 I'm in a misty spooky forest which is a great location to tell you about why I think that every service designer needs to learn how to sell. Now, you might be thinking, well, Mark, I'm just a service designer. My work speaks for itself. I don't need to sell. You might be right, but if it doesn't, then you're taking a huge risk. And how do you, in the first place, get the opportunity to do that work? At some point, you have to explain the value of your work and somebody has to trust you. And there's even much more at stake. I think if you fail at selling the value of your work, you don't get the opportunity to be in the room when important business decisions are made. So you end up working on challenges that are maybe trivial, less important than you'd like to work on. You might get frustrated with the fact that you have to defend the value of the work all the time. And for a fact, I know that people have quit because of this reason and that's a shame. So I wasn't brought up with sales or selling, not in the closest area. I wasn't even brought up with design and somehow I arrived over here. So I managed to run a service design studio, quite a successful service design studio for over a decade. And one of the things that frustrated me the most in that journey was that we were losing work to people who were less qualified than we were. And that sucked because we didn't get the opportunity to do good, to show our magic. And we knew that if we did get that project, did get to work on the challenge, people would be satisfied. But somehow we failed to show the value of our work. And that led me on a path to learn and understand how to communicate the value. Because I knew that there were people around who had already figured this out. This isn't something new. There are already many books, many expertise, many experts who know how to do this. So I started studying sales and selling and translated those lessons into the world of service design, sprinkled in my experience, my failures for running a studio over a decade. And one of the big insights that I had was, and it's really simple, it's staring us right in the face. The insight was that the diagram, the Venn diagram that we all know, that the zirability, feasibility and the viability circles, which overlap very neatly in the Venn diagram, they are actually very misleading. It's correct on paper, but in reality the viability and the desirability circles don't overlap. At least not to the extent that the model does, makes us believe. So as designers, we're the people who are responsible for the desirability part. We look at what users find important, what they value. And the business is the part who's interested in the viability part. So who's making the overlap? Who's creating the synergy between the two? If it's not us, the design community, who else is it? So I think the solution to the challenge of selling service design is really simple. We need to find ways how we can create a better, a stronger overlap and connection between the desirability and the viability circles, if you will. And the good thing, what I've noticed is that the people who are able to do this actually use their existing design skills. They stay true to the nature of design. They use visualizing, they use empathy, they use everything that's in the design toolkit to make that connection. You don't have to become somebody else to actually be good at selling service design. And when you do, when you do this successfully, you end up being more confident to speak about your work. You'll know what to say when you're in a business conversation. You'll feel more prepared. And that allows you to work on challenges that are more interesting, that are more rewarding, that are more impactful. So I think there's really a lot at stake in learning how to better sell service design. Now, I'd be curious to learn from you what do you feel is the biggest challenge of making that connection between business and service design? Leave a comment down below, down below this video, and I'll try to comment on it in the next video.