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 Kyle Morgan who asks, how do I sell the outcome? So let's say the client says, build us an app to do this, this, and this. And then Kyle would say, what's the business outcome? What needle are you trying to change? And the client would say, we want a 50% increase in sales or something like that. So I can build the app, but how can I sell the outcome instead of my output if I don't know anything about sales, marketing, or whatever their metric is? Okay, so this is a common question, especially when people are used to selling a deliverable or their time. They don't feel like they have any kind of downstream effect or they don't know exactly what the downstream effect that they are having on these business goals that clients are actually buying or actually want. So in this conversation, it's just too short. So I would just keep going. So if the client said, we want you to build an app that has these features in it. Then you'd say, well, why? Why do you want those features? What are they going to do? And push back to the client. And the client says, well, we think if we have an app that has all these features, we'll have a 50% increase in sales. Oh, really? That's kind of a stretch. Why do you believe that? I could build you all these things and I could charge you a million bucks to build this app. But I don't want to drain your resources. I want to be adding value to the business. So what's your plan for making money off of this once it's released? Or how is this app with all these features going to contribute to this goal that you have? And sure, as the developer, you don't have control over that ultimate metric, the 50% increase in sales. Because they could drop the ball all over the place. They could come up with a terrible name for it or they could just fumble. So what you want to do is find the thing that you believe that you can control and build toward that goal. So you have to work with the client to say, well, okay, I can't guarantee a 50% increase in sales, but what can I guarantee? So, for example, they've got this list of features. You could go down the features and say, well, why is this so important to your clients? How many clients do you think would sign up for this particular thing because of these features? Or you could say, instead of just agreeing to build these features, you could say, how about this? What would be a good leading indicator that us as a development shop could control that you think would ultimately get you that 50% increase in sales? For example, if onboarding went from a week to a minute, do you think that that would help with sales? Or do you think if you could convert more free trials to paying customers or if you could sell more free trials? Like, what can we do with our skills at building good interfaces and fast applications that are accessible on any device? We can do that all day long, but if that's not going to turn into business results for you, we don't want to take your money. So, again, it's like you need to work with them to uncover what the leading indicator is that they believe will ultimately result in 50% increase in sales. It's probably in there somewhere, in their head somewhere, or they wouldn't be talking to you. I mean, unless they're just completely taking it on faith that they're a genius and this idea that they have for an app is definitely going to be the next Facebook and they're just being naive or silly. So, if I'm talking to someone who's giving me a list of features, I would say, hey, okay, great. I can build all these things. I know how to do all of this. Let's back up, though. I want to get the overall business context because I could go in 100 different ways. There's 1,000 ways to skin the cat. I'm going to be making decisions in real time as I'm building all day long every day while I'm building this. So, if I understand your goals for this piece of the project, my contribution to the project, and we can come up with a way that we can measure progress to know that I'm on track, not the list of features is slowly getting completed, but let's say we have tests with focus groups and they love it. Okay, that's a good sign that we're probably going to have more sales. Or maybe it's a user interface for their customers to self-serve. So, maybe it's some company like they clean commercial stoves and their customers are places like Walmart or big malls that have food courts or an airport. And they want you to build an interface so that Walmart can check and see the progress on each of the stores.

Well, you could say, well, what if as we're designing this and researching this and coming to and building it, we involve a contact from Walmart. And if we, throughout the course of the project, if we say, you know, we poll them initially and say, hey, Mr. Walmart person, how much do you like the current interface that the client has? And they say, well, not that much. Like, okay, on a scale of one to five, what would you rate it as? Eh, probably a two. All right. So then you can go back to the client and say, well, if we can get this person from Walmart to rate us instead of a two to rate us a five, do you think that that would be, you know, a good indication that the product is better and that more people that are like Walmart are going to be compelled to buy this product? So you want to look for metrics that you can measure along the way to make sure that you're actually helping the business. Because they could just be asking you to do the wrong thing, or they could be asking you to do something in a way that has so many assumptions in your mind and their mind that you're accidentally going to build the wrong thing. That maybe if you had uncovered all the assumptions that they had, then maybe you would build something better. But the way to get to that, the easy way to get to that is to say, okay, Mr. Client, I'm happy to cash your checks, but I want to make sure that you're getting a positive ROI. I want you to be so happy at the end of this. I want you to be so happy that you paid us all this money that you kiss me on the lips. So how can I do that? How can I satisfy you? You know, this and the list of features to be completed is not a reasonable, that's not a reasonable, that doesn't give me confidence. Yeah, I can do that, but where's the value? I don't know. Maybe you're asking me to build something that's not going to work. I mean, probably everybody's had the experience of some, you know, you're at a barbecue and they're like, you're like, oh, what do you do? And you say, oh, I'm an iOS developer. And they say, no way, an iOS developer. I've got an idea for an app. And they tell you some idea, and it's probably a terrible idea. And if they had some money to say, oh, well, I'm going to remortgage my house and I'm going to give you $50,000 to build this app for me. If you treat this situation like a doctor would, a doctor's not going to do random surgery on somebody just because they asked for it. A doctor's going to say, what are you trying to get out of this? You know, why do you want this open heart surgery? Maybe you don't need open heart surgery. Maybe you just need an antacid. Maybe you're not actually having a heart attack. Maybe you're just having too much Taco Bell at night. So find that. You have to have that conversation if you want to get to these higher-priced gigs where you can, instead of managing scope and how many features are involved, you can have a goal that will perhaps lead to a 50% increase in sales, or at least it will enable their team to do something like that. But they have to suggest to you some kind of leading indicator that you can measure during the project to make sure that you're on track. And maybe it's customer satisfaction ratings, like I described with Walmart. Maybe it's a software program that's going to be used internally by a big team. And you can say, you know, we will ensure that users, your internal employees will adopt this system and love it and be more productive. Well, how much more productive? Well, based on what they have now, I think we could probably at least double the productivity. Okay, great. So then it will change the way you build the thing because you'll sit down with the sort of like lead team leads and people doing data entry in the system. And instead of just saying, okay, we built all these features that you asked for. Instead, in a design review, you can say, well, we built all these new features that we decided to build after talking to Karen, who's our user contact, our lead user. And she said, this is way better. She's giving us like five stars. She loves it. She thinks it's going to be amazing and transformative for the business. She's contributing to the design, so on and so forth. So you can say, Karen loves it. So back in the proposal phase, you need to say to somebody, okay, what if we meet with Karen every week and give her the design reviews? And if she's liking it better and she thinks that she's going to have a better chance to have better productivity at her job and her team underneath her is going to be more productive, then that will be considered a win, right? And once we get to like 100% productivity, then we can be like, declare victory. We're done. This is great. Anyway, I'm going on and on in a soapbox. I haven't recorded a video in a while, so I'm very excited. Back from vacation. So Kyle, I hope this helps. You're on the right track. You just need to keep going. You need to find something that the client believes will lead to this 50% increase in sales and you believe that you have some kind of control over, whether that's Karen's opinion or Walmart's opinion or some other metric that you believe you have control over and the client believes will contribute to their ultimate business goal. All right, I'll be quiet now. I'm Jonathan Stark.

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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. That URL again is JonathanStark.com. Hope to see you there.