I find this challenging—maybe more than most sales folks. I don’t have a 15-year track record in agency business development. I don’t have a reservoir of previous sales experiences and mentors, and this topic is protected behind tight lips. How do I know if I’m doing this right? Is it a matter of measuring wins and losses? If so, how many wins are considered a good ratio? Why do losses matter?

Let’s begin.

What’s in a record?

Every year, I prepare a report to recap our business development effort at Happy Cog. I start with the W-L column. I figure if Roy Halladay can be judged on the merits of his W-L record, so can I. This feels like super top secret information, but then I saw former Cog Dan Mall boldly present Superfriendly’s first annual report and disclose his W-L record. Inspired, I decided to share Happy Cog’s: 17-5 (77%).

I’ve read that anything above 50% is considered "good." But, then I have to ask, why do we care about the losses if it’s the wins that keep all of the lights on?

We care, because we care.

Truly competitive junkies love to claim that they hate losing more than they love winning. These sound like wonderful people to spend time with… but the truth is, when your team is excited and geared up for a pitch and you don’t win the work, it stings. Losses cause collateral damage. Too many losses in a row starts to feel like an epidemic and can color other aspects of your work.

Losses cost.

One way or another, a loss is going to cost you. Let’s assume you travel to a client pitch and end up losing the work. You possibly paid for:

• Airfare/train/gas
• Cabs to and from the meeting
• Meal(s) you ate in transit
• Lodging expenses
• Parking
• Incidentals

These things all add up. “But, we don’t travel for pitches,” you might say. Bully for you! I don’t agree with this tactic in most cases. We should talk about something called opportunity cost. Did you spend any time pursuing this lead? Did you prepare a proposal? Have a conversation or two? Create an estimate? Deliver a proposal?

All of these things require an investment of your time, and I’d argue that time is your most important resource, not dollars. It’s time not spent pursuing another lead, time spent by your team not working on other client work, time simply gone.

Let’s suppose you didn’t create a sales presentation, or an estimate, or do any of these things. Congratulations, you’ve avoided all costs (as well as avoided any chance of winning this project).

To determine your minimum opportunity cost:

1. Calculate how many total hours you spent working on all of these pieces of your pitch.
2. Calculate your hourly blended rate for the folks who invested their time (what each person costs you an hour, averaged).
3. Multiply them together.

That’s your minimum opportunity cost. What this doesn’t account for is the revenue you might have earned had you pursued another lead—the road not taken. That’s a bit unquantifiable, but it adds a little extra weight (i.e. regret) to your opportunity cost.

There are a bunch of firms out there who bloat those opportunity costs spending tons of hours creating spec work for proposals and pitches. If you’re one of them, you’re kinda reaping what you sow. This article isn’t for you.

Once bitten…

Losses teach us how to avoid future losses.

Last year, a prospective client team assured us that despite the fact that we determined we were outside of their budget and couldn’t start as soon as they wanted, they’d move Heaven and Earth to get the extra budget needed. Oh, and they’d also delay their start.

Neither happened.

We sent a team to pitch, only to learn we were still overbudget, and they could not accommodate our availability. A total waste of effort. Within days, another prospect confronted us with the exact same dilemma. We elected not to make the trip.

In another case, a prospect helped us tailor our pitch prep to appeal to one key stakeholder. We were awarded the work, but, sure enough, that critical stakeholder wanted to meet again, and our coach/contact left for another job. We beat out two agencies, but ultimately the project never got out of the starting blocks. Not an epic win after all.

Months later, another client offered to prep and coach us to pitch perfection for another critical stakeholder. We politely declined.

In both instances, we were able instead to focus on other opportunities, opportunities we won.

2013

So far, we’re a year wiser, and 2013 is off to a good start. We’re seeing an overall increase in project inquiries, and so are some of our industry contemporaries.

Let’s conduct a terribly informal poll: How is your 2013 performing so far? More sales leads? The same as 2012? Fewer?

Remove the veil of secrecy and share. While you’re at it, what’s one valuable sales lesson you’ve learned the hard way?

I savored the moment and the fact that my off-the-cuff insight was the only time during our lovely evening that I thought about the greater web industry. I was 100% anchored in the moment with my wife and kids and only thought about work long enough to realize I wasn’t thinking about it.

I take pride in balancing work and life, and it’s a delicate balance. I leap out of my chair at the end of the day, despite the fact that I love my job. I race home to coach tee-ball or for pizza-and-a-movie night on Fridays. That’s when I shut it down and focus on my family.

But, I can’t always prevent work’s tendrils from creeping into home and vice versa. I was fortunate enough to kick off our recent weekend by the boardwalk with the very welcome news we’d won a huge project. Not too shabby, but work crept in. A few days later, smothered by all of my kids in bed one morning (it’s like cuddling with an octopus made entirely of elbows), I dreamed up this post instead of the My Two Gregs opus I had ready to go. Work crept in.

The easy jokes about the sales guy encouraging you to give thinking a rest aren’t lost on me. To those that use the term “sales guy” like that, I extend a very cordial invitation to you. Realize that everyone working in client services works in sales. In our team, I merely lead the sales efforts of our larger group. Everyone at Happy Cog must work directly with clients. We’re all user experience practitioners. We’re all web standards bearers. We’re all in sales. That’s the basic job description.

There are many excellent minds in our industry so immersed in our work they can’t stop thinking about it. They eat, sleep, and breathe it. This is well-evidenced on Twitter. This lifestyle is often lauded as a symptom of their passion for their work, but I see it as a symptom of undisciplined minds. These folks are often seen as some of the finest speakers and writers in our trade, but I bet they’re a drag when it comes to client services. You need to be able to separate from your work, to put it in perspective, and stay normal.

