The customer is always right. Whatever the customer needs. We’ll make it work. Happy to flex on that. Yes, and we can bill it. American supplier speech accommodates first and prices afterwards. The refusal, where it comes, arrives as a number rather than as a no.
Can you just
The two words that open the American scope conversation, and the change-order literature quotes them directly as the thing to watch for. Can you just is a request framed as a small one. The framing is what makes it hard to refuse and what makes it worth a document.
The statement of work
The American SOW closes with acceptance criteria stated as testable facts — the system processes a thousand transactions without error, fifty users complete training and pass assessment, the sponsor signs off.
The guidance is explicit about why: these become the finish line, and everything else is a change order.
The definition of done is written before the work begins, because everyone involved expects the request to grow.
The change order
The American answer to scope creep is a document. Either party proposes a change in writing, the supplier delivers an impact assessment naming the effect on fees, timeline and acceptance criteria, both sides approve, and only then does the work proceed.
The standard clause is blunt: work performed without an approved change order is performed at the consultant’s risk and may not be billable.
The American supplier is not defending the boundary of the work. He is building the machinery to price its expansion.
Scope creep
A named American business phenomenon with its own literature, its own software features and its own prevention advice: the gradual expansion of a project beyond what was agreed, without any corresponding change to fee or timeline.
It begins small. One more interview, a slide deck summarising the findings, a follow-up workshop. A consultant contracted for three research workshops and a report can end up delivering forty percent more work for the original fee.
The word exists because the behaviour is normal enough to need a name. Creep is the giveaway — nobody decided it, and it happened anyway.
Laboratory Turnaround Time
A report of the National Insitute of Health from November 2007 states:
Quality can be defined as the ability of a product or service to satisfy the needs and expectations of the customer. Laboratories have traditionally restricted discussion of quality to technical or analytical quality, focusing on imprecision and inaccuracy goals.
Clinicians, however, are interested in service quality, which encompasses total test error (imprecision and inaccuracy), availability, cost, relevance and timeliness. Clinicians desire a rapid, reliable and efficient service delivered at low cost.
Of these characteristics, timeliness is perhaps the most important to the clinician, who may be prepared to sacrifice analytical quality for faster turnaround time. This preference drives much of the proliferation of point-of-care testing seen today.
What is a deliverable?
In his What Is a Deliverable in Project Management?, Kermit Burley, of Demand Media, writes: „In project management, a deliverable is a product or service that is given to your client. A deliverable usually has a due date and is tangible, measurable and specific.
A deliverable can be given to either an external or internal customer and satisfies a milestone or due date that is created and produced in the project plan. A deliverable can be a software product, a design document, a training program or other asset that is required by the project plan.“
Ask !
In May 2014 John Barrows – a sales trainer for companies like Salesforce, Box, LinkedIn, Marketo, Zendesk – posted the following advice on follow-up in SalesHacker:
Question: How do you follow up effectively with a potential client without being annoying?
1. Ask for guidance on the best way to follow up with them while adding value and not being annoying. You know who does know how to effectively follow up with the client The client. Ask them.
2. Ask what their preferred form of communication is and if they will respond. This is different than asking them about the best way to follow up. This is about their preferred form of communication and getting them to commit to a level of responsiveness. I literally ask people – “what is your preferred form of communication moving forward here? Is it cell, e-mail, text?”
3. Make sure you always end each conversation with a clearly defined next step. It kills me how often I see sales reps get off the phone after a good conversation with a prospect without a clearly defined next step scheduled on the calendar. The easiest time to get a commitment on a next meeting is at the end of the meeting you just had.
4. Summarize your conversations and get written confirmation. At the end of every decent conversation, I always send an e-mail that summarizes what we talked about and asks for their confirmation.
5. Always have a reason to reach out and never just call to ‘touch base’ or ‘check in’. I am on a personal crusade to get ‘touching base’ and ‘checking in’ out of the vocabulary of sales professionals.
Add value. Don’t annoy.