Selling the value of design, and design process to clients

00:00 Hello and welcome to Perspective. This is a show by founders of digital creative agencies giving our perspective on starting and running our own companies. Their aim is to provide useful advice and inspiration to others as well as learn from each other and others we get to come talk on the show. This is our 22nd episode. My name is John Dark. I'm a director at Every Interaction and joining me again today I have Dan Ghent from Lighthouse London. Hello, Dan.

00:24 Hey, John. How's it going? I'm pretty well. How are you? I am good. Absolutely. Looking forward to getting another episode done after being away for a couple. You've been doing lots of talks with other people.

00:40 Yeah, it's good to have the the duo back together. Watch those listening figures drop. No, they're going to go up, Dan. Trust me. I know, I know that. I know that. I was being self-effacing. It's fine. I know.

00:58 I know what the people want. So we thought we'd mark the occasion with a bit of a tricky topic, something we're not sure we're actually going to come to a conclusion on, but we think it would be interesting to talk about nonetheless. That's something that I know we've definitely struggled with in the past and continue to struggle with on a regular basis. I'm sure everyone with the creative agency does. And that is how do you sell the value of design to a client? And by that, I think, I mean, if you're working with people who haven't gone through the design process before, or perhaps they just don't understand what it takes to go through the process and what's required.

01:49 And often these things come down to price as well, where people are trying to negotiate you down and you try to explain to them that the things that are needed in the proposal you may have put forward that are there for a reason in order to achieve the end result of going through the process to solve the problems that they put in their brief. Is this something, a challenge, that you guys face at Lighthouse, Dan? Yeah. And I think what you're outlining there is that people think design is different things. And it's quite, I wouldn't say it's easy, but it's easier to sell someone something that they think they already understand. But it's quite, if what they understand isn't what your design process is, and I think, I hope both of our agencies have kind of mature processes, because we've learned the hard ways we've gone along, and we've all read the same books, etc. But if someone doesn't understand why you go through a full design process, starting with research and defining problems and those kind of things, then it's quite hard to sell them the value of design. I mean, I would almost argue at some point, if someone doesn't, there's a certain level of understanding of the value of design, if someone is below it, then you're maybe not kind of fishing in the right place for clients. Yeah, sounds familiar. I think, to me, that the first challenge is really trying to define what design thinking is. I mean, we've met lots of clients who just think that design means making something look pretty.

03:53 But obviously, experienced people who've worked in the design industry closely with the design process, they get it. But a lot of clients you may meet aren't in that position. They haven't been through the process. They've never really worked closely with the designer. And sometimes people who still haven't gone through this process properly. And yeah, trying to define what design is and how that fits into your process and the value it brings and how it touches every aspect of a project throughout the project lifecycle is a bit of a difficult thing to conjugate into something that's easily understandable to someone who's not familiar with it.

04:45 I think as well, it depends where you are in the process. So pre-sale, before you've kind of engaged someone, you're in quite a vulnerable place with this kind of thing. Because if someone's buying on what they believe to be important, things they believe to be important, like it looking pretty, then you're at risk going in and saying, no, no, no, that's not the value of design, you need to do proper design. Because you might come up against someone else that says, you need to make it look pretty. And then you're kind of in disagreement with what they believe their requirements to be. Done right, that can be quite powerful. And you can take out the person that just says, let's make it look pretty if you explain it well. But how long do you get to explain it before that agreement? So I think there's two sides to this. There's selling design to get a sale, to get a contract. And then once you're actually working with someone, there's selling them the process that's going to get them the best outcome. And at that point, obviously, you can be a bit more, you're a bit freer to spend time educating them. So we kind of handle those two things quite differently. Do you find, because the temptation is to, you know, at that beginning bit, if someone's saying make it look pretty, I think you make your stuff look really pretty. I mean, do you at that point turn around and say, yeah, but I'm going to give you a proposal that isn't about it looking pretty? I mean, do you always the temptation just say yes?

06:42 It looks lovely. It looks lovely, doesn't it? Are you asking if we put designs in pictures then? No, I'm not asking for it. Surely not after 22 episodes, we find out that you guys do loads of spec work. No, I'm more I'm more asking how you find it because I think this is because we do development as well. I expect we definitely have things where we pitch and we're doing and we're talking a lot about development and how we're going to bring this thing to life and people want to know how we're going to do the technical challenges and yes, it's going to look nice. Now, little do they know, we'll go through a proper design process, but if they're not talking about a proper design process, we're not going to spend ages educating them on that. But for you guys, presumably, if people don't understand the value of design, they're surely not one of your clients, right?

