How being a salesperson has made me a better Product Designer

Photo by Alexander Dummer on Unsplash

I used to spend all my time as an Education Consultant serving young parents, many of them are first-time parents concerned about future of their firstborn.

I would see them everyday, listen to their anxiety about how their son have yet to adjust to the classroom and explain wonderful theories that this is all part of the process.

When i left my corporate life and jumped into mobile apps development, i thought years of sales experiences will not make much contribution, i was determined that this will be a completely new challenge and start all over.

When it clicked

Alas, i was wrong! It was not until i started to go deep into Product and UX design process that it all clicked. What i have learned in my sales role will give me a huge advantage in understanding our users!

My art of sales was quite simple.

• My job is to assists and support my client to do things better. To do that i need to find out how? and why? my client is doing things now.
• Then, i have to ask them questions, listen to their answers and discover their needs.
• Get in touch about how they feel, consciously and subconsciously before, during and after.

Once you put your client first and really listens to what they are saying, you will discover that they can do a lot of your work. My client was the experts on their child and they know what the challenges are, what they do not know is how you can help them. This part is where we come in.

I have seen few designers and product owners focuses so much on mechanics and processes of an experience when creating user personas and journeys, but pay small attention to the emotional bits, they were left a little undefined and sometime feels made-up and i personally believe that leaving emotion part of user experience up to chance is a dangerous way to operate a business desiring profitability and longevity.

Six types of questions

There were six basic question that i used as my framework for a salescall to discover user’s needs:

1. What the client does.
2. How the client does that.
3. When and where the client does what they does
4. Why does my client do it that way?
5. Who the client is currently working with
6. Identify whether we can help the client do what they do better (and be honest if we are not able to!).

Each of these questions have a specific objective and you can decide how to structure the question depends on your field of business. Be observant, show a genuine and actual interest, These sets of questions has helped me discover the level of my client’s emotional engagement and how they feel about our business.

Emotional insights will take center stage

Driven by our metrics, we tends to focus on the rational parts of the experience. We wanted to further decrease user errors, increase number of visits, increase adoption of the new feature, which is exciting! but, don’t you think if you want user to stay, you need to evoke these emotions that drive long-term value?

In the future, i would like to dive a little bit on how emotions are a critical component of a customer’s experience. A component that doesn’t always fit into a spreadsheet.

Thank you so much for taking the time to read my writing, it’s my first time publishing it online and would appreciate honest feedback on where and how i can further improve!