 I'm so glad you all made the right choice in coming to hear my friend Dwayne speak. Dwayne comes to us from San Francisco. He has been to Ward Camp Phoenix several times. He loves this region, so thank you for joining him when he teaches us that nobody wants a website. They want results. Give it up for Dwayne. Thank you, Claudia. Thank you, thank you, thank you. Everybody give it up for Claudia. She does an amazing job. First, volunteer up this morning to introduce someone. She's fantastic. I've decided to call on Audible and, wow, I got a lot of some feedback here. Whoa, yeah, I think, is this mic still up? Okay, maybe. I decided to call on Audible. We're gonna go in batch scripting instead. No, I'm kidding. But I'm Dwayne. I work at Pantheon. I'll get back to that in a second. But I will do love Phoenix. I do love this area. It's about the fifth time I've been here. First time I've ever seen it rain in Phoenix. I was amazed by that. Come on in, come on in. Outside of doing tech, outside of stuff that I'm gonna talk about today. If you ever wanna talk to me about comic books or web comics or crochet, I do less finger knitting these days, but I love crochet or karaoke. I love karaoke a lot. I am on Twitter. I love Twitter. I think it's the best social media platform for events that ever existed. And I would love for you all to be on Twitter with me. In fact, if you could take a picture and put it on Twitter, I would really appreciate that. Oh yeah, all my slides and stuff are over at mcdwayne.com. That's my website. And that's where you can find the slides for this. And pretty much everything else I do, including the travel schedule of where you can kind of see me at upcoming shows. I work at Pantheon. We're a website operations platform. We help people operate their websites in a way that is possible, obviously, without us, but in a way that is more easily attainable to iterate on websites faster or for a team to cohesively work together on a larger project. Scale is what we're really all about. Some of the largest websites in the world. ACLU, the Boston Herald, patch.com, run on Pantheon. And we can help you just the same we help them. Come talk to us. We're happy to talk to you. I want to know who's in the room. Who saw this on the schedule and said, I want to go in and see that talk this morning. Good, for the rest of you, the door is that way. Who said, hey, I am a business person and I want to go and do a business talk? Business people? All right, I'll tell you it less strangely. Who's a developer in the room? Awesome. Who does it all? Who is like, they do the whole ball of acts. Awesome. Is anybody here just a designer? You're not just a designer. Design is super important and thank you for your job, sir. Is there anyone in here that is a project manager? Surprise, this talk is actually for you. This is gonna try to make your life a lot easier in the long run. So why am I talking about the fact that nobody wants a website if I'm in a WordCamp? Well, I was talking back at WordCamp Baltimore in 2017 and somebody in the audience during my talk about Discovery raised his hand and gave one of those questions that was really a comment of how a website should unite a brand under a current common theme and blah, blah, blah. And I like, it took me a back. I'd never heard anyone say that before. I said, I don't think so. I think a website does what a website does because nobody actually wants a website. They want what a website gives them. And that's, when I said that, half the room did this. And the other half of the room did this. And it was one of those moments where I said, there's a conversation that needs to be had here. There's a conversation that I don't think I am 100% qualified to be the expert in. And I firmly believe that in this room right now, collectively in all of your heads, you have more knowledge about this subject than I can possibly have. And the only way we are going to get better with everything we do is to share. That's why we're at WordCamp in the first place. So later on, when I start the Q and A, I want to have a conversation with you. And for the people with mics running around so we can capture this, it's gonna be a little hard. We're gonna make this an act of conversation with you. I'll do my best to put this on WordPress TV in an easy way for them to consume. But before we get to all that, I need to volunteer. That's a little bit hungry, because it's still a middle of the morning. Who here wants a sandwich? I don't want somebody that's hungry. That's hungry. Anybody here, even a little bit? Way in the back, way in the back. Come on up here. Come on up. Give her a round of applause, everybody. She was brave. Absolutely, thank you. Thank you. All right, I do. Introduce yourself for the fine people at home. I'm Vicki. This is Vicki. Deluzio. That's it. Yeah. I'm speaking also later. So she's speaking. What time are you speaking? 1150. 