For me, one of the tough­est stretches in the web design game has always been the phase between the ini­tial con­tact with a client and ham­mer­ing out those final agreed-​upon specs. Not that I have trou­ble ‘closing the deal’. I think most design­ers can sell them­selves quite well. The real issue is actu­ally that most design­ers and devel­op­ers are so great at com­mu­ni­cat­ing their own vision, some­times they have issues with lis­ten­ing to poten­tial clients express­ing their own. That com­mu­ni­ca­tion gap must be bridged, and early, if both par­ties want to come out of this dance happy.

All too often, we forget that folks coming to us for a project don’t have a lot of expe­ri­ence with this type of stuff. We don’t make it all that easy either, usu­ally hit­ting them over the head with dozens of tech­ni­cal ques­tions and jargon-​filled sur­veys. No wonder we either get back noth­ing, or noth­ing useful. It’s impor­tant to clear out the clut­ter and cut to the really impor­tant ques­tions before that first meet­ing with the client. If you can single out their goals, their budget, and their dead­lines, the rest gen­er­ally falls into place.

One com­pany who does a fan­tas­tic job of find­ing that ’sweet spot’ is Airbag Indus­tries (not that I should be sur­prised). They recently launched a really solid RFP that quickly gets the impor­tant infor­ma­tion from the client, doesn’t hit them over the head with pre­ten­sion, and gets them out the door asap. The more acces­si­ble you make your­self, and the fewer bar­ri­ers that you have between the infor­ma­tion in the client’s head and your inbox, the more likely that you’re going to get folks com­mu­ni­cat­ing with you and want­ing to work with you.

There are zil­lions of tal­ented devel­op­ers and design­ers out there. There are also zil­lions of design­ers and devs who can sell them­selves to anyone. But the real pros are the folks who work just as hard to really listen to the client as they do pol­ish­ing their ele­va­tor pitch.

Long story short, look for a new Square­One RFP form in the coming days.