By:  Renae E. Gregoire
The Write Idea
©2003

The Problem: Order Taker, Not Consultant

Do you act as an order taker in your business? Or as a consultant?

Let me ask it another way: Are you in business to do exactly what your customers want—and no more? Or are you in business to help your customers figure out what’s in their best interests?

Take hairdressers for example. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve sat in the chair and cringed when I heard, “How much do you want taken off?” Sure, some people are picky. They want their hair cut “one-half inch above the nape…and no more.” But I’m not one of those people. I go to the hairdresser so they can make me look good, not so I can tell them exactly how many fractions of an inch to cut off each area.

So I typically say, “I’ll trust your judgment. I just want it to look nice and be easy to maintain.” Even after I say this, I usually still hear, “Well, do you want me to take an inch off, or half-an inch?”

GRRR. I’m too polite a person, so I pick some fraction and hope for the best, all the while grumbling in my head, “Isn’t it YOUR business to help me get a good haircut?”

I’ve had my fair share of nappy haircuts because I’m not an expert hair person. I know how to wash it. Comb it. And blow-dry it…if I absolutely have to. But that’s about all.

I am still searching for a consultative hairdresser. Someone who will tell me, “Renae, the shape of your face and the texture of your hair calls for x.” Granted, I might have to let it grow out to get to x. But I’m willing. If I believe a person knows what he or she is talking about, I’ll trust their judgment and do what they recommend. (If you’re reading this and know of a good consultative hairdresser in the St. Pete Tyrone area, please get in touch!)

Another Order-Taker Example

Another business which desperately needs more “consultative” types is the web design and web development business.

I’ve paid too much money learning from my website mistakes…mistakes which would have been avoided had I known how to distinguish a consultant from an order taker. My old website design used to come with drop-down menus.  You know...where you roll your mouse over the word and a sub-menu "drops down"?  I paid out more than $1,000 to get them to the point where I found out they didn't work on every browser.

The first guy who developed the drop down menus tried to pull one over on me by telling me his quote was to implement the drop down menus on the home page only. “WHAT?” I said? Who ever heard of such an a#*#&!@ thing? If you hire a web company to install a drop down menu on your website, you would certainly expect it would be for EVERY PAGE of your site. After much bickering from me, he finally did it for an extra $150.

Then I started hearing from clients and potential clients that the drop downs weren’t working properly. So I hired another web guy to fix it. He told me that I had a new problem: he’d have to go in and make the change on every page on my site…a formidable task indeed. I told him, “Look…fix it and make my site a template so that if I need to make another change it can be done once and carry through to every page in my site.”

That cost me another $500…with no visible change to my site. It was internal only, to avoid future problems.

Then I started hearing from even more potential clients, “Renae, your drop down menus aren’t working.” So I called my last web guy, “Didn’t I just pay you $500 to fix this problem?” I asked. He said, “I don’t know what my web guy did…I fired him.”

Basically, he said, I was stuck because he already paid the guy.

So I hired someone else. He said the problem was due to the “style” of drop down the first guy used. I paid this new guy $300 to make my site work on every browser by changing the style of the drop down.

Then, I heard from even more prospective clients, “Renae, your drop downs aren’t working.”

So I got in touch with my latest web guy who said, “Well, those drop downs are a real problem. But I didn’t say anything because you were so insistent on drop downs.”

GRRRR.

Now if any one of these web guys along the way would have told me this…if they would have acted in a consultative role rather than in an order-taker role, I would have gladly foregone the drop downs.

As it stands right now, I am having my site completely revamped—NO DROP DOWN MENUS (and this website you're looking at now is the end result...no more menu problems).  

And a Few More Examples the Order-Taker Mentality

I have run into the same problem with other businesses…graphic designers, doctors, virtual secretaries, accountants, real estate agents, house painters, etc.

I go in with a problem. I am looking for a solution. However, non-consultative businesses do not provide a solution. They simply fill your order. I go to a graphic designer and explicitly say, “Do not just ‘plop’ my content into the brochure using the same font I used to type with. I will trust your judgment on fonts for the headlines, sub-headlines and body text.”

It is getting to the point where I am no longer surprised to see that they’ve “plopped” my content into the brochure—just as I asked them not to.

That creates an additional burden for me as their client, because I have to come up with some font scheme myself. And as I am not a designer, I don’t appreciate doing it.

I’ve recently went to the doctor about a mysterious syndrome that has been plaguing me for the past two years. She ordered some X-rays, gave me the prescriptions…and then I never heard from her again. I called the office and a secretary told me that the results came back “clear.” The doctor didn’t call me. She didn’t say, “Renae, let’s see what else could possibly be wrong.” She basically charged me $92 to “take my order” for x-rays and write out a script. And I paid $470 for one word, literally. “Clear.”

Same problem with virtual secretaries. I hired one to help me complete a project a few months back. I told her why I was doing it…what the end result of her work would be used for…and guidelines on how I would do the project. The results were less than I had hoped for, and I had to do much of the work over myself. Why? Because she didn’t think. She didn’t try to do the project as if she were doing it for her own business. She simply tried to fill what she thought was my “order.”

The Solution

If you’re a service provider who knows you have been guilty of being an order-taker in the past, chances are you have more than a few unhappy clients.

How to correct it? Simple. Ask your clients about the end results they’re looking for, and provide them with a variety of solutions. Don’t ask them to do your job for you. Your clients come to you with a problem. If they propose a solution that might not be in their best interests, tell them so! They’ll appreciate your input. After all, you are the expert at what you do—which is why your client came to you in the first place.

And if your client does give you explicit instructions that fit in with the overall solution, by all means pay attention to them. Otherwise you leave your client with the feeling that you weren’t listening…and that you don’t really care.

Put yourself in your client’s shoes for a minute. See what they’re trying to accomplish by coming to you, and them communicate to them the various ways in which you can help. If you think they may be heading in the wrong direction; if you spot another road to travel, let them know. They’ll become long-term customers who will highly recommend you to others.

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