07:48 Yeah, true. I hadn't really thought about it like that because they're not our clients. Don't get to meet those people because people coming to us, yeah, exactly. They just have a need for designing UX specifically. Sometimes there is some development in there and we can use our partners to get that done, but more often than not, we're working with the client's existing partners or internal development teams. I guess maybe that makes us more fortunate that people come to us with an expectation in mind that they're already looking for design. Maybe that puts us a little bit further down the road of making our job easier to sell them in on the value of design in the process because if they're already seeking it, clearly they have some knowledge there.

08:40 Yeah, maybe it is a bigger problem for guys like Lighthouse where you are selling design, but you're also selling other services. The way we handle the pre-sales, so the literal selling. In that case, it's about trying to spend that time you get with a client, a potential client, to somehow show them just a piece of value. For example, we'll take, we'll run... Because I always think if you put a proposal down and it just says, "Here's what we're going to do," it doesn't really show... It kind of explains the value, I suppose, but what you really want is to get them to go, "Oh, right. Okay. So that way of working can bring you some new thinking." You sort of want to go, they come to you and they're like, "I want it to look nice." And if you can get them through some kind of little exercise where you go through a user journey or think about a customer, you just want them to have one idea they hadn't had before out of that process and then be like, "So that's why we start there." You just want them to see by doing that workshop or even just listening to their problem. You have to start by listening to their problem and then trying to work out what a solution is, which is that that is a good, very generic design process. That's the sort of thing you can do pre-sale. You can't make things look pretty pre-sale, really, unless you're doing spec work. And then I don't think... I'm assuming that the average prospective listener is up to date with not doing spec work. So let's not go on about that for ages, but as I say, you just want to get a... If you're going to sell the value of design, you need to show it. You need to get the client or potential client to just have that moment of, "I've now thought of something that I hadn't thought of before." And then you go, "Yeah, because that was the design process that made you think that. And if we do this more, you'll think more of those things and that's how we'll come to... That's how we'll generate a lot of great ideas for your project." So it's always trying to find ways of trying to design little workshops that don't take too long, but can generate that sort of thoughts within the client.

11:25 And then you can hook onto them and they go straight into proposal. My thing these days is you can spend hours writing a proposal because you just spent... You worry about, "How am I going to sell this person the value? How am I going to tell them about our design process and writing and rewriting?" Whereas if you can before doing that actually do something with them where an outcome comes out of it and that goes into the proposal, it's sort of written... You've written it already basically and it's the thing they recognize from before. And I think something wrong with designs like to sell the value design, you just have to show them that process and take them through a tiny bit of it. I mean, what do you guys do before when you're kind of chatting up a prospect as it were? Yeah, probably not enough of that, to be honest. I think wherever possible, we try to meet them before we put the proposal forwards. Quite often that's a bit more of a requirements gathering exercise than a workshop per se. But I'm a big believer in whenever you're in front of a client, especially when you're trying to win the business off to do exactly what you say, to give them some little nugget of value. You're not there in that meeting to solve all the problems of the project, but if you can demonstrate value and what a design-led process can lead to, just by revealing a few little nuggets of information or ideas that you have on the spot, based on your experience, based on what you're learning there and then, then they can see the value of taking that further and continuing to work with you, which in turn, I guess, makes writing the proposal easier. But we're still in the position where we do have to do quite a few proposals where we don't get a lot of time to do that with the client either because they're really remote, not that that should really be an excuse, but just because I think they don't feel like they need to do it, probably because they're speaking to five agencies and can't take half a day to go sit with five different agencies in order to make their selection. So, yeah, we have to mix it up a bit. When we can, it works brilliantly and much better than when we don't do a workshop or a meeting beforehand. We still do have to do those ones where we try and communicate everything in the proposal without really having had the chance to do that face-to-face. Yeah, and that's really hard. I mean, you can use case studies, I suppose, and make sure those case studies are very outcome-based. I always think a case study should basically be about one thing, like even if a project was, "Oh, we did branding and we did this development and we solved all these different diverse problems," you really want to work out what the problem the person has is and then basically make out that that's all that project was. That's all that was worth saying about that project. So, if they've got a problem, user research problem, something like that, then just make the case study about the amazing thing that happened because you did the user research and don't worry too much about the fact that you designed them a bespoke CMS or something like that.

15:21 But I think, again, that's just demonstrating the design process, right? Because if you were going to start designing something for someone, the first thing you do is listen to them and try and understand exactly what the problem is, not necessarily what they're saying the problem is, what it actually is, finding out what's important with what they're trying to achieve.

