The Marketing Mix | official blog of the Marketing Mentor community

Help me: By sharing your money issues

The deadline for my new book, The Creative Professional’s Guide to Money,  is rapidly approaching, and I am sizing up some new worksheets for possible inclusion. 

This is the third of 3 worksheets, and I’d love your feedback. Of course, if you do the worksheet, in addition to helping me, you might be helping yourself too!

How much do you know about yourself and your money issues? Often, when we have trouble with an area of our lives, we don’t spend a lot of time thinking about it which maintains our ignorance and perpetuates the behaviors and situation.

Use this worksheet to take a realistic view at your money situation.

Download the worksheet here.

Please share your feedback. What works? What would make the worksheet stronger?

Kindly email me with your thoughts and ideas, by Tuesday, August 17th. I appreciate your help!

Help me: By recognizing your ideal client

The deadline for my new book, The Creative Professional’s Guide to Money, is rapidly approaching, and I am sizing up some new worksheets for possible inclusion. 

This is the second of 3 worksheets, and I’d love your feedback. Of course, if you do the worksheet, in addition to helping me, you might be helping yourself too!

You may know the demographics of your "ideal client," but can you spot them by the language they use? What do they say when they know they need your services and are ready to move forward?

The worksheet is intended to help you discover what it is exactly that separates your “typical” clients from your “ideal clients” -- the ones you can help the best – so you can find them and pursue them.

Download the worksheet here.

Please share your feedback. What works? What would make the worksheet stronger?

Kindly email me with your thoughts and ideas, by Tuesday, August 17th. I appreciate your help!

Help me: By setting your goals

The deadline for my new book, The Creative Professional’s Guide to Money, is rapidly approaching, and I am sizing up some new worksheets for possible inclusion. 

This is the first of 3 worksheets, and I’d love your feedback on it. Of course, if you do the worksheet, in addition to helping me, you might be helping yourself too!

Amazing as it may seem, putting your goals in writing gets you halfway to achieving them. You don’t need a big fat plan. All you need is to think through the details of what you want to do and the steps you can take to get there.

This form is intended to spur that thinking process —one goal at a time.

Download it here.

Please share your feedback. What works? What would make the worksheet stronger?

Kindly email me with your thoughts and ideas, by Friday, August 13th. I appreciate your help!

There's nothing like a classic

Need a new book to read this summer?

Unfortunately, my new book, "The Creative Professional's Guide to Money," won't be out ‘til Spring 2011. In the meantime, why not consider an old classic instead? You might be surprised at the new perspective you’ll gain.

Bob Bly, copywriter and marketing pioneer suggests 10 classic marketing books you should read, and we also have a list of favorites on our website.

Defining "one round of revisions"

In the book that I’m working on, about how creatives deal with money, I’m getting down to the nitty-gritty on many topics.

Right now, I’m dealing with the topic of revisions.

Many contracts include a certain number of revisions – but how exactly do you define one round of revisions?

I asked this question on the Creative Freelancer Conference LinkedIn Group yesterday, and I’d love to get your input.

How to make yourself ask for more money

I heard a great tip last week from Monique Elwell, CEO of Conversify, a social media marketing start up.

Monique told me she got into the habit of buying a really expensive piece of jewelry right before going into a negotiation with a prospect or client. I asked her why and she said, "It made me ask for more, for what the work is actually worth, and prevented me from convincing myself that I shouldn't." Listen here.

Do you have any tricks like that?

Getting to the real decision maker

A designer recently shared a tale about how important it is to make sure the real decision maker is involved in a project from the beginning. Here’s what happened to Robert:

Robert recently met with the President of a company about a large project.

Robert noticed that the President seemed to be lacking passion and involvement, but since the company staff was deferential to him, and the title “President” was printed plainly on his business card, Robert decided his authority seemed solid.

After Robert met with the President, he followed up with members of the marketing and operations teams to get more information about the project. A few times, someone suggested that Robert meet the Owner.  Unfortunately, the Owner always ended up being “too busy.”

Robert began to get the impression that the Owner, not the President, was the real decision maker, and considered “pushing” the President to introduce him to the Owner. But he was concerned about challenging the President’s authority – or seeming like he was trying to go over the President’s head.

Ultimately, Robert wrote the proposal, and the President accepted it.  Robert put his team to work. 

When Robert presented the creative, the President forwarded it to the Owner, who said, “It wasn’t what we were expecting.”

In the end, Robert lost the account.

Robert shared this story as a lesson about the importance of finding, and meeting with, the real decision maker.

This topic also came up in a recent interview I did with Petrula Vrontikis. Here's how she finds the real decision maker.

Has this happened to you? What can you do to avoid this scenario? How can you “push” the President to meet the Owner without seeming “pushy”?

What About a Weekly Budget Check-in?

