By discussing the scope of work, boundaries, and communication preferences, business owners can avoid misunderstandings that could lead to disappointment or negatively impact the client relationship.

I strongly recommend establishing these expectations upfront to ensure that clients and business owners are aligned and understand their respective roles and responsibilities. But, I will also teach you how to assess a prospective client’s decision making style before you begin, insuring a better outcoming and eliminating unpleasant surprises altogether.  

During the episode, I shares my insights on the importance of being explicit about what services will be provided and how these services can help clients achieve their goals. For consultants and coaches, being transparent about the limitations of their expertise is also essential, as it ensures clients have an accurate understanding of the services they provide, the outcomes they can expect, and the level of responsibility consultants hold for their results.

In this episode, you will be able to:

• Enhance your expertise in managing client expectations with strategic communication.
• Uncover compatible decision-making methods, supported by tailored guidance.
• Develop and negotiate unambiguous work scopes to protect clear-cut boundaries.
• Break free from wishful thinking by asking the most important questions upfront.
• Employ screening techniques to attain mutual satisfaction in client partnerships.
• Decide on guarantees, refunds or even terminate a client agreement with certainty 

Want to hear more on the topic of client expectations based on your role? Check out this episode: Ep #135 Business Strategist, Consultant or Coach: Which One Do You Need? https://bit.ly/episode-blog-135

The Boss Up Breakthrough  is my signature coaching framework and I am accepting a limited number of clients to work with me 1:1 this summer on clear, confident and compelling communication skills in your business. 

I’m talking about communicating your value, setting boundaries, raising your prices, dealing with diffficult clients and team members, scope creep and more.  How you show up, stand up and speak up really matter, so let’s stuff your toolbox his summer. The first step is to schedule a free 30-minute consultation right here: https://bit.ly/calendly-free-consultation

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Well, hey there, driven woman entrepreneur. You know, something I think about all the time and many of my clients do as well, is when you are working with other human beings who is actually responsible for their results. Now if you follow me, you are probably a coach, a consultant, a creative, an independent professional, or run a small service-based business and you are going to have clients who get stellar results far above what they expected. And you will have other clients who inexplicably just don't get what they came for. Now, if you're anything like me, and I suspect you are, it feels really shitty when your clients don't get the results they want. So what we are gonna talk about in this solo episode is, why does that happen, when does it happen. Are there ways that we can get more consistently good results and really the bigger issue, whose responsibility is it that our clients get what they came for. Let's get to it right after this.

Okay, listen, it comes as no surprise to you or me that the number of women who have started their own businesses in the last decade, and definitely since the pandemic has absolutely skyrocketed. But what's also true, is the number of digital courses, group coaching programs, memberships, masterminds, and individual coaches, consultants, and business strategists have also increased exponentially. Now, unless this is your very first episode, listening to the Driven Woman Entrepreneur Podcast, and if it is, welcome. You have heard me talk a lot about hiring the right kind of help at the right time for the right reason, and you've probably also, like me, spent a lot of time, money, and energy on courses, programs and services that didn't measure up, they did not deliver the desired result right?

Well, whether you have built your business by consuming free advice, cobbled it together, purchasing low ticket products, or even enrolled in programs that have a price tag right up there at the level of a new luxury car or family vacation, it can be really, really hard to determine what you can actually expect and whether your expectations are even realistic. Especially because some of these sales pages are written so well that even if you're thinking, eh, this is probably too good to be true, you still find yourself hitting the buy now button. Well, let me break down a few of the areas that make this confusing and give you some information about how to make it easier and more reliable to get what you came for. And if you are a coach, consultant, independent, professional, creative, or small service-based business owner, I'm gonna give you some information about how you can be better at what you present to your buying public so that you don't get into the business of disappointing other people who gave you money and didn't get what they expected.

So, one of the ways that we can try to get better at, let's say calibrating expectations are what we call ourselves and what the people we hire call themselves. Now, I did an episode on coaches, consultants, and business strategists who is what, and I will link to that in the show notes. But sometimes, how much direction, how much feedback, how much advice you are expecting or giving can be, at least in part related to your title, but it's also not necessarily enough to make sure that you land on the same page. One of the reasons for this is that coaching is an unregulated industry, and while consulting has been around a little longer, there are a lot of different definitions for this as well. Like nobody really agrees on what a coach is and what a coach isn't, what a strategist is or isn't, what a consultant is or isn't.

There are general categories, but we can get ourselves into trouble when we call ourselves one thing, but the service we deliver looks more like something else. Now, as I said, coaching is unregulated, but many coach programs and coach training programs do try to follow the standards that have been set forth by the International Coach Federation ICF. Now, according to ICF, ICF certified coaches are trained to ask insightful and powerful questions that inspire their clients to make decisions. Coaching therefore, according to the ICF, helps the client to look within themselves for solutions that will work. Now you're either thinking, well, yeah, duh, or wait, what, that's what coaching is. Well, according to ICF and many coaching programs try to align themselves with the standards set forth by ICF. Some clients are gonna love this approach because some clients and some coaches believe that they have the inner knowledge, wisdom, and resources, and when they hire a coach, they really just want that person to ask the right kinds of questions that will bring those inner resources forward.

But not everybody who decides to hire a coach wants that or expects that. You simply have to communicate about it, you cannot just imply it or think, well, I was trained this way. So when I offer my services as a coach and a client who happens to be a coach hires me, we're kind of like singing from the same hymn book, hmm, not necessarily. I think you need to be much more explicit than that because as we know, people call themselves all kinds of different things, but not everybody has the same expectation, and we can think about this in other areas of life as well. For example, do you and everyone you know have the same expectations of the terms boyfriend, girlfriend, partner, significant other, friends with benefits, side piece. I mean, there are so many different understanding shall we say about relationships that unless you've had a conversation and probably a series of conversations, you should never expect that you both think you are in the same kind of relationship.

All right, now here's another way that we can get a little more clarity around this, what are your program promises? What are the program promises that have influenced you to buy, to sign up, to join, to enroll, to recommend? You know, it was very popular for a while to offer income-based promises, and you would see on people's sales pages. It's a little less common now, but a lot of well-known coaches and consultants, business strategists, and other folk took screenshots of alleged sales enrollments. You know, people's bank accounts just blowing up because they followed this particular person's advice and they used that as a form of social proof, but you can also talk about claims to 10x or 2x or 5x. Many people claim specific amounts of money or specific increases in sales, leads, enrollments, and all of these tactics while very, very popular in my opinion, they tend to trigger wishful thinking, what I call magic pill expectations.

Now they're meant to get people off the fence and get them to buy, but both consciously and unconsciously, they do set up expectations that no matter what, those results can be expected. And we all know there is no automagic anything, you have to do the desired actions to get the desired results. So I'm a little wary when I see program promises like that because even though they may sell programs, products, services, eBooks, you know, people will listen to podcasts that have that kind of wording in their title. I think you are going to be on a slippery slope to unmet needs and unfulfilled expectations, and it doesn't take too many people who feel that they were promised something they didn't get to really ruin someone's reputation so, I'm not so positive about those.

So be careful if those are your practices, no matter who they seem to work for and no matter how enthusiastic someone you have paid to coach you recommends these things. I think they are really fraught with problems about creating expectations that we probably can't really fulfill. Now, here's another thing, does anyone ever ask you, can they contact a former or current client of yours, would you even be willing to offer this as an option? Let's say you do kind of high ticket or high-end one-on-one coaching or consulting, would you be willing to let a potential client speak to a happy client of yours, past or present? How would you feel if they asked you? It's a really worthwhile thing to consider because this used to be very common practice before we all started marketing ourselves on the internet and relying on sort of anonymous social proof.

I mean, we have screenshots, we have video, we have audio, but you can't really validate, especially now that AI is blowing up, nobody can really validate that those are real people. So it is something to think about, you know what else you can think about. Do you want to offer a money back guarantee, some people think this is a great idea. Some people think this is a terrible idea. I think it depends who would be attracted to a money back offer, and is that the type of client that I want to attract and what is required of someone in order to activate their money back guarantee. What do they have to do in order to verify that they have taken all the appropriate actions to get the desired result and still didn't get it, such that the money back guarantee would make sense for you to honor. You see, I don't believe in cookie cutter solutions, and I don't believe in blank checks and blind promises.