15:46 You do that in a design project anyway, so doing it in the sales process is the same thing. You've got to sit there and listen and then even if you sum up their problems back to them and don't solve any of them, you've already shown a valuable part of the design process by doing that, by filtering their... Because often you get just a massive... I mean, I don't know the briefs you see, but the briefs I see, it's like there's a huge amount of stuff in them and it's only when you get one on one that you can basically go what three things here are actually important. Like you put SEO in your brief because someone told you to, but actually that's not where the value lies in this project. So yeah, I think using your design skills to identify what their real problems are, both makes a great sale, as a great sales pitch and shows the value of design even if they don't realize you're already designing something. I think a sales process needs designing as much as anything else, but that's maybe separate, but just designing something for them, even if that's the understanding of their problems, I think is really important. Then once you go beyond...

17:22 That gives you the ammunition to put into the proposal directly. Completely. And if you've done it well, it means that your proposal speaks exactly to their issues and not to their brief. And if everyone else is speaking to their brief, hopefully that's what's going to make you stand out. It's risky because you've got to make sure the person you're talking to is the person whose problems matter, who's going to pay the money. So the person who put the SEO in the brief, they might be the person that signs off the check. And if your proposal makes light of the SEO problem, then you might get judged differently. So you need to like understand those basics of who is the person whose problem you should be solving.

18:13 But once you know that, I think you can definitely start a design process with them. I mean, I don't know about your process once you get a project's game, but we'll often start with that kind of research into the problem, talk into their stakeholders. And we'll often stop after that stage and go, "Okay, so what's this project now look like? Is it different to what we thought it was before?" And I suppose you can stop at the proposal stage having done a tiny amount, but at least got somewhere. Yeah, that happens to us quite a bit actually, that you might sell in a proposal based on what you know before winning the work. Then obviously, the first thing you do once you've won the work is you kick things off with a workshop where you have now at the time to be able to delve into this a lot deeper, ask a lot more questions, figure out a few more things together. And at the end of that discovery process, then yeah, sometimes the brief needs to change anyway, but you're still beholden to figures, especially that you put into that proposal that have at that point been signed off and are in a contract. And yeah, maybe that whole process needs rethinking of it in order to get that value out upfront so that you know what you can put into a proposal and demonstrate that. I've been in situations as well where clients have run workshops with everyone who was pitching in the same room.

19:52 Wow. I'm fascinated. I think I would love that, but it sounds horrible. It is a bit unusual. Everybody's competing, but also trying to get on at the same time. And it's a bit of a weird environment. Everyone's just a bit of one upmanship going on from one person to the next. It's not really a requirement gathering workshop.

20:21 Wow. Yeah, it is a bit uncomfortably competitive. That would be hilarious. Maybe there's value in that, that everybody gets the same thing from it and everybody leaves with the same amount of information. I don't know whether that's good or bad.

20:39 Yeah, I'm always annoyed by the ones where it's like where everyone gets a bit of time to ask questions and then they send round the answers to everyone from what everyone else's questions were.

20:53 Because actually, the questions you ask and the way you handle that process are like they're yours. And that's your skills that's going into that. And I hate any sales process that we're not in control of because you don't get to show that value in those.

21:18 As I say, the point is that because we're into design, we run that sales process like a design project. And when someone makes us run it like a kind of, I don't know, makes us run it like, "Oh, okay, you get the brief. We need a cost. Now a half our phone call. Now we email all the questions around or now we get every competing person in a room." Who would design that environment as a productive design environment? No one. That's not a productive design environment.

21:56 At that point, you're literally just being good at sales. You're not getting to show any of your design value. And that's not the sort of good of sales that we are or maybe I doubt you guys are either because we sell through showing the value. So if you don't get to show any value, then what's the point? I mean, I think another angle on the value of design is kind of trying to show someone the difference that design will make. And by that, I mean, yeah, there's obviously really famous things like, "Oh, we changed the font on this button and it made our company three billion pounds or whatever," at that really high design optimization level. But with most people, if you see an opportunity to just take one thing that they are doing and show them how they could do it differently and get some kind of... With a lot of the stuff, you're not really working with enough data to actually do anything other than just BS really. There's no point in saying, "Oh, we'll increase this by 50%." You haven't got enough data at that point. If you can demonstrate that something would save time and then show them... For example, if it's an internal system, so real case in point, and this maybe came about because we were developing something, we got asked to work on a system as developers. And it was the terrible... The UI and user experience of the system was terrible. And we just saw a few points where it's like, everyone is creating that report and they have to click eight buttons and they have to download three different spreadsheets because it doesn't let you download three months at once in one report or something like that. I think it was something along those lines. And you just show them how often these people doing this report, how long is it taking them, and you can come to some kind of like, "You're paying people this much to do this many times. What if you invest in redesigning this?" You'd have a one-off payment and you'd have reduced all those times by enough to pay for it. So every now and again, you get an opportunity to see something like that.

24:33 It's not some... We don't often come up against those kind of problems where you can just quantify it so quickly and easily. But I think you should always be on the lookout for them. You should always be trying to find that place where you can go, "I'm not just selling you some abstract thing here. Here's design and your bottom line and here's how they can be linked." Yeah. And there's a lot to be said about anywhere you can immediately spot where some repetitive task like that is being done. And there's a lot of friction and it's easy to spot how you can remove friction. It's an easy win and an obvious place to be able to sell in design thinking.

25:18 What we need the opportunity to do to convince a client about the value of design is demonstrated. I think that's clear. Design is about solving problems. That's what we're talking about here.

25:31 It's not just making things look pretty. It's about how design touches every single aspect of a project and every little angle through to the example you just gave, which is about analyzing the business itself and applying design thinking to the business logic and finances, but also every little edge and corner of the experience and story of a project, everything and start to finish.

25:57 I feel like you're about to say every interaction. It feels like you're building up to that kind of punch line.

26:11 I try holding myself back because I do do that a lot in meetings. And then some kind of musical sting will play and it'll be like that.

26:24 That'll be it. Smoke machine kicks in. Everyone in the meeting just goes, "Wow." Ah, I get it. You're completely right. Some of it's intangible, things like brands and how that goes into an interface and how those things about how you design something to make people feel something completely possible to measure, I suppose, hard to measure, but hard to measure.

27:03 Right. Yeah, hard to quantify. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, it goes into all those things. I think if someone gets that, that's a really hard thing to explain to people.

27:21 I suppose the other side of this, as in how you sell the value of design, is how you sell it when you're on a project. Because I think to me, that's harder because before you've sold it, you've got that flexibility. If they don't understand the value of design, then don't keep banging on about it. If you win the business, worry about it then. You can use it to sell or not to sell. But once you're on the project, the value of design, then understanding the value of design for me then becomes pretty tightly linked with the output of the project, how smoothly the project runs. I'm finding more and more how enjoyable the project is for the people working on it. I think that's also a big deal, especially running an agency.

28:20 You don't want to be saying to people who work for your agency, "Hey, this person doesn't get it, but keep working with them. I don't care. They don't get it." People want to work with people that understand their value. How do you go about that? Do you find that people...

28:42 That might be easy for you, but maybe people do understand it a bit more. Do people just fully entrust in your process or do you find you have to be on top of them and how they think about how you're going to design things? It depends. Some people just trust you and then they're just wowed by the results, but other people are always just pushing to get things done quicker and faster without following the proper process. That's no fun for anyone. They're going to get worse quality results aren't properly considered. Just spitting out a solution isn't design. That's just a vomiting experience onto a page. It doesn't help anyone.

29:36 It's bad. I suppose it's bad design, right? Yeah, well, exactly that. It isn't really design. Design is a process. It's about solving problems. It's about taking a considered approach, having inputs, having a process and thoughts and outputs, and often testing and verifying those as well in order to make sure you're doing everything right. Something else we've done in the past, when you're not in such a competitive pitch environment, so maybe it's a client who've just approached you only so far at least, and/or maybe it's someone that you've approached, which we're trying to do a lot more of recently, where you would approach someone and say, "We'd really like to work with you." Something that we found as a way of getting past the whole proposal thing is obviously to do a meeting and to try and convince them that you'd like the opportunity to demonstrate the value that you could bring by bringing your creativity and your process to their business, what the results could be and the benefits that would then follow.

30:53 One thing we often try to do is propose doing a really small test piece of work. We would do a quick workshop to gather as many requirements as we can and information to be able to go away and come up with some ideas, start our process, document the whole thing, and then in a couple of days, just come up with a solution that we can put in front of them to really demonstrate the value as a really small exercise. It could be one user story that we follow. It could be a page in an experience that we just look at and think about the layout and the way a user would navigate that page differently. It may be something like an app that is missing something. Maybe it's got a really bad or completely missing some sort of onboarding flow for an app or a service that it needs it in order to guide the user through the early steps as a first-time user. Something like that where you take a nugget, you apply your process, you have some outputs. They may not be completely resolved because maybe you don't have all the information, but it will be better than what they have.

31:58 Immediately, you can demonstrate the value and we don't do that for free. That is a paid piece of work, but it's a very small and isolated piece of work that is low risk to them. There's no commitment beyond that and they can see what might happen if they invest more. That is one of the most successful ways of being able to demonstrate the value of design to a client, to us.

