The Future of Selling Design : Blair Enns

I had a fabulous change of scenery today attending a morning lecture put on by the GDC called "The Future of Selling Design" presented by Blair Enns.

Blair Enns is the founder of Win Without Pitching and a business development consultant to marketing communication agencies.

When Blair began his presentation, the first thing that I was impressed by was his public speaking skills. I've never been very strong in public speaking myself so watching him speak, motivated me to improve this skill.

Throughout his presentation Blair continued to impress by shifting my thinking. He made some great points about the future of design and how we, as designers, should stop selling something clients can get anywhere and start selling specialties relative to the demands. Sure we design wonderful things and have a certain flair for it but how can we remove ourselves from the "mushy middle" and separate ourselves from the "me too's" ?

Well, pick one.

Specialize (add value to your product/services and find your USP) or generalize (reduce production costs in order to compete). My creative mentor always told me to specialize, which I always agreed with. I never did like the concept of knowing how to do everything because it's just impossible.

To explain this theory, Blair used the analogy of pouring a bottle of beer into a casserole dish vs. a tall beer stein. With the casserole dish, you cover alot of area but the expertise is very shallow. With the beer stein, you're narrowing your focus and deepening your expertise, which in turn adds value to your business or service. That kind of expertise can't be bought for $99.

These concepts worked well in conjunction with a book I'm reading called "Green Graphic Design" by Brian Dougherty. Brian's book focuses more on a designers responsibility to the environment and being sustainable and innovative with our creative solutions but both are thinking from a marketing standpoint rather than a creative standpoint. Yea a brochure is good but what kind of value does it have? Why should people care? What's so different about this that can't have been found anywhere else?

Seemingly, there are boatloads of designers and not enough jobs to go around so each one of us has to specialize and offer something more than what can be bought online for next to nothing. This is how we, as designers, can put the value back in our work that clients are willing to pay for and not worry about reducing our cost to compete with the sheer number of designers that are out there. The truth is that the Walmart's of the world offering design templates or the Craigslist post offering a logo for $99 won't go away, so all we can do as designers is take the control back and differentiate ourselves from that.

I could go on for hours spewing ideas, thoughts, insights inspired by my morning but I won't. I will suggest, however, you visit Blair's website : Win Without Pitching. It's got some great articles for designers, firms, and businesses.

Hope you enjoy it as much as I am.