Buyer-driven sales of design services: adapting sales practices to buying behaviour of the client

During the past few years, the role of design as a means of achieving strategic goals and creating competitive advantage has been widely acknowledged, increasing both academic and business interest towards understanding design in business terms as a driver of added value. Despite the widespread interest, the application of and investments in design have remained rather small and the full potential of design rendered benefits has not been acknowledged. These challenges seem to reside in the lack of common understanding of the scope and possible benefits of design as well as a common language between the two different professional fields of design and managers. This study approaches the existing communication gap of design value from a new perspective by examining the sales interaction between design agencies and their clients with a buyer-driven approach. Hence, the objective of this study is to augment the understanding of sales interactions between design agencies and their clients by better understanding the client perceptions of design. The theoretical framework of the study builds on research in the domains of design as a knowledge intensive business service, sales as a means of creating mutual understanding, and organisational buying behaviour in the context of business services. Outgoing from this theoretical background, sales is seen as an interactive problem-solving process with the aim of creating mutual understanding by aligning on the customer’s and the seller’s interpretations of the customer’s problems and solutions. The underlying logic is that by understanding design in the scope of the client’s overall business and the client’s individual perceptions, design agencies can shape their sales practices to align on a mutual understanding of the customer-perceived problems and solutions. This study adopts a multiple-case study approach with three cases consisting of agencyclient couples with three different types of design services: product design, package design, and service design. The empirical data was collected through semi-structured interviews, selfethnographic observations and analysis of project documentation. The findings of this study are mainly three-fold. First, this study augments the existing understanding of design purchases by identifying the design industry specific criteria for evaluating design purchases and the organisational, individual, and offering-related factors that affect the selection of these criteria. Secondly, the findings of this study support the theoretical conceptualisation of sales as a problem-solving process, and hence suggests conceptualising the sales of design services as a process based on understanding customer problems and interactively conceiving desirable solutions to these problems. Finally, the findings of this study give a more detailed description of the sales practices applied by design agencies in order to reach alignment with their clients and suggests how these practices can be shaped across different client contexts and design services to most efficiently reach mutual understanding in order for value to emerge.