32:23 It's a bit of a privileged position to be in because especially if you've been invited to a pitch, that isn't something that you often get to do. That's unfortunate perhaps. Maybe it should be.

32:37 Maybe clients should try that instead and do like a paid pitch and get everybody to spend on two days on the same problem or different problems and see whose process that they prefer the best. It's really down to who does the best job of demonstrating the value of their design and their process. That's winning work on real merit and the client will have the best information to make the most informed choice. I don't think there's anything wrong with just saying as you are there that the pitch process doesn't work for you. You've designed a different way to show people what you can do. The pitch process is a thing that is designed by the potential client to try and filter out options to work with. There's nothing to say it's going to be a good way of doing that. I think completely circumnavigating, a pitch is a rubbish really.

33:56 Circumnavigating that to show your value in a different way that then, especially as you say, if you can identify someone who is prepared to invest in design to the point where they're prepared to invest in the possibility of working with someone that's good at design, already that's a brilliant lead. If you're then able to do something to show them some value, then who cares that there wasn't a pitch process like that. They'll have found someone they want to work with and they won't have had to have wasted all that time going through pitches.

34:40 We have something similar. I think it operates similar. We don't always think of it in this way, but when we're working with startups, we run a two-day workshop that's to produce a prototype.

34:55 I don't know if you've seen Google's design sprints and the concept of a design sprint, which is all the rage these days if you can get 10 people in your company to all take a week off and as virtually no company I've ever met. But loads of people are doing it, John, and they're all doing it at Google. Sounds expensive.

35:22 Yeah, absolutely. It's the dream. We'll get there. We'll run a five-day. But at the moment, we do two-day ones. They're fine. They make money on their own and they're standalone things and we come out the end of them with a little prototype for people. But it's completely the same thing.

35:41 It's a low-cost way for us to demonstrate the value of how we design a startup first offering.

35:52 It's a slightly different thing to design than a fully-fledged piece of production work on an existing problem. It's design. It's understanding a problem and helping to solve it. That's a similar thing. We know if someone does that process, they are much more likely to then come and work with us after that. I think if anyone's looking for ways to demonstrate the value of design, they're almost trying to come up with little products they can sell that aren't big commitments, but show off the things that they're good at doing. That's the way to do it because then you get someone that's buying, which is already a great lead, and they leave with something that proves them what you can do. I think that's a really powerful way of going about it because you're also selling something different as well. If someone's going out there to get a project done and they've put a brief out there and everyone's coming back and it's huge numbers in terms of price to do this thing, and you put down on the table something that's a tenth of the price that they can just try out. If the output of that gets them a bit nearer their solution and they can go to other people afterwards and get it finished off, we would say with this prototype thing, you can do this and then go and get the thing outsourced to actually develop it.

37:36 I think that's really interesting. I think that is a really powerful way of literally selling the value of design. Is that what you do then? If a client comes to you with a really big brief, quite a big project, instead of answering that brief, you're turning around to them and trying to sell them one of these smaller products, I guess is what you might call them, of workshop.

38:05 Instead of doing your brief and spending the next three months trying to design and build what's in your brief and charging you the amount everyone else is going to put in for this proposal, what we're going to do is say, "Here's a one-week process or a two-day process that's going to cost this, and the output of that will be this, which will take you so far down the road." Is that how you sell those in? Yeah, basically, especially in situations like a startup with a new product where the outcome of the project is in no way settled. They've gone out there and they've probably got a brief with what they think might happen, but they're starting a new business and what they think might happen isn't going to happen. Something else is going to happen.

38:56 It's almost like there's no value in selling a solution to their brief because what's in their brief isn't going to happen, therefore, your solution is not going to happen.

39:09 You can either try and explain that to them and say, "Do you know what? This thing could cost 10 grand. It could cost 200 grand." It completely depends on what works, like what does your market want? How complicated is that to build? So many unknowns that a proposal is pretty much worthless.

39:31 Certainly, if they're then going to take that number and go, "Oh, this is how much money I need to raise from investors," actually, at that point, it's almost a risk because they go and raise an amount of money that's a pointless amount of money. It's not going to get them what they need.

