Who Are You Selling To? What makes companies buy service design
During the past years, Hellon’s sales team has become very successful in selling service design. The yearly turnover has increased at an accelerating pace, reaching a total growth rate of 30% in 2015. The growth can be attributed to a process of learning about our customer base. The sales team has developed its skills along the way and has recognised a great number of meaningful factors contributing to successful sales. Based on Minna Einiö M. Sc. (econ), Client Service Director. She has years of experience from leading creative agencies’ top management tasks and in consulting clienteles from various fields. Her strength is to support clients in challenges where creativity can make a difference. Laura Franck is Client Service Director and has reached excellent results in growing Hellon’s sales. She believes that meeting client companies’ needs on a strategic level will secure the good co-operation leading to excellent results. Mariann Parts is Client Service Director and has years of experience in consultative selling of design both in public and private sectors. Mariann specializes in finding innovative ways of meeting client needs. Pauline Ranta is Client Service Manager and has special experience of local service innovations.
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that experience, this article summarises key insights from the Hellon sales team: how to sell service design to various clients from large and small companies, in both private and public organisations.
Why is selling service design important? Never in human history has technology developed as fast as it has in the past twenty years, greatly affecting the way we live, work and communicate and the way we act. Now we are reaching a tipping point, the corporate world is beginning to understand and react on their customers’ needs for more emotional connections, for a sense of belonging and for the need to bring the human back to the centre stage. We are entering the era of ‘human-to-human’ business and service development. Service design is a great approach for this. However, the service
design process is not simple to adopt for companies as they have to shift away from a technology or marketing focus towards real empathy for their customers. Moreover, they need to figure out ways to support their employees in turning empathy into innovative services and profitable growth. Even though it is relatively easy to explain the benefits of service design, the selling process can sometimes be challenging, frustrating or even impossible. How do companies utilise service design? Generally, there are three types of challenges in organisations1:
