Say, for example, I wanted to consult with an architect on remodeling myself a new kitchen. You don’t just sign the paper work and have them start building a kitchen. They would ask questions like how you use the kitchen, what you’re looking to do in the kitchen, if you entertain in the kitchen, etc. They need to know how you’re going to use this space before they can start crafting it.

Websites work the same way. For you to effectively design the best experience for a website, you need to understand how your clients’ business works and what they’re looking to do. Understand all of the hows and whys of the business that you’re working with. Understand the challenges the business has and will face, their business objectives/goals, and so on. Here are a few, of many, questions that we, at Tridea, normally ask during the client discovery meetings:

• Who is your target audience?
• What do you feel is your number one business problem?
• How does the company differentiate itself from competitors?
• What are your short-term marketing goals (in the next 1-2 years)? And how will the website help reach those goals?

Remember, as designers, you’re a problem solver. More likely than not, if you’re being approached by another business for work, they need your help (and creative knowledge) in solving business problems. And asking the right business questions will help get you to better creative problem solving. I would recommend asking these types of questions in a questionnaire, so that you can come back to the answers during your creative jam sessions. They can turn into a good checklist when going over a design to make sure that you’ve addressed the business problems.

Outside of working in Photoshop, what other skills do you find necessary for designers to have?

This doesn’t mean that you need to turn into some expert salesman, however, your potential clients need to know that they’re investing in the right person for the job. In all of the projects I’ve won with both freelance, and Tridea is confidence. You’d be amazed at how many people admire those who are very confident about the services that they would provide. Don’t just think you can design them something great, know that you can design them something great. If you communicate that effectively, it goes a long way. Confidence always wins.

Another tip that helps a ton is actually being interested in your clients’ business. A client will know whether or not you’re really interested in them and their business, and I’d be willing to bet that they’d rather choose the designer that’s interested in them, over the designer that’s just looking to make some money. So be interested, do some research on their industry, and ask tons of questions.

Keep it simple, keep it clear, and keep it calm, so everyone understands what is happening and feels safe. via

Knowing how to communicate without the use of industry jargon is huge. More likely than not, your potential client will not be a designer or web developer. So when talking to potentials, leave the technical jargon at home. They will not understand it, nor will they care. If they have no clue what you’re trying to say (because of tech jargon), then why should they feel comfortable spending money on your services?

In my opinion, a big part of selling is the talking that you don’t do. It’s easy, and effortless, but listen to your potential clients. Hear what they have to say about what business problems they’re facing and/or what they’re looking for. This possible project will be about their business and consumers, so let them tell you as much as possible about it, then respond.

And the last tip I have should be a no-brainer, but have a portfolio. Remember that confidence thing I talked about earlier? Well, showing off your work helps establish that you’re the right person for the job. I wish I didn’t have to mention this item, but it’s shocking how many designers don’t have portfolios to show off their work. Can’t build one? Then use a hosted service. Don’t like the hosted option? Then take pictures of your work and put them on Flickr. Whatever you do, always be ready to show potential clients the amazing work that you’ve done in the past.

Those are a few tips that I think are very useful, and have helped me out quite a bit in the past and present. What other tips would you say are essential when selling your services?

We have tried different approaches and we have far from mastered being consistently right on our quotes. At first we tried doing the hourly thing. This proved the be the worst solution for us because it was very challenging tracking hours to the minute. At one point or another, I always went over the hours specified for the project, which ends up in us losing money and having issues staying within the project budget.

Our next approach was, which we’re still using is just giving the project a total price, loosely based on an hourly rate. This has worked for two reasons. The first is because we’re in a different mind state in not having to stress over every hour spent. This allows us to be as creative as we need to in our research/design/development and not short ourselves because of the limitation on hours.

The second reason this has worked, is because when we meet and go over a quote before sending to a client, we all make sure we’re in agreement on the price tag. When we get to a point that we feel that we can crank out a project for a certain amount, then we are comfortable on whatever time we spend on the project. Again, this isn’t the best solution, but it’s worked for us lately, and we’re still working on refining this as well.

It’s not easy quoting projects, however, I imagine that the more we get used to working with each other, the better we will be at estimating the costs of certain tasks of a project. But it seems like only time will get us better at quoting.

How do you normally quote projects? Has your method been effective for you?

The web community loves new features and new technology. New is exciting. New is fun. New is challenging. And when clients come to you wanting something new, their enthusiasm can be really contagious. via

I have definitely been guilty of this before. A client will contact us looking for a redesign of their site, and upon the first glance of their site I start thinking of ways I would redesign it before identifying what their business problems are. We design to solve problems, and sometimes it’s hard for a client to identify what their business problems are, so they think adding “this feature or that feature” would help them grow their business.

In client discovery meetings, how you’re going to design the site should not be the topic of conversation. That stuff doesn’t matter at that time. What does matter is getting information on their business and see what is working and not working, the problems they are having, who their audience is, etc. In other words, just listen and stay focused. From that information, you should then have your work cut out in knowing what needs to be done (features) to tackle problems.

Why should we choose you to design/develop a website for us?

At first I really hated this hearing this question. I’m sure, in my rookie days, I lost a few [potential] clients because I stuttered way more than normal in a business situation. That doesn’t show confidence at all.

I can’t say that I still hate hearing that question, but it’s something that I’m still working on getting better at. Whenever you listen to successful business people, they have no problem telling you why you should choose them over a competitor. Freelance designers/developers should be the same way because every one of us, at some point, will be asked that question. And in the DIY Era, your pitch means even more now.

Having a solid pitch for your services not only helps prove that you know what you’re talking about, but it also shows confidences in your own self and/or your business. And confidence speaks volumes for yourself and skills, and helps build trust with the person that is seeking your services. Imagine walking into a car dealership inquiring about a certain car, and your salesperson can barely tell you about the specs on a car, or why you should buy it. How comfortable would you feel about buying that car?

I would image that by the time a [potential] client asks the question on why they should choose you, they are already very interested, it’s just up to you not to screw it up.

Of course there is much more to learn, but here are a few key lessons that I’ve learned thus far.

Time Management

This has been very important to me. Having to work a full time job during the day leaves a very limited amount of time to run a business, so I’ve had to be very efficient with how I spent my time. Working all day, only to come home for more meetings and design work to do can wear on you pretty quickly. You want personal time to relax as well, so in order to balance that time, weekends become a big factor with managing time.

Every person has their own way of managing time, but what I’ve done for the Tridea would be to crank out a few days of solid hard work, little breaks, and get a good chunk of work done. Then I relax for a couple days. This isn’t a sure-fire plan, but it has worked for me. I can’t work all day, then all night for 5 days straight only to have a short weekend to relax, I like to spread my work out a bit more, because working on the weekends doesn’t bother me.

Focus

I can’t lie, sometimes it is extremely hard to stay focused on my work after coming home from an 8-9 hour work day. Somehow I manage to do it easier than other days. To help me focus, I ignore phone calls, non-business emails, turn on music, and just go at it. Once I start paying attention to non-business stuff while trying to work, that is when I lose focus. I’ve also learned not to force creativity. Sometimes you have it, sometimes you don’t, so in the times that you don’t, just let your mind rest. It works wonders.

Choosing Clients

Since we’re in a position where we don’t exactly need every single project for the money, we’re able to pick and choose our clients. It’s awesome. When we meet with [potential] clients, we make sure that we have a good vibe going. If we don’t have a good feeling about it, we turn it down, no matter what the price tag is. A bad client experience is not worth the money. As Cameron Moll says:

I’ve turned down a fair share of projects based solely on the fact that something didn’t feel right at the outset. Fact of the matter is you’ll inevitably be faced with unknown variables in any decision, no matter how well you do your homework.

Communication

This is easily the most important, and the one thing that seems the most overlooked. Our first client was the hardest simply because of communication issues. There were just too many people involved in the project that didn’t need to be. My advice on communication, establish one point-of-contact. Dealing with that one person will help keep projects within the scope, and things will go much more smoothly. You don’t want to be taking direction from 5 different people. It’s not productive, and very frustrating.

In addition to what I mentioned above, keep the client in the loop throughout the whole project. It’s normally not a good thing if the client has to come find you. They should be apart of the whole design and development process. If you have an idea, let them know. It shows that you care about your client. Don’t just communicate with them at the beginning and end of a project.

Contracts are golden

We made the mistake of not having a contract on our first project, which we thought was going to be a quick and easy project. We were wrong. The timeline dragged further than it was supposed, and the project got out of scope. If we would have had a contract, it would have helped tremendously. From now on, no matter how big or small the project is, a contract is required. Outline everything that is entailed for the project within the contract. If the client wants something not in the contract, charge more and redraft the contract. It will save you lots of time and headaches.