Over the course of a long design project, it’s the interpersonal connections and relationships you forge with clients that keep the roller coaster on its tracks (crap, this does relate to the boardwalk after all). These connections matter as much, or more, than your innovative ideas and penetrating insights.

Talking shop only gets you so far. Maybe you coach your daughter’s soccer team or you’re building a canoe. Whatever your passion, it’s those personal interests that clients often relate to. It’s also those interests that cultivate your inquisitive mind and sharpen your problem-solving skills. The outside-of-work stuff improves the work stuff, in more ways than one.

This was manifest within our team recently too. My boardwalk adventure was hot on the heels of returning from Happy Cog’s first company summit in Chicago (I’m stringing together vacations like a Rockefeller, or Brett Harned). We spent a few days collaborating and discussing process and another few days listening to some of the industry’s most excellent minds at An Event Apart. It was the things around the discussions—karaoke, the dinners, the walks around Centennial Park—that was the really good stuff. The outside-of-work bonding is what I’m looking forward to the next time we all hitch up again. We’re better off as an organization coming off this trip, and it is as much a credit to the fact that we all genuinely like one another as it is due to any new processes or other products of our working sessions.

It’s the extracurricular stuff that keeps our work and our workplace human. In client services, we’re all in the human business.

Do you see virtue in being wholly immersed in your work? Do you balance your work with some amazing hobbies and passions? If so, chime in here. You never know, someone else out there might be one of the world’s leading experts on DC Comics’ 1985 epic Crisis on Infinite Earths maxi-series. No? No one? Just me?

This is alchemy. There is no guaranteed or bonafide method that works for everyone. Sorry. Evaluating design, UX, and/or development teams is an exercise in predicting future success based on previous results. Sometimes the trick is finding what you really need in a sea of information that RFP respondents think you need. What is important to you? Intuitive user experience? Awesome. Intelligent graphic design? Sweet! Bullet proof code that offers accessibility across browsers? Now we’re talkin’.

Now, what is really important to you? What about coming in under budget? Or launching on time? Or being handed a site you can manage internally moving forward? Let’s focus on everything that matters, not just the stuff you want to talk about when interviewed by .net Magazine post-launch. I’ll walk through a few criteria and site some examples.

FULL DISCLOSURE: These are Happy Cog examples. It’s the space I know best, it’s a glimpse behind the curtain for the curious, and as the Business Development Director, it’s kinda my job to sell us a little bit. If this turns you off, read no further and check out these awesome cat gifs instead.

COLLABORATION

You and (hopefully a manageable subset of) your team are going to work with this agency/team/firm under tight deadlines and rising stakes. The way you work together during the relatively stress-free sales process is a great predictor of what working together during the more stressful periods of the project will be like. We evaluate prospective clients through this lens all the time. Specifically, the strength of the project manager they dedicate to the effort and the quality and tone of communication.

How seriously do the firms under consideration value collaboration?
How have they addressed that as a capability or practice?
Do they say “yes” to everything, or are they actually going to help lead this project?
How will they help you sell the project through your organization?

If you’re lucky, you’ll get a great vibe from your interactions through the sales process. Maybe they’ll even offer you a glimpse into the team and how they work.

Previous or current clients can provide insight into their experiences through references. Better yet, you can do some digging to see what clients say without being prompted:

• It’s been a fun couple of days! Thank you guys. :) @happycog @brettharned @kevinsharon -@jaimeejaimee
• @zeldman I’m super happy with what the team produced. Thanks @yeseniaa @ccashdollar and @SpleenLatifa! -@ryanshafer
• Big Whoop Whoop to harvard and @happycog team for cranking out the rebuild of harvard.edu – @perryhewitt deserves some champagne today -@ctraganos
• @bryanjones Since we are a @happycogclient, #aea is definitely on my list. -@shaneadams

PROCESS

So, now you know the folks under evaluation are going to be great to work with. The next question is, what are they going to deliver? I know you want to look into a crystal ball and see the project outcome now. It’s the same human need that leads to the invention of 3-D ultrasound machines and searching your house for Christmas presents. But, you’re not going to request spec work. We’ve covered this previously. What you can ascertain, is the method behind the madness.

Design is problem solving. Say that to yourself 10 times under your breath (now apologize to the people near you who you just freaked out). What any vendor should be able to communicate, is how they solve problems. What methods or approach do they employ? Faith in this process is what gets designers though rounds of revision to arrive at a final result. It’s faith in the process that will similarly get you through the stressful stretches within your project.

Once the process has been described, does it feel like it would work for you and your team? Are they describing their approach in an understandable way, or are they pulling a David Copperfield, trying to razzle dazzle you with industry jargon and arcane terminology? Now that they’ve described their process, are they going to provide what you need? I often explain:

“At Happy Cog, informed by user research and focused on business requirements, we create user experience and design systems coded to the highest industry standards, and then we teach you and your team how to manage your website’s new publishing platform.”

That’s the elevator pitch, but what does it really mean? What are the advantages and what are the risks? What it means, is that in many cases we design the critical core experiences and interactions of the site, and create documentation that acts as the decision making models you need to add and extend our work. We don’t typically build every page out for your new site. The good news? You own your site. You can add to and evolve the experience infinitely, without having to call an agency to make updates. The bad news? You need to have some internal capability to flesh out and extend your site.

RESULTS

So now that you know what to expect, contextualize it through previous results. Look at the evidence at hand, but also consider what the vendor highlights about what was important in their own work. Do they demonstrate they care about the same things as you? Are they more focused on making a splash than ROI? Did they create something mind-blowing, but also blow their deadlines? Are there broken links in the vendor’s case studies? Typos? How many change requests did they have to author midstream and why? These are all questions you have a right to ask, and ones a smart agency endeavors to answer.

