Easy to Buy – Not Easy to Sell Outperform with a customer-centric approach to selling We believe selling service design isn't about making service design sellable. Instead, successful sales are determined by adopting a mindset of ‘becoming buyable’. We believe that applying the methods and approach of service design to your sales process Daniel Ewerman is Entrepreneur, Co-Founder and CEO of Transformator Design. Daniel has delivered over 300 successful projects in the last 16 years. He’s a board member, columnist and frequent keynote speaker on the topic of customer experience, service design and service innovation, and author of the book Customer Experience - Why some organisations succeed … and others don’t. Anders Landström is Senior Service Designer at Transformator Design with broad and international experience. He manages customer-centric projects at both strategic and handson levels for clients from all business sectors and industries. With a background in industrial design and change management, he successfully creates impact for both clients and customers.
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will help you become buyable. In this article, we share critical factors for understanding your clients, and show how to act as service design consultancy when selling your expertise. This article isn’t all about becoming buyable, but let’s start by ticking off the basics needed to get hired: — Packages of different sizes — Understandable deliverables — Content in every step you sell — Appropriate price It also has to be very clear how the client can make use of the result. The more abstract and strategic the project, the more structured the package needs to be. You can’t sell a future solution or idea, but you can sell a trustworthy and proven process for developing solutions. Be the nanny Selling is always part of a problem solving – or opportunity seeking – process between two parties: the problem owner and the solution provider. The problem owner has an issue important enough to pay someone to solve
it. This is always the starting point. When someone with an established deliverable, deadline and budget gets ownership of a problem, a project can be initiated. You, as a consultant, have to be a nanny and embrace the problem with them. By taking a genuine interest in the client and their customers, you can dive deeper into the situation. We’ve found that looking over small prestige battles and adopting a holistic perspective of the client works as a successful strategy for building great working relationships. One prospect, but two agendas You need to know who the buyer is — both the person/group contacting you, and their organisation. You need a deep understanding of each to become buyable: The person: When has the purchasing client done a good job? What are their KPIs? How
