Process.

More than surely, the agency you want to work with has a process put in place. A specific way of dealing with things, a set of procedures that they’ve used and refined over time.

It doesn’t have to be a Nobel-prize edge-cutting process with 32 white papers and 80 more yellow papers and who knows how many fancy nominations or genetically modified humans that operate it. Anyways, most of them will claim this, when in fact all agency people are focused on is this: create value for you — in most cases, that is revenue (indirectly).

But that’s a quick filter to weed out some agencies who you might not want to engage with.

Why would that be important?

Because that’s an undisputed step in creating something for someone: handling objections.

One creates something that they think is the best solution for someone and then sorts out the way the information is displayed based on the objections the user might have.

Websites are created like that.

The first thing that is shown on a website answers the user’s question “What is it?” — that’s the first thing you’d want to know as soon as you enter a foreign field.

It’s an objection in the sense of “I need to know what it is otherwise I’ll go away quickly.”

That’s usually the case but even that can vary depending on the audience. For instance, youngsters think everything is for them — so that’s not a direct problem.

The next screens are highly varied, i.e. there’s no cookie cutter answer to decide in which user doubts are handled but here are some other objections:

1. “Is it for me?” a user might think — the company points out who it is for in a direct manner, calling their names. It might be multiple audiences, mind you. See how Apple did it some months ago, displaying who the MacBook Pro is for:

Coder, musician, photographer — simply some of the people who this machine was built for + the stories of those.

Need some other example? Uber is a two-way road. It’s either for the end consumer or for the driver. Here is how they point that out:

2. “How does it work?”

“You had my curiosity, but now you have my attention” says very relevantly one of Tarantino’s characters. Once I know it’s for me and a bit of what it is, I’d be interested to see how it does what it’s promising.

3. “Can I trust you?”

This is either backed by social proof (you see those quotes from people who’ve used it and recommend this product) or by past work — maybe both, if relevant.

4. “What else do you guys do?”

Right under Uber’s greeting screen, you’d find this:

While this in itself might not be an objection, it can become one if the solution that was initially displayed is not the needed one, however I, as a user, feel like it’s in the vicinity of what I need — so I’ll spend more time to see if you’ve got that other solution as well.

I was mentioning that the order of how these are handled varies by audience and preference.

Why is that relevant when picking an agency?

This whole story draws back to my point of agencies needing to have a process.

The agency you want to work with most probably needs to have experience — otherwise, you’d go with a junior freelancer. If they indeed have the experience, they must have been through different clients and found out over time that one of the most important objections they need to face is this:

“So suppose we’re paying you this amount, what happens next? How do we start?”

To which the defined and refined process is being shown.

Again, how that process is put in place varies by company. But it more than sure has to be there, maybe even defined or explained on their website — not necessarily though, some are secretive about it and prefer not putting it out in public.

About Ch Daniel

I run Chagency_, an experiences design agency that specialises on helping tech CEOs reduce user churn. We believe experiences are not only the reason why users choose not to leave but also what generates word of mouth. We’re building a credo around this belief.

If I’ve brought you any kind of value, follow me and get in touch here: LinkedIn | Twitter | Email | Quora | YouTube (same content but in video)

I’ve also created an infinitely-valuable app for sneaker/fashion enthusiasts called Legit Check that impacted hundreds of thousands over millions of times – check it out at chdaniel.com/app

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