Steps to expect in the sales process of a digital project

If you've never been a part of a digital project before, the sales process may be completely foreign to you. At Oshyn's Tech Mornings: Buying & Selling Digital Projects event, Heather Tacskovics from Huge goes over what a typical sales process at a digital agency will be like.

Video Transcript:

Jose Caballer, The Skool: “Heather, can you give us an overview of the sales process at Huge. What happens before you get a project? Walk us through the steps.”

Heather Tacskovics, Huge: “Sure, we’ll get an inquiry either from an existing client or a brand new client. They will provide us with some kind of a project brief;  what they are looking to do, what they are trying to achieve, and we’ll take that back and look at it  and it may be really flush out what they want and in which case we can jump right into more of an estimation phase otherwise if it’s more of a generalize goal they are trying to achieve we’ll gather a team together - a cross-functional team - to talk about what the best way to address this problem and what does the solution look like. Once you got that figured out we’ll get that cross-functional team together. So we’ll look at getting people from project management, account management and then our different disciplines like strategy, research, UX, visual design, technology, whoever needs to be involved in this project and start to break things down. We really initially look at more of what we call a top down approach. So not looking to get really granular with what each task it’s going to take but more in general terms  like we think is going to take like about 6 weeks of this kind of activity, three weeks of this kind of activity and get an idea of team size and duration and then build an estimate out of that. So that’s kind of our process in general. It various on the type of project and then often that will sort of kick-off a back and forth with the clients. So we’ll come with an initial proposal, a plan, and how we think we would execute it. What that time and cost that would be and then the negations begin in terms of, is that really what the client is looking for. Price is often a sticky point as well so are there ways to get to a price that they are looking for. You can look at scope to get there. sometimes schedule is a driving factor so do they need to hit a specific launch date for an event  or for a product launch or whatnot   So we work together collaboratively with them to get to a place where it’s a plan, a price, and so on that is going to work for them.”

Jose Caballer, The Skool: “Are you, as a PM, responsible for putting together the team to do the proposal and the scoping on a project?”

Heather Tacskovics, Huge: “So our project management teams will work with, we have a person in our office dedicated to that resource management. So we’ll look across organization and luckily we can pull not just from our LA office but we have offices in New York, Portland, and so we’ll look at who are the right people to help us scope this out in addition to who’s available. So the project manager will work with someone in resourcing to look at that and pull together the team.”