July 20, 2023

4 Ways To Avoid Getting Buried By Your Subscription Clients

When presented with the idea of selling their services on an “all-you-can-eat” basis, people often wonder if they’d end up buried by an avalanche of work from clients.

The rationale is that clients may want to “get their money’s worth,” like a tourist filling their pockets with shrimp at a Vegas buffet.

If you are choosy about who you work with, this shouldn’t actually be a problem, but there are lots of ways to discourage this sort of behavior in the event that it does crop up. Here are four:

Areas Of Involvement—Be clear about what is and isn’t included in the client’s plan, and then stick to it.
Client Access—Limit the number of people who have access to you. If the only person allowed to contact you is high-level and busy, you will get a lot fewer requests than if a team of low-level employees can dump work in your inbox.
Response Time—Set expectations about how quickly the client can expect a response from you. If the deal is that you will respond to requests within two business days, you can throttle a demanding client by waiting for the full duration to get back to them.
Serial Queue—Let the client know they can make as many requests as they want, but you will only work on one at a time. As long as you’re cranking through enough of their requests every month to justify the subscription, they’ll stay. You don’t have to finish EVERYTHING they request every month.

Some of these may not apply depending on what sort of subscription service you’re considering, but I hope they’ll get your gears turning with creative ways you could prevent a capacity crunch.

Yours,

—J