I have never met a designer who loves selling. I have met thousands who love being chosen.
That gap explains more about design firm growth than almost anything else. The projects are beautiful, the delivery is thoughtful, the referrals are warm – and the part of the business where a stranger becomes a client is a collection of accidents. An autoresponder here, a PDF proposal there, a week of silence in between.
The standard advice is to fix your sales process. Get a CRM, script your discovery call, follow up faster. All useful, and I have written a whole guide on how to design your signature sales process. But after years of working on both sides of this – first in SaaS, where I sat next to people who sell for a living, and now with design-led firms – I am convinced the sales process is the second thing to design. The first is the buying experience.
What a buying experience actually is (and how it differs from a sales process)
Think of one client journey, seen from two chairs.
From your chair, there is a sales process: the steps you take. Respond to the inquiry, qualify, book the call, run the call, send the proposal, follow up, sign.
From the client’s chair, there is a buying experience: everything they feel while you take those steps. How the inquiry response lands. What the wait before the call feels like. Whether the proposal makes them more confident or more confused. What happens in the silences…
Two sides of the same coin – you cannot have one without the other. Every firm with a sales process is already delivering a buying experience, whether anyone designed it or not. The question is which side you design first, because that choice changes everything downstream.
Design the sales process first and you optimise for your own convenience: fewer calls, faster qualification, templated everything. Design the buying experience first and you optimise for the client’s confidence – and then build the process that delivers it. The second approach closes more work, and it happens to be the approach designers are naturally better at.
Why large companies can afford to think sales-first
Here is something I learned in my corporate years that most designers never get to see up close.
Large companies employ professional salespeople, and the good ones love the work. I have shared offices with them. I’ve been part of sales teams. They love sales with passion. They block their calendars for call sprints, they get energised by objections, they celebrate closed deals like match wins. Selling is their craft, and their enthusiasm papers over a lot of cracks in the buying experience. When a skilled seller is guiding every conversation, the buyer feels attended to even when the underlying process is mediocre.
But still, even the large ones need to focus on buying experience design. No matter how much passion, buyers move in certain sequences and go through certain milestones, and yes – emotions – to get to the conclusion of whether or not to buy, and whether or not to buy from you.
Now think about small firms, like most design firms are. They do not have that person. The founder is the salesperson, and the founder usually became a designer precisely because they wanted to make things, not pitch things. So sales gets done reluctantly, between site visits and deadline pushes, in a tone somewhere between apologetic and exhausted. Heck – that was me years ago when I started my design firm! I hated / feared sales, even if had been in corporate for a decade!
You cannot out-enthusiasm a professional seller, but you can out-design one.
That is the strategic point small firms keep missing. The buying experience is the one part of commercial work where a design firm holds the home advantage. You design experiences for a living – considered arrivals, managed reveals, moments that land. A large firm’s sales team cannot replicate that, and most of your competitors have never even tried, as I wrote in Buying Made Easy.
Buying is harder than you think – and your client is doing it alone
There is solid research behind this. Gartner found that 77% of B2B buyers describe their most recent purchase as very complex or difficult, and that buyers spend only about 17% of the total journey actually meeting with potential suppliers. The rest of the time, they are on their own – researching, comparing, second-guessing, trying to build certainty without you in the room. And as of today: using AI to make better decisions.
Buying design services is at least as hard. Your client makes this purchase rarely, the fee is significant, the outcome is difficult to evaluate in advance, and the fear of choosing wrong is real. They are not comparing your portfolio against another portfolio nearly as much as they are comparing how each firm makes them feel about the decision.
I’ve studied up close several studios’ processes over the past 10+ years. Some studios replied in a few minutes with a warm, specific email that told me exactly what would happen next. Others – with objectively stronger work – replied three days later with a price list attachment. There’s no right or wrong, but the way you design your buying experience matters.
Turning the lens on the client
This is the core of my methodology, and it is a genuine relief for people who dread selling: stop designing for the seller, start designing for the buyer.
Most sales advice puts you at the centre – your pitch, your confidence, your objection handling. For a founder who hates sales, that framing makes every improvement feel like a personality transplant. Designing the buying experience puts the client at the centre instead, which means the work becomes a design brief rather than a performance. You are very good at design briefs, I reckon.
I have written about the wider version of this idea in 9 Signature Experiences for Designers – the practice of designing every experience around your business so deliberately that you become the number one choice for the people who matter. The buying experience is where that thinking pays off fastest, because it sits exactly where decisions get made.
The inquiry response
The first reply sets the temperature for everything after it. A generic autoresponder tells a premium buyer they have entered a generic process. A designed response – prompt, personal, clear about what happens next – tells them the experience they are buying has already started. Your new client inquiry assets carry more of the sale than most designers realise.
The waits
Deals rarely die in meetings. They die in the silences between them – after the inquiry, before the call, and above all in the days between a great conversation and the proposal landing. An undesigned wait fills with doubt. A designed wait builds anticipation: the client knows what is coming, when, and why it takes the time it takes. This costs almost nothing to fix and changes close rates more than any script.
The proposal
A proposal emailed as an attachment asks the client to sell your work to themselves, alone, with a fee at the bottom of the page. Presenting it live, the way you would present a concept, keeps you in the room for the moment of maximum doubt. You already know how to do a reveal… Use it here.
Where to start
Walk your own buying journey as a stranger (which is hard, I know, because you’re not a stranger to your own business). Send yourself the inquiry email, read the autoresponse, sit with the gaps, open the proposal cold. Note every moment where you feel uncertain, unattended, or generic – each one is a design brief.
Then design the moments before you refine the process. Once you know what the client should feel at each step, the sales process almost writes itself, and running it stops feeling like selling. You are delivering an experience you designed, which is what you have trained your whole career to do.
The firms that get this right never had to become better salespeople; they made the buying decision feel easy, considered, and safe – and buyers reward the firm that does that with the signature.
