We’ve all been there. We open our email inbox only to find an email from a client or potential client that just cuts us to the core. Whether it’s asking for a refund, asking for a discount, or worse, informing you that they want to break up with you as a client, no matter what, receiving and responding to these types of emails is tough.
There are so many different things that can happen in our businesses where we need to have the tools, social skills, communication, and savvy to be able to address them effectively. I know exactly how hard receiving challenging client emails can be. They can be totally devastating and just put a damper on the day, week, month, or more. However, having guidelines that are already in place to deal with tricky client emails can make all the difference.
Today, I’ll be sharing some of these guidelines with you. They are sort of the self-affirmations I live by as someone who works for myself in order to help me navigate difficult client situations.
Guidelines to Keep in Mind When You Receive Difficult Client Emails
To give credit where credit is due, some of the advice that I’ll be giving to you today comes from a good friend and client of mine, Magi Fisher. Magi is the Artist’s Lawyer – a licensed attorney who creates contract templates that you can purchase and customize for your business. She and I have worked together and have a really fabulous friendship and partnership in our businesses. If there is anyone who knows and understands how to navigate tricky client emails and situations, it’s her.
Together Magi and I have come up with a few guidelines to keep in mind when you receive a tough email from a client. Some of these will require a bit of a perspective shift and take time to actualize. I just ask that you do your best to keep them in the back of your mind the next time you have to address something hard or challenging or open an email that you’ve been dreading.
1. Take Emotions Out of It
When we run into circumstances where it feels like we’re under attack even when we’re not, like our work is just being criticized and unjustly critiqued, our immediate reaction is to feel shame and vulnerability, like we’re a failure. Rest assured that you are not a failure. As creatives, we put our heart and souls into so much of the work that we do. That could actually be the reason why we’re so successful. However, it’s going to be hard – allow yourself to acknowledge that it’s hard – but try to take your emotions out of the equation before you respond.
2. Sleep on It for a Day
The second piece of advice works well with the first one: avoid responding to emails in any sort of charged way. In fact, avoid responding to it for at least a day if you can.
Chances are when you first opened that email where someone is asking for a refund or are informing you that your work doesn’t meet their expectations, you have a pretty visceral response upon reading it. I know when I receive emails like this, my stomach drops and my skin starts crawling. If you respond right away, you open yourself up to saying things you don’t mean, making promises that you can’t keep, and otherwise just not coming across the way you would like. You might end up sounding too accommodating or you’ll sound angry and upset. There are so many different variables when you’re just steeping in that feeling. Your best option is to sleep on it for a day. Let your mind process and figure out logically how you’re going to respond.
3. Channel Your Most Professional Self
Now, when you do respond, you’ll want to channel your most professional self. This means, thinking clearly and acting without emotion to be able to figure out what is best for your business. This could mean marking time on your calendar to make things right, comping something, providing a refund, or even adjusting your contract terms. Think with your business brain and not with the brain of an artist who has just been scorned.
4. Recognize When Someone is Projecting
With the way the world is right now, there is relentless negativity just swirling around day in and day out. That partnered with this kind of purge of our own negativity stemming from our own unresolved trauma can sometimes lead to people projecting their negativity onto others. Do what you can to sharpen your intuition so you can identify when this is happening. This will be especially helpful for those of us who are highly sensitive.
It’s important when you’re handling a sticky client situation that you own and address where you may have gone wrong that resulted in the client being dissatisfied with the project. However, beyond what potentially inspired the circumstance around the negative email, you should be able to identify when it is more than just the logistics and going into emotions that someone else is bringing to the table. Be aware of others projecting their emotions onto you and be ready to counter it with professionalism.
5. It’s Not Always You
This is similar to projecting but know that it’s not always about you. When someone comes to you with energy that feels very negative, angry, or frustrated, it’s easy to take on the responsibility for those emotions and be hit with a deep sense of guilt. Again, own what you could have done better, but if it feels as if a client is just coming at you to the point where it exceeds the severity of the situation, understand that it might not be about you. There could be a lot going on in the background of their life. That doesn’t have anything to do with you and everything to do with them.
Remember, business isn’t personal. Take your emotions off the table to protect your own energy. We are not responsible for handling other people’s emotions. It can be pretty freeing to shift your perspective from believing it’s always entirely about you and what you did. Think of what you can do to make things right, assert your own boundaries, and know your worth.
Emails are Your Paper Trail in Sticky Situations
Before we really dive into how to respond to difficult client emails, I want to mention briefly why I always advocate for writing emails. Emails are your paper trail. Although we always hope for the best, sticky client situations always have the potential to escalate into something where you may now need to provide receipts of your communication.
As service providers and entrepreneurs, emails are our fallback for when things aren’t going the way we hoped with a client. They ensure that somewhere in writing, you are certain that you heard everything correctly. Although some people will point out that written emails lose some of the nuance that speech provides, if you are in a situation that has the potential to escalate, it’s good to be able to remove nuance from the equation and lay out solutions very clearly. This gives little room for debate in comparison to a spoken misunderstanding where you have to rely on “he said, she said”.
Even if you have a face-to-face meeting, summing everything up in an email afterwards is a great way to be certain you’ve understood all of the information given to you correctly and gives your client the opportunity to correct any misunderstandings. And should things escalate (perhaps as far as into a court case), you now have proof about what was agreed to, what happened, and what was actually said.
4 Tips for Responding to Tricky Emails
Tip 1 – Meet Negativity with Kindness
My biggest recommendation for when you’re met with negativity in an email is to kill them with kindness. Do you know how hard it is to jerk someone around who is being super nice to you? It’s not easy. This is totally preferential, but I always suggest being as sweet as you can possibly be while balancing not letting anyone walk all over you. Keep your emails sweet, simple, and straight to the point without softening your language to where it becomes confusing.
The opposite of this would be simply laying all of the information out as the honest truth without any sugar coating. Ultimately, the decision falls to you to determine how you’re going to respond. I’m a big advocate for kindness. However, if a person is being downright mean, being direct and upfront with them may be the best way to communicate. Knowing which response to choose is something that you will learn and develop over time, but when you do respond, just remember to think with your business brain and not your emotions.
Tip 2 – Refer to Your Airtight Contract
Whenever you engage in any sort of business, you want your contract to be airtight so that it can help you when difficult circumstances arise. Your contract should be ironclad and protect you in every single way.
For example, my contract states that I do not offer refunds of any kind because by the time I’ve delivered the first draft of a project, I have already put in 20-30 hours of work for the client. Make sure your email response refers to that clause in your contract. Ask them for more details as to why they’re requesting a refund and how you can make it right for them. The work you’ve already put in is not worthless and shouldn’t mean nothing just because the client now feels like you’re no longer a good fit. Ultimately, you want to explain why you’re holding firm to your contract and are not going to loosen that boundary.
Tip 3 – Take Your Contract with a Grain of Salt
Although this seems counterintuitive to the tip above, if the project has not fully begun yet, it may be in your best interest to save the client relationship by loosening your contract terms. At this point in the project, you may have accepted a retainer fee and first payment and either have not yet begun or are only at the very beginning stages of the project. Even if your contract is specific about not accepting refunds, if someone is pulling a project early on, refer to the clause in your contract but maybe take it with a grain of salt. Be gracious and conscious of the fact that they may have something going on that is causing them to cancel the project. If they’re asking for a refund, maybe you can state you’ll be keeping the retainer fee as that was what saved their place on your calendar but you’ll refund the first payment.
Tip 4 – Provide Them with a Path Forward
Regardless of what a client is asking for whether it’s a refund, a discount, a break up, or are just otherwise unhappy, give them options for moving forward. They can accept the work that you’ve delivered as is and you can send a cancellation agreement or you can offer to work through the misalignment, to figure out what exactly was falling flat for them and discuss ways that you can work together to repair the relationship. Whatever the case may be, determine what would work best for your business and offer the client different options to choose from in order to move forward.
Receiving negative emails from your clients or potential clients is always going to be a difficult thing to navigate. It’s my hope that if you can keep these guidelines and tips in mind, you’ll be able to respond to them with confidence and professionalism. Remember that having things in writing is an important part of navigating these murky waters and to remove emotions from the equation in order to think with your business brain.
If you’re finding that the right words aren’t coming to you, Magi and I have worked together to create an email swipe freebie that includes pre-written email responses to a variety of challenging client emails. The responses take all of the tips that we’ve discussed in this blog and deliver them to you to copy and paste into your replies and simply add in the specific details regarding your project or business. If that sounds like something that would be beneficial to you, visit Magi’s page to download the email templates right away.
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