“The truth is we are in sales”

Creative Career Conundrums is a weekly advice column from If You Could Jobs. Each week their selected panel of professionals from the creative industry answers your burning career questions to help you navigate the creative journey.

This week’s question: 

“How can I measure my progress in creative work at my company?

Unlike fields where results can be calculated numerically – such as in an Excel spreadsheet or through sales figures – the creative field lacks clear parameters that allow others to easily evaluate whether a result is good or bad. As a creative leader, how do you measure your own growth and present your results to a company or client?”

Katie Cadwell, co-founder of branding studio Lucky Dip and The NDA Podcast:

The creative industry is terrible at this. We shy away from the truth, which is, we are in sales. And to sell, sometimes you need cold, hard stats. 

There are lots of ways to measure our impact. They might not be overnight results or easy to input into a spreadsheet, but they exist. The agencies that harvest and surface them are doing very well – because they’re speaking the language of their clients. For example, Ragged Edge put their figures at the forefront of each case study. How much funding was raised, share price changes, retail expansion, social impressions… There are lots of metrics that can track the results of a project and they’re powerful.

For each brief, you should identify what success would look like post launch. It’s not always about unlocking a billion dollar investment. It might be ‘buy in from senior leadership’ or ‘unlock X budget for a further project’. It’s important to know what problem you’re trying to solve and how you’re going to measure whether you did it. 

There are a few other quick ways you can demonstrate your results…

Testimonials. It’s very simple to ask a client at the end of a project to send a quote you can use. We recently had one back where the client said ‘they are funny, and they are fast’ which I loved. 

Keep track of your own stats. How many projects you’ve run, how many client presentations, how many team members you’ve led, how many speaking events… if you’re not counting the wins, then you should be. 

The power of the before and after. Shiny case studies are impressive, but how much change you enacted in a business can be much more dramatic. Keep a record of what came before so you can demonstrate how far they’ve come. 

Part of seniority in the industry is learning how to sell your creativity. Quite often that’s to a room of people more impressed by metrics than a shiny logo animation. The best leaders get them excited by both.

In answering your creative career conundrums we realise that some issues need expert support, so we’ve collated a list of additional resources that can support you across things that might arise at work.

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