This week on SalesTV.live we welcome Rui Quinta, Co-Founder and Executive Creative Director at With-Company, to explore how the intersection of design and sales creates opportunities for innovation and deeper client connections. With expertise in Design Thinking, Radical Empathy, and Service Design, Rui offers fresh perspectives and actionable ideas to help you stand out, stay ahead, and create value-driven connections that resonate with clients and drive B2B sales.

We’ll ask:

* How does futures thinking empower sales teams to anticipate client needs?

* What role does radical empathy play in building trust and long-term relationships?

* How can service design and UX strategy improve the sales experience?

* What strategies can align creative processes with closing successful deals?

A designer turned strategist, Rui has spent over a decade developing systems that combine design thinking with practical sales applications. From lecturing at leading business schools to leading transformative design projects, Rui offers a unique perspective on how sales professionals can leverage creative strategies to drive success.

Facts, the latest thinking, chat, and banter about the world of sales.

Come and join us for some lively discussion and debate.

This week's Guest was -

• Rui Quinta, Co-Founder and Executive Creative Director at With-Company

This week's Host was -

• Helga Saraiva-Stewart, Founder of SalesShaker

Transcript of SalesTV.live Early Edition 2025-01-28

Helga Saraiva-Stewart [00:00:16]:

We go in. Still says connecting. Gonna be my Internet, isn't it? Here we go. We are live. We are indeed. Hello. Good morning, leader, valuepreneurs, and sales shakers. This is your host today, sir, sales TV.

Helga Saraiva-Stewart [00:00:38]:

My name is Helga Sarajevo Stewart. You know me. But I more importantly, I wanna introduce you to Ruiz Quinta, and he's this amazing professional who's gonna talk with us and give us, some, crazy insights that involve radical empathy and design thinking. You're a master who very, very interest skills that when adapting sales, they can help us to do some amazing things. So let's just kick off. Tell us a little bit about you, Yuri.

Rui Quinta [00:01:17]:

Yeah. So, I'm I consider myself a designer. I'm a designer. I think I at the beginning of my career, I was designing a lot of beautiful things as a communication designer, visual designer. And then I decided I I asked myself a bunch of questions, like, if the things I was doing, I was producing were actually impacting the real world and if people were actually reacting to the things that I was doing. So I decided to sell my first company at the time and spend a few years studying strategy and focusing more on questions and, putting questions question marks at the beginning of of projects and, having a lot of conversations be before I actually started designing anything. So I think in that process, I ended up, I stopped buying design books and and and and started buying a lot of books from different, from up from other disciplines like, behavioral economics or, neurosciences, psychology. And and I think that's that led me also to to to having a break also of 1 year studying design thinking, in Germany in 2011.

Rui Quinta [00:02:32]:

And, I think from there, I decided to open a bunch of companies. So I think there's people who consider myself a serial entrepreneur. I don't know how many companies you have to open. So that you can be considered a serial entrepreneur, but I've opened a fish shop. I've opened a space experience design studio. I found it with company, which is basically where I spend a 100% of my time, today also building other companies from from there.

Helga Saraiva-Stewart [00:03:15]:

And if you the audience that you serve and what you do them.

Rui Quinta [00:03:25]:

I think the complexity of, of with company at the moment is that, I think we say this is kind of probably this is this is wrong. This is something that is wrong in every business book or every sales book, which is basically, the fact that we sell everything to every to everyone. And and this is really, really hard to manage because you have a company who is doing a lot of branding and organizational, design work for institutions and companies and startups and scale ups, and you are, you know, developing projects around systemic thinking or futures thinking, you know, strategy innovation, and you also have, you know, the same pyramid. Like, you you you wanna work and you wanna do those projects for for for for everybody, and then you have another unit that it's focusing on responsible experiences with a focus on digital products and and making digital more responsible than it is today. And, basically, like, you want to appeal to everybody. But what we are doing is actually, defining different hierarchies in terms of targets for each one of these units of these business units. So it's not that you cannot do, something for an institution when you are selling, a branding service, for example, but our main focus there is to appeal to a particular audience and a particular target. So it's really difficult to juggle between the different units, the different goals, the different targets in each one of these units, and the channels that you use to communicate and to interact with these people, and the messages that you have to convey have to be different also in these different, setups.

Rui Quinta [00:05:17]:

So meaning that, for example, if you're trying to sell something on social media, you have a particular tone of voice and a particular way of talking about things, and you can be a little bit more complex when you, explain and, what you have to sell and and when you position yourself, in-depth in that way. But then you have, you know, one to one meeting with a client where you can, you know, just simplify, your language, and you can you can you can just translate, everything into a more kind of open conversation and simple conversation in that, one to 1. But I don't know if this answers, your question, but I can try to go a little bit deep. Elga, I think we cannot hear you now. I I think the microphone is not working at the moment. So if you wanna write it, I can I can just,

Helga Saraiva-Stewart [00:06:32]:

I'm I was muted? I apologize. There's a little bit of a a a distance between, my pressing the mute and mute and it actually going in. So I just want to take it off, off, on mute. It feels so, you know, I would love to just if you think about one of your ideal customers, right, one of your ideal customers who are this entity that is trying to do what and what do you help them to achieve? What problems do you fix for this entity? And who are

Rui Quinta [00:07:11]:

So let's imagine yeah. So let's imagine that, like, again, like, because we do so many services, we have to kind of cluster them and try to define priorities for each one of them, but I can give, like, an example. For example, when working with a corporate client, on a organizational design, project. Right? So they have a a cultural issue internally. And the way we address that, it has been, I think in a way it has been successful for us because we define that we want to position ourselves, in a particular topic, and we want to become experts in a particular topic, and we want to develop even ourselves and our team in a particular topic. So what we do is that we study a lot about that topic and we start realizing projects, and investing in those projects. So, basically, the way I think I can even start I can even start by by telling you the story of how with company was born. Like, we invested in in our first project.

Rui Quinta [00:08:23]:

So me and my partner, we decided to do a project around the topic of organizational design and business design, and we spent 3 months working so that we can have a use case, so that I so that we can have this this business case that we can show to the world how it works. Right? So instead of us just saying it's gonna work. This is the process. We're gonna do this and this and this and this. Our sales pitch actually for almost 10 years, and it's not different from, a public appearance on a stage in a conference, where you actually explain what you did with the client and for the client. So, basically, what we did was that. Like, we invested our time in helping a company that was in really, really bad shape, in 2012, and we documented the whole project from the beginning to the end. So we filmed us, you know, talking about the project.

Rui Quinta [00:09:19]:

We took photos of the project. We wrote everything we knew about the client and all of the insights we were discovering, and we actually documented the whole thing. We we've placed, that information, on a blog, that we can still see. It's so naive, you know, like, looking at yourself in 2,012, saying these things and doing these things. But actually, like, we transform that document, you know, the documentation of that project into a sales pitch. So it's a it's a presentation. It's a keynote where you actually explain how to go from the beginning to the end. You know, how to bring value to the client.

Rui Quinta [00:10:00]:

What you did in the research stage, what you did while synthesizing, which were the ideas that you generated for the project. And, of course, you show the line, you know, like the, the health line of the company going down for about 10 years, and then we enter the project, and then we were able to help them in about, the 3 months project and the 6 months after the project was concluded. Like, they really turned around, in terms of of of, of health for their people and for the company, financial health. So it was it was the best case, I think, that we use as a as a sales pitch. Another strategy that I can share with you, Elga,

Helga Saraiva-Stewart [00:10:43]:

is that whenever we

Rui Quinta [00:10:46]:

go. Go. Whenever we whenever we we want to dig in into a topic, like, we we we we use, as a way of learning for ourselves and also to add value to the clients, like, we do a program. You know? Like, we design a program of 2 or 3 days around a certain topic. We dig a lot into that topic, and we bring clients in to talk about that topic. So we design, like, a, like, a training program, for example, around the topic of branding. Like, if you wanna sell branding, like, we know a lot about that because we've been doing it for, I don't know, 20 years since the beginning of my career. And also a lot of people at with company have a lot of experience in doing branding.

Rui Quinta [00:11:29]:

So we design a program around the topic of branding as a way to get people in and to get people to understand that we are talking about that and we are sharing our experience about that. We have proprietary models, when working with these different disciplines and different topics. So it's not that we are kind of copying everything that is out there, but we really try to be original. We really try to be proprietary when we design something and when we bring people in so that they can feel the difference.