1150, go see her talk. So let's disagree that a sandwich, we all agree, we know what a sandwich is. All right, so here's your sandwich. Are you satisfied with this? It looks a little plasticky for my liking. You know what? I understand exactly what's wrong here. Nobody likes the cheese. If I remove the cheese, is this what you wanted as a sandwich? If I could take the cheese off of it. Not particularly. I'm gonna add more onions and mustard and we're gonna toast the bread a little bit. It just melts it a little bit. Would that satisfy you? I could deal with it. Thank you very much. Thank you very much. You're gonna have to sit down. Of course, no one wants this sandwich. You made a plastic. But just swapping things out, I can't possibly solve the fundamental problem. This isn't what she wanted at all. I asked who was hungry. There's no way this can feed her. There's no way this constitutes the expectation because that's really what it comes down to with everything. If we can line up the expectation with the results, people are happy. My expectations for this slide, it would say expectations and results. I can see the designers in the room cringe because I had no other expectations. When we don't align our expectations and results, bad things happen. Sometimes they're fun, bad things, but people really get cranky and downright furious when they put money on the line and we simply don't deliver on what they expected. Even if they don't know what they were asking for. And that leaves us in the industry, every single person in this room with a bad reputation overall for people that don't know what we do. This is our actual quote from an actual CMO in Silicon Valley, the friend of mine. We were drunk one night and this is, at the time, it was a quarter million dollar project that spiraled beyond that later. But he said, going developers don't take their fiduciary responsibilities seriously. We pay them good money to figure out how to make the best website to meet our needs is up to them to figure out those goals. How many people think that this CMO is gonna recommend that same agency to anyone else he knows in Silicon Valley? Yeah, exactly, know when a hand went up. And he won't. Because he got a quarter million dollars into the project before anybody on that web team said, so what are you trying to measure? We'll get to that. The problem, fundamentally, is that we see ourselves in a single role, a lot. Not everyone, for those of you doing it all, I see you're probably wearing a lot of hats, but there's one that you relish. There's one that when you think, what do I actually get to deliver when you actually get to your real work, you're doing a thing. And for some people, it's web development. And they wanna sit behind and write PHP code or a JavaScript or they wanna actually write a thing. The problem is if we're selling that service a lot of the time, people that don't know how all of this works, they don't know what a website is, think we're all of this all at once. So while we have this picture in our head of what we do, this is what the people wanting a website think you're gonna do. If we step way back from the problem set of, well, how do we make that sandwich better by swapping things around or putting different ingredients on or changing the format a little bit and say, well, what are we actually trying to solve? You pretty quickly come to the realization that, wait a minute, they don't want a fancy website. They don't wanna be Facebook. They don't want that. They want four people a day to buy a thing. We can start thinking of the problems different. This is my favorite quote from Candace from Woof Conf. Not designing a chair, but a human suspension system. We need to look at what we're actually, actually, actually trying to accomplish and step way back. And I think the time to do that is very, very early in the conversation. It's your process. If you follow this process or you have another map system, it's all good. It's all a process. This is the way I learned how about processes for my 12 years in sales and a few years in marketing. All projects work kinda like this. Let's imagine everyone in this room, I have a lead from you, which means I have your email address. And I send out about emails and I say what I am capable of doing and you say, hey, I would like to maybe engage with you about that thing that you do. You're now a qualified lead because, well, you want the thing. And then I qualify you further and then we'll do a whole series of discovery to make sure that, hey, we can actually do the exact thing you want. I will write that down. We will buy it. Or you will buy it. I will deliver it. This is every project you've ever done. If you buy an ice cream cone, you go through this whole process. It's just very fast. And transactional doesn't really matter. I've been involved in 18 and two-year sales cycles before, 18 months and two-year sales cycles before, you get stuck in the middle a lot. Discovery is where you're gonna spend a lot more time than you think you're going to. And we're gonna talk about that later. But I think we can actually save a lot of time in the discovery process by doing the qualification process a little more intelligently, a little more attentively, and thinking about what we're trying to deliver before we even talk about what we're delivering. We're trying instead talking about what they want. So if we take the qualification process and really dig into it, who here knows what a qualification process is? Has there ever been any training whatsoever about this? Okay, so this is brand new for a lot of folks in the room. In the qualification process, you're trying to answer some very, very minimally basic questions to figure out if you should spend time with someone or not. The qualification process should be very, very quick and efficient. It might take a little bit longer in