I am part of a committee that decides what the future design will be for a certain home page. We have outsourced the design work to another company and I have been impressed with this companies ability to sell their designs. Here are a few things that I picked up from them that I thought were good moves on their part:

1. Be with the client as you present the design. This allows you to be more persuasive in selling your product and you can immediately dispel any concerns. If you simply email you screenshots to the client they may latch on a negative point that leads them to the conclusion that it wont work.
2. Don’t release your concepts. This goes along with the previous point but is more in an effort to control third parties. If you are there in person to push your product and you are successful, then good for you. However, if you let people take the concepts they may show them around and others may bring up concerns. Without being present at the moment to calm the troubled waters, the concern may stick and grow.
3. Target your presentation at the decision maker. In my case, there was one individual present that was the main deciding voice for the design. The presenter knew this and structured his whole presentation around that one individual.
4. Make the presentation slick. When I have presented design concepts before I would usually hit Ctrl+Shift+Alt+S in Photoshop to save the screenshot as a web page (select HTML and Images as the file type.) Then I would pull the design up in a web browser so that people could see what it will actually be like in the browser. That is a practical thing to do when you are on the buying end but, when you are selling your design, there are nicer alternatives to a browser window. This particular presenter had everything laid out in an Adobe Acrobat file. The main points they were trying to address with the design were in a column on the left and then the screen shot was displayed with a drop shadow on the right. No browser window. So, in essence, the design around the design was good too.
5. Give the client several options. If you present one option and the client doesn’t like it you’re toast. If you give them several options you are also giving yourself a lot of flexibility. You can gauge which design they like and, if there isn’t one that is the winner, you can see what aspects of each design are liked and which are not.
6. Bring people that are on your side. This presenter also brought with him the designer and writer for the design. Then, while we were talking about the design he would refer to these people to give their opinions. So, instead of it being five against one it was five against three.

I think that the real down side to decisions like this is that it is so opinion oriented. Once you have tested the design you’ll know. Before then it is difficult to make progress when you have two people who have different opinions and all they have to back up their decisions are their opinions. Well, regardless, this company has done a nice job in making progress through good selling techniques.

This entry was posted on Monday, October 30th, 2006 and is filed under Whatever, Business, Design and Usability. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.