4th Place: The Logo Size

Big vs subtle logo dilemma at FoxyTasks

Yes, it’s trivial. And it occurs thousand times a day all around the world, round the clock.

A marketing expert designs a new website or a flyer. Everything is harmonized, subtle connected and has astonishing look.

Then the customer looks at the design and says: “I like it, but please make the logo much bigger. And put CEO photo beside it!”. The final result looks like a scam site, but the customer paid you, so was right, yeah?

How to handle: Do quick corridor tests. Go out of a conference room and ask a few people in the kitchen which design they prefer. There is no warranty for this solution, it may not always work when you are in a hostile environment inhabited by engineers, bankers or lawyers!

3rd Place: Customer Knows Better

Philo Nordlund, Finish

There is a common scenario that the customer’s coordinator is better than you at your job. Important disclaimer: sometimes this is true. If so, admit it and take the opportunity to learn from the best. For instance, the customer needs to outsource part of the work because of being overloaded.

But usually it is not true at all. The person who orders your service just wants to build an image of an expert, either in front of you or in front of colleagues or boss.

Endless discussions about the important yet noncritical details, unclear overall direction, quotes from important magazines and experts, scholar knowledge. All these are clear indicators that your partner has ambitions to be better than you, although feels insecure or is lazy enough not to take the sole responsibility for doing the real, hard work.

How to handle: It might be a bit witty hint. Generate an (un)necessary work for the customer: a kind of ambitious task to ensure she is busy enough to not disturb you in doing your job. The great tool for that is a huge spreadsheet template full of different cells to fill with numbers, x’es and colors. Just throw this spreadsheet to your customer’s inbox to gain a few weeks of peace and calm. One risk with that approach is that one day you will receive the spreadsheet filled, possibly with significant improvements (additional tabs, cells, filters). And someone, presumably you, will have to at least roughly analyze what was created.

2nd Place: A New Player

Keith Allison, Golf Players

You get a contract and do your best to do your marketing service, working with the coordinator customer assigned to the project. You have a gut feeling that there is a little of hesitance in actions and decisions of your customer’s contact, and that these decisions might not be the best ones, and frankly speaking, not in line with the assumptions you had recommended in the campaign brief. Then, usually near the end, a new person starts coming to the meetings. It might be a boss of your coordinator, or someone from different part of the company. The new player begins to negate the decisions taken months ago, turn inside out basic assumptions of the project and put the project goals in new light.

How to handle: So-called Change Control Process. It is a buzzword beloved by corporations. Please be careful with this tool: it is not the right way to prevent all the changes, as in general changes are good!

Once the new player proposes a change to the original agreement, add it as a new task in a project management app. Add a Change Request label to the task. Remember to estimate the cost for the change and the delay expected by adding this change to the project. Then show the changes list to the new player and ask him to ensure with stakeholders in his company if they are OK with the changes, their cost and schedule slip.

1st Place: It’s Your Fault

Great thing about being an independent marketing agency is that you are away from so-called “office politics”. OK, you are away from office politics until you start working on a B2B project with a big corporation. It is not uncommon to get into a cyclone eye, where forces can be stronger than a small agency can stand. You land between opposite fractions within the corporation. The departments have different goals, or just bosses compete with themselves for the promotion. The project is delayed because of the tension and lack of consensus. Then, near the original deadline, both fractions notice that the success is at risk. It is too late to fix the things, so they start looking for the guilty one. They can’t blame each other, so you are the best candidate to be finger-pointed!