It always depends, it depends on your values, your financial goals, your ideal customer, your business model, your revenue goals, and what you specifically offer so these are all things that are food for thought and things that I think we need to, as individual business owners consider when we're asking ourselves, who is responsible for client results or who owned the outcome. Now, whether you are a coach, a consultant, a creative, a small boutique, agency owner, an independent professional, you are offering your clients each of these things in some manner, guidance, support, and accountability unless you are doing a completely done for you service. So I find it very, very valuable when I am interviewing potential clients for them to give me feedback on how much do you need of each of these things?

Some people need a lot of guidance and once they feel like they know what their direction is, they're on the right track. They're ready for success, they don't really need a lot of support, nor do they need a lot of accountability. Other people know exactly what to do and why they should do it. But if they don't have a lot of accountability, frequent and regular, they're not going anywhere. And some people mainly need support and the rest are kind of imbalance. So I think each of us varies in terms of how much guidance, how much support, and how much accountability we need. And it also varies based on what the specific goal is, is it a time sensitive project in which case you might need a lot of accountability. Or is it a long-term strategy, let's say for your content or your marketing, you might need a lot more support to keep it going, to keep it sustainable. So I think asking each of our individual leads, preferably before they become clients, how much do they need of each of those things and what are their preferences for how we provide those things.

Some people would feel ridiculously satisfied if you sent them a text or a Voxer message once a month, others would want it once a week, and some would want it every day. Does that work with your business model? Does that work with your bandwidth? Does that work with where you are at the age and stage of life you're in, and the other obligations and responsibilities you have. So all of these things play a role in determining, all right, this is the client, these are the results, here's the timeline. This is their individual need for guidance, support, and accountability can I feel confident that we can achieve their desired result within the parameters of my business model. You know, most of us have both conscious and unconscious expectations about results in everything, and it is often related to our decision making style.

Most people don't even think about what their decision making style is because it's so unconscious and it's how they make most decisions most of the time, and have for a very long time. But you know, I'm a former psychotherapist and so obviously figuring out why people do what they do and why they don't do what they say they want to do, those are just some of the things that have fascinated me about human nature for a really long time. So as a business strategist, I find it immensely helpful and useful to both myself and the client to sort of sus out what is their decision making style, and oftentimes you will see it pretty quickly when you're doing your free consultation or your strategy call, or your discovery call, whatever you may ask them now, you may decide to ask openly about their decision making style. Or you may decide to assess it based on other questions that you ask, but here are a few different decision making styles that I have noticed many people have.

These are some of the most common, and I'm offering them to you so you can think about, oh yeah, I have clients like this, they were a freaking nightmare. Or, oh, I wish I had more clients like this, maybe I should tweak my ideal client profile so I can attract more of them. Are you ready okay, so there's one type of client whose decision making style is what I would call the impatient impulsive. They have a higher tolerance for errors, but the fix has also gotta be quick. Their motto is wrong action is better than no action, and they do tend to be more often then, they just want to get busy taking action as quickly as possible. So if you are the type of coach who likes to do a lot of assessments, who likes to do a lot of self-awareness exercises, these are probably not your ideal clients.

But if you feel like, gosh, I keep attracting clients who just wanna keep processing and learning and processing and learning, I wanna see some fricking deliverables, then you would do well to try to attract a few of these clients and just see how you like working with them. They don't mind making mistakes as long as they're taking action. So you might find that you really enjoy working with these clients because, they're willing to use trial and error to figure out what's gonna work. They don't have a problem understanding AB testing, and they'll say, well, I don't know if it's gonna work or not, let's give it a shot. What can be most helpful in working with people with this kind of decision making style is that you get them into action as quickly as possible because that is how you demonstrate value to them.

So we're looking at making the best decision we can with the available information, treating it as an experiment, framing it as trial and error, and also looking to create the minimum viable product, service, or offer. The next type I wanna talk about is those who will actually choose the most expensive person or program because they see that as a shortcut. I think of these as the money gun people. They probably won't say this to you, but they might be thinking, I'm paying you to figure it out so I don't have to. Now, this is not always the case, that it's a done for you offer. Their idea of throwing money at it is they want you to tell them what you think the best course of action is.

