Time and time again, I get asked the same question from most businesses and agencies I’ve worked with, ‘How do we sell UX?’
The story is the same, they’ve hired the team, they get bits and pieces, but they haven’t been able to sell the huge pieces or been able to grow accounts with optimisation programmes.
Most agencies sell ‘Design thinking’, ‘Workshops’, ‘Hackathons’, ‘Design jams’ and whatever else. But in all honesty, that’s more digital strategy than pure UX.
Design Sprints are great, I sell them, but for me, it’s something you sell in at stage 2, after some of the problems have risen to the surface, and there is a need to kick something off, gain alignment or create something tangible to test.
UX is difficult to sell if you’re not known for being a top tier UX focused agency like IDEO or CXPartners. So how do you get your foot in the door and prove your worth?
- Summary report
- Data
- Opportunities and next steps
Product Health Checks are an excellent cost-effective way to get a foot in the door; they take 5-10 days and cost around £3-5k depending on the length and your shop-rate. For most businesses, that’s an affordable investment, and for an agency, it’s an affordable piece of business development if doing for free.
A Product Health Check is essentially a report that takes a look at revenue generation, profitability, market fit, competitive positioning and end-user experiences. It provides actionable insights that can (potentially) reduce costs by improving operational efficiencies with digital tools or process improvements.
After you deliver the report, the customer can then discuss what they want to do after, such as wireframes, designs, further studies or ‘Design Sprints’. But the initial delivery would be a Product health check.
It’s easy for Client services to sell and package up. Unfortunately, I can’t share any previous client examples as most of the content is commercially sensitive, but the straw man is detailed here.
- Problems and suggest fixes
- Opportunities
- Quantitative research results
- Qualitative interview results
- Actionable insights summary