If you’re in the creative field or have spent any time as a marketing professional, you know how challenging it can be to communicate your work with clients. Unlike other professions, selling marketing or creative services takes a disciplined and different approach in order to successfully communicate your ideas and their value.

A successful outcome to any presentation depends on your ability to remove subjective opinion and demonstrate how your ideas are relevant to their business or overall marketing strategy.

Research first

Before you even put pen to paper or start sketching ideas for a campaign or logo, you need to conduct the proper research. Some designers will dive right into ideation after an initial conversation with their client, focusing only on the aesthetic qualities the client may have communicated.

The problem with this approach is that these initial discussions are often casual with only anecdotal information or examples cited by the client. So when the time comes to present your ideas, much of what was originally discussed has probably been forgotten and can create disagreements based on different recollections of the same conversation.

The brief

The Creative Brief is one of the most important tools in any designers toolkit. A properly written brief is a series of questions that help determine your client’s needs and is a vital tool used as reference when presenting your ideas. This brief should include questions about the business history, industry and competition, marketing and sales strategies among other key business insights. Additionally, questions should be included that help determine the client’s overall visual aesthetic, such as other brands, websites or campaigns they admire or believe to be successful/memorable.

The answers to these questions and the information gathered from the client should become the foundation and criteria for all creative development.

The presentation

Getting in front of the client for the first time to present your concepts can be stressful, particularly if this is a new client relationship. However, proper planning and preparation can go a long way in making your presentation go smoothly and well-received.

As I already mentioned, presenting creative ideas is immediately open to the risk of subjective opinion, and when that happens, things can go off course quickly. For this reason, it’s important to open any presentation with a review of the research and input received from the client and their responses to the creative brief.

Starting your presentation with an explanation of your framework as well as how you’ve structured your concepts or ideas will set the tone and expectation of your client. Remember, the key to presenting creative ideas is removing as much subjective opinion as possible and keeping the focus on the validity of your ideas.

If you’re presenting a range of ideas, specifically branding or logos, arrange them in a logical progression from most conservative to more progressive. In my experience, many clients aren’t comfortable moving too far away from where they might be visually, so giving them choices that show incremental steps can be better received than a group of ideas that radically depart from their current brand.

Prepare for questions

Even the most prepared presenter can receive pushback or questions, especially if your audience has never experienced a creative pitch. Presenting your ideas while referring back to the creative brief and research from the client can go a long way in heading off subjective comments, but you can still face unexpected questions.

There’s no fool-proof method or secret for addressing questions or pushback on your creative ideas, this can only come from experience. I’ve personally been in situations where the client has had a very negative and visceral reaction to the colors used in a brand presentation. This then led to a series of accusations leveled at the quality of work, qualifications of creative staff, lack of communication, etc.

Rather than engage the client during his moment of rage, I simply waited until he was done and calmly started to ask him to further explain why he didn’t like what was presented. When he commented on the colors used, I referenced 3 direct competitors he gave us and showed him the colors we used were in the same family. Further, the color palette was representative of his industry as a whole where similar colors are universally adopted. Additionally, our creative brief asked him to list 3-5 brands he admired, and coincidentally, those brands also used similar colors.

The point of asking these questions wasn’t to prove he was being irrational, but rather to validate that our creative was based on solid research and not simply the product of subjective design taste. Addressing his concerns professionally, while being able to defend our work against the very research he provided, changed the entire tone of the presentation and defused his anger immediately.

Understanding the client

The reality with many business leaders is that while they may be confident in their business decisions, they aren’t so confident when it comes to decisions that require subjective taste. In fact, these types of decisions can cause a lot of anxiety and hesitance because they aren’t driven by business metrics or quantifiable data. To overcome these feelings, it’s your job to turn subjective opinion into a business decision.

Structuring your presentation as a process—and guiding your client—becomes an educational experience for them and will make them more receptive to your ideas if they’re supported with logic and research. Always being able to answer “we did this because you told us that,” will help mitigate questions based on personal opinion.

There are no guarantees how clients will react. I’ve had great presentations as well as having things go completely off the rails. The key is to be able to roll with things in real-time, while always having the ability to defend your work by aligning it with research conducted on the front end.