Feedback on Feedback

I just had two clients this week–a new one and an old one–call me up to give me negative feedback. Well, not so much negative, but the factual reasons why a negative thing had happened: why they’d chosen not to hire me for a job. The first one was a longtime client who had issues with licensing. Not the terms in particular, but the concept of licensing in general. So he’d decided to work with a photographer who didn’t even mention licensing. (Photographers, please note all the reasons why this is a bad idea, found all over the internet and especially at the ASMP web site. And clients, please note that most professional photographers–real professionals, I mean–know that this is a bad idea, so they don’t do it. You might be hiring a “pro” rather than a pro.) But I’m digressing.
The second client called up to say that she had been shopping around for a new photographer because she was unhappy with the customer service and turnaround times she’d been getting from her current provider. (Actually, she didn’t tell me that part until she gave me the feedback on my proposal–which was that my price was higher than she was used to paying, though it sounded like my customer service and turnaround times and ultimately my product were superior. Which is sort of the point in why I’m more expensive: I’m better. (Hopefully not only at the photography part, but also the service part and the turnaround part and the generally caring a whole heckuva lot more than I should about your project and to that end bending over backwards for you part.)
But even that is neither here nor there.
What is here and there and the point of this post is that both of these folks gave me feedback about what they were looking for, what they were valuing, and what factors were most influencing their decisions. And that is IMMENSELY helpful for any business, particularly a small business, and particularly a small business in a field like photography where decisions could be made for creative reasons, budgetary reasons, turnaround reasons, customer service reasons, location reasons or many other reasons that would never occur to me. But they might occur to me next time if clients keep giving me that feedback.
Which is why, as I told the second client, there’s no such thing as bad feedback. All feedback is good feedback, even when it’s bad feedback.
So on behalf of vendors everywhere, I’d like to thank these clients, and I hope I have the opportunity to work with them again soon. And maybe I will, since I know now what’s most important to them, and what factors most influence their decisions. In the end, because of informative feedback, we all win.
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