 If you want to get a hold of me, the best way to get a hold of me is always going to be Twitter. I love Twitter. It's the best social media platform of all time. All my slides and everything I do are on my IndieWeb project of mcduane.com, which is WordPress. If you ever want to talk about anything besides anything I'm talking about today, please hit me up about Crochet. And karaoke tonight, how about the Wild Beaver at 10? Everybody? Everybody? Yes. I got a project I'm doing this year, so excuse me for just a second. Animated GIF will be posted later. Why am I talking about this thing? Nobody wants a website? Because in Baltimore, 2017, I had a conversation about discovery process. And someone in the audience said, the point of a website is to unite a branded or a common theme. And I said, I don't think so. I think a website does what a website is supposed to do. But that's whatever a website is supposed to do. Because nobody really wants a website after all. And half the room did this. And half the room did this. And I said, you know what? That means there's a good conversation that should be had here. I firmly believe that inside of this room, inside of most rooms I ever talk about this stuff, that there's a collective knowledge that's way better than what's in my head. And I would love to learn about you all. I don't have a lot of time. But very quickly, who here is involved in the business process where they work? I wrote this talk for you. But what I found out giving this talk is who here works in internal projects on teams? It's actually for you. And as we go through here, I hope to explain that. So the whole rest of this is about this process of lining up our expectations and results. And I feel every designer in this room cringe. My expectations for this slide is it would say these two words. And it works. No other expectations were met. But if you expect something like that, then you get good results. But if you expect something like Elmo and you get a red monster like that, you can have a very cranky child on your hands. And as we all know, clients are really cranky and act like children. They also act like mobs sometimes. And this is actually a real problem. So to get sober and stern for a second, this is a real quote I'm about to show you from a real CMO who worked on a quarter million dollar project that kind of spiraled after that. And he said, one night drunk to me, when they don't take their fiduciary responsibility seriously, that they, we pay them a lot of money to do these websites. And they don't even bother to find out what we're trying to do. And we just keep throwing money at it. And who here thinks that this CMO is recommending that firm for another project? Exactly. And that guy knows a lot of people. He's at Silicon Valley. So we can fix this though. There's a really good way to fix this. I think the problem stems from that CMO when he said, I'm going to hire a web development team. The web development team heard, hey, they're going to hire a web developer. And this is what the web developer said in their head. I'm going to make the best piece of technology to do a website in the world. And it's going to be awesome. And what the business owner, the CMO in this case, thought was I'm going to hire a firm that does all of these amazing things. And I'm getting at the price of the single developer. That's amazing. And there's nothing wrong with this. There's nothing wrong with that. But how do we prevent that world of, I think I'm hiring that, but I'm really just hiring this. Or I think I'm just doing this, but I'm expected to do all of this. And I think process can save us. I'm a firm believer in processes. Good processes mean good communication. We just heard about Scrum. We've heard about good things this time around. But who here has never seen a project funnel before? Awesome. We can save some time. So as things move through a project funnel or a sales funnel or any other kind of funnel, there's things you can do, people you can talk to, people that actually need you to do the thing that you can do, people that will actually pay you to do that thing, and finally the people that you actually did the thing for. Moving through that process, well, is literally a system. The part that comes first is figuring out, can I work with this person? The more time we spend here, the less time we have later to actually deliver the thing and actually write good proposals. So I want to talk to you the whole rest of this time about how we can improve that qualification process. I want to talk to you about it from a sales perspective because I have a long background in sales. But this works for internally as well. Do we have a budget authority need time frame to get this done? Does somebody actually approve this project to say, yes, we can do this project? Awesome. Do we have a timeline? Is there a drop dead date? I firmly believe. If you don't have a drop dead date, you don't have a real project. Can you pay for this thing? As a sales guy, I can tell you that's the only one I cared about. All the others, I can figure out if you got enough money. And need is the one I always neglected. If you're talking to me, obviously you need my product. Why else would you be talking to me? I make this assumption. Unfortunately, need is the hardest one to nail down for a lot of salespeople, for a lot of business. And you don't step back and say, why are we doing this? What are we actually trying to get done? Instead, we just dive in. Too fisted. And we're trying to get it done, whatever that thing is. Because they're talking to you, of course they need your thing. We don't step back and say, what are you actually trying to do? What are we actually, what's the goal of me working with you? What is the thing that I should produce at the end that makes value for you? And if they've done their homework, they're going to have some smart goals for you. I like smart goals because they're well-defined on the internet. I didn't make this up. You can find this everywhere online. Smart goals, specific, measurable, habitable, relevant. Relevant, you're never going to be able to tell that for sure. Working with an outside firm. You can actually ask these questions. So where does this tie back to our higher goals as a company? Nothing wrong with asking that. You're not saying no. You're not just asking for a better definition. Time bound, of course, I already talked about that. Measurable is the one I want to talk about, though. Measurable is the most important one on that list. Because you can't measure something. You can't improve it. You can't actually get it done. There's Lord Kelvin, the guy that admitted the Kelvin scale. He said this and a bunch of other really, really cool stuff. He reads Wikipedia article. But this is my favorite thing he said. And fortunately, very fortunately, this is a very well understood thing out in the world. In fact, marketing people tend to refer to it as this. KPIs. Who here uses KPIs in their business regularly? Look around the room. Seriously, keep