You win some and you lose some!
So we lost a pitch. It happens to the best of us. But for the first time we were happy for losing one. There are a few times you go into a pitch towards the closing stage expecting to secure a win, and hoping the client is on the same wavelength as you, and vice [...]
So we lost a pitch. It happens to the best of us. But for the first time we were happy for losing one. There are a few times you go into a pitch towards the closing stage expecting to secure a win, and hoping the client is on the same wavelength as you, and vice versa. God were we wrong! What we thought was a rountine IT meeting to discuss e-commerce, logistics, the nuts and bolts of a project became a nightmare when you meet the CEO and all he says is and I quote (add accent as appropriate)
My site should be like amazon.com. It should be personalised to the user from the word go. It should work on every mobile. I want people to be able to surf my entire site from their mobile phone. Also on our next meeting I want a diagram explaining this so that i can compare apples with apples and not apples with bananas
Is the guy talking about a website or fruit!! I know what you are thinking, it is doable. But you have to remember that amazon.com has had billions poured into it to get to where it is today. And over 8 years. There is something fundamentally wrong with what clients expect from their site. They hear all the buzzwords in the industry and spray them liberally at meetings in the hopes of sounding smart.
So when a client says i want this in 2 months, I don’t want to pay those prices, and I want it to work on every mobile so that the 0.5% of the users surfing his site will be happy, you only have one option. You price yourself out and hope for the best. I know that one agency will not have a merry christmas!
comments
yousef
December 5th, 2005 at 1:17 amI’d just like to chip in a little more about what the specific requirement was for this project. They actually wanted the website to work in :
- 5 different languages (including Arabic, Farsi & Urdu)
- 13 country-specific portals
- 4 different mobile phone platforms (as well as regular browsers)
- with full e-commerc support (credit card and C.O.D.) for all the above platforms and languages.
- with personalized content for over 100 models of mobile phones.
Oh, and they wanted it ready to roll in February!
ameinfo
December 5th, 2005 at 6:12 amUnless his name was Jeff Bezos I would also leave it alone
dotone
December 5th, 2005 at 2:35 pmThat’s what happens when a CEO meets the Design/Creative/IT partner and not a CIO or a Marketing Executive. I hate hearing “My Site”, man how much they repeat it they could at least say “our site” or just “something.com” not forgetting how every business man suddenly becomes an Art Director around the meeting table. Man!
MjK
December 14th, 2005 at 6:44 amI can’t double that…I face the same problems too,Client calls me up and starts giving me a whole lot of GYAN on what he wants,how he wants and whole lot of other stuff on his website…and of course he wants all the latest happenings in the cyber space…”I hope you guys would do SEO as part of the deal and iam sure its not hard…I hope the spiders will work great”now iam sure he has no clues on what he is talking about…and the worst thing is iam sure the website will be developed by next wednesday to start off with…jus work on the 5 pages currently and then comes the itterations by wednesday he would want the entire website to be done
poor us…but i guess thts the way its everywhere