June 16, 2023

Selling internally...

I spent half my career in leadership roles at various organizations. The other half I spent as a solo entrepreneur.

I learned some important lessons as a solo entrepreneur:

• Talking publicly about the work you’re doing is a great way to get people to hire you to do more of it in the future.
• You often have to educate a client on the value of what you do before you can pitch them work. In fact, my favorite kind of pitching ends with, “Wow! I didn’t realize a solution like that existed. Can I hire you to solve my problem?”
• The more a potential client trusts you and understands your expertise, the more likely they are to trade money for that expertise.
• Conversations with clients almost always center around a value proposition (to be clear, that isn’t always money.) Before you close the deal, you explain the value of addressing their needs with your expertise. During the project, you chronicle the value you’re delivering on a consistent basis. At the close of the project, you articulate (and ideally measure) the value you delivered.

These lessons apply in-house, especially for work that can benefit the entire organization — like user research or design systems work:

• You are always marketing your team internally, and you need to grow its reputation over time.
• One of the best ways to do that is to talk about the work your team is doing. If you can do that publicly and elevate the profile of your organization at the same time, even better.
• Design systems work is emergent, with many new tools. Leadership (or the people that approve funding) often doesn’t know what they don’t know. Educating them on what’s possible goes hand in hand with explaining the value of the work.
• Keep that value-mindset in the forefront of your work. Guide your teams to talk about it in specific ways. Focus on value when you’re securing funding. Set up regular check-ins with leadership to share the value of the ongoing work. Set specific goals, measure against them, and communicate the outcome at clearly.

This approach doesn’t just help you grow your team and fund the work theyre doing, it helps you think about the work that you choose to do through a pragmatic, value-focused lens. And it gets you better at communicating the value of the work you’re doing, a useful skill no matter where you work.

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Cheers,

Up Next: Finding work by solving problems...

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