39:50 So at that point, yes, I think going, "Look, it's really hard to define what you need here and how we deliver it because there's too many unknowns. So how about this? Something small, low risk, it will teach you more." And the value of that will be that there'll be a load of stuff you drop out of this brief that you don't build. The value there being you'll understand more about what people want, you won't build all these features that they probably don't want. So yeah, I mean, and again, but I think it also works because it gets in a room with people and shows them the process of how you go through defining user problems and things like that, and they come out of it understanding how to go about doing that kind of thing. So yeah, no, I think that's massively important. Yeah, I'd never, I mean, we do something similar sometimes that we will get a brief from someone and largely in the cases where it's an ill-formed brief, there's not much to it. And it's one of those situations where how long is a piece of string that we would propose doing something a bit smaller, a bit faster, just trying to get something out there that maybe they can test with.

41:15 But one thing I don't think we have done is taken that approach as a contrary standpoint to a competitive pitch where they've asked for a lot. And I think in almost every time that's happened, our response has been, you know, we've got to stand up against the competition.

41:38 And then we've scrambled around, spent days and days trying to scope things out and figure out where the boundaries lie and how much time this is going to take and what the stories are for every possible thing that they wanted in their specification that half of it isn't really clear and half is guesswork. You're not really entirely sure how much time you spend on it. So you're taking a bit of a stab in the dark. And yeah, it's hard, I think, to resist the temptation to put in a competitive pitch when you know everyone else is probably doing that, to be contrary and give them something that they haven't asked for. Yeah. And I think if in the case of, it completely depends on the project. So it works really well for those new companies, startups, because the proof is there from how the experts in that realm operate. So you have got endless anecdotes on how X company discovers and then pivoted and then when it did something different about how, you know, most startups fail because they build the wrong thing. And there's so much out there.

43:01 And it's so it's very like evocative. If that's the right word, it's very, it's just a very powerful you can, you know, when people cross sit across the table and say, I'm looking to start my own business. And here's what I think is going to work. And you can kind of like lay out to them, how their way they're going about it is wrong. Because look at all this evidence, look at all these experts, and then lay out to them a different path. That works pretty, you know, that's, and it works brilliantly because it's a good idea, right? I'm not kind of trying to calm them. Like it's, it's how they should be doing it. But it, it's a very, that's, that's always a very powerful conversation. And you can see when it works that they just converted. And you know, then fine, you're good, you're going to buy that smaller thing now. And you're going to, you know, there's no point in trying to compete with the people answering your brief.

44:03 But that's a different project to a more established company saying we need this piece of design work done. At that point, though, what should it be? Is there some similarity there?

44:14 Well, I would say your approach is really interesting. And I think something we normally do is say to people, if there's a chunk at the beginning of the project, you can snap off and just offer that. So like, you put down your proposal for the full thing. And you say, but you know what, we don't know loads about it yet. This big number at the end, we could we could make that smaller if we knew the right things. It may be that it, it's an unreliable number, that one, you know, so that's an, that's an idea of how much based on other projects we think this is going to be. If there's a bit at the beginning, you can just snap off and say, and I think this is sort of what you're saying you do, you know, you, if you take just a, can we, you know, can we just do the scoping for this? Can we can we deliver some wireframes? And then then you can decide whether to go on and do the rest of this. So I mean, wireframes is a fairly chunky deliverable, but can we deliver some, just some sketching or, you know, just is there a small project we can do at the beginning to prove ourselves here? Because you're reducing risk for them.

45:32 And that's always enticing, you know, that always goes down well. Yeah, of course. Of course. I mean, I think, you know, as I was saying before, I think the sort of selling strategies around it, you can get really creative with. I mean, this, you know, we do this two day workshop, this project, we call it the prototype sprint, but we're looking at how we can do that cheaper, maybe with multiple people at once. So, you know, maybe instead of us doing it with one startup, try and get four startups in a room and just facilitate the workshop a bit more, have them just get them to facilitate it themselves for cheaper because we're not doing as much. That then extended on to thinking about some kind of massive quiz night kind of event where you've got loads of stuff in the room and everyone's doing it. But, you know, and that's for even less. So, you know, I think if you can almost try and productize the way you show that value, you know, have a package there on your site that's like, do you want to just buy the workshop and single user journey package?

46:48 You know, it costs this, it's a set thing and have that there because that's just nice for people to be able to go, all right, I'll buy that then. That sounds good. And I think it's hard to productize a whole big design project, but you can create smaller things that people can buy off you.

