Get an Edge on the Competition
This article has been translated into Spanish by Diana at Artegami. Thanks Diana!
You’d be surprised to hear how often clients tell me they went with us not because of the quality of our work, but because we ‘spoke their language’. So many times I’ve heard them say ‘the other designers were intimidating’ or ‘we didn’t understand what they were talking about’. Or even worse; ‘they didn’t seem interested in our business’.
Most freelancers are so busy trying to prove to potential clients how creative they are that they ignore their clients needs in the most basic sense. Save your creative talk for people in your industry. Talk to potential clients about what you can do for their business. Discuss how you will help them:
- communicate effectively with their customers;
- get a new market’s attention;
- get a larger audience; or
- just how to make them more money!
Those are just some examples, but you can do this for whatever industry you’re in – just consider what you’d want to hear about if you were a potential client. Many creatives have a pathological fear of talking frankly about business – as though it will somehow taint their creative cred. It won’t, I promise. What it will do is build trust and rapport with potential clients.
So try this on at your next pitch and you’ll get the edge on your competition – because unlike them you’ll be speaking your client’s language.
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You are right to speak about creatives’ fear of speaking about business, especially the monetary aspects of it. I think this is in part because they (*we*) rarely have experience from the client side of the transactions. We gain a lot when we put ourselves in other people’s shoes.
In contracting out work myself I realized how important and almost comforting it is to deal with someone who was clear and frank about business, payment, and the factors that contribute to it.
Like much else in life, we can improve in this area through practice. Once we begin to speak our clients’ language we will feel better ourselves and, over time, our confidence will build.
You’re totally right, Zac. I also found that once I started to speak to my clients in their listening, an added bonus was that my own business skills developed and my freelance career really benefited!
Amen!
Client relationships are not about the design. They are not about making things pretty or insisting your choice of pink in every other design that you do for people is a righteous one. It’s about listening to clients. Growing their businesses. Improving their bottom line (or exposure, or other initiatives).
The most successful freelance designers are able to separate the ‘design’ part of their work from the ‘client and project management’ aspects. Both require different sorts of skills, but I’d argue the client relationship skills are as important as design fundamentals for the freelancer who wants a thriving business over the long haul. thanks so much for posting and reiterating this!