Helga Saraiva-Stewart [00:12:01]:

And so I I, you know, I I I didn't quite a few people listening. And if that's you, let let us know and let us know if you have questions here. That it it feels like a different way of generating leads. It feels like it's very much based on proof of concept, being able to show and demonstrate an ability to achieve a certain result and a certain outcome and prove and validate that you have in house the skills and differentiation to be able to help that company to achieve that result. So it feels like a very smart way of sort of standing out from it. Right? Can I just get a little bit into your lead generation? So when when you are getting fighting prospects as well, how does the lead generation work for you?

Rui Quinta [00:13:03]:

I think I I I couldn't, listen to the to the to the whole question, but I I will try to address based on what I could could get. So first of all, I think we have to do it that way. So, you know, generating a case study that we can use to address the to address our potential clients, because we don't have, you know, like, we don't have the credibility. Like, we we are a 20 something people company. We've been growing every year, fortunately, but it's not like and we are, you know, running against big players, who who who have, you know, like, big consultancies that we that we run against in in a lot of in a lot of potential clients and potential projects. So it's a way to stand out. It's showing, you know, our ability to actually do things, our ability to change things around us. And by having these case studies, I think it's the I think it's the the way that we have to stand out because we don't have the legacy.

Rui Quinta [00:14:07]:

We don't have the credibility that these companies have. So we have to show work. And I think going going a little bit, also to this story, and, I think at the beginning, clients would hire us because of that, because they wanted to understand how we worked, you know, the process. It's not that they only wanted the product of the project, you know, the output of the project, but they wanted to understand how we worked. And they wanted their teams to work like us. So they wanted kind of a a model on how to produce outstanding design work. And, and I think I think that was that was one of the criteria that made clients come to us. And I think even if it sounds a little bit pedantic today, I think it's not only about how we work, but what we think about.

Rui Quinta [00:15:03]:

It's about, you know, the impact that you want to generate in the world that that you want to provoke, the good things that you want to happen around you. It's about being critical with, a lot of the thing that a lot of the things that are happening in the world and finding ways to actually solve some of these externalities that were created, in the in the last decades. So and I think today they are coming to us not only because of the process and because of the you know, how we work, but how, we think about the future and how we, how we apply what we know in order to build, you know, like a a more I think we we talk a lot about earthly optimism. I think there's a certain there's a certain, in I don't know. Like, a poetry a certain poetry also in those two words, together.

Helga Saraiva-Stewart [00:16:01]:

Wow. And and can you still hear me? I'm sorry. My my camera seems to have gone, AWOL. But, you know, I first heard of the term futures thinking through you, and I would love to know, you took a lot, not just futures thinking, but responsible experience design. And I'd love you to just sort of expand on that and how you feel it helps businesses to anticipate clients' needs.

Rui Quinta [00:16:41]:

Yes. I think it's interesting because it's, like, for me, this conversation is a little bit, meta. Like, it's it's it's difficult to have this conversation because, like, we apply, I think, we apply, you know, systemic thinking. We bring a lot of complexity into our conversations, into the frameworks that we use when analyzing businesses. But it's interesting that, in the end, everything that you do, it's also it's not everything, but for a lot of, at least, corporate clients, like, the impact you want to have for them is also to help them, sell, more of their of their products. What we try to do in parallel with that is also how to make them sell better products that are not harming as much. They are not being so extractive as most of the products that have been developed in the last decades, have been. Because we've learned so well on how to turn people around.

Rui Quinta [00:17:40]:

Like, we learned so well how to hack our own brains that we actually can sell people anything and anything we want, you know, because we know too much about them. We know too much about, behavioral economics. We know too much about behavior in general. We know too much about neurosciences that we can actually hack people in understanding what they want. And I think the balance that we try to do when we talk about sales and when we, you know, like, when we bring this topic and when we are doing any strategy work, it's actually not only, to help them sell more, but to sell better products. You know? It's redefining their strategy in terms of sustainability. It's redefining their strategy in terms of energy. Like, for example, when we talk about responsible experience design, it's actually Sophia, from our team who's leading that unit.