47:11 Everything doesn't have to be a massive three month project, you know? Yeah, agreed. And if you can achieve trying to, you know, successfully communicating the value of the design to the client, I think it makes an enormous difference on the project afterwards. Like the results you get are so much better. You're not fighting with the client as much over time and budget because you've come to an agreement, especially if you take that sort of test approach of selling your workshop package or snapping off that piece of work to do something smaller first. Yeah. And in my experience, that almost always leads to more work. Like it's not a case of, oh, there was a three month piece of work here and I've just sold in a one week piece of work in its place. No, it's a case of you do the one week's worth of work. They see incredible value, but you haven't solved all their problems by a long shot. There's still a lot more to do. And with any luck, they'll continue to work with you and keep coming back to you because they saw the value. It was clearly demonstrated to them with your process and they want, they'll just keep coming back for more. Completely. And also they trust you at that point. And I think that's one thing we definitely are trying to do more of is when the design is kind of sort of documenting and almost like branding our design process. I mean, not branding it, like calling it like we've invented something, but just there's a Google doc that's getting written up. We keep threatening to publish it. That's like designing with Lighthouse.

48:50 And what it is, it's manifesto, Dan. There's some principles in it, right? What is it? What it's going to do is like is explain to clients that as we're working, like why we're doing certain things because so much time is spent not designing. So much time is spent there staring at a client email or base camp post or whatever, where, where someone's just gone, oh, I want it to be this or the bit of feedback they gave you. Your work was just not useful. And now you're spending time trying to undo that and educate them. And we just thought, well, look, what if, what if we at the beginning, we just took them through something that is their documents, they got it. And yeah, they're not going to probably read it or remember it, but it's there and we can and we can point at it, you know, you can point to it and say, I love the fact that you sent me a Photoshop file with your changes on it. But take a look, you know, take a look at why that doesn't produce a good outcome. And it's not because we're precious, although, or, you know, it's not because we're precious or because it's a massively insulting thing to do, even though I sort of believe those two things. It's because we're following this design process, because we have these principles about what makes good design and framing, just framing the whole thing so that arguments can be processed through that and, and you can have that control. I mean, I think I think we did, we did one of our earlier episodes on client feedback, right? So this is, it's probably going back a bit on that. But is that is controlling, controlling the process by, by constantly selling why you're doing stuff. So you're not selling to win work, you're selling your process to people.

50:58 So you just need to be able to, you always need to be able to explain it. Have you read? No, you haven't read this because we had this conversation, but the listeners don't know we've had this conversation. So have you read You're My Favorite Client, the, the, the, the, I haven't read that book. Tell me all about it, please. Well, you should basically go and read it. I mean that in there he, it's old Mike Montero. I'm just, I've never said it out loud before. And that's what my brain thinks it is. But it's the guy that runs Mule Design. And he's written the book for clients, but it's, it's essentially for designers as well, because it's just him pointing out how a design process should run. And it's just really, you know, really powerful bits in it about when to be scared if your designer just says, if you say to your designer, I don't like it, and your designer says, okay, I'll change it to just worry. That's a red flag that the design process is not robust. That that, you know, clearly the designers put something there, just for the sake of it. And you should be expecting more than that from your designer. So it's a clever book, because it says, hey, you know, your, your designer should be amazing, they should, you should expect all these things off them. And the flip of that, of course, is you should hold them in high regard, and you should listen to them, and you should follow their process.

52:31 And I think he's written that book to control the, to control the process and well, to help, I'm sure he controls this process fine. But to outline to other people that they should be doing that as well. And it's, you know, it's selling, it's a book designed to make you take a certain course of action. And I think you need to put effort into making your clients understand by selling to them the value of your design process. I don't mean I'm assuming I presume even guys like yourselves come unstuck with the people ever edit your Photoshop documents and send them back to John. No, but they do put them into PowerPoint and try doing it that way. Now that I respect, which is brilliant. And I've developed an incredible skill over the years of defending the design process and justifying the reason for every single thing that we've put in there, because it's important. Maybe it's similar to you documenting the process, just do that mentally and make a mental note of everything. And there's always a reason for every single decision that was made along the way. And a good reason. Yeah, sometimes some valid points are raised that you need to consider. And sometimes some ridiculous points are made that will make things worse and you need to be able to defend those. And yeah, if you have done a good job of selling in the value of design, that would be much easier to do. If you're constantly battling with a client on those things, then I think you probably haven't been able to demonstrate the value you bring enough yet and need to work a bit harder at trying to sell that value of design to them and demonstrates with results and or statistics, if it goes to test to go that far, that what you're doing and where you do things is going to make things better for their business.