Now, if you like this idea, you would also need to be more comfortable feeling responsible for the client results, because if this is a client who is paying what they consider to be a premium for your leadership, for your experience, for your wisdom, for your expertise, then they are going to expect you to tell them what you think is the right course of action. Now, I don't have a problem with being directive, it was much more of a problem when I was a psychotherapist, but this is not for everybody. There are people who do not want to feel responsible for the client results, and they definitely do not want the client projecting responsibility onto them. So if that's you, you're probably gonna wanna steer clear of the money gun folks, and they will usually expose that way of thinking if you ask. You just have to ask the right kind of questions in the screening process and they'll tell you, yeah, if I'm paying you well, I expect you to figure it out for me.

So if that's for you, rock on with your bad self, if not, defer and send them to someone who likes those kind of folks. Then there are the folks that unfortunately tend to be more female, and they are the ones whose prime directive is make no mistakes. These are the clients who overthink, they tend to need a lot of reassurance and they tend to second guess even after a decision has been made, they don't wanna be wrong. Oftentimes, they were raised by a very critical parent. They might have a lot of problems with anxiety, and these are often really, really smart people and really creative people. And while that might sound like a wonderful thing, I love being smart and creative, to tell you the truth, you can be a little too smart and a little too creative for your own good when you're a business owner. Because your brain is infinitely capable of generating more and more and more options at some point you gotta decide and that can be a lot harder for these folks.

So if you don't have patience, dealing with people who tend to need a lot of processing time, may have some difficulty making decisions, need a lot of reassurance, and even after the decision has been made, they may still second guess it. They might not be the right folks for you and if you are one of these people you are going to want to work with and hire people who are not gonna become impatient with you because you need to process things a little bit longer, then maybe someone else might. If someone's going to make you feel rushed, that's not gonna be comfortable. But if they say, all right, we've been talking about this for the last several weeks, we do need to come to a conclusion.

We do need to make at least a preliminary decision in this area because all the other things we're working on in your business rely on a decision made in this area. Then I think that is realistic and that might actually be really helpful, this tends to be something that I do a lot. I will honor anyone's process, but if we are working together for a set amount of time, and I know all the other decisions we're gonna make in your business, depend on this decision being made at this time, then I'm gonna pull out everything in my toolbox to help you make the best decision that you can at this point, knowing that all decisions can be revised later, but we got to make a decision so we can move forward. And then the last group is the people who are kind of related to group number three, they need to research every single option and leave no stone unturned in order to feel that they have chosen unequivocally the best decision for them.

These are the folks that may have trouble knowing when enough is enough, and they're often really served by having a deadline or a specific amount of time that they can spend on something. I do work with people like this, I like working with smart people, and smart people often need to know what all their options are. Well, here's the thing, in reality, nobody can ever know what all their options are because new options keep coming onto the market like literally every day, or at least every week. So to help this person make decisions, I'll say, I want you to look at, for example, if they are launching a website or a new website, I want you to look at three platforms. Or they wanna decide on a new email service provider, or they wanna decide on anything really. I'm gonna give you three options and I need you to choose one of them knowing that I have already spent considerable time and worked with lots and lots and lots of clients, and I have vetted the three options on that list.

Now, they may very well go on their merry way and say, oh, I spent, you know, 17 hours one night without sleep and I came up with all these other things. Okay, that's fine, but you still need to choose by X date and this can often be a big help to people like this, because I certainly did this. I mean, I spent two years researching options for something and I still didn't take action. So I find if you are a questioner, for example, you need to keep asking questions. At some point you have to say to yourself or to your client, okay, we've asked enough questions and now we need to have an answer. Everything could be changed later knowing that once you make a decision and you start moving and taking action in that direction, you're probably going to continue to take action in that direction unless it was just really a bad fit, which is rarely the case.