Here’s some of our work to give you a sense of what we do and what we think is important to understand within these projects.

If you’d rather look at our results through the lens of our industry, or our peers’ perspectives, we’re happy to stand by what others have to say about us too.

Hopefully you now have vendors evaluated or graded based on:

• How nicely they play with others
• How they make the donuts
• Their track record

You have to make a call. Hopefully there is a runaway favorite. If it’s a photo finish, rank your priorities, identify the option that best meets your most important needs. Make a decision based not only on what launch day will look like. Make a decision based on what project day 10 will look like, day 100, day 200… It’s the stuff in between kickoff and launch that really matters. This is a critical and unique opportunity. Pick the partner that makes the most sense for you, and make sure you enjoy the ride.

We’d love to work with you, but this isn’t just about us. In the hopes of making your partnership with any team more successful, we’re sharing these resources and insights:

• Our project planner can help you build your internal project strategy to better articulate your needs to vendors, ensuring you’re not missing any important considerations.
• RFPS: The Least Creative Way To Hire People
• Never Get Involved in a Land War in Asia
• Lastly, if you’d like to talk with us about your project, contact us and we’ll get in touch as soon as possible.

It is within your power to prevent the bloodshed, Dear RFP Author. It’s May. Let’s assume you’re working toward delivering an RFP before the end of the fiscal year. Further, let’s assume you’re building an RFP to redesign a web property. How can you avert disaster? How can you avoid the pitfalls that have plagued so many RFPs before you? Well, I’d start by recommending you:

Avoid All RFPs

Don’t Google RFP. Don’t do a search. A Request For Proposal is a many splendored thing. RFPs facilitate municipal governments bidding waste disposal services and state universities purchasing lab coats (never go to a school that’s BYO Lab Coat, that bit of advice is free of charge).

Don’t use someone else’s template. You don’t know where that template has been…

You’re in a leadership role of an internal creative department or a member of a procurement team. Architecting your organization’s redesign plan is a unique opportunity to help your company/school/service/team evolve. You are engaged in the critical first steps, so don’t start off with a bad template. Templates shoe horn your project to meet their own dimensions. Instead, start with a blank canvas and explain your project:

• Why are you undertaking this effort?
• What are the limitations or challenges of your current experience?
• What business requirements or user needs do you need to (better) meet?
• Who is your primary audience and what do you want them to do?
• What are the capabilities of the team that will manage and update your redesigned site after (re)launch?
• How will you measure the success of your project six months after launch? After one year?
• What are the biggest risks to your project? What are you afraid of?

If you need more questions, email me and I’ll send one of our project planners your way.

NOTE: Be careful not to be too prescriptive. This is about strategy, not tactics.

Say things like, “We need to have an experience that works well on mobile devices.”

Don’t say things like, “We need a responsive site design.”

You’re putting the cart before the horse by suggesting a solution. Focus on defining the challenge/goal. You’re paying your vendor to solve your problems. Go ahead, get your head wrapped around your project. Got it? Good. Now you can look at some RFP templates, but remember, don’t force your project to fit any one template. Bend, break, and Frankenstein these things together until they adequately communicate your needs and goals.

If you find yourself requiring a response that fits into a set number of pages, set in a specific font, font size, line spacing, you need a paper copy mailed in addition to an emailed pdf, or you need them burned to CDs with one marked as “Original”, stop. Make it stop. If you’re the state of Wyoming and legally you need to require those criteria, bless your heart. You’re stuck. If you voluntarily require these criteria in the hopes of diagnosing how well a vendor can “follow instructions,” you’ll get what you deserve in your vendor responses. Agencies have a saying, “You get the clients you deserve.” It works the other way too.

Allow some creativity in vendors’ responses, this is a creative endeavor and these are creative teams, but do not request speculative work. Spec work is a terrible thing for many well documented reasons. If you’re looking for spec work, do me a favor and don’t send us your RFP.

Be Picky

You get to pick a group of agencies to invite to your RFP. This should be a treat. If you’re in the industry, this is your chance to geek out with teams you admire. It’s like the awesome first issue of a comic book where the super team is originally hand selected. Right? Anyone? No? Moving on, remember, when forming the Avengers, you build a team of 6 or 7 superheroes, not 75.

This past year, Happy Cog was invited to respond to an RFP from a large municipal government. I asked how many firms were invited to respond to the RFP, and was told 364. This is insane. An RFP is a courtship. You’re engaged in a matchmaking transaction. An RFP is a series of first dates to determine who warrants a second date. Order the lobster, you’re worth it! You wouldn’t go on 364 first dates, would you? That’s only one night off, two if it’s a leap year. Keep the party small so you can get to know your guests. Start with six and whittle that group down to three finalists.

If you don’t have a wishlist, ask for advice. Your company employs designers, developers, etc. right? Ask them. Ask Quora. Ask Twitter. Or do your own research. Pick sites that you think are exquisite, contact them, and ask who did the work. Check out award sites. There are more design awards out there than design agencies, check out the winners. I’m partial to Webby awards myself.

Getting to Know You

Now that you’ve found potential dancing partners, get to know them. Schedule calls for all of the RFP participants to speak with your project team. If it’s not worth your time to connect each of the potential vendors with the project team, or a subset of the project team, then you’re not taking this project seriously enough. Make the time.

Let people talk, ask each other questions, and get to know one another. Are you having fun? You’re going to spend months (in some cases years) working with this vendor. If it’s not fun now, why continue? It’s only going to get more intense as the stakes get higher. You don’t want to go through the tough times with someone that pronounces the word height as “hithe,” talks over you, or eats what sounds like it can only be a bowl of cockroaches while talking on the phone.

The Benjamins

Here’s a great piece of information to share with your vendors: Your budget. Why go round for round with a hidden budget? If you don’t have a budget, you don’t really have a project. You have a strange hobby where you invest lots of time talking to vendors. What you don’t have is a real project.

We’ve bid on a handful of RFPs this year and come under budget 85% of the time and over budget the other 15%. We’ve miraculously never come in at, or $5 under, a proposed budget. This is not The Price is Right. There is no valor in blindly guessing the “right” number. If you guess the right number then you have to put your hand in Bob Barker’s pocket for the hundred dollar bill reward, and Bob stuffs those C-notes way down in there… Maybe you’re just not sure what something like this costs?

If you don’t know what your project should cost and need help, hire help. Ask one of the vendors you’re considering inviting to the RFP to review your project scope, maybe interview a few members of the project team, and deliver a rough project roadmap and estimate. You’ll know you’re getting their best thinking because it’s informed by research. You’ll also know they’ll honor their final bid and think twice about asking for a change request. Your project is based on their expert direction after all.

Get This Party Started

Finally, give the vendors the information they need, and let them sell you on their capabilities. They need your:

Requirements
Timeline (from RFP response through launch)
Budget
Staff information

• Who will project manage from your team?
• What internal capabilities can you provide?
• Will your team be able to migrate content from the old site to the new? Who will migrate it?
• Will you have updated content ready for the new site? Who will create it?

Technology information

• What CMS do you use? Are you looking to move to a new publishing platform?
• What third party systems need to integrate into the new site?

In return, vendors should share their process with you (if they don’t have a process to share, RUN!), some information about their history and capabilities, insights into other projects, a broad response to your project needs, a budget, and a rough timeline. Basically all of the things you need to make an informed decision about their candidacy. Remember, you did your homework. You hand picked these vendors. You know a lot about them already right? Asking vendors to rehash what’s on their site indicates you may not have done your homework. Vendors’ Spidey Senses start to tingle at this point. An RFP is their opportunity to evaluate your team and your project as well. Don’t show up for your first date dressed for paintball when you’re actually going out ballroom dancing (I’ve been married a long time, I have no idea what you people do on dates).

From those responses, pick the best three and invite them to continue the conversation in person. Bring the members of your project team (let’s cap it at 7 people) and ensure that the critical decision makers are available. If the critical decisions makers aren’t available, cancel the meeting. Your vendors would rather reschedule than come back. Trust me. Reschedule.

Let your vendors set the agendas and see what they have to share, evaluate how they engage the room, ask them the hard questions, but be ready for a conversation. When it’s all over, pick the best fit and be on your way. How to pick the best firm? That’s a topic for another Cognition post.

Do you have an RFP horror story to share? I’d love to hear the gory details.

If you’re interested in more RFP advice, check out my SXSW panel with Todd Ross Nienkerk OMG Your RFP Is Killing Me

I’ve sold allied health text books to nursing schools and UX consulting services for internal pharmaceutical applications. I’ve cold called upwards of 75 clients per day while working in staffing, and been lucky enough to work with clients who were true partners. Whether I was the last phone call a prospective client wanted to receive, or offered a truly valued service, successful business development often rests in knowing when to walk away, and when to run.

It’s Our Time

I have about 40 hours per week to work with when I’m lucky, and right off the bat a minimum of five hours per week is spent in internal meetings. Five daily status meetings, an hour long weekly sales meeting, plus a two hour long weekly estimating meeting take an eighth of that week out of the picture. In addition, sales calls can easily take an hour each, a pitch or client meeting can be an all day affair, and a new project kickoff takes a full day off the books. And that’s just my time.

We’re a boutique-sized team. Our practitioners are hands-on at every step of the process. This means every time I pull someone into a meeting about a prospective client, they’re not working on an existing client’s project. If they’re traveling to a pitch, which they often do, they lose even more billable time. So the challenge becomes not only investing my time wisely, but theirs as well. That’s when the stakes get higher.

Moneyball

The trick is ensuring that you have the opportunity to spend the time you need on the valuable investments while simultaneously avoiding the pitfalls of a bad time investment. If you are scheduling intro cold calls with clients, determining top priorities and lowest priorities is key. If you are choosing between responding to a lengthy RFP with a company you might want to work with, or spending that time connecting more personally with potential clients through email or generating a referral, you need to decide where your time currency is best spent.

Comparing prospective clients can feel like evaluating apples against pineapples, but I’ll let you in on a secret: I grade client prospects against a series of criteria. I assign a total value to each opportunity or prospect, and evaluate based partially on this grade. I’m still working out the kinks, but, man, is it satisfying to look at grades on a scale. Additionally, I work with a variety of passionate, entrepreneurial leaders on our team, and it’s not always 100% my call to walk away from a prospective client. That said, empirical measurement becomes useful in these conversations too. Defining what you (and your team) consider a valuable opportunity is the first step. For our team, this tends to be a client that meets a mix of tactical and strategic criteria.

Dollars and Sense


Tactically, budget and timeline expectations have to be appropriate. This sounds terribly mercenary, but there is little reason to dig deeper if a potential client’s expectations are completely unreasonable. Budgets that come in at a fraction of what you’ll propose, or timelines that will compromise work quality are difficult to overcome in the best of situations. If a client is close-lipped and unwilling to disclose budget, share your ballpark with them and see how they respond. Ask about the money tactfully and up front, every time. If the project is flawed at the ground level, winning it may actually be the worst possible outcome.