54:33 Yeah, it definitely comes from experience. You definitely, I think you start out like a designer probably makes every decision for a reason, even when they're quite new and haven't been doing it for a long time. But I think the difference in experience is understanding that they need to be able to justify those decisions. Yeah, that's one of the things I always say to junior designers, just take time to write, even if you have to actually write it down, every decision you make along the way, why you're doing it, because people don't, are not cognizant of these things, they just do it out of instinct. Yeah. And if you start thinking about it, it will also make you a better designer because it will start making you rationalize everything you do rather than literally just doing things because you think they look better to doing things because there is a valid reason for it and get good at describing that. And that will help you in explaining to clients the value of the design process and the value of your design ability when you come to defending any feedback that you don't agree with. And then you realize that it's not just, it doesn't just make sense from the point of view of, "Oh, great, now I can explain all my stuff." That makes that process run smoother, which means, one, not so much a nightmare project because that can be one of the, that's definitely one of the major ways that projects derail for us over the years has been design, who's in charge of design and who gets sign off and people, one of our designers has a point where he stops caring and he's even created a little emoji for it to stick in Slack if it ever happens. It's like a graph where you hit a point where you're like, "Okay, fine, you can just have this however you want. I don't care anymore." And at that point, I just am terrified of him hitting that point. But it's a great motivator that if we're ever getting close to that point, it means we've got a fight to make our process understood because when you go past that point, it doesn't just mean they're not happy with their design anymore. That project's likely to be less profitable. It's likely to even drag way on past what it was supposed to. It's not going to make your portfolio. It's really bad for business to not be in control of that design process and sell it. So it's definitely worth that upfront effort. It does save time in the long run, I think. So yeah, I mean completely. So I mean, that's selling design, John.

55:52 It is, yeah. It's not easy and it does take practice. From selling it to get people to work with you to selling it to people that already work with you. I thought you said this was going to be vague. For me, that's comprehensive. I hope we've managed to spit out a couple of nuggets of wisdom there to help people try and sell value of their design process to their clients. Hopefully, you'll all get more work and better work from it and not get frustrated by constantly battling with people because they don't understand why you want to do things a certain way and the value that you could bring. Completely. Good. Yeah, we did go around the houses a bit, but I think we came to some kind of conclusion there. Yeah, absolutely. I'm happy with that. Good. Done. Stick it in a proposal. Send it off. Absolutely. Just put this podcast in a proposal. Done. Cool. All right. Thanks for coming on again, Dan. Where can people find out a little bit more about you? I'm @GentisMaximus on Twitter. We're @WeAreLighthouse on Twitter as well. I am going to use a hot minute to say that we're having an event. Tell me about it, Dan. Our event is on the 14th of March. It's going to be basically like a product panel. There's going to be a bit like, "Did you ever listen to the 'Risington' podcast, John?" Great old school podcast. I didn't believe I did. It's a good old school podcast. John Hicks and John, someone else who I can't remember. And they said it was like, "Garden's question time for the web." We're bringing that back. So we've got like a startup doing a deep dive. We've got a few startups giving some product problems they're having. And then anyone that comes can then ask questions from the audience. If you want more details on it, and I suggest you do, then head over to our site, forward slash event, and it will all be there. It's going to be in London. And I'll be there. And you should be there as well, John. And then the prospective people can come and meet us and we'll tell them. Wow. That'd be fantastic. Exactly. I've got a link to it in the show notes. I'm already coming, Dan. I may even be a bit more involved. Yes, absolutely. Watch this space. The panel is forming. So should we rebrand this? Could it be Perspective Live, Dan? Perspective Live. You do that when you've done like a hundred of them. I'm hijacking your events. I'm going to come with a load of banners and posters and put them up with those as well. You do Perspective Live once you've done like a hundred episodes or something. Yeah, we could do Perspective Live. That'd be big. But this is Lighthouse's event. I'll drop the link in the show notes. And yeah, everybody who fancies it, come on along. It should be really good. And yeah, I'll be there too. I've met some prospective listeners before, John. It was immensely pleasurable. Wonderful. Yeah, I had lunch with someone who listened to every single episode just today. And yeah, he was saying very good things. So happy about that. Whoa. The good feels and some food. Dream combo. So thanks to everyone for listening. I've been John Dark at Dark John Twitter from Every Interaction. You can find us at everyinteraction.com and @everyinteract on Twitter. If you would like to contact us about this episode or find any of our past episodes, you can do so on our website, perspective.fm, or send email directly to us at get@perspective.fm. We're on Twitter, underscore perspective.fm. You can find us on iTunes. As always, we appreciate any ratings and reviews you might leave us there. Or please tweet about the show, share it on Facebook. Tell your friends. Every little bit helps. We're easy to find in your podcast app of choice. Just search for perspective.fm in Google Music, Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Pocket Cast, whatever you like to use, we should be there. All the links are on the website along with the show notes from this episode. Thanks, everyone. We'll see you next time. Cheers, Dan. Cheers, John.