One on One

 When you get one on one with a new potential client, or a new potential employer, how do you sell yourself?

Personally my experience is….. You don’t!

Selling more often than not will backfire on you (unless your really good at it). So what do you do instead?

My approach is to educate (not lecture, not condescend), and learn (in other words listen).

Educate: For a client, listen to what they want. Try to understand all their requirements and wishes. Then educate them on things like process (how the design process works), how a website works, or various technological aspects of it. Educate them about choices they may not have thought about. There’s always something that you can find that they will appreciate.

All these things can be true of an employer as well. Research them first, listen to what they say, ask them intelligent questions and understand their answers. Then don’t just respond but educate them in your replies. Don’t just describe something actually walk them through it.

Learn:  This starts with researching the client or employer before you meet. Preparing yourself by studying any material/info they may already have given you.

When you finally meet don’t assume you know, listen and learn, then when you speak stay on task and address the concerns that have been expressed. The more you do this, the more they will perceive you as being on their side, and that you have something to offer, as opposed to something to sell.

To Parallax or not?

I’m going to start by summing this up first: Let me say that I will at some point design a small parallax site for my portfolio cause I do think it’s somewhat cool. I can’t say how much beyond that I will go, so I would like to get some feedback from the design masses as to:

• ·      What do you think about Parallax?
• ·      What type of client would it be good for?
• ·      Have you ever, or how many and what types of client have you done it for?

Here’s Why:

So at this point in my design education I am at the door of entering my 4^th and final term. In our 1^st term we were presented with the concept of Parallax Scrolling Websites.

It was very interesting and different from a design point of view, and a couple of my classmates embraced it and actually did a project in it. But I had some difficulties getting my head around the “what I will call value proposition”. Essentially I couldn’t define what sort of client I might design with it for.

Fast forward to term 3, and in our web interactivity development class we got to try our hand at creating the basic parallax scrolling effect. But I still had the same difficulty, so I asked my teacher what sort of client was it suited for, and had his company developed any parallax sites for anyone.

His response was it was probably best geared towards design/arts based type clients and clients wanting a small site (limited pages), and no they had not as yet done one for a paying client.

I have done a degree of researching on the Internet to try and answer/understand my issue, and I have seen many examples of parallax sites, some good some bad, but very little information as to why the choice was made. I have found a couple of sites that actively promote that they do parallax, but they don’t offer their criteria for when it is appropriate to use.

There is an aspect of a scrolling parallax site that puzzles me. We have been taught that generally when designing webpages, you don’t want them to be to big, because scrolling through to much information will cause a viewer to lose interest. It seems to me that a parallax website flies in the face of this. Yes they are very graphical, but I know that now having viewed quite a lot of them, I tend to lose interest pretty quickly. So why do I see this as being promoted as the next best thing on the Internet?

Collaboration

I attended an interesting session the other day entitled “What I Didn’t Learn From School”. One small part of the presentation was about collaboration, specifically amongst people in the same field (in this case web design).

The gist of this was to not look upon other designers as rivals, but rather as potential collaborators. After all it is not always possible to do it all yourself, and if you want to succeed and expand, then you need to be able to take on more work than you can always do with your own 2 hands.

Now I agree with this concept whole-heartedly, and one of the caveats was to be sure you were familiar with your collaborators (how good they were at what they do etc.). But I want to expand on that in so far as you need to establish with your collaborators what you expect from them as far as business professionalism is concerned, especially if you are going to put them in front of your clients.

A Story: When I moved from mainstream employment to working for a full-time consulting company, I had the good fortune to be well mentored, and the opportunity to learn a phenomenal amount about working in the field.

We were implementing a huge upgrade to the custom ERP system our client was running. In this implementation we were integrating some 3^rd party IBM solutions along with our own custom work, and in conjunction with the needs of our client we had sourced an IBM specialist (retired) who was doing education on IBM products.

My boss, and our sales manager met with the consultant and reviewed the project with him, then arranged a meeting with myself and the client I.T. Manager.

From that we contracted an initial education session for the clients sales group, which went very well. However after that session, I (as the project manager) was asked to have meeting with my boss, the client I.T. manager, and the consultant.

Picture this scenario-small conference room, my boss and I on one side of the table, the I.T. manager and the consultant on the other. After some initial positive feedback for the I.T. manager the consultant took over the session. Essentially he proceeded to call into question some of the things we were doing within the project (based upon 1 meeting with the client), and to semi proposed that there were more IBM specific solutions that he could implement instead.

Although I didn’t let my annoyance show, you can guess I was not pleased. I listened to everything he had to say, and when he was finished, my boss (who does not love confrontation, and always tries to appease a client), turned to me and said that the project was designed by me, and approved by the client, and that he would hold his thoughts till I had an opportunity to respond (Wow some times I loved that man).

I merely proceeded by asking questions (that I knew the answers to) that related to the actual requirements of the client. I asked how the IBM solutions in question could be tailored to meet those requirements (knowing they couldn’t and why they couldn’t), and referring to the I.T manager to correct me if I erred in describing any of the requirements.

At the end of the meeting the consultant agreed that his ideas were not suitable in this instance.

You would have thought a supposed expert with so many years of experience would no better than to address this in front of the client rather than with me or my boss, that is unless you consider that he was probably more of a rival than a collaborator.

He did one more education session on the contract for our client, and never worked for us again. The project completed on time, on budget, and everyone else was happy ;)

Beware Win Win!

Since I am just embarking on a career in design, I will be the first person to acknowledge that I don’t have much experience in this arena.

So for the purposes of this blog (at least at the out set), I will stick with subjects that I do have some experience with and that apply to design as much as anything else

I call this installment “Beware Win Win”, which on the surface sounds like the perfect situation for both a vendor and a buyer.

But actually win win translates as “Compromise Compromise”. Not that compromise is wrong, just that you need to be aware what your compromises are in order to know if you are actually winning (thx for that Charlie Sheen).

From the perspective of the Vendor: They may only have a limited variety of products/services/solutions that they are willing or able to sell. When they sell, they may only be representing what gives them the best Buck for the Bang, and in doing so ignore or actively downplay solutions that would be much better for the client.

So something may sound like a great solution, but it’s actually only the best deal they can offer.

Buyer beware!

From the perspective of the Client: They may be pursuing a product/service/solution, just for the sake of change, or just because a friend recommended it, or because a competitor uses it.

They are after change for changes sake, not because they have identified an actual need. So when they are presented with something they tend to jump on board.

Sounds great for the vendor, but in reality, because this client isn’t honest with themselves about their needs, they will never be satisfied with any product. They will constantly be tweeking and asking for changes or upgrades, or identifying problems that seem to only apply to them. Scope creep is their middle name

Vendor beware!

If you are selling something, be willing to look at your clients needs (learn from them) and help them find the best solution, not the best solution you have available, don’t be afraid to look beyond because even if you can’t deliver the solution, the client will appreciate and remember your help (what goes around comes around).

If you are buying something be honest with yourself and identify the need you are trying to fill and why. Be honest with your potential vendor and be willing to learn from them.