Pt1 Filtering With Your Questionnaire

For the Designer Musings

Use Your Questionnaire as a Filter

In order to provide a quote, it is necessary to have information about a project. Clients will have a general idea of what they are looking for but understandably do not know everything that they should provide.

This is where we come in.

Ask the Right Questions

As designers, we must make sure to ask the right questions. Striking the right balance between being concise and thorough is key. You want to ask for everything that will be necessary for you to make the best decision, but don’t overload the client with questions that you should be answering yourself.

Focus your questions on the two most important things you need from the client: content and goals. Stylistic questions such as adjectives that describe the desired look and feel, or preferred colors are important, but are secondary to content and goals. You want to emphasize that these are the two more important things for the client for focus on.

Designers will typically compile a set of standard questions in the form of a design questionnaire. There are two approaches to having your potential clients fill out the questionnaire:

1. Sending the Questionnaire After Initial Contact

This is probably the most common method. The main reason being: you can have a simple contact form that lets people essentially say “Hey, I’m interested in a website,” which puts the ball in your court with the least amount of hassle for the client.

Keep in mind that in using this approach, with the increase in overall inquiries also comes the increase in unserious inquiries. You will have to decide for yourself how much time you have for handling inquiries and investing in converting the unserious ones into serious ones.

2. Presenting the Questionnaire Up Front

Rather than a simple contact form, this strategy integrates the questionnaire into the initial contact process. By consolidating the initial contact and the design questionnaire, you save time and you are also able to attract specific types of potential clients.

It is worth noting that with this approach you will receive less inquiries. It really depends on your point of view as to whether this is a negative thing. Although the number of inquiries will be significantly smaller, the quality of these potential clients is much greater.

The inquiries you do receive will be thorough inquiries from potential clients who have invested time in providing thorough answers the your questions regarding their project.

This has a couple of benefits:

The clients are more likely to enter the relationship with the proper mindset. They approach you with goals and you handle the process and design.
In many cases, you’re now already at the point where you can provide a quote (as long as you asked the right questions and the client provided thorough answers)

Considerations

If your questionnaire is extensive, this could potentially be very overwhelming. Ideally, you want to condense as much of the form as possible by displaying only what is relevent to your inquirer.

You could do this a number of ways. The Bold Perspective Quote Request form has several buttons (Web, Identity, Print, Other) that when clicked insert additional inputs into the form. This way, the user can customize the questionnaire to fit their needs so it is less overwhelming and more targeted.

Budgets

Whether you decide to require that clients fill out the questionnaire up front or not; requiring a budget is a good idea.

The right type of client will always be one that is up front with their budget. Playing close to the chest with their budget as if it were a game is no way to start off a healthy relationship.

Professionals don’t play the “car salesman game” by providing a superfluous price that is intentionally inflated in anticipation of being brought down. For this reason, a client should be trusting in the initial stages of communication by providing an honest budget. Anything less is an insult.

In many cases, clients are hesitant to provide a budget up front because their prior experiences have been one of the “car salesman” persuasion. If this is the case, it’s necessary to explain how professionals conduct themselves and pateintly make it clear why this is a requirement.

The budget indicates what type of investment the client is willing to make in the success of their project. This allows web designers to determine what they will be able to provide.

Conclusion

You are going to need all the information at some point either way. Sending the questionnaire later opens the throttle to let in more inquiries. Requiring it up front wards off less serious clieant. In both cases, it’s best to require a budget with initial contact. No need to beat around the bush as it will have to come out sooner or later.