A prospective client has walked away, leaving me with nothing but a one line rebuttal. And in that line, is the single, sorry truth about what clients really want.

To explain the background, the would-be client was a US start-up, who had said at the outset that their budget was limited, and so I had focused on the question of how I might deliver them the results that they needed at the lowest possible cost. It was a pretty straight-forward web-based prototyping project, and depending on how you build your prototype there is a lot of room to work on cost, so I managed to get the price down pretty effectively.

So, having put the thought in to the project, it was a tad galling that their brief rejection was a terse “we feel that your quote is unrealistic” – i.e., too cheap. And for irony, I happen to know that they instead chose to work with an Indian freelancer who (in true Indian freelancer style) had promised to be able to do the whole range of diverse project tasks himself.

Now, I could draw a lot of pointless and questionable conclusions from this.

I could react with sarcasm. So, they’d rather that I’d tried to charge them more and waste their money, would they?

I could get indignant. Clearly it doesn’t occur to some people that a good project director can add value to a project – presumably they think that the project management function can only increase, not reduce, costs – I am offended!

I could bewail the Indian-style habit of grossly over-promising, and I could mock the (entirely human) optimism which leads some people to fall for this.

Or I could tell myself that it was a client I would have regretted taking on, anyway. This is someone who asked for a load of detail which they never read, and insisted on booking a Skype call at 2.30am my time and then couldn’t be bothered to show up for the call. Yes, they might have turned out to be a nightmare.

But all of these reactions miss the wonderful succinctness of the rejection. They feel that my plan was unrealistic.

Now, they know little about the technical tasks that need to be done to complete their prototype. They hadn’t even bothered to read the information I had sent them. But that doesn’t matter. They had, in their heads, before ever speaking with me, a sense of how they thought that things should pan out.

If an Indian freelancer gives them a low quote, they expect that; if a British project manager offers them a similar quote that feels wrong to them – it doesn’t mesh with their expectations; they cannot believe it.

Tom Stoppard is a playwright, not a business guru, but he still wrote one of the truest statements ever about dealing with both prospective clients and project stakeholders.

Audiences know what to expect, and that is all that they are prepared to believe in.

Every stakeholder or would-be client carries the baggage of past experiences, which informs what they expect to see in the future. There is no point telling them that their expectations are wrong. Their experiences are real, and their expectations usually follow logically and intelligently from those. They know, in Tom Stoppard’s phrase, what to expect.

And so if I challenge those expectations, what I’m doing is showing them something which they consider – as in today’s rebuttal, unrealistic. Literally, it conflicts with their concept of reality. They are not, quoting Stoppard again, prepared to believe in it.

Of course, this is a problem. For example, if my job is to deliver a great result for my clients, then what am I supposed to do if the client expects a mediocre result, and won’t believe that better is possible? I do actually have a rule of thumb for dealing with this problem, and my mistake in the last few days has been to forget this. But that’s not the point. The point is that when someone says “we feel that your quote is unrealistic” they are offering a salutary reminder of the fundamental truth of working with clients, as explained by Tom Stoppard.