Question: How Honest Should I Be?
I occasionally get asked by business People I meet to take a look at their website and give them some feedback. They ask the question because they know I do work around websites.
My question is, how honest should I be, some of the sites are awful and must be at least 8 years old. Now some of these people might be prospective clients and others may not.
Do I ease them into understanding their issues or do I blast them full force into total embarrassment and hope to motivate them to action?
Most of these folks are people I don't know (except for a 5 minute conversation) so I have no perspective to estimate what they might best respond to. I want to serve them but not sure the best approach.
What do you think?
2 Comments
Other Links to this Post
RSS feed for comments on this post. TrackBack URI
By TimK, August 29, 2006 @ 3:01 pm
Be completely honest. Not offensive, just honest. If they asked for your evaluation, they want it. Be sure to highlight the good (what they need to do more of) as well as the bad (what they need to fix). If there are so many things wrong, you don’t know where to start, just pick the one best and worst feature of the site and comment on them.
-TimK
By Chris Brown, August 30, 2006 @ 3:14 am
In my 8 years of marketing consulting I’ve found what works best is to deliver the news via the sandwich method. The “bun” is the good and the “meat” is the bad/needs work. If you make sure you put some meat in between a great big bun, your client won’t feel defensive and will also find out that you won’t be throwing away all their hard work when you try to improve their “baby.”
I didn’t come up with this idea on my own, I learned it at Toastmasters for evaluating speeches. Try it. It works.