So how many times have you been one of these people and again, we usually have a go-to, we usually have a decision-making style, but we'll sometimes deviate from it and we'll have a secondary style. There are some people who use a different decision-making style in different areas of their life or at different times in their life. Oftentimes we will have to change our decision making style because we're in crisis, because we don't have as much time as we would like to exercise our preferred decision making style, but be that as it may, most people need to get better at making decisions, and it's often one of the reasons why they will hire a business coach, a business strategist, or a business consultant because feeling like you can create more predictably good decisions simply saves a ton of time in any kind of business. So what I usually will say is all of us need to get better at making decisions, all of us need to feel more confident about the decisions we make, and when we do feel more confident about the decisions we make, we are willing to be responsible for our results.

We are willing to own our outcomes when people don't feel confident about the decisions they're making. They feel that it's a crapshoot, some of their decisions are good and some of them aren't. Sometimes they will hire someone and get great results. Other times they won't get good results, and they don't even know why. I have found, oftentimes it comes down to how do you make decisions and how do you feel about that being your decision-making style. A lot of people want to avoid critical thinking, and a lot of people want to avoid strategic thinking, and that's why we get into these impulsive choices or overthinking choices or just point the money gun at it choices, or, I'm not gonna make any decision because I don't wanna make a mistake and the only way I can avoid making a mistake is to avoid making a decision.

You know what, none of that feels good and when someone feels backed into a corner and they finally break down and hire help, I strongly recommend that you help them look at their decision making style and preferably you assess and screen their decision making style before you agree to work with them. Because what you really don't want is to feel responsible for the outcome that you were never going to be successful at helping someone create. I don't think anyone intentionally sets up a coach, a strategist or consultant to fail, but we often do. Because there's a mismatch. There's a mismatch between what they said they wanted and what they actually wanted. Or there's a mismatch between what we said we can deliver and what we actually can deliver.

And usually it's because it's a technique or a tactic that we learned from some program that we were in, but it ultimately comes down to this. If you wanna have more control, you want to have more predictable outcomes, and you want to actually feel good about the program promises that you make and the results that you tell your clients you can help them get, these are the things you can do to get better at that one. You need to choose your just right client, not by their demographics, but also by their psychographics, meaning screening how they make decisions, their decision-making style, screening that as part of your discovery call or free consultation process. If you know that you are not suited to people that need a lot of time to process before they can decide, please do not offer to work with them. You're both gonna be miserable and they are not gonna be happy with you, trust me. You also need to choose your business model based on how much responsibility you want to hold for the client outcome.

So for example, if you sell a DIY product, you have a lot less responsibility for the outcome. It's basically, on them, it's a DIY product, and they own the solution, they own the results, they own the outcome, you are just providing the teaching or training. If you do not want to feel responsible, you might want to create courses or workbooks or other types of DIY products. Your business model based on how much responsibility you want to hold for the client outcome could also be you do it for them, then you are a hundred percent responsible given the, you know, screening that you are working with the right clients and you have articulated what you will and won't do, and they have articulated what they do and don't want. And it's a match done with you in my experience, that needs a little bit more finesse when you are communicating expectations around outcomes and to that point, the most important tool in your toolbox is communication.

As with any kind of relationship, being able to thoughtfully, mindfully, carefully articulate what you expect of your client and what they can expect of you, and doing so in the areas of scope of work, access to you in between coaching calls, deadlines, the termination of the agreement. I personally think termination language needs to be included in all client agreements because you have to be able to give yourself a way out if you started working with someone that's not a good fit and I think we need to give them a way out as well. But also when it comes to creative work, you need to articulate how many revisions and under what conditions. I have worked with a lot of clients who have creative service businesses, and they are literally yanking their hair out by the handfuls because they thought they were abundantly clear about expectations for deliverables, and their clients had a completely different idea.

That coupled not having clear expectations articulated and not having a termination clause will really make you hate your business big time and all of these things are relatively easy fixes. I'm gonna tell you a little story, I've had several careers, and in a former life when I was in medical sales for about a year. I was in Beverly Hills and I was selling at that time the most highly regarded malpractice insurance to physicians. Now, turns out I learned very quickly that I hate the insurance industry. Still do, by the way, just about the only industry, not one of a few industries that I think are absolutely evil and completely misleading to people. But, for a minute, I sold malpractice insurance, and one of the things I learned that was really, really fascinating to me is that the doctors who would get sued for malpractice were not usually the ones who did a shoddy job.