your hands up, people. Find these people later and ask them how that has changed their business and how it affects them and how they think about numbers and metrics. That's an important conversation I want you to have. I think we can tie that into the qualification process. And if someone says, I want you to do a project for me, I think you should say something like this. So do you have KPIs to find? And most people are going to give you a blank stare and have no idea what you're talking about. Because most people don't work with the world of KPIs. Marketing people do. But you can ask everyone, what are we going to measure? How are we going to know when we're done? Because what are we going to measure? And if they look at you and say, I need my leads to go up by 30% in the next 120 days. That is a yes or no black and white. We did it or we didn't. But if they start talking and explain a business model and, honestly, you have no idea what they're saying, that's a giant red flag you should walk away from or run and never talk to them again. No, I'm kidding. If you're an internal team, though, and if they start saying, like, start trying to boil it up again, again, what is the goal? What's the number? How am I going to be measured on success here? All managers understand that idea of success. And it might be, if you're working as a consultant or an outside firm, that you could say, you know what? You need a business consultant. And I am willing to change hats right now and charge you for being a business consultant. Who here thinks that a web developer doing WordPress and a business consultant should make the exact same rate? Not a single hand in the room for those people at home. I firmly believe that, too. Those are different jobs. Because a business consultant is going to say, all right, a web developer is going to give me these numbers, but I don't really care about these numbers because I'm a marketing person. I care about these numbers. But a business consultant can say, hey, these kind of map together somehow. And then he talked to the salespeople and said, the salespeople care about these numbers, which, again, aren't these numbers or these numbers. These are different numbers. And ultimately, we've got to talk about these numbers. What do the business owner actually care about? All of this is Google-able. What do business owners care about? KPIs, business owners, KPIs, salespeople, KPIs, marketing. That's where I found this. Anyway, a business consultant can look at these and say, I'm going to tie these together for you because I'm going to figure out a strategy for it. At least a good one will. At least a good one that's data science driven. Not all business consultants share the same. I firmly believe in the data science model that we look at the real data and we move those needles forward. And if you look at real numbers, it's all math. You can just put it all together. Average data scientist starts at about 140,000 a year in case you're curious. If you want to go down that metric path. And you can definitely make algorithms. Don't use this verbatim in your business. But you can make metrics like this, algorithms like this that will start saying, all right, we can get to your business owner KPI. We can solve the problem. We can get to the goal that you actually want to do. But business consultant was one of the things on that list they think you're already doing. So in your qualification process, again, this is literally the first five minutes you're talking to this person about the project. Not the first five minutes of all time, but first five minutes about you're seriously talking about can we work together? It's like, well, do we have a plan for these other things? Like, what's your content strategy? This is the way I've gotten out of almost every work, every website anyone's ever wanted me to build. It's like, I want a website. I'm like, what's your content strategy? And I never hear from them again. One exception, my sister, who did an awesome job on her content strategy. Go, Deb. What's your plan around design services? Because a designer and a back-end dev are two different jobs. They just are. I'm a terrible designer. I have borrowed all of these slides from the Internet. What's your plan about project management? Ooh, this is a fun one. Am I going to report to someone on your team? Who is that person? And when push comes to shove, what happens? Have you defined this? If so, they have a project manager team internally that says, yeah, we know exactly what to do. Here's how the process goes. I would try to join that company. They're amazing. What's your social media game? Oh, we have a Twitter account. How much other work are you going to have to do for them? We have this entire media library that floats out to 15 different sources. I was like, all right, you got that figured out. Good to go. I don't need to worry about that. Because those are all different jobs. And it's up to you if you want to do any of those jobs. Literally, you get to make the decision. Do you just want to be the developer who sits there in codes and delivers a tech product? That's awesome. Thank you. You can work inside of a larger organization that delivers those things. Or if they're just hiring you for a specific job, do that one specific thing. And then spend all of your time delivering. But the only way you can do that is you spend almost no time on the things above it. The things that take, honestly, the longest time. Because I might talk to 100 people to qualify them into like 40 people that I can actually talk through with the discovery process to get to 10 proposals. And I'll probably lose eight of those. That's just reality. I'm expensive. But that's a lot of time. I want to spend all my time in the delivery aspect. So let's optimize. Let's ask these questions earlier. Let's say, hey, you want me to do a thing? Explain the business value to me. Don't be a jerk about it. But say, look, I'm just trying to understand how we can better meet your goals. Because at the end of the day, nobody actually wants a website. What they want is the results that website can give them. And hopefully we can measure that with KPIs. Because that's pretty easy math. You're supposed to clap along with Picard and Riker. No idea why Picard's mad at Riker right there. But again, I'm doing a work at Pantheon. Please reach out to me on Twitter. But I want to have a conversation really quick with you. Don't account for Q&A. But really quickly, anybody here that charges for discovery in your business, please raise your hand. Look around. Look around. Anybody, just keep your hands up. Anybody that doesn't charge for discovery, also raise your hand. And the first group, put your hand down. All right. The first group, people in the second group, talk to people in the first group, find them and say, hey, why do you charge for discovery? Or why don't you charge for discovery? If you can have that conversation, I'll feel like I've won WordCamp US. So thank you very much. I'm Dwayne.