3 Types of Difficult Clients You Will Meet (and How To Manage Them)

Difficult clients and bad clients are not mutually exclusive. Some of my best clients have presented me with some of my biggest professional challenges. Often, the difficulty does not result from their ill intentions. Rather, it results from a conflict between their desire for success and their ability to relinquish control.

There are various ways that difficulty manifests in project and consulting work. And with six years of running my own agency and another six years of, first, being an agency client and then selling for a large consulting firm, I have seen plenty of difficult situations.

I can’t discuss every type of difficult client in one article, but let’s explore some of the most common to better prepare for such situations in the future! 

“You’re not the boss, I’m the boss…”

The first example I want to share comes straight from the annals of really bad clients. These are the types of companies that operate in a barely legal space — where the boss is some shadowy figure you only know by a first name, who can’t be found on LinkedIn and who you are lucky if you even meet on a call.

One of my initial clients at MVRK was exactly that. They operated what appeared to be a dubious investment scheme presented as a school teaching crypto exchange trading. The boss, whom I only knew by their first name and spoke to a handful of times, hired two gentlemen who had worked at a large tech firm but had no Salesforce CRM experience.

It was those two who asked for my help and had the boss approve me joining the team. The boss never signed the contract I sent, but did send payment in Bitcoin before I even started working. In hindsight, I wish I had never started the work.

When the project did start, the problems were apparent. Instead of trying to follow what I laid out in my statement of work, they wanted to treat me like a lackey. Despite being the only person with experience of the platform, they didn’t want to take my advice. They wanted to tell me what to do.

As an expert, it’s important to understand that if someone is paying you but doesn’t want your expertise, there is something majorly wrong. In this case, as soon as Bitcoin started crashing, the payments started coming in later and later. And without me being in charge, the project puttered along. Eventually, I cut ties, wishing I’d done it sooner.

These types of clients are best avoided. If they won’t change their approach to trust the expert they hired, you will eventually end up with a bigger mess on your hands. Get out of there fast!

“But here is what ChatGPT told me…”

This next example is a more recent phenomenon, and one that we will see more and more as AI chatbots become a daily fixture in everyone’s lives. The big difference here is that the client who inspired this example is a dream client.

The team is deeply focused on growth and investing in their technology. They have a phenomenal market fit and a great team.

But the CEO, like many in today’s world, became very passionate about leveraging AI in every facet of her work. Early on in our Salesforce Implementation project, it was starting to affect my team and border on micromanagement.

She was having side conversations with ChatGPT about different topics we were discussing. But this type of passionate curiosity started to feel more like an inability to let go of control. I can’t fully get into her brain, but I know her well enough to know it was all coming from a positive angle. She wanted success just as much as we did. And she trusted us.

But when she started sending my team long AI chat transcripts (I’m talking a dozen or more pages), it became difficult to make real progress. No part of our delivery model includes skimming AI hallucinations that are not grounded in what is possible within the system.

The only way to manage that situation positively, in my opinion, is to do what I did. I had a heart-to-heart conversation with her, reminded her that she brought us in as experts and asked her to trust us. That project went very well, and we’ve done multiple since. But empathy for her situation was critical.

“…”

The last and most common challenge consultants face with clients is silence. It comes in many shapes and forms, but it never comes at the right time. And every time an unexpected silence appears, it is a sign of trouble!

However, it doesn’t always mean you did something wrong. So don’t immediately panic. Often it comes from something that was out of your client’s control. And when the silence lasts, it is because they either don’t have all the information needed to communicate with you clearly or they don’t have the confidence to communicate an issue with you.

When this happens, you need to completely detach from your ego and let go of your immediate needs. Instead, you need to lead with empathy and give space. You must send a message expressing concern for the silence, but you must also avoid putting pressure on the client.

Trying to go above and around the client can often create more challenges and burn the relationship. The only time you should do this is when you are owed a significant financial debt.

There have been many reasons why clients have gone silent for me over the years. They range from company financial troubles and medical reasons to a company being sold and many others. Silence is never good. But with an empathy-first approach, you can usually get past the situation positively.