We've been talking a lot lately about how creatives can do a better job dealing with the "money conversations" with clients. For my new book, I've been interviewing people on the client side to hear what they're looking for when it comes to talking money with creatives.

So last week, I interviewed Dana Manciagli, GM of a large division of Microsoft, who described to me her dream of how the money conversation would go with her ideal creative. She suggested creatives make it part of their process to talk money in every single conversation. Do a Budget Check in before hanging up. Just say, “By the way I want to let you know you’re on budget and there have been no changes since we talked last.” This shows a great deal of respect for the client and demonstrates your professionalism at the same time. (Plus it helps your client sleep.)

And if something has changed, that's the time to speak up right away and say, “That new section on the web site is out of scope so I’ll go get some new prices for you.” Then you formally re-quote, using the same language. “That extra section was out of scope and now we’re putting it in scope. Here’s the revised estimate.”

What do you think? Could you do this as a formal part of your process? Would it help?

Money is a minefield

In my latest Quick Tip, “Money is a minefield,” I talked about how many creatives don’t deal with money simply because they don’t know what to say.

We used scope creep as the perfect example. In a situation where the scope of the project is creeping outside of the budget you agreed on with your client, you may not be sure what to say, so you might not say anything at all. I asked what readers thought about speaking up, here are some of their responses:

Paul Chato of YourWebDepartment.com said:

NEVER tell the client that things have gone over budget or there has been scope creep as a prima facia comment. I always go into update meetings with choices. Make the client decide on the course of action that they themselves (unless it's your fault) put themselves in. I say, "Well, this is where we are. Do you want to stay within budget? Then I would suggest we do A. If you really want these things then I suggest we can do B. Alternatively, we can explore if this has changed the way you need the end product to work and we should try C. So, what do you think we should do?" This always works. It's respectful. The client likes choices and it shows you've put some effort into solving the problem.

Jamie Capozzi of Theory Associates said:

I love how Kit Hinrichs deals with scope creep in question form. It's very disarming and makes the client feel like they're more in control of their money. I will surely use that tip in the future.

Scope creep is such a major issue in the design business that I find that I have to really educate my clients through the process. I do this so they clearly understand when something they're requesting is outside of the agreed upon scope.

Before I started educating in my relationships I found that scope creep happened merely because our definitions for things were simply different. For example the term illustration can mean many different things to different people, and have many different costs depending of what's being requested. From the clients perspective something could be "no big deal" and from our stand point it's a very big deal that causes us to lose money, resent the client..., etc.

Now, I try and talk to my clients more that I did before. Face to face communication as much as possible where we have that  "how it all works" conversation. It's not that clients generally want something for nothing or look to take advantage of designers more than they just don't understand what it is we do. To a left brainer we're just making pretty pictures and getting paid way too much to do so. My goal is for them to see me as a highly effective marketer that uses design amongst many other tools to help them sell more and make more. Once I communicate that effectively money ceases to be a major issue.

And Ray told a little story about something relevant that happened just last week:

I was working on a photo set yesterday with a dog that would NOT cooperate. The producer made sure to put in a call to the booking agent during the middle of the shoot so she knew we were having problems at the time. We wound up getting a "usable" image, but it wasn't easy.

Now when we go to bill, negotiating a discount might be possible. After all, if we hadn't done our job, we wouldn't have gotten paid. But if we had not called at the time, the agent could have said, "nobody told me there was a problem.” 

Any other stories and ideas out there?

No matter what they say, they do have a budget

Last week I interviewed Kit Hinrichs, who spent the last 23 years as a partner at Pentagram and has worked on projects for Muzak, Sappi Fine Paper, Gymboree, Hemispheres Magazine, and Design Within Reach, to name only a few. Last week he was pretty busy launching his own firm, Studio Hinrichs, but he graciously took time out of his first week to chat with me about how creatives deal (and don't deal) with money. (BTW, one of his success strategies is to say "yes" to as many opportunities as he possibly can.)

There were some real nuggets in our conversation, which will go directly into my next book-in-progress, but here's one I just had to share right away. It's about those clients who say they don't have a budget.

We’ve all had those clients so we know what happens: you give them a budget and they say, "On no, that’s outside my budget."

Aha! They did have a budget after all! Okay, maybe they didn't know it until you gave them your price. But I really think that if you probe a bit, you can get the info you need to determine whether continuing the conversation is a waste of your time and theirs.  (This was the topic of last week's CFC webcast; the recording is available here http://www.mydesignshop.com/product/determining-your-clients-budget)

But what to say? How to probe without offending them?

Kit sometimes says, “Look, we can dance around each other about this, but we’re trying to find the best way to spend your money effectively. So if we know what budget you have in mind, we can find solutions for you that are within your budget.”

This is going directly into a chapter of the book I think I'll call, "What to say when..." What do you think of this (could you use it with your own clients?) and what else would you like to see in that chapter? Post your suggestions here.