Process is King/Queen/Important

You can evaluate a lot about a client through their vendor selection process. If clients:

• Reach out via a criminally bad RFP delivered by mail
• Deny you access to the project team
• Miss calls or are late for meetings
• Become unresponsive
• Exhibit fundamental differences of opinion on critical concepts

You can bet, heavily, that you will experience these issues throughout the course of the project. The excitement of finally engaging a client you have been long pursuing can sometimes blind you to their faults once you break through. Sales cycles can be lengthy, but stubbornly pursuing increasingly difficult clients, merely due to the time invested to date, can be throwing away good money after bad. We all know that brand appeal is hard to resist. RESIST IT. Similarly, the appeal of the end result of the project can often overshadow a shaky roadmap getting there. Don’t allow yourself to get too excited by the potential project outcome and blind yourself to what you’ll endure in order to get there.

Get Someone on the Phone, Anyone.

The next criteria is the authority of your client contact. Are you talking to the right people? I hate to harp on RFPs, but procurement folks are rarely the right people. Lovely as they may be, typically they are involved in the vendor selection process specifically because they are insulated from the actual project itself. If you are talking to the project or product lead, good. They should know what you need to know. However, if this person is not also the budget owner, a lot of hard work can be wasted when/if that budget owner swoops in down the road. The wrong contact at the right client is a liability and very difficult to overcome. Soldiering on is an admirable quality, but results are pretty sweet too.

Between the Lines

Then there are significantly more subtle, and occasionally critically important criteria: project appeal. Over time, it should become extremely clear what your team and your organization find valuable in prospective projects. In my first year at Happy Cog, our team’s priorities became crystal clear: baseball and cats. Alright those are not everyone’s top priorities, but absent those, we tend to agree that the most important criteria, number one with a bullet, is the client project team. Everything else takes a back seat. Historically, our most satisfying and most successful projects have been the byproduct of meaningful client collaboration.

Awesome client teams can be difficult to identify this early in this process. Fortunately, we employ a Project Planner to organize and diagnose prospective projects, and I couldn’t recommend utilizing something similar highly enough. This is a diagnostic tool you can utilize no matter the size or maturity of your organization. If nothing else, a document like this tells clients that you take your work seriously, are organized, and deliberate. It doesn’t have to be pages and pages, just enough to ask a few critical questions. If a client balks at completing a well-defined form where the value is clearly communicated, fold ‘em.

When a client takes the time to fill it out fully and thoughtfully, they immediately get points for process with our team. We recently received a Planner from a potential client and after reviewing the document, one of our directors turned to me and said “We need this project”. Need. All based on a thorough Planner that was thoughtfully and creatively completed. They “got” us and sounded like an awesome partner. It was like a love letter, so it received top priority.

Also important when looking at potential projects is the opportunity to try something new. Maybe it’s a new kind of problem our team has not previously addressed, or a new platform with unique constraints and opportunities, or a chance to adjust our internal process. We learn from each and every project. It’s exciting when we get to ask ourselves, “How much are we going to learn here?”

How do you evaluate clients and opportunities? Wanna share any war stories? Blog back and we’ll swap them like Robert Shaw and Richard Dreyfuss in Jaws.

Hold on there, let’s pump the brakes on the generalizations a bit. Recruiters, like designers or developers or content strategists, hail from a variety of backgrounds, have a wide range of capabilities, and deliver varying degrees of value and results. For many people, a relationship with a recruiter is the catalyst for opportunities that reshape a career.

Now, to all you recruiters out there slowly nodding your heads in silent agreement, not so fast. Having worked previously in interactive recruiting for five years, I can say with conviction, most recruiters don’t fit that bill.

This is not recruiters’ fault. The staffing industry as a whole is to blame, and don’t get me started on HR departments (btw, recruiting should live in Operations, not HR). The problem is that the pervasive strategy behind staffing as an industry is:

More + more = more

More calls and meetings, lead to more jobs to fill and more people under contract looking for jobs. These are often ‘Dialing for Dollars’ environments built around a ‘Fill It, or Kill It’ attitude. This is genuine staffing vernacular. Need a shower? I’ll wait. We’re not talking about folks selling widgets out of the back of a van here. These are people shaping other people’s careers. As a result, staffing companies experience amazing rates of turnover, so opportunities to find a recruiter willing to slow things down and have a human conversation are rare.

As a guy who has been on both ends of that recruiter call, here are my thoughts on how we can all get along and generate the best results.

To all the people leading recruitment strategy out there…

Take the tragedy out of your strategy (that kinda works)

Information is everywhere. It’s amazing when a recruiter emails me listing a freelancer’s job history and skills, but doesn’t include their last name. It’s called “LinkedIn” people. If someone wants to reach out to that resource and cut out the recruiter, leaving off their last name won’t stop them. What is going to prevent them from going direct, is a relationship with said recruiter. Most people will not screw over people they actually know.

Build relationships

Recruiters need to spend more time learning about the industry they are staffing, immerse themselves, and spend less time on the phone pounding out sales calls. Twitter, Quora, Google+, conferences, meetings for professional organizations—this is where you earn your bones, and the trust and loyalty of your community.

Hire people adept at building relationships, not people eager to make 75-85 phone calls per day (yep, 75-85 phone calls, EVERY DAY). A recruiter friend of mine was told by her manager that she was not fit for a promotion at her staffing company because she didn’t care enough about money. Great recruiters solve problems, build teams, help people. Crap salespeople chase a dollar. Reward people that drive meaningful relationships. In a market competing over the same pool of resources, give both clients and job seekers a reason to choose to work with you.

I owe my role at Happy Cog to the relationships I cultivated. I can say from experience, it’s well worth your time.

To all those pros out there fielding calls/emails from recruiters…

Wear protection

If you have a profile on LinkedIn, you are in the Yellowpages. Further, I bet most of you list yourselves as interested in ‘career opportunities’ or ‘job inquiries.’ Go ahead and check. Back? Don’t feel bad, all but three of the people in my office fit this bill too, including @hoyboy, and he has a pretty sweet gig. Absent a role that requires eating bacon while on an airplane, I think he’s staying put. Similarly, I’m sure most of you intend to indicate you are looking for freelance work or side projects. This is a big green light to recruiters. Take two minutes, and add “I am not interested in partnering with recruiters regarding new positions at this time” to the first line of your Summary. If someone chooses to ignore that explicit request, you then have my permission to hang up on them when they call.

