603 - Presenting Your Work To Clients with Billy Baumann
{preamble: skip ahead eight minutes to get right down to business.}
While the visually stunning work you've created for others is what you got you into a meeting room with potential new clients; how you visually present your ideas behind closed doors is as important as the final product everyone sees. Creating a complete experience for your client is what will ultimately determine if you got the job and how much your new clients believe in your ability to get it all done. Billy Baumann of Delicious Design League and Mark Brickey share their secrets to creating a pitch deck that will walk the people behind your next paycheck from Point A to Point Chimpanzee all while selling your intellect, abilities, and attention to detail. This workshop will help you build an unshakeable bridge between creative and client that will put you a cut above a crowded marketplace filled with designers who could be anything from artistically better than you to just flat out cheaper than you. Stay ahead of it all with a well thought out plan all held between a cover page and a thank you.
Talking Points
The work to be done before the pitch.
Branding your company and building the client's confidence in your abilities.
Deck Building with openers, closers, and the ideas you want to see through.
Presentation pointers.
Handling the client through the rest of the design process.
ROUND ZERO
Understand what the project is to guide how it should be presented to the client.
Develop a road map for how your creation process to mentally prepare who you're working with for every step they'll take.
Doing the up front footwork to find aesthetics that resonate with your client and helps instill their ownership in the entire project.
ROUND ONE
The branded and necessary bones of your template.
Jpegs, Pdfs, and building confidence.
Sketches, color roughs, and getting your executed idea across to the client.
Openers and closers.
Controlling the leeway in the presentation and conveying the value of your design intellect.
Make what you want, make what they want, but make sure it's what you want to do.
Emulating Neil deGrasse Tyson and reading the room.
ROUNDS TWO THROUGH HOWEVER MANY ROUNDS IT TAKES
Once your client knows the deal you can pull back on the dog and pony show.
Walk throughs that require multiple meetings for projects with a larger scope.
The necessity of designing for mobile.
Don't forget that swag.
The following pitch decks are the explicit property of Delicious Design League that Billy Baumann (The Godfather of AID) has graciously provided as a visual component to this workshop allowing you to see exactly how DDL practices what is being preached. With that being said... please exercise some common sense and don't spread these all over your hometown or on a reddit thread somewhere and potentially land The Cobra in some hot water with his clients when he only wanted to help out because you're in the Circle Of trust.
OUTSIDE LANDS PITCH DECK
Thanks in advance for being cool about this.
You landed the job with your incredibly well crafted pitch deck that you devised after taking copious notes form this workshop? Great! That's only the first part of the battle and now you have to keep that client coming back for more... and more... and more because you got bills to pay.
How do you get to sit down with your dream clients in the first place? You could have the best deck around town but if no one will meet with you to see it then what's the point. Billy and Mark lay out strategies to get you in front of the people you've always wanted to work with.
Every DKNG Show episode is a resource to see exactly how an agency runs from soup to nuts. Get an overview of the entire process but most importantly take a look at the pitch decks you'll find in the slide show to get an actual glimpse at how the handle presentations.