The doctors who got sued from malpractice were the ones where there was a misfit, a mismatch, miscommunication between expectations and outcomes. If the family or the patient thought that the doctor did not clearly articulate what they could expect from the treatment, from the procedure, from the surgical intervention, they sued them. The other group of people that they sued were the doctors that they thought didn't care, which again is all about expectations. So if a patient thinks the doctor should care about them and should want them to have a good outcome, and they don't think the doctor did care or did create the outcome that they felt that they gave them reason to expect, they got sued, whether it was real or perceived, and oftentimes it really was the perception.

So I'm really glad that I had that experience because even way back then, it started to inform my thinking about customer experience and expectations. Now bottom line here, there is absolutely no substitute for communication and people expect things in business and in life. And after all, when you are working with human beings in any capacity, they expect things of you and you expect things of them. Now, even if you have long-term engagements, let's say you work with your clients for a year or two or even longer, at some point they're going to have to fly solo. Are you helping them get better at making decisions that they can live with? Are you helping them identify and evaluate their options? Weigh the pros and cons for each one, set up a minimum viable scenario to test the one they decide on, and then assess the results so that they can make longer term decisions based on outcomes.

When I first started working at Children's Hospital Los Angeles years ago, I saw a door in the basement that said Decision Support. Now, I had no idea what that was, but I thought it sounded really cool. I didn't realize it was part of IT, but I thought, what a great title and later, when I became a business strategist, I wanted to refer to myself as decision support. Because while decision support, real decision support, and certainly the decision support that was going on behind that door in the basement of Children's Hospital was part of IT. Fundamentally, it couples the intellectual resources of individuals with the capabilities of the computer so that the quality of decisions made in the organization would be improved, I love that. I mean, wouldn't it be great if there was, here I am with my ideas. Okay, but bear with me, wouldn't it be great if there was like an algorithm that could analyze all of the possible options in your business for whatever decisions you need to make branding, marketing, messaging, pricing, your business model, strategic planning, risk management, like you name it.

Wouldn't it be awesome if there was an algorithm or, or an app that you could just plug in all the options and it would spit out the best possible choice, reducing the risk of failure, and maximizing the likelihood of success and reward like I think some clients actually think that's what they're getting when they hire a coach or consultant. Now they may not say so in so many words, but if they're thinking that you are going to help them make better decisions, both during the engagement and after, I would want to have a conversation about that. I would want that to be an all cards on the table face up kind of conversation because that kind of expectation, if that is not how you work and that is not what you do, that is a setup for failure and probably damage to your reputation because when people don't feel that they got what they came for, they will take to the innerwebs and write you a bad review and that can happen even when they didn't tell you that they were dissatisfied.

So I think we need to ask, and if you like doing that kind of work, by all means say so. I happen to love helping people learn how to make better decisions so that they won't need me to help them make those decisions in the future but that's not everybody's jam. And if you do creative work, you need to define your scope of work and the nature and availability of communication with you before, during, and after the project. Boundaries, the number of revisions, all of that stuff needs to be spelled out because we come to coaching and consulting with all kinds of spoken and unspoken expectations. Our needs, wants, preferences, priorities, but also our beliefs, our biases, and our blind spots, and a whole lot of us, whether we know it or not, indulge in magical thinking. If we really want to have happy clients, get referrals, repeat business, we have to be willing to ask ourselves and our clients, what are they willing to do to achieve their desired outcome and what they expect of us. We need to be willing to negotiate that if it's appropriate, or walk away if it isn't.

Sometimes a irreconcilable differences around client results are a matter of dodging a bullet, and when you ask the right questions ahead of time, you can avoid a really messy, uncomfortable, time consuming and probably painful experience. I have heard about so many horror stories and I think did you ask about X, Y, Z? I think we need to ask more questions before we get into a relationship and not just try to make it work once we're in it. Especially if you are a people pleaser, you have trouble with boundaries. You have difficulty asking to be paid what you are genuinely worth. And you find yourself feeling responsible for client results, even when the client doesn't do their part.