 In this video, you're going to learn how to sell service design, and the special guest is Chris, though. Let the show begin. Hi, I'm Mark, and welcome to the Service Design Show. In this video and this series of five videos, we're going to help you sell service design with more confidence. My guest in this episode is Chris, though. Chris has been on the show before. You might know him as the Jedi Master from the future. If you don't know, make sure to check out the channel. Chris has been on the show before Chris. And like I said the last time, you know what happened after your appearance, right? No, what happened? The future blew up like the channel tripled in size. So, you know, you might be dead to you on your show. I don't know if it happens the second time, but I'll probably want some kind of recognition. Let's see what happens. Chris, we're going to talk about sales. You're like a business guru. You're like a sales guru. You're anomaly in the creative world as I see it. And I'm really curious, you know, you share a lot of content on the future. It's a lot about branding. It's a lot about graphic design, but also a ton of stuff about business and sales. Why do you create that kind of content? You know, I've been very fortunate and I appreciate the very generous description of a business guru. I would not use that to describe myself. I've just been a practitioner of design and I've been very fortunate to meet really generous people who have been very giving in terms of sharing their business knowledge with me. I've worked with a business coach to refine the sales game. The thing that most creatives are afraid of doing, which is to look at the client and say, this is what it should cost and be totally comfortable in the space that exists between those two moments from when you say it, from when they react. With some encouragement from friends and family, I started to share this information in increasingly more transparent ways. And I found that there was a real need for this because you live in your own little bubble. You don't know what people need, what they don't know and what they find to be useful and helpful. Something that people don't know about me is I've been teaching at design schools for 15 years at that time. And so teaching was not a new concept to me, it was just the kinds of things I wanted to teach. So in design school, we generally focus on concept and execution, but we rarely ever talk about communication, negotiation, belief and pricing. We very rarely do that. So there's a need for it. And as soon as I started to share some of this information out there, those videos became widely viewed and people started to know me for these kinds of things. That's how I started to share this information. And I've seen your, I don't know if they were early, but I think 2016 videos and you were rocking it. You were in a classroom just with a whiteboard and teaching business to designers, basically. I love those videos. I'm really curious if you can recall some sort of a moment in your career where you realized, I need to get better at this. I need to get better at sales and business. Can you take us back to that moment? Yeah, that would be probably year one when I was getting opportunity. And this is good news, bad news, when the thing that you hope for that people actually reach out to you for potential jobs and it happens and then you're totally ill-prepared. There were a couple of things that were very painful for me at that time. When somebody would call, I didn't know what the rules of engagement were. How do you conduct yourself on a conference call with a big client? Like we're not talking about little clients. We're talking about shy day and they're calling us about Nissan, the car company. And I'm 22, I think 22 years old at this point, talking about really big national campaigns. I didn't even know how to talk to them on the phone. Like what am I supposed to say? What kind of questions am I supposed to ask? What am I listening for? So that's challenge number one. Challenge number two is then they say, okay, prepare a pitch and a budget for us. What are you gonna do and how much is it gonna cost? So that presented two more problems. What's involved in a pitch? How should I price this project? So some things that I think your audience is going to relate to at least, if they're especially they haven't been trained to do this is you think of a number in your head and then immediately what you do is you negotiate against yourself. You start to say, well, that's too much money. They can't afford. So this number started small and it gets even smaller before you say it. Or the opposite happens, which is you start thinking, okay, niece on a shy day. This should be a really big number. And you start putting all kinds of numbers in there, work in a proposal, 17 pages, you submit it in the ghost on you. Well, what happened? It's because you didn't have the money conversation to begin with. And so you're just guessing the entire time. I think we all can relate to this but not a lot of people actually take action upon it. Why did you decide to, I need to get better at this if I want to be successful in my career? Simple answer, losing sucks. I mean, you put your heart and your soul into thinking into a project and then you think, this is it. This is the one. And then they say, no, this is not. We went a different way. We hired somebody else and something else. That's even worse. Yeah. Well, it's the bitter taste of defeat and it's not one I want to get accustomed to tasting. So I started to reach out to producers and everybody that I knew and that's not a lot of people and asked them, do you know anybody that knows how to bid projects like this? And sure enough, two phone calls later, I met a woman, her name is Karen. Karen came in, she started doing a bid for me and what was beautiful and very generous of her was she said to me, it doesn't cost anything for me to do the bid for you. If you get the project, then hire me. And then not only did she do that, she gave me the Excel spreadsheet, a five page document and she left the file with me because she wasn't trying to hide anything. So I love that. Unfortunately we didn't get the job but what she gave me was some insight into how to bid projects. This is the beginning of learning how to bid projects the right way. Chris, we got some super good questions from the service design community about sales challenges. We're going to handle the first one in the next video and the first challenge will be regarding clients who say, what you're doing, some kind of vague, it's abstract. I don't have a clue what it is. So we're going to talk about that in the next video you will hear how Chris will handle this situation. If you're interested, make sure you click this video and we'll see you over there.