Ditching Hourly

Hello, and welcome to Ditching Hourly. I'm Jonathan Stark. Today, I've got an audio excerpt from an answer I provided on my YouTube channel. You can check it out at thejonathanstarkshow.com, and it'll redirect you to YouTube if you're into watching videos. Otherwise, you can just listen to the audio here on the podcast. Enjoy. Hey, Jonathan here. I've got a question from Joe Solowitz, who says, question, I'm a UXer. How do you guarantee a certain ROI when you operate at a strategic level like UXers often do? A lot of my work takes months, years to launch or measure, if it ever launches at all the way I designed. Thanks. Okay, so anybody who operates upstream from sales is probably going to have to find a leading indicator that the prospective customer cares about, that the prospective customer believes is going to lead to this increased sales or whatever this way downstream change is. That's where the why conversation comes in. So if your client is talking to you about a potential UX project, there's a reason. For some reason, they think that you're going to contribute something that is going to benefit them downstream in some way. So if they're talking, you know, if you're talking to them, you say, well, why are you going to do this project at all? You know, why are you, let's say redesigning the interface for a SaaS. So you're talking to somebody who owns a SaaS product, a software as a service product, it's a digital product that exists in a web browser, and they're talking to you about redesigning the interface. And you say to them, well, why? What's wrong? Like, what's the problem? Why would you bother doing anything? And you go through the why conversation, they're going to say things like, well, you know, whatever, it's, we're getting a lot of complaints about it, or the, you know, users are complaining about it, users are churning and in their exit interview, they're saying that it's because the interface was too clunky, too hard to use, too slow. Maybe their free trials aren't converting into paid users, and the feedback they're getting is that people couldn't figure out how to do the things they wanted to do or whatever the case may be. Or maybe a competitor is coming into their space with a really sexy new thing that's making a big splash, and they're afraid that the competitor is going to eat their lunch. Okay, great. So what we're talking about is things like churn and onboarding and conversions and competitive advantage. These are all business things that business people can understand. So if you're not, if it's not clear to you, what the client thinks your contribution to that eventual outcome is, and that's what you're saying, you're not, you're not clear on what the contribution to the actual outcome is, you have to ask them, and they're talking to you. So they probably have an answer. So you could say something like, well, why bother having a UX person come in and do this? Why not just like figure it out or A, B test it forever and ever until you sort of tweak it into place? Or if this is a brand new project, why would you hire someone expensive like me to do UX? Like, don't you have any, you know, web developers that can just kind of figure it out? Or can't you just beta test it or focus group it or do all these other things? When you try to talk them out of working with you, they will tell you why they don't want to do that. And that reason is the thing they're buying. They're not buying decreased churn from you. That might be an outcome that you need to know about because that's a home run, but it's not going to come for a long time. The thing that you do maybe is the value, like it's immediate. So if they're talking to you and they trust you and you're, you know, a friend of theirs recommend you as like a UX guru, they want some kind of insurance. That's why they're thinking about hiring you. And they'll say something like, well, we've done things wrong before and we want to do them right now. And you are the person who I believe can help us do this right. You say, okay, how are we going to know if we're doing this right? So yes, I believe that I can, you know, best, I know all the best practices. I know all the things, but you have a unique business. All businesses are unique and you're trying to do specific things. You've got specific goals. What can we measure while we're doing, while I'm doing my piece that is going to allow us to know that we're going in the right direction toward this future decreased churn, increased revenue, increased competitive advantage, whatever the downstream effect might be. What can we do? And the client will probably tell you. They might say something like, well, we've got a core group of partners who are, you know, have sort of graduate or super users or a core group of partners who are in our user base. We could involve them in, you know, we could let them look at the designs or whatever the interactive prototypes or whatever your output is. You could involve them and be like, you know, are we on the right track here so that you're measuring something that you can measure something now that the customer believes will contribute to their future long-term goal. So you can declare victory when you're done.

not wait around hoping that maybe someday they actually implement the stuff the way that you designed it and oh that they don't you know step on a landmine some other place with like a who knows what a scandal or some other thing that destroys their downstream effect that you have no control over. So the bottom line is the client will tell you why they think they need to hire a professional like you and if they can't do that or they give you an answer that is actually not something you can do then you shouldn't take the project. But if you are confident that you can do it and you do believe in what they're saying and you do come up with something that you can measure in the near term that would help and you know that would give them that feeling that they are doing things the right way and that this is going to work if they don't screw up something else then you can price that. Now and before I wrap up there's also this is also the kind of thing that people will price as a productized service. So very you know upstream things are usually not a giant implementation it's usually a relatively small engagement you know maybe five, ten, fifteen hours spread out across a couple of weeks. You could probably set that up as a productized service just pick a price for it increase the price over time as you sell more and more of them and not worry about finding the value with every single client. So if you do want to value price each of these upstream engagements then the conversation you need to have is why you know the why conversation why would you bother hiring someone like me why not just do it the wrong way why build this why have blueprints just build the house just start hammering nails and good clients are going to know why that's a bad idea and they're going to explain to you what they are going to look at to decide whether or not you did a good job. So find that out before you write the proposal and you can base a price on that or create a productized service that is for a very specific kind of project or a very specific kind of customer so that the scope is fixed it's basically fixed no matter who buys it and you can just sell that all day long at this price and if you're selling tons of them raise the price. Okay that's probably enough for now hope I didn't talk too much. I'm Jonathan Stark if you have a question for me you can hashtag ask Jonathan on Twitter YouTube or LinkedIn and we'll find it and add it to the queue. Bye. Would you like to learn how to get paid what you're worth? How about selling your expertise and not your labor? We work through all of this together in the pricing seminar. Pre-registration starts soon and you can sign up to be on the first to know when early bird pricing is announced at thepricingseminar.com that URL again is thepricingseminar.com hope to see you there. Hey Jonathan again do you have questions about how to improve your business? Things like value pricing your work instead of billing for your time or positioning yourself as the go-to person in your space or maybe productizing your services so you never have to have another awkward sales call or spend hours writing another custom proposal. Book a one-on-one coaching call with me and get answers to these questions and others in the time it takes you to get ready for work in the morning. Best of all you're covered by my 100% satisfaction guarantee. If at the end of the call you don't feel like it was worth it just say the word and I'll refund your purchase in full. To book your one-on-one coaching call go to jonathanstark.com slash call C-A-L-L that URL again is jonathanstark.com slash call hope to see you there.