The Art of Selling

Design Leadership
Jul 14, 2008
4 Comments









One of my first bosses taught me an important lesson.

Good designers are a dime a dozen, he said. Coming up with a great design solution is the easy part. The hard part, he said, is getting the client to accept the solution.

“But if the work is good, don’t the clients know it when they see it?” I asked.

My boss just looked at me silently for a long time. And then, with gentleness and no small amount of pity, he reached out and patted me on the head: Poor kid.

He was right, of course. In any creative activity where clients are involved, you have to make the sale twice. Before you get to the customer, you have to sell the client.

I love this little snippet by Michael Bierut that highlights why some great designers don’t really go anywhere. The ability to sell a design is one of those skills I would rank very closely to creativity in terms of important ones a designer should have.


Via: Design Observer




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    • Comments

    drew kora
    Jul 14, 08 – 8:35 pm

    Yep, this is a great lesson that I’ve learned throughout my design career, too. I used to think “man, I can’t wait until I’m good enough to get the ‘cool’ clients that let me do cool stuff.” But that’s not true, almost any client can be that way, you just have to know how to prep your client for it, deliver it, and sell it. (that makes it sound easy…it usually isn’t)

    DT
    Jul 15, 08 – 10:32 am

    Hey Drew,

    Good to hear from you. Thanks for the great points as usual! Take care and please keep in touch.

    Niels
    Jul 18, 08 – 1:10 am

    Dead on! This not only applies to your customer but also within large companies you have to sell your design to marketing, production and so on.

    User links about “bierut” on iLinkShare
    Aug 18, 08 – 11:16 am

    [...] | user-saved public links | iLinkShare 1 votesThe Art of Selling>> saved by numberoneRaymanfan 1 days [...]


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