 If you've ever tried selling service design, you know one of the hardest things to sell is actually the research phase This is one of the questions I got from a student in my selling service design with confidence course, which you can find over here and The question is like why is it? Why is it so challenging for clients to invest in research? I think there are a lot of reasons one of my favorite explanations is if you think about how companies tend to use their budgets most of their budgets they they like to allocate it towards the back end of a project so Towards the implementation part towards the building part and that is because they don't want to end up in a situation where They've spent all their money in the first three months of a year-long project and then realize that they need to do all kinds of Shit, but don't have money left. So your client will be naturally wanting to push in fat investment Further down the line that is a challenge if you are selling research because we are when doing research We're saying, you know, you need to invest upfront and the and the investment upfront might be Larger than you're used to but it will save you time money and resources further down the line But that requires a lot of trust from your client because in his head or her head and their head He's always thinking like yeah But what if this doesn't work out and we'll be halfway through the project and I will be all my all my resources Will be gone because I've invested in this research phase That's a challenge now We need to flip that conversation completely and the way we can do that is by talking about research as a Insurance policy. Now, let me explain try to try to do this the next time with your client when you're talking about research Have a conversation about Okay, so what if we don't do any research at all in this project? What if we spend all our Resources on other parts like ideation prototyping and building stuff And what if we're halfway through the project realize that we have to We have to start over because we made some big assumptions that prove to be false How much time money and energy? Will will we have lost because we need to? yeah start over and How much of those resources would we be willing to? Invest upfront to lower the risk that we're actually making those mistakes So and that is of course through research. So You know if we I don't know you can you can think of the numbers But if you're spending a hundred thousand euros on a project if you would be halfway you would spend 50 and and then like if you spend 10% of those 50k to do research to make sure to make a little bit more sure that you're on the right track that you're Testing your biggest assumptions You know would it be worth it would it be worth it to spend 20% of your resources to Yeah, to make sure that you're on the right track. So this isn't the only answer to selling research There are definitely more perspectives on how to do that, but try just try it and see what happens frame Research as an insurance policy as a way to actually minimize risk further on down the project and Understand that one of the reasons it's so challenging to sell research is that clients are afraid that if they invest the budget up front They won't have anything left at the end and they'll be in trouble. So they want to push it back towards the end Hope this makes sense Yeah, if you want to know more about selling service design including selling research Don't forget to check out the selling service design with confidence course where we talk more about these topics And yeah, you'll see me and the other students in this community talking a little bit more about this topic Hope this was helpful. If so, leave a comment down below. Thanks for watching. See you in the next video