a larger sales cycle, but it should be pretty quick. And these are the basic four questions that you're trying to answer. Do you have a budget? Can you actually pay for the thing? Do you have the authority to make that purchasing decision? Do you actually need this thing? And do you have a timeline? My favorite thing about sales guys, if you don't have a timeline, you don't have a project. You don't have a drop dead date, there's no way you're gonna get it done. I also subscribe to other versions of this, Scotsman, Mean Act, they're all the same. There's a preset list of things you need to identify that people have or they don't. And then we'll go on to spend more time in discovery. And if we can mechanize this as much as humanly possible, at the same time of stepping back and saying, well, what are you actually trying to accomplish in an intelligent, repeatable way? You're gonna spend almost no actual human time on the qualification process. Let's go back for just a second. Notice how the funnel's very, very big at the top. There's an awful lot of people to qualify in the world versus how many proposals you write. Where do you actually wanna spend your time in this funnel? Your actual, actual day-to-day time. Anybody? Anybody? Delivery, that's 100%, thank you. 24 hours in a day? Yeah, you wanna spend eight hours a day doing delivery, which means you need to spend eight plus N doing procurement and then eight plus N plus F for qualification and N plus, then you get the idea. There's not enough hours in the day to do this. If you do this by hand piecemeal in a unique fashion every single time. So let's mechanize it. Asking someone, do you have a budget? It's pretty straightforward. I'm not gonna tell you about that. Do you have a timeline? Again, straightforward, I'm not gonna talk about that. Do you have the authority to do this? You guys know how to ask that. Need. All the years I spent in sales, I took this one for granted the most. Because if you're talking to me, obviously you need my product. Why else would you be talking to me? And that was how I thought about it. And that's wrong. A need is a goal. A need is a thing that they're trying to accomplish. And asking them what their actual goal is, is tricky. Because I want a website to sell a thing. Like, okay, but what are you actually trying to get done? That's why we can rely on beautiful systems that I didn't make up that other very, very intelligent people wrote books on. Smart goals. I love this. This is one of my favorite things that I've ever used in my life. Specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, time bound. Because we're getting back to that whole band idea again. It's time bound, relevant. Relevant, you're never gonna know for sure. If you're, especially if you're an internal project. If you're external, you're never gonna know if it's relevant to the rest of their business needs or not. Unless, we'll talk about that later, but if you're internal, you can kind of ask this, is this really relevant to what we're doing? But more importantly, if you're on a project, is it attainable? Can we actually do this thing? And really the most important one's the M. Can we measure it? How do we know when we're done? When do we know we've succeeded? Luckily, there's a science behind this. You can call this whatever you want. I prefer KPI over OKR or whatever else you wanna call it, all the other acronym soups of it. But key performance indicators, the general's topic is pretty easy. And in the simplest terms, it's a yes or no. It's a percentage, it's a raw number. For instance, my laptop here is my laptop on or not? Just based on looking at it. Yes, why did you say that? The light, the light is indicating there's a key performance going on. That's what a key performance indicator is. It's simply a number that indicates a thing happened or it didn't. A thing is happening. A number of people did this thing or a number of people didn't. That's all it is, it's simple, a number you can look up. And if we can bake this in early to the process, to understand what their KPIs are, it's gonna save us so much time down the road. And in a five minute conversation, you'll be able to quickly tell, I can help you or I am gonna walk away. Oh, I can do this project with what you told me or we really need to dig in here before I am willing to sit down and do a full scope project internally. And just figure out the business needs. What are we actually trying to accomplish with the business when you want this landing page? Now in a perfect world, we could just flat out ask this. But you're gonna get blank stares if you ask this. Just blank. In a perfect world, someone will say, oh, I'm glad you asked. Here's my spreadsheet with 12 pages, or 12 tabs in it, and here's what we gotta deliver and here's the timeline for it. Work with that person. If you ever meet that person, work for them. Immediately just take that job with no questions asked. If we don't, if we don't dig into, if we don't qualify enough first, we're gonna spend a lot of time to discover with people that we don't wanna spend time and discovery with. We're not gonna discover that they don't know what they're doing until it's way too late and you've spent hours and hours of paid discovery with them or unpaid discovery with them, which is even worse. If you talk to someone and they say, I got all these KPIs figured out, that's awesome. But more people are gonna start explaining their business idea. And unfortunately, a lot of business ideas aren't thought through. And if you're getting more and more confused about what they wanna do, the more they talk to you, that's a very bad sign. That's a red flag. If they can't tell you the business value of why you're doing a thing, start asking the questions a little bit differently. I mean, an easy question, even if they don't know what a KPI is, oh, I thought I had that slide in here. Yeah, easy qualification question is, what are we measuring? I slipped, flip sides last night, I forgot. What are we gonna measure? Now, as a web developer, and speaking to web developers, would everybody agree these are generally good KPIs for a website? You better, because this is like what Google told me, was KPIs for a website. Unfortunately, marketing's KPIs are a little different. And again, this is what Google told me after multiple search results. And unfortunately, the people that actually bring the money in the door have these results that they're looking for. And ultimately, the people that report to the board or just the president of the company has this. And if you're sitting there and you're like, I don't know how we can get to any of these, that's okay. Because sometimes, you wanna wanna change hats and say, look, I don't know how we can get there, but I can help you get there. And we're gonna do a little data science. But now, I'm gonna become, change hat, a business consultant. Who in the room thinks that a web developer, developing WordPress websites, and a business consultant should be paid the same rate? Not a single hand went up. How many people doing web development projects have ever given free business advice? Every hand in the room went up. That's ever, 90% of the room. Because data science is a different project. And we're gonna dig in and figure out how to measure these things and how to interrelate all of those numbers. Because it's just math. If you look at what you're trying to accomplish, you can say, look, I need to get this metric. This metric is made up of these metrics. These metrics are made up of these metrics. Don't use this for beta in your business, it'll fail. But you can start mapping things and say, look, we can get to here, because I can show evidence of this, this, this, and this working. And these should all indicate that this is working. We're gonna add all these things together and show you on paper, we measured success. We're done. And if they go along with that, they'd be like, that's a good idea. We should do that. Charge them the business consulting money and be on your way. And then come back and sell them again the web development services, different contract, different rate. But do you wanna change hats? If you don't, how many people know somebody that specializes in business consulting? No, raise your hand super high. Go, look around, look around. If you don't know somebody that currently knows some, if you currently don't know anybody that does business consulting, somebody who's got their hand up right now, find them later, out in the halls. If you see them say, hey, you had your hand up. Who's that business consultant, you know? Because you need to know a business consultant if you don't wanna be a business consultant yourself. So introduce yourselves. But that's not just business consulting, it's everything. And know which hats you wanna wear. Know which specific hats you wanna wear. And ask people, again, at the qualification stage, the first five minutes you're talking about what they wanna do, what's your plan around? Fill in the blank. Everybody can answer those questions or, again, they will start getting very confused and frustrated and that's a very big red flag and a bad sign. Asking the question, what's your plan around content strategy? How many people have ever started a project and then you find out the client once you deliver all of the content? Yeah, this is the number one question I use to get out of work. When people say, I wanna build a website and like, what's your content strategy? And nobody ever comes back, except my sister. She did an awesome job. But it builds your announcement. Yeah, that's a simple theme. Same thing for design services. Back in web development is not design. People outside of this industry, people that don't build websites for a living or aren't involved in the space, they don't know that. They don't know what a Vernon developer is. They don't know what React is. They have no concept of PHP. They think it's all the same. So ask them, who's your designer? What's the design plan? Because should a Vernon designer and a PHP developer be the exact same job? They could be. Yeah, we're both hats. Project Management is one of my favorite ones to ask about. This won't really apply if you're doing a very, very small business, but if you're working for any size company with a marketing team, make sure you're asking this. What's your project management strategy? And if they scratch their heads and they're like, well, we thought you would just do that. How many do you wanna spend all day wrangling people in emails? Yeah, project managers do that for a living. So if they have a good PM team, great. Plug into their Asana and away you go. If they don't, well, know that you're gonna charge for that too. It's up to you. You can fill in the blank for any other thing you can think of. I was a short list. Again, my goal here isn't to be the product expert or the subject expert. My goal here is to start a conversation with you because if you just wanna focus in on the one thing you wanna do, there's only so many hours in the day to do it. And if we can get through the whole process and get just the delivery super fast, you can spend all day doing this, doing whatever you said I wanna wear this hat. But we can't waste our time doing piecemeal discovery with everyone in the world. And we'll save a lot of time with those discovery processes if we disqualify people that don't have their game together and aren't ready to work with you yet or sell them the services to make them ready to work with you. Because the end of the day, the goal needs to be met. And that goal is the thing they actually wanna do. Because nobody actually wants a website. They want the results, which we can measure in KPIs. What's that? Is that a hint? That was a hint, that was a hint. A subtle, subtle, it was subtle, I know. Again, I'm Dwayne, I work at Pantheon, I'm on Twitter, all my slides are on mcdwayne.com. Thanks. I wanna have a conversation with you. I'm serious. If you have questions, Q&A type, I'm happy to answer, but I have a couple of questions for you first and then we're gonna run around. Who has the mic? Is there a mic? I guess I'll just repeat the question, it's fine. But who here charges for discovery? Then raise your hand high if you charge for discovery. I look around the room, everybody, everybody, everybody see? Who here does not do a paid discovery process that involves in a discovery process? Again, raise them high. Don't be ashamed, don't be, there's, would someone that charges for discovery like to say a few words about why they charge for discovery? How is, why do you do that? Right there. Yeah, you get underpaid and wasting time, not sure if you can do it or not. That was a question for you, actually. Oh, me? All right, I'm gonna steal focus back up here just because it was a very large room. If it was like 30 of us in a very small room, we'd just keep it going like that. Someone that doesn't charge for discovery, is there anybody that specifically doesn't charge for discovery because they've made the business decision not to? They like went down that path and it didn't work. Or there's just a reason you don't. So thank you for those, didn't hear that. Works in-house, they do have paid clients, they're willing to do free discovery and free, not free work, but original scope out. But if it turns out written scope creep come in, then we're no need to go back and do a paid discovery. Thank you very much for making that point. That's actually a point I wanted to make. This isn't just about marketing. This is for every project you ever work on. That's why I said generic project funnel. Doesn't matter if it's a website, doesn't matter if it's an online anything, it doesn't matter if it is literally how you're gonna get cookies out to your employees. Any project goes through a project funnel because you only have so many hours in a day to do things. I saw a hand way in the back. You're gonna have to yell. Okay, that's the first time I've heard that answer. It's a need by need project basis. Or you do it on a per project basis whether you're doing it or not. At this point, oh yeah, good, good. I'm sorry, can you speak up just a little more? I like that. Yeah, thank you very much for that answer. Thank you very, very, very much. In added service, you are 100% correct. This is why I'm a huge fan of paid discovery. For those of you who do paid discovery, I don't know, this is a tall talk about qualification. We'll get back to it, I promise. But for those paid discovery, what do you give them at the end of that paid discovery? Is there an artifact that is generated and created at the end of your process? Case by case, okay. Yep, that's it. Yeah. Every client loves color, it's true. But that is the heart of it right there. You're not selling them just arbitrary meeting time. You're selling them a process discovery where they can take an artifact and if they don't wanna work with you, maybe you don't wanna work with them, they can take it and go wherever. Everyone's happy. They've spent money to get their ducks in a row so they can go actually get a real project done and I love that. All right, back to qualification process. Who here has a web intake form on their website and if you wanna work with you, they have to go through your form? How many hands? Everybody raise your hand if you can do this. How long is this form? Just random, just shout it out. Long? Conditional. Tell us about the conditional one. And just for the people in the back, can you mind speaking up just a little bit? Love it, love that. How much time does that save you overall? Just gut feeling. The night and day difference from before you did that to now, how many sales calls end with them saying that was a giant waste of time? Or with you saying that was a giant waste of time now. None. Who here can say that every sales call they're on isn't a massive waste of time? Wait a minute, no, I said that wrong. Who here only has successful sales calls? Even if it doesn't result in a sale, it wasn't a waste of time, it just wasn't a good fit, but who, yeah. Yeah, we've all been there. We've all been in sales calls like why am I here? Why am I talking to this person? They don't know what they're doing. Either side of that too, like clients don't know what they're doing more than I don't know what I'm doing most of the time. For those of you who don't have a web intake form, is there any kind of formal process that you go through to qualify a person that's been very successful for you that you'd like to share? All right, I guess web intake forms are the only way to do it. No, there's a billion ways up this tree. That was my point here. I was hoping someone would share an anecdote or two, but there's not one way up this mountain. That's why again, I can't be a subject matter expert in this because there's no one true subject matter expert in any of this stuff. I have years of experience of doing this over and over again, and I wanna spend all my time fighting procurement to get that check at the end if I'm just doing the sales part. Oh, you had a question? Oh, yeah, I thought you were standing up to say something. With that, those are my questions to you. I'm always interested in those two big questions intake forms and discovery. What questions do you have? Smart goals, relevancy. Okay, where's my, oh, sorry, there it goes. I've always seen that it's attainable, but you're right. If it's not something you can actually do, if it's not realistic, don't start. Again, this is why spark goals are easy to understand. Like, who here doesn't understand what's on the slide? Anybody? Exactly, or you're just embarrassed to raise your hand. But specific, measurable, attainable, relevant time bound. Relevant, so you might be thinking, hey, this is a great talk for people that have outside clients. I was given this talk in the Drupal world, and my buddy over there in the works for a company called Genuine, Mike Miles, he came to me a few months after I gave the talk, the first time I ever gave it. And he's like, this has helped me immensely internally. He's a lead developer of this company. Because now when he gets a work request that he doesn't understand why he's doing it, he go back and ask what the business value is. What were they actually trying to accomplish? And several times, he said, he has stopped work dead in his tracks, moved to a completely different solution, and the customer was thrilled doing backflip so happy because they actually got what they wanted, not just a new form on a web page. They got a new way to engage with their customers that they didn't think of. They don't know how to think about these things. My other talks about discovery and storytelling and understanding of the points of story, if they knew how to come up to you and say, I would like you to design me a React front end for a WordPress website that's gonna be on the back end. We're gonna have 16 pieces of content and they're just gonna give you all the technical specs and you just have to implement it. That's amazing but that doesn't exist. That just doesn't. They're paying you to figure out how to take that idea they have on a napkin and turn it into money. A website might do it. It might not. But we gotta measure these things. And that's the whole point of this. If we can't measure it, we can't improve it and then we never know we're done. All right, one more question and then we're just gonna be done. Over there. I personally feel that comes down to communication with project management. If you don't have a dedicated scrum master or project manager, it's almost impossible to keep a project aligned because everyone will start building their own fiefdoms back up. That's a whole other talk of the fiefdoms inside of any company. But if you have a person, a task master, whose job it is to make sure they stay aligned, they'll stay aligned. Yeah, I highly, highly recommend looking into scrum training. It feels like a buzzword, agile feels like a buzzword right now but the core fundamental things of the agile manifesto are true. We need to favor people over processes. We need to have better communication of feedback loops. Who here thinks DevOps is about tools? It's not, it's about communication between all the users. If you're not getting feedback immediately and often on everything you do, there's no way you're knowing if it's working or not and you have no way to iterate on it and that's what scrum is all about and agile is all about at its heart is let's figure out how the thing works and keep it working and let's iterate to make it better. And if you don't have someone actively, actively, actively doing that and forcing you down that road and keeping you in check and honestly keeping everybody honest then people will go back into their fiefdoms and the numbers will drift apart again and that's just, that's reality. So if you haven't had that conversation with your company of like, can we look at scrum training? Highly recommend doing it. It's not that expensive and it will literally be a game change for how you work internally. Oh, good thing. Yes, I left it on the conversation time slide and I meant to leave it on this one. mcdwayne.com is my website. They're also gonna be on the WordCamp Phoenix website linked from the event. Same exact slides if you go to the website and look for this talk. All right, well with that, thank you very much for your time. Thank you for the conversation. I always learn something every time I do this and thank you so much. If you wanna talk to me more. Happyness Bar.