Vance Phillips

Selling technology is not easy, particularly in this Web2.0-fuelled, open-source aware, web-enabled environment. There is always a competitive product, and sometimes the competition might be available for free.

Sales calls are a wonderful bevy of pleasantries and good intentions. Sales, though, are not won or lost in the sales call itself. No, they are won or lost in the between-times where ‘thinking’ happens in the heads of clients and commercial games develop.

Why is this?

Firstly, clients become indecisive and ambivalent. It’s extremely rare for your product or solution to be unique. When there are competitive products and solutions, indecision becomes a real issue. There is often not much in the difference, except the price on the table. All sorts of strategies are used by clients to make decisions, and on rare occasions they are rational. Most of the time, it’s on price. This creates commercial gamesmanship and you will find yourself used as leverage with other vendors. Rats! Well it happens, and you must be honest with yourself, you do it too.

Also, solutions to business problems become less urgent – very rarely more urgent. The nature of business and people is that workarounds are found so what seems like a done deal can become a more difficult sell if the sale isn’t closed in time. What happens is that the pain becomes more tolerable and then some other more painful issue arises for the client.

The other fact is that the envisaged solution in the minds of the client elaborates over time as they learn about their problem space and furthermore learn about your solution space. What tends to happen in these circumstances is more and more questions appear from the client and they become more about comparisons with competitive solutions. This can be really annoying as you’re essentially helping them learn and, often, painting yourself out of the picture.

What else happens is a withdrawal from well-intended clients who lose confidence in selling the deal internally. I know you know this, but maybe you don’t know that a common problem in clients is that they lack the persuasive skills with their colleagues to gain support and building the case – it often doesn’t even go as far as their manager or CFO. They receive your proposal, which should seal the deal, but their personal relationships with peers can lack credibility to get the rubber stamp.

Office interior design is much more complex than the interior design for residential projects and in this article I will give you a basic overview of what is involved in most of the first task of the project office interior design, floorplan.

Office interior design plan

Interior floorplan or layout of the office as it is often called is the first task in the planning office. Spaceplanning as it is often called is a specialized skill and requires not only a good creative problem-solving ability but also specific knowledge of building standards and knowledge of the requirements of the company who will live there, generally known as a client or tenant.

The process and purpose of the layout floorplan is to achieve a plan that meets all the requirements of the company in terms of how many offices, meeting rooms, storage areas and so on and also in accordance with relevant regulations and standards.

Floorplan will also include designs for numerous technical and engineering services such as:

* Electricity for lighting and power design
Emergency Services * design for exit signs, emergency lighting and evacuation warning system
* Design for all communication services for telephone and computer
* Design a fire sprinkler system for fire detection and fire hose reels
* Design for air conditioning
* Design for service pipes
* Design for security and access control systems

Floorplan will also need to meet some specific standards such as:

* Emergency exit or compliance solutions to enable the safe and rapid evacuation in case of emergency such as fire.

* The disability Discrimination Act or DDA, which ensures a safe and easy access for people with disabilities such as wheelchair access.

* Various Standards applicable to countries that include standards for air conditioning, fire protection, partitioning and many others.

* Any other standard local authority

* Building Code applicable to state

* General Health and Safety standards

Achieving Client requirements and issues of common workflow

Floorplan need to be designed with consideration for not only all the required standards but also what the client needs are as well as the common practice of good design for the flow of work and effective work environment.

Some of these problems are as follows: