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How do you guys deal with your deliverables not getting implemented?
Looking back at some 6 months of work, my clients maybe got 25% of what I sent over to them actually implemented. Some are as simple as copy and pasting title tags or uploading a sitemap. I don’t overwhelm them with things they have to figure out on their own either.
Every 3 months I’ll do deeper dive and make a 1 pager and prioritize projects/implementation from easiest to hardest and send them an update. Still nothing.
Things get stuck in a dev queue behind other projects, or they have a developer who implements half of the project (many times I find errors in QA-ing), and forgets about the rest, or they use overseas people who maybe don’t understand the complexities of what needs to happen or just are not very good.
Amazingly, the clients are happy b/c I’m organized, a good communicator, and I’ve been doing this 10+ years at this point so I am able to intelligently speak to problems and do some advanced, one-off things for them to save them time, but I’m confused because the results are not overly amazing.
My lowest retainer is $3500 a month so they are still paying a decent retainer for me (solo operation). If it were “that easy” to, I’d love to double my price again because once there’s more money at play, they would hopefully prioritize it.
I also thought about tacking on another $1000/mo for a 10 hours of Dev work, but a lot of these companies don’t want that as they want to own the environment so my hands are kind of tied.
Any thoughts?
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3 Replies
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What exactly are you doing for $3500/mo? In my opinion you should be implementing the deliverables, not the clients, that way, there is more accountability in your process.
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At the end of the day, you can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make him drink.
If you are doing what the client asks, which seems to be providing them with the information for them to execute, then you can’t really do any more.
At this point, you may want to ask them if they want you to implement this information at the additional cost that you mention.
It’s up to the client to agree to pay you to do the implementation, or just pay you for the information in which they put on a shelf to collect dust.
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Larger companies will frequently hire contractors to do dev work.
But the team that hires an external SEO is almost never the same team that would hire the dev so there is no process in place to onboard the person into the ticketing and publishing environment.
Even if the SEO could be onboarded into the development environment, the engineering team typically wouldn’t allow the person the authority to make the changes based on their own judgement.
So, recommendations no matter how foolishly simple and easy to implement go through the normal internal processes based on level of impact and level of effort. Thus, both easy and really difficult tasks often get neglected leaving out much of the really good stuff.
I include a “get out of jail free” statement in recommendations which suggest that the projected returns are dependent upon the deployment of the majority of the tasks. So, if there is any question about performance or lack there of, my rebuttal would include the statement that I provided up front. Then the internal team is back on the hot seat, not me.
Doesn’t mean you can’t be fired, but it provides leverage.
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