Battles to Lose
The pitch process is difficult, stressful, and enlightening.
I’m incredibly grateful for the clients, organizations, and partners that our Spoke team has established in such short time. I’m even more grateful for those opportunities that didn’t work out because there is just as much to be learned from one of those “not this time” emails.
We won’t always know why things didn’t work out… though we often times make guesses. That said, there are two areas where we’re happy to lose a battle that we acknowledge as a team internally.
On Budget
Not everyone will be open to paying our rates and that’s OK.
Compared to an agency that hosts the burden of overhead, a single freelance individual (be it a designer, developer, or product person) will always be able to undercut Spoke’s project rates.
We talk a lot about relationships because we ultimately want to work with clients who see us as equal partners and who are willing to invest in quality work and services — That means clients who are willing to pay a rate congruent with our value.
We’ve found that clients happy to pay our rates are also the ones who glean the most from working with us. The transactional nature of the client-agency relationship reinforces the process of collecting buy-in.
In the rare instances where we’ve been more fluid with our rates, clients are inevitably harder to get on the phone or in a room for a meeting, require more hand-holding when understanding design decisions, and ultimately value our expertise and opinion less.
On Personality
Not everyone will like our approach or our candor, and that’s OK too.
Our office mantra is that we “do serious work, but don’t take ourselves too seriously.” By that we mean we work on projects and with clients that have impact, influence, and high exposure, but don’t allow that to cloud our ability to speak with honesty and to share feedback candidly.
Our best work is the result of a process that is collaborative and open-ended. If we have to sacrifice that transparency and personality by working with a certain client, then we’ve already sacrificed a core feature of what makes our work uniquely Spoke.
The process of figuring out which battles are worth fighting for and which ones are OK to lose is an important part of a businesses’ growth and will come to define your work. Choose those battles wisely.
Love the process,
Sam
