How to use Design Thinking to sell Design Thinking
The UX of Sales
Personal notes and thoughts from “The UX of sales” Erin Malone & James Young iA Summit Summit 2014: http://2014.iasummit.org/the-ux-of-sales/
Erin and James shared their experience in writing an presenting proposals for clients and practical tips on how to use a UX process to sell UX projects
- Do less proposals by using proposals as a roadmap for solving a problem.
- Clients buy what you do when they feel you understand their problem
- Avoid delivering a solution too quick and work on problem elicitation
- The sales process can be described as a Design process: Discover, Define, Test&Refine, Deliver.
1) Discover: Ask questions
Design Thinking teaches you how to prepare great User Interviews. It’s the same for redefining user briefs. Write down the key questions you need to ask each time a clients offers you a brief.
A good practice is to start with something like this sentence:
Whether or not it’s appropriate for us to do business together at this time, I don’t know. Either way is fine with me, however, we can determine that very quickly if I could ask you a few key questions. Would that be OK ?
Then ask these questions:
- Background: tell me about your company, your group, your plans, your customers. Did you already run similar projects ?
If they didn’t work, why do you think this one will ? - Challenge: What are you doing today, what do you know about your users, what you don’t know and are worried about ?
- Impact: What kind of outcomes are you looking for, what are the financial implications if you do this project and if you don’t.
What success will look like ? - Value: if this project is done who’s gonna care about it most (you, your boss, users, stakeholders), how this is gonna affect your team, how you measure the results ? How does this affect the company revenue ?
As you listen, underlie the needs : “We need, we wish, ..”
Then reformulate “So if I understand correctly your top three needs are” : 1.2.3.
- Ask about budget to deliver something realistic
If people don’t understand the value of asking these questions, they won’t understand the value of your design approach.
2) Define: interview buyers
- Get in contact with Sponsor buyer (your fan), User buyer (who will use your product), Detail buyer (competing on the same budget), Financial buyer (the one who pays).
Then put all this in your proposal, addressing all buyers: 4-5 pages in all
- Current situation
- Top needs: synthesis from all the buyers
- Separate what we will do from what you will get. Make sure to define what they will get, what’s the value from that deliverable, not only what you need to do to go further. Saying that you will draw “personas” is only useful if you can explain how the project will benefit from doing that.
If you end up not working for the project, your proposal will be the only “deliverable” your client will see from you. It is a good opportunity to show your approach without having to explain what design is.
3) Test your proposal and iterate
Your goal is to write your proposa WITH your client:
- Use tools like Google Documents or Slides and ask your clients to add text and comment.
- Test your ideas with your Client and your Sponsor to gather feedbacks before presenting a proposal.
4) Deliver
- Present your work and go through the proposal and take feedback.
- Don’t bring any handouts ! Otherwise they will flip to the money page.
- At each point in the presentation, ask constantly “Does this accurately reflect your situations ?”
- Use close questions : “Are we right?” yes /no
This article is part of my collection on Lean UX.
