Adventures in Web Application Develompent by Phil Duba: CFUnited

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CFUnited - Changing the Game

Posted On June 21, 2008 10:11 AM By Phil in CFUnited

So I'm a little late in posting these reviews. I'll spread them out over the next few days (you would not believe how many people came up to me and asked why I wasn't posting reviews anymore). Hal Helms and Clark Valberg did a presentation on how to change the game when dealing with clients. This was a really good presentation and focused generally on how to make you stand out from others when obtaining work. My suggestion, as a I put on the review sheets, is to make this presentation into a podcast. I think it would benefit the community as a whole and the conversational style they used fits into a podcast nicely. It started out rather funny with Clark and the "outsourced" Hal and then everyone in the audience essentially revolting and saying "We Want Hal". The overall them was to show value to the customer by focusing on their needs first, being open to them, and including/working with them on processes that benefit both during the development of the application/project. Below are my notes from the presenation:

- Concentrating only on your rates = commoditizing yourself, at least without adding value and/or establishing relationships
- Acquiring a new customer costs 6 times as much as keeping one
- put the best interests of clients first, even if it isn't in your immediate best interests
- message you put out is the types of clients you will attract (ie., if you say you build what is wanted and are cheap, those are the types of clients you will get)
- build a portfolio before going off on own, take on jobs you have no problem referring future clients too
- look deeper when responding to potential clients, keep their interests at heart
- keep up to date on competition across the client's industry to see if there are other ideas that may be applicable to a client's needs or other things the competitors do not have
- get as much information about a client as you can before meeting with them
- remember that to a business person, software is expensive and risky. ideally, you need to develop a process and/or methodology that helps to mitigate the risk
- Great comment from the audience: customers want programs done good, cheap, and quick and that most can only achieve two of the three
- help to define the risk about the project, make the customer realize what could go wrong. it makes you stand out and differentiates yourself from others
- goal is to be not just a commodity developer or coder, but become someone they can rely on that has their interests in heart