As I said, we still have a whole lot to learn about running a business. We will face many more challenges down the road, but the first 6 months have been great, and I’ve obviously learned some useful lessons thus far. I hope to write more after another 6 months.

When meeting new clients, I always like to listen to what the client has to say. I like to hear their perceptions of the web, and how they think having a website wil help their business out. After the listening part, I then chime in on things that I felt that they misunderstand about the web, and help them better understand things about the web, that could prove to be beneficial to their business.

An example of this, was a client that I had a while back who wanted an all flash site (and they actually bought a template for me to customize), yet the core audience for their site would be people ages [roughly] 40 and older. I was non-hesitant to let them know the downsides to having a flash site with that type of audience, and the types of issues that it would pose with accessibility.

The client was very receptive to my recommendations, especially because I sent articles backing up my statements so that they could further learn about why a flash site would not have been ideal for the project.

My overall point is that clients need education sometimes, and just because they approach a designer with a good price tag does not always mean we should bow down and do everything they want when it goes against the standard practices that we are used to. If they’re smart, they will find a designer looking for help to solve a problem, and not just paying to get something done.

Now that I’m going through the motions of having my own company, I’ve come to realize that actual design work is a very small percentage in the overall scheme of things. To make it that much harder, I don’t have a business background at all, so all of the aspects of business that I’ve learned up to this point have been through trial and error.

But once things get professional, it’s almost all business, whether it’s chasing down leads for new projects, negotiating project budgets with clients, contracts/proposals, meetings, overall communicating through emails, etc., it never stops. After going through all of the business aspects to get the project rolling, design seems to be the easy, less exhausting part.

Not all of the business stuff is bad. I will always enjoy the designing, but I’ve also come to like some of business stuff and I’ve learned a ton within the last few months. I especially like chasing down leads. That is by far the most interesting aspect, to me, because you find out whether you’re a good fit with a client or not. I also take lots of pride in being able to explain to others what we and how someone would benefit from the services we provide.

Meeting new people is always interesting to me, so I guess that is why I enjoy chasing down leads and learning what other people do. Whether you get along with new client leads or not, you always learn something about them and/or how to do things differently for the next time.

The aspect that I’ve come to like the least is paper……….unless it’s a check! I just don’t deal well with the legal/paper stuff. It gives me a headache, and I always feel like I leave little loopholes for something to go wrong. It’s just a tedious process having to write up proposals and contracts and nothing really excites me about it, however, they are extremely important to every project, and I’d never start a project without one.

Since my company is so new, there is still tons to be learned about the business side of dealing with clients as well as running a small design shop. I am in the process of wrapping up a great book called The Business Side of Creativity, and I would highly recommend checking it out. It packed with useful information on how to get started, and running your own business.

A question for other freelancers/designers……..how do you cope with the business aspect of this industry?

Freelance Switch has only been around for a handful of weeks, but the amount of good content and resources that they’ve put out since they launched is really amazing. It only took reading one post of theirs to become a subscriber. And most feeds that I subscribe to, I don’t read every single post, but for this site, I find myself visiting almost daily.

a Community & Resource for freelancers of all varieties – designers, writers, programmers, illustrators, photographers …

I normally bookmark links that I find useful, but I was bookmarking so many of their posts that I figured I might as well do a quick write up about them. So if you’re a freelancer of any sort, it would be worth your time to go visit Freelance Switch. It might be one of the best resources on the web for freelancers, and being so new, there is a ton of potential for growth. You might even find a job there!

Because of the fact that Tridea is a side company of mine, along with two others, we are in a position to pick and choose who we want to work with. Through initial client meetings and stuff, I like to feel out clients to be sure they actually believe in their company enough to think that it has a good chance to grow. I want to know that when we’re contracted to do a job, we’re investing our time into something that our client believes will be something of value to it’s customers.

On the flip-side, I believe in us. If someone asks “why should we choose you?” then I 100% know that I can answer that question well enough for the interested party to realize that we believe in the services we are offering. I am confident that we can provide a great service to further help out in advancing the clients to where they want to go.

I think it’s pretty important for designers to believe in the type of work that they produce. Otherwise, how would you expect to wow clients? Why should a client want to choose you over other designers if you don’t believe that you can do good work? Even if you get that chance to work with clients, I’d think that it would be a bit awkward presenting a design to a client if you don’t even believe in your own work. It would make explaining design decisions pretty hard.