Body language speaks volumes to the subliminal intentions of the person sitting across from you. But how do you find a way to charm someone, especially a client, when you’re unable to read what their potential needs are?

Designers deal with this everyday, and though the online world facilitates international communication, it’s not always easy to establish rapport screen to screen. Here are some ways to charm your online clients and bring money back into your wallet.

First Impression: The Inquiry

A potential client sends you an email inquiring about your marvelous design services, how do you respond? Depending on your workload, I recommend that you hold off from an immediate response to gather a brief understanding of your client.

Reading Your Online Client

How does this person approach you for your services; are they laid back, or does their language reflect a business professional? Is their email formatted by general standards, or is it embellished with the savvy of professional headers and intricate signatures?

The number one point to establishing rapport is finding common ground with the person you’re speaking to and even mirroring their actions. By taking a moment to take in the details of a client’s email, you can learn how to adapt to their comfort level when it comes to negotiating business.

Initial Research of Your Client

Take into consideration whether or not your client has left potential clues to the project you’ll be designing, especially for generalized inquiries. If they’ve dropped the url to their website, check it out, noticing the standards they’ve already set for the designs for their company. Learn about the story of their company and what they do so that your future suggestions are better suited for their audience.

First Impression: Your Response

Now that you’ve learned a little about your potential client, it’s time to respond to their initial inquiry.

Basic Online Etiquette

It’s always beneficial to follow the general rules of online etiquette. If you choose to mirror the casual or professional format of their email, be sure to always maintain a level of professionalism for it is still business. Other rules of online etiquette include:

• Caps/small cases – Never write in all caps or small cases. Verbal communication is lost in email, so your client will be unable to cipher the tone of your words.
• Grammar & Proofread – You don’t want to go as far as mirroring a client’s poor grammar. Make sure your email makes sense grammatically, check the spelling, and always proofread it before finally hitting the send button.
• Excessive !!! or ??? – Excessive use of common punctuation can be seen as immature, sarcastic, or overly excited. Think of an exclamation point as a smile, you want to throw one in the conversation every now and then to illustrate your excitement, but avoid the creepy looking grins at all costs.

Charming Your Client

Charming your client requires confidence and the knowledge from briefly studying your client’s email and design needs. I always find those who are generally inspirational, supportive, and carefree as charming individuals. Be thorough in your explanation for the system you’ve set up to handle clients, you can even choose to briefly walk your client through the process. Remeber to use visual words so they can see the experience unfold within their minds.

For casual clients, lose some of the big words of design that are often used to impress them. Instead, show them what you mean by supplying a previous client’s finished design, and if it relates to their industry–even better.

Little Details That Count

Make the conversation sound personal and real. Throw in the client’s name throughout the email as though you’re talking to them in person. Try to be intuitive to their design needs by linking to examples.

Ever consider supplying a customer’s testimonial? Include a testimonial of a recent client to jump start their excitement for beginning a new project.

It’s Only The Beginning…

The initial exchanges between you and a potential client are often taken for granted. Here is where you can truly shine as a charming and respectable designer. However, that confidence is within us all, and it’ll only take a couple of tries before understanding your charm potential. Learn how to build online rapport and you can truly charm the pants off your next client!

After a few years of freelancing out of my Gmail inbox and a simple checklist in my Google Desktop sidebar, I finally committed to finding a new solution. I needed a better way to manage my projects. Avoid common mistakes in selecting a new project management tool with these easy steps.

Step 1: Identify Your Needs

In most cases, different people have different requirements. I didn’t need some massive piece of project management software, I just needed a better way to organize and track about 4-7 projects simultaneously. Gadgets and graphics are fun, but I needed to upgrade for the functionality, not for the pretty effects and eronious options.

Step 2: Indetify Your Wants

This is just as important as identifying your needs. Since you’re already willing to make a big change, you might as well make sure you’re making all the changes you’d like to. There’s few things more frustrating that going through a big upgrade or change only to find out shortly after that you’d like to make additional tweaks and you need to go through the whole process again.

Despite what some people think, it’s strikingly easy to determine your wants for things like project management… Just answer the following questions:

• I wish I could…
• It’d so awesome if the software did…
• Hopefully I can find a program that…

See, it’s not rocket-science folks. I discovered that I’d love a solution I could log into from anywhere and get to work. I thought it’d be great if my clients could also log into the software and track and discuss projects so I also wanted it to look nice. Do you want to access your info on the go? Do you want to have multiple users?

Step 3: Identify Your Restraints

This is the most commonly skipped step for most of us. We’ve gotten so excited about what we might be able to do, we’ve forgotten to get realistic again. Once you’ve thought about what you need and want, it’s time to get down to business.

Money
We’ll start with obvious. If you can’t afford new software right now, you’ll have to be looking at only free packages. The open-source community has plenty to offer so you’re not out of luck. It is also important to keep in mind that “not able to afford” new software is an idea you need to look at closely. Personally, I was ready to admit to myself that a one-time investment into better project management was something I couldn’t afford NOT to do. Between searching through emails and IM conversations and not remembering enough about something my sidebar is calling “Site for Joe”, I was losing more money every month in lost hours than what I would spend on the software.

Time
Now to the not-so-obvious. If you’re putting in 60+ hours a week just to keep your head above the water, you don’t have much time to spend on this upgrade. You’ll need to find a solution quickly and get it up and running even quicker. If you’re not so crunched for time, you should be pretty thorough while going through these steps – the more time you can put in here, the better off you’ll be in the long run.

Needs
In the first step, we pin-pointed what we have to have in our new solution so don’t get sucked into something that doesn’t meet them to your satisfaction. As simple as it seems, I still talk to plenty of people who forget this. Perhaps I could simplify it a bit more… If ‘Software A’ doesn’t have your needs, move one to ‘B’. The solution you select needs to have these… that’s why they’re called needs.

Step 4: Go Shopping!

Note that I did NOT say “Go Purchasing”. My wife could assure you that there is a distinct difference between the two. To me, shopping consists mainly of research and test-drives.

Start by googling some keywords like “project management software”. You’ll see that there are thousands of companies and individuals claiming they have the best software ever created. Try integrating some of your needs and wants into the searches like “hosted”, “simple”, “mobile”, etc. and you’ll start to narrow the field. Once you find a few good-looking candidates, download the trials and test out the demos.

Step 5: Pull The Trigger

You’ve done your homework, you’ve planned, and now you’ve found the solution that best fits what you’re looking for in a project management tool. Puchase, download, install, test, and use it. If you’ve followed these steps you should be well on you’re way to more efficiency and a less stressful work week.

A Few Links to Help You Out

You didn’t think we’d leave you empty-handed did you? In addition to searching around, here are a few of the most popular choices for project management with a quick description.

• ActiveCollab – $199-$399 (one time)
  My choice for project management. Fully-featured, web-based software you can install wherever you want. Full support for iPhone.
• BaseCamp – $24-$149 (per month)
  Crazy popular hosted, web-based solution. Plenty of features, plenty of support.
• Open WorkBench – FREE
  Downloadable replacement for Microsoft’s Project software. More traditional, database-style management.
• dotProject – FREE
  Popular open-source web-based software. Decently equipped, Convincingly ugly.
• Project Management Software
  Read for Benefits of Program Management Software.

Any other favorites out there? Let us know in the comments.