If you wind up on the phone with a recruiter, manage the call, don’t dodge it. Hanging up on someone sucks. Don’t be that guy/gal. Explain you are not looking at this time, explain you do not have any referrals to offer to a recruiter you don’t know, explain they can check back with you in six months if they’d like, then wish them a nice day and end the call. If the recruiter on the other end is worth their salt:

1. They’ll still be around in six months to follow up
2. They’ll listen to you and not call back until then
3. They’ll let you say your piece rather than steamroll over you with a sales pitch

If they meet these criteria, and you see them at your favorite networking event, and one or two of your peers seem to dig them on Twitter or Facebook or whatever, keep them in the back of your mind. There are always rainy days.

If they don’t follow these basic expectations of civil discourse, you may now begin with the hanging up. Now that I’m on this side of the conversation, I have heard some true horror stories about recruiters from my colleagues. Scare tactics, slimy emails, and more. In these instances, hang them out to dry. A public Twitter flogging may just be in order.

Manage your reputation

If you are working with a recruiter, work with one recruiter. It’s easier, trust me. The addition of more recruiters does not yield more opportunities (please see my snide equation after paragraph 3). In fact, adding more recruiters creates confusion, overlapping conversations, and more opportunities to screw up. For them, and for you.

If you agree to interview for a role with one recruiter carelessly, then pursue that job on your own (or through another resource without thinking), you just burned a bridge with someone who spends most of their professional life talking to people in your industry, about the people in your industry. Screw over a recruiter and they’ll remember, forever. Trust me. Trust. Me. Better to stay organized, work with one recruiter as long as that relationship is successful, and avoid looking like you ‘slimed’ someone. You keep that bad karma forever, like luggage.

Also, make sure you treat each opportunity like an opportunity. If you sulk your way through an interview you’re not 100% excited about, or drag your ass through a contract gig, you can bet the folks you intersected with are telling the people they know about it. “Bad news” is a hard reputation to shed.

Do unto others

If you’re working with a recruiter driving great results, let them know it. Referrals are a good recruiter’s lifeblood, so tell a friend. Better yet, sing it from a Twitter or LinkedIn recommendation mountaintop. Shine a light on great recruiters and help set the bar for the industry.

Similarly, police the bad behavior. Warn the folks in your network away from a bad experience, but let’s keep the generalizations about ‘recruiters’ to a minimum. Just because one or a few people come off as ‘le douche,’ that doesn’t condemn every other professional in that industry. I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve seen someone tweet about what a pain in the ass recruiters are, what an unwelcome inconvenience and intrusion. Loads of times, those complaints are from people I know for a fact owe their last job, or a recent gig, to a recruiter. Don’t say anything about recruiters as an industry that you wouldn’t say about information architects, or designers, or office managers.

So where does that leave us? Do you work with a great recruiter you’d like to recommend? Tweet ‘em up. Have a war story you want to share? Vent, let’s get it off your chest, put it behind us and move forward. Have any insights into improving the recruiting industry? Good recruiters want to hear it.

User voting has a tremendous impact on the panel selection process. Our panel proposals are outlined here for your consideration. If you see something you’d love to explore more with us and our panelist partners in March, please follow the links provided and let the Panel Picker know what you want! Voting ends 11:59 CDT on Friday, September 2.

Go Forth & Make Awesomeness: Core Values & Action

Leslie Jensen-Inman
Jeffrey Zeldman Happy Cog Founder

Passion. Purpose. Promise. Pursuit. These are the 4 P’s that create a Map for Awesomeness. Discover how to: embrace your passion, define your purpose, foster your promise, and engage your pursuit. Find out how to do this in a creative environment that encourages collaboration.

How to Build and Evaluate Ideas

Kevin Hoffman Happy Cog User Experience Director
Aarron Walter
Andy Budd
Dan Mall
Kim Goodwin

Before the code, before the design, before the architecture, there was an idea. Some digital design professionals consider their ideas to be a major portion of their currency. But where do ideas come from, when are they ready, how do they evolve, and when and how should they be shared? And when don’t they matter at all?

Web Project Management Lessons from Darth Vader

Sam Barnes
Brett Harned Happy Cog Project Manager
Ani Moller
Cola Richmond

Many web designers and developers do the unthinkable and join the dark side, they become Web Project Managers! However, most underestimate its powers… Web project management is dark art and there’s no better master to teach us than Lord Vader himself. In this discussion, a council of battle-hardened Web Project Managers will look at what tips we can take from Darth with regards to the processes and challenges we face every day when planning, designing and delivering both small and large websites and web applications. Working with internal senior management and Emperor-esque clients, managing Stormtrooper productions armies like a boss, dealing with Bounty Hunter contractors and making brave decisions based on mystic instinct – this guy has all the skills. Not to mention the job that must have been the sitemap, wireframe and functional specification that resulted in the launch of the Death Star v1. Join us in the digital Jedi temple to find how web projects can be delivered smoothly.

OMG Your RFP Is Killing Me

Joe Rinaldi Happy Cog Director of Business Development
Rawle Anders Happy Cog Director of Client Services
Rebecca Sherman
Jen Oliver
Todd Ross Nienkirk

There has to be a better way. In this panel, business development professionals will speak to the RFP process and other options. Ways to circumnavigate an RFP will be discussed. Creative alternatives will be outlined, and the strengths and weaknesses of RFPs will be analyzed. If you are building an RFP now, this is your intervention. If a project looms on the horizon, learn about your options. If you like a good war story, we’ll be comparing scars like Robert Shaw and Richard Dreyfuss in Jaws. Let’s start architecting a better process.

