This post continues our week long series, whereby I will publish one of the seven habits on each day of the week. Here is the link to Thursday’s post if you missed it.

Post-it Note Sold by cccdebbie

5) Ability to sell well
Well, actually it’s not so much about the ability to sell. Let’s look at it in another way; selling is really all about persuasion, or about persuading someone to buy your product. So in other words the effective designers are not good salesmen but good persuaders.

I think you can see where I’m heading towards? Effective designers have the ability to sell ideas to clients, build convincing design proposals, negotiate contracts or get a project buy-in from all the stake holders. The list is endless, and the ability to sell makes life a lot easier for everybody.

But how, you may ask, if one feels that he/she is not good at selling? That is again why I encourage you to look at this habit more as persuasion rather than selling, and that is something everybody can do. Think about it, when you were a kid, have you not persuaded your parents to increase your allowance before? What about convincing someone to trade that hot collector’s baseball card? Or what about staying up an extra hour after bed time? If you think about it we are well equipped to be good at persuasion.

Not only that the good negotiators also are masters of yesterdays habit. That is having wide and varied interests. This variety helps to come up with different and creative ways of approaching a subject or attacking a negotiation point.

Before I close for today, I like to leave you with one more tip on persuasion, and that is to tie your sales pitch with a great story. That’s right, convincing people is a lot easier if you can paint a picture that puts him into your shoes. Wait a minute, is that not why we learn to do mood boards or consumer use scenarios in design school?

The circle is complete. Heh-heh!

———-

I do hope you enjoyed Friday’s entry; check out Saturday’s habit here.

Love this post? Subscribe to The Design Sojourn Newsletter, for free, and get the latest content delivered right to your inbox with our 110% NO-SPAM Policy!

You can also follow me on Twitter and Facebook as well.

Related Posts You Might Find Interesting: