Cold Calls Make You Sweat?
Architects are Uniquely Prepared to Excel at Sales Calls

By Marcy Steinberg

Many architects bemoan the public request-for-proposal (RFP) process. A client with the authority to continue hiring you, sans RFP, is so much better. Yet, many designers won’t pick up the phone to start such client relationships. They continue to comb the public notices for RFPs. They are afraid of “cold calls” and they think they aren’t good at sales. After all, they are designers, not salespeople.

If only designers knew just how well their profession has prepared them to be consummate salespeople.

A look at what’s behind current sales lingo shows that what designers do, every day, is what sales people struggle to learn how to do.

Consultative Sales
This method shifts salespeople from selling to consulting. They identify needs, they suggest solutions. They want clients to see them not as sales representatives, but as consultants.

Conceptual Selling
The foundation of conceptual selling is reaching a thorough understanding of the client’s goals, needs, and hopes, collectively referred to as the client’s concept. It is the salesperson’s job to get into the client’s head, then conceptualize and present solutions. It requires asking more than telling and listening more than speaking. It can require site visits and other research. Sound familiar?

Designers’ Selling Savvy
The skills architects have developed in programming, design conceptualization, and design presentation are precisely those that superior salespeople use to uncover their potential client’s concept, identify beneficial solutions, successfully sell those solutions, and position themselves as the consultant to turn to next time. Take a closer look at how your work makes you more prepared to sell than most salespeople are:

1. Programming: You draw out your client’s goals and needs. You collect facts. You state the problem. You do this by asking the right questions at the right time. The Problem Seeking techniques architects read about in William Peña’s programming book by that name are the very techniques salespeople try to use. Like you, they are, or should be, asking questions, listening, asking more questions, listening more, coming to a thorough and perceptive understanding of the client’s true needs, and itemizing what it will take to meet those needs.
2. Design Concept: Now you generate design concepts to meet those identified needs. Again, notice the parallel to what the conceptual salesperson is trying to do: analyze the client’s needs and come back with proposed products and/or services to meet them.
3. Presentation: You show your clients what you have designed for them, you help them visualize it, and you generate confidence, excitement and anticipation of the benefits they’ll gain. Sounds like a “to-die-for” skill to the struggling salesperson!

Apply It!
There are specific methods and vocabulary that the best sales people use. You already use of many of them, too. Let’s review some basics when it comes to putting design methods into a sales context.

1. Never make a cold call!
   Turn a cold call into a warm call with a little research.
2. Prep your call or visit.
   Review what you have learned about the client, the company, its successes and challenges, and its decision-making process Anticipate the questions you might be asked.
3. Determine your purpose.
   What should happen as a result of this call or visit? What’s next?
4. Determine client’s purpose.
   Why should this potential client want to accept your call?
5. Jot down the questions you plan to ask.
   Avoid questions that can be answered with yes or no. Asking whether the person you are speaking to is the decision-maker gets you a yes or a no, and leaves the impression that you are interested only in your own bottom line. Asking how these kinds of decisions are made in the company opens up a conversation.
6. Jot down your key message.
   What’s the one thing you want the client to know about you and why she should meet with you? This statement should be short enough to leave on voice mail. Memorize it.
7. Identify Your Proof.
   How will you demonstrate that you have done your homework, know the client’s challenges, and have ideas that can help? How will you demonstrate that your ideas have helped others? Think “stats and stories.”
8. Decide what to take.
   What might the client want to see? What shall you use for show and tell and leave behinds?
9. Watch Your Vocabulary.
   As architects who are trying to sell, you have two vocabulary challenges—archibabble and salesbabble. Neither go over well. After interviewing design clients, watching selection interviews, and role-playing sales presentations, I compiled a list of words that don’t work. When I ask architects and engineers to try to imagine what’s on this list, they can usually do so—they do know the words that are overused and becoming useless. But they don’t replace them. Can you?
   
   These “avoid like the plague” words fall into one or more of the following categories:
   • cliché—all your competitors are using these. They include: “on-time,” “we understand,” “high quality,” “we have experience in,” “we realize,” “out-of-the box.”
   • general and vague—these don’t say much on their own: “responsive,” “customer service focus,” ”quality control,” “effective.”
   • overly technical—these show you are not in touch with your client (unless the client is in your profession). They might include: “massing,” “programming,” “space affinities,” “charrette.”
   • presumptuous—these convey arrogance, or that you think the sale is in the bag. Sometimes, this happens using common words such as “we will” instead of “we could,” or “you should” instead of “you might.”
10. Practice.
    Get someone to role-play with you. Give him some ideas of the kinds of challenges, questions or rebuffs you fear. Give him a list of words to avoid, and ask him to “ring the buzzer” when you use them.

Applying your problem-seeking and problem-solving skills to the sales process takes practice. But, unlike many salespeople filling the sales seminars, you, as a designer, already HAVE the skills. You are uniquely prepared to sell. When you pick up that phone or head off to that visit, remind yourself that you know how to do this!

First published in Sources and Design, March/April 2003.

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