Getting Good: Practical Tips for New Designers

Yesenia Perez-Cruz Happy Cog Designer
Allison Wagner Happy Cog Developer
Meagan Fisher

Being new in a rapidly changing industry is scary. Luckily, as young designers in the web industry, we have access to boundless tutorials, resources and mentors willing to share their knowledge. Actually, the abundance of information out there can be overwhelming! This session is about looking inwards for improvement, not outwards. We’ll talk about understanding your work habits, setting realistic goals and building upon them, how to ask better questions, and the never-ending experiment that is your personal process.

Bootcamp for a UX Team of None

Fred Beecher
Russ Unger Happy Cog User Experience Director
Todd Zaki Warfel
Brynn Evans
Krista Sanders

This workshop will introduce you to affordable user experience design methods for getting user input and feedback throughout your design and development process. These methods, like guerrilla research, gamestorming, and progressive prototyping, will allow you to do just enough UX design to get you started in the right direction. They will help you get in touch with your users efficiently and use their feedback and insights to influence your design decisions. But why should you care? Your code is gold. Your business model is solid. You should care because having a good UX is no longer a differentiator; it’s an expectation. What you need is a good UX designer. Of course, they’re rare and expensive right now. Is it possible to fix your UX without one? Yes. You won’t go home from this workshop with your own UX designer, but you will be armed with the knowledge that will enable you to enable your users to make you next year’s most sought after angel investor.

Dealing With The ‘F’ Word: Feedback

Brett Harned Happy Cog Project Manager
Sam Barnes
Whitney Hess
Cassie McDaniel

You’ve poured your heart and soul in to your work and proudly presented it to your team or your clients, and the response you got back was…not what you expected. Maybe you didn’t miss the mark, but they did? Maybe the feedback you got was a little confusing? Maybe you did suck, and you need to go back to the drawing board. It’s okay, it happens. Reviewing, filtering, understanding and responding to feedback on any type of deliverable can be a rough experience. This cross-disciplinary panel of web design professionals from the UX, Design and Project Management communities will discuss The “F” word and how to deal with it.

Designing Experiences for Women

Jessica Ivins Happy Cog User Experience Designer

Women have become the digital mainstream. In the US market, women make up just under half of the online population, but they spend 58 percent of e-commerce dollars. Women are online gamers, shoppers, bloggers, and social media consumers. And yet, we still don’t know how to design for them. The immediate impulse when designing for women is to “shrink it and pink it,” meaning products are splashed with the color pink, and content and messaging are dumbed down. But women want what’s relevant to them. They want products and online experiences that are intuitive, not insulting to their intelligence. They want function, not frills. This session reviews the historical and contemporary landscape of designing for women. We’ll review misguided, yet well-intentioned designs based on assumptions and stereotypes that have flopped. Likewise, we’ll review success stories of well-designed products and experiences that truly meet women’s needs. We’ll also look at when gender should factor into your design and when it shouldn’t. Ultimately, when designing for women (or men, or both), you’ll want to get it right.

Guerrilla Research Methods

Russ Unger Happy Cog Director of User Experience

This hands-on session will cover a number of low cost, yet powerful research methods to help you make better data-driven design decisions. We’ll provide a number of techniques for recruiting research participants, creating better research questions, and what to do with your data once you’ve conducted your research. Topics Covered: How to sell guerrilla research into a project from the start How to recruit better participants How to form better research questions A number of inexpensive, quick, but highly effective research methods when time and/or budget are limited Valuable “how-tos” to execute the research.

“I want to make cool shit.”

I’ll be honest, I just don’t get it. To be fair, it’s safe to say I don’t get “cool” in general. I routinely dress like I’m headed to a corporate team-building ropes course, and I’m still waiting for Firefly to be picked up for season 2. So maybe it’s no surprise that the quest for cool escapes me. I don’t get the allure of making something cool for the sake of it being cool. Further, I don’t understand how you sell that to clients, or more importantly, why they would pay for it.

Cool is a byproduct

Steve McQueen never tried to be cool, he didn’t have to try. He could even make riding a motorcycle into a barbed wire fence cool.

Cool just happens; it shouldn’t be the target a project tries to hit. I don’t think great work and being cool are mutually exclusive. I think a lot of creative agencies are cool. But here’s the thing: the coolest agencies I know do great work with some excellent people, thus they are cool. They don’t have to spend a lot of time or effort convincing you how cool they are. Sure, they may have a foosball table (almost a requirement for creative agencies these days), but it doesn’t have to be the first thing you see when you walk in the door. It’s a company’s work that makes them cool; their output, not their amenities.

Great teams do great work. They take their projects and clients seriously. They push ideas, reconcile them against business requirements, stretch them, make them intuitive, and take the time to deliver something awesome, on time, and on budget. That’s what’s cool.

What’s not cool?

Bragging about how late you stay at work, how many weekends you spend at the office? Not cool. How hard you play; lawn darts in the hallway, all night client benders. Also, not super cool. I think long hours tend to be a product of poor process. Going bananas in the office probably means you have nothing to do. The Princeton Review’s motto when I worked for them was “Work Smarter, Not Harder” and I want it engraved on my tombstone.

Clients want maximized results, especially in this economy, which is why having a moon bounce in the office seems to be happening less frequently. Imagine if some of the energy dedicated to pushing the limits of creativity, was applied to refining process, streamlining internal approvals, or developing a joint creative/project management/client services approach.

So what is cool?

