We all heard our parents say that and most of us learned to apply it pretty well in our personal lives. It’s another story in our business lives, though, especially when it comes to transitioning a business into the digital age. All of a sudden we’re back in middle school.

I see it manifested all too often with business owners who just follow what their peers are doing in situations like deciding which SAAS (software as a service) to use for functions like email marketing or accounting, or even which platform to have their website developed on. It’s like the blind leading the blind. note: I know that’s insensitive but my father was blind and he would have cared less about the apt comparison 😉

Actually, most never ask much about options because they don’t even realize there are real differences between the options. They think “what’s good for one is good for all” and usually just look at price.

To top it off, most consultants don’t understand the idiosyncrasies of individual businesses enough to know to ask the client the subtle questions that make all the difference. They know the software they’re used to working with and that’s all they think matters.

As with pretty much everything in life, though, the devil’s in the details.

MY mantra is “if you don’t ask the right questions you don’t get the right answers.”

But it’s impossible to ask the right questions if you don’t understand what you could or should even be asking.

Here are just a few situations that have popped up recently. All could have been avoided if time had been taken to speak with a trusted advisor beforehand:

• a nonprofit can process recurring donations online but their system doesn’t offer the ability to allow donors to choose whether it’s a perpetual gift or for X number of payments. The donor is stuck with perpetual until they call and cancel their donation. So much for the digital age.
• a business had their online store developed on an e-commerce platform that didn’t have the capability for them to offer the types of product options they need. They can’t even sell some of their products online unless they take the order and then follow up with each customer to collect the rest of the information. How’s that for efficiency and customer satisfaction?
• a service provider wants to offer truly personalized attention (i.e. how Amazon shows content based on your activities) and got deeply into a “marketing automation” project before they realized the system can’t track actions on their website. It can only track interactions with the emails. Knowing if someone opened an email or clicked on a link in it is pretty worthless in understanding your client’s needs because you have no idea what happened after that.
• an organization wanted their website to be handicap accessible but never mentioned the requirement to the developer until the site was complete. You wouldn’t build a new house and ask the builder during the closing if it’s handicap accessible. The same goes for your website.
• a creative signed up for a year’s subscription with an online website creation platform that’s way too complicated for his purposes. It actually makes it harder than it should be for him to manage his own site.

In each of these instances the client has to make the decision of whether to throw good money after bad and stick with what they started with, even though it doesn’t meet their needs, or whether to cut their losses and go ahead and make the switch so they can move forward.

The problem isn’t that they’re irresponsible and don’t care about results. It’s that they didn’t even know enough to ask about the details. Donors being able to control how many monthly payments they make seems like a basic thing that should always be available. But it’s not.

Before you embark on a new project, you should always work with a trusted advisor who will ask you the questions that you don’t even know to ask them.

Ideally they shouldn’t be selling a specific system, but be a neutral advisor who can truly help analyze what you need. That’s when you’ll have the highest chance of choosing a solution that meets your needs now and for the long run.