What’s my favourite question
Clients come to me , and they usually need a website, so it should be pretty obvious what they want. But what’s my favourite question, the one I always like to ask my clients?
What are you trying to achieve?
Why is this post accompanied by a picture of car jump leads? Yesterday a very good friend of mine texted me
“Have you got any long jump leads?”
His car is his pride and joy , a british racing green jaguar , but like a lot of us, it hasn’t seen much road-time in the last 12 months. My answer to his question was, “No, I don’t have any long jump leads” and that could have been the end of the conversation, and he would still be in a sticky situation. So I asked him, “what are you trying to achieve?”. What he actually wanted was to pick up his supermarket click and collect, but his car wouldn’t start. The car was parked up against a fence, making it difficult to jumpstart. Now that is a problem I can solve in several ways.
I have short jump leads, but we keep an old caravan battery just for such occasions. And he’s a good friend, so I would be happy to fetch his click and collect for him . Problem all solved.
What on earth has this got to do with websites?
Another good question. Because if you tell me what you are trying to achieve, I can probably offer you solutions you didn’t know existed or hadn’t thought of. Tell me you would like to tell your customers where you ice cream van will be each weekend, not, “I want a calendar” because there are lots of ways to do this, and I will find the best and easiest one for you. Tell me you want to let people reserve space at your shop’s events, not that you want a booking system, and we will discuss all the options and make life easier for you.
So – what do you want to achieve?