Sites like thefwa.com have been defining what’s cool for our community for a while now. Certainly they focus on championing innovation and risk taking, but most of the projects featured seem to border on impractically cool. Was The Wilderness Downtown cool because it was Arcade Fire or because of the integration of Google Maps and HTML5? Or was it both?

I’m certainly not saying there is anything wrong with a desire to be innovative or take risks. And maybe I’m undervaluing the direct correlation between innovation and the quest for cool. It just feels like sometimes the creative execution of these sites are geared purely to “wow” at the expense of solving genuine business goals. I’m not saying that’s what happens, it’s just how it feels to me.

Clients aren’t entirely off the hook though. “We want an award-winning experience” can be interpreted as “We want to be the coolest.” Awards certainly serve a purpose, but again they’re a by-product. Winning an award shouldn’t be the stated goal from the start of a project. Instead, we should urge our clients to focus on what’s most important: their site’s users. Meeting that kind of goal, combined with a fun, collaborative client-agency relationship makes a project cool.

What’s in a word?

Perhaps I’m misunderstanding folks’ cool intentions. Maybe they mean “great?” I’d say Amazon offers a great experience, but there is nothing compellingly cool about Amazon.com (Amazon – sorry, please don’t delay the shipment of Dance With Dragons). Maybe their definition of cool is, in fact, grounded in utility. Maybe they mean they want to build a cool jQuery slideshow plug-in, or a cool accessible user interface, but I’m not convinced. The decision to use the word “cool” instead of “innovative” lends a sense of style or image to the work. Polish over structure, form over function.

The truth is, some of the professionals I know crave an opportunity to “make cool shit” because their client work leaves them hungering for more. If you have to make a career move to get to the work you want, do it. Life is too short. Or, create a business development strategy to get the work you want. Reign in your client services and creative team and make something awesome happen. A wise man once said to me, “You get the clients you deserve.”

You know what I think is cool? When a project hits on all cylinders. Gorgeous and imaginative design, intuitive and engaging UX, seamless and accessible development, all managed pleasantly and collaboratively with a happy client. When a client gets a promotion because the KPI’s and ROI’s and all of those other jawns are clicking – that’s cool. Also, I think the word “jawn” is cool.

I’d say it is fair to conclude that the quest for cool still confuses me (and anyone that knew me in high school would agree it seemed to elude me then as well).

I’m asking you.

What is your definition of cool? How does “cool” factor into your project and approach goals? How do you manage clients that prioritize cool over utility, or award-winning over user-focused?

In the last year, it has been my privilege to help organize and launch a start up design community called PhilaMade. PhilaMade facilitates dialogues dedicated to “celebrating, inspiring, and cultivating creative brilliance in the Philadelphia community.” Without a blueprint, we’ve managed to grow a network of active participants, strong brand recognition, and a ton of momentum. The lessons we’ve learned in our first year lay out a simple road map to getting any community, online or offline, off the ground.

If we build it, will anyone come?

Does anyone seek the community you have in mind? Without a mandate for the community you plan, you are painting with the lights off. PhilaMade launched from a series of email and phone interviews. We identified and spoke with creative leaders in the Philadelphia community we hoped to engage. The interviews yielded our most valuable catalysts: perspectives from our target audience, and a group of contributors invested in our community prior to launch. Not only did we emerge from these interviews with our outline, we came out with an active leadership team dedicated to shaping and growing the project. We essentially performed stakeholder interviews like we do for a web project at Happy Cog.

Nothing draws a crowd like a crowd

This is where you ultimately succeed or fail. Without a network of truly interested participants, your effort yields a lot of “talking at”, which is the death knell for any community. The balance is driving interest while curating membership. To succeed, we needed creative leaders to engage. We also needed to insulate them from:

1. Serial Attenders – You know these folks, they’re at EVERY tweetup, meetup, barcamp and bandcamp. Lovely folks, but often not content drivers.
2. Bear Traps – Vendors looking to mine your email list, job seekers looking to spring their portfolios on the unsuspecting, or anyone really lying in wait with ulterior motives.
3. Mean People – Mean people suck.

This is where the heavy lifting happens, but it gets easier over time. By recruiting our board and building rapport and interest via our interviews, we stacked the deck. We were able to leverage the reputations of our participants when recruiting additional members. The “If “so-and-so” is involved, I’m intrigued” effect. Every time we added to our roster, it became easier to recruit.

Don’t be afraid to learn from others

When we launched, we had a clean slate, which was actually very intimidating. The first meeting existed in a vacuum, without context. While this was the first PhilaMade meeting in recorded history, it wasn’t the first meeting in recorded history. Local groups like PhillyCHI and Build Guild have been holding great gatherings for a long time, and there was a ton of good stuff to learn from them. We were original enough to be memorable, but derivative enough to be successful.

Build a Brand

Over time, the organization as a whole developed and shaped our mission. An attitude evolved, a point of view was refined, and a voice was identified. Our own Chris Cashdollar then stepped in to build all of this into an identity. The positive response to Chris’s work on Dribbble facilitated its warm reception within the group. We accommodated this interest by producing PhilaMade buttons and stickers for members, and their passion for this mark has generated better guerrilla advertising than we could have anticipated.

Deliver

Your community will erode without nourishment. We needed to deliver an experience that our members could not find elsewhere. To that end, we hosted our first Show & Tell. Two design teams presented projects to the PhilaMade membership outlining process artifacts, insights into technology, team collaboration, and measured ROI. The presentations were recorded and are destined for the PhilaMade website. We produced something and committed to deliver more. In the end, we rewarded our constituency for remaining interested through our first year. Today, they are part of a community they know is dedicated to delivering valuable content, a brand they are happy to associate with, and excitement about our plans for the future.

We’d love to learn more about how you or someone you know has been able to grow a community from an idea. Tweet your response, or better yet, write a post of your own and link to it here.