Rui Quinta [00:18:33]:

She's a master in understanding, you know, how to simplify an experience in the digital context, but also how to be more responsible in knowing, in in understanding what we can do with what we know about behavior and what we know about people. And we could actually instead of extracting, more in terms of behavior that will lead people, to be more depressed, to be more addicted to some some app or to some to something, it's actually trying to turn things around and make it more pleasant and make it more responsible in that way. Wow. So I think we I don't know if we bring other words into this conversation, but it's not that we are not helping our clients sell more. This is come on. We we we know about we know about, how the economy works, and we know how the world works. But at the same time, you have to bring a layer of responsibility. You have to bring a layer that considers all the externalities of the work that we do and all of the decisions that we take when we are doing work for for for for any company.

Helga Saraiva-Stewart [00:19:43]:

Wow. You see, I mean, I hope sorry to everybody, listening. My camera, as you can see, has just gone haywire, but it really is not about me today. It's about Huy, and you can see why. I mean, I don't know how many of you are kind of listening and thinking about futures thinking, responsible selling, selling better products. How do we listen to customers and anticipate their needs in order to provide, experiences that really help us to stand out, but it helps our customers to also understand and feel that they're doing better, and and they're contributing to a better future and a better planet? Does radical empathy have a role in building this trust and these long term relationships, Huy?

Rui Quinta [00:20:32]:

Yeah. Sure. And, it's interesting. I think there's always there's also, like, two levels, that we can bring to the conversation when talking about radical empathy. I think the first one is how we bring that to the projects, and now we are obsessed with empathy. I know that empathy is overused, words in the last, in the in the last decades also. Like, I think everyone talks about empathy. I think Elga just, left the conversation.

Helga Saraiva-Stewart [00:21:06]:

But No. No. I'm here.

Rui Quinta [00:21:07]:

I know. You're you're there. Okay. Yeah. Okay.

Helga Saraiva-Stewart [00:21:10]:

I just I just maximized your screen because

Rui Quinta [00:21:13]:

Okay. Cool.

Helga Saraiva-Stewart [00:21:13]:

Cool. Cool. Cool. I

Rui Quinta [00:21:14]:

was just gonna do. Leave you alone. I'm gonna have to improvise.

Helga Saraiva-Stewart [00:21:17]:

No. No. No. I hear

Rui Quinta [00:21:19]:

what you told me, like, if something happens, just keep going. I'm going there.

Helga Saraiva-Stewart [00:21:25]:

No. I'm having real issues with this camera. So I just rather than look at a black screen, look at you better.

Rui Quinta [00:21:31]:

Yeah. I told you. I I was once a musician, and I had a lot of, technical issues. So I it's it's difficult to to, you know, to deal with

Helga Saraiva-Stewart [00:21:39]:

Improvise.

Rui Quinta [00:21:40]:

Yeah. Like, you're doing a great job. So we're we're glad to do that.

Helga Saraiva-Stewart [00:21:43]:

Doing an amazing job. Thank you, Huy, for your being understanding, and thank you guys at home for for being understanding with these with these screen issues. Please carry on.

Rui Quinta [00:21:52]:

Yeah. So radical empathy, I think there's, like, 2 possible, ways of talking about this. So one is, like, the way we bring that, like, honestly and truly to to the projects we do. So I can give you a bunch of examples on how to understand your customer and how to understand, your client. And it's really like, when people say, you know, empathy is the ability to put yourself on someone else's shoes. It's really easy to say that, but it's not that easy to, you know, to do that because it's impossible. It's impossible to the the word empathy is an impossible word. It's an impossible word because you cannot be the other person.

Rui Quinta [00:22:38]:

But you can really, really try to be close to what other people are feeling. You know? For example, if you are working in a product or in a project for elderly people, like, there's ways for you to try to feel what an elderly person feels when they're 90 years old and they have, you know, a vision that it's not, a 100%, like, working a 100% like like like the vision I have at this moment, you know. Or Sure. Or they are not moving in the world, with the dexterity the I don't know how to say this word in in English.

Helga Saraiva-Stewart [00:23:14]:

Dexterity.

Rui Quinta [00:23:16]:

Dexterity that that you you navigate your own world. So, you know, there's ways for you to try to be closer to the people you are working with or addressing. And I think we bring that I I can give you, like this is a funny one because we were working with, one of the biggest retailers, in Portugal. Actually, they have, they have also a lot of supermarkets in Colombia and Poland, and and we were redesigning the takeaway experience. So we were hired to design the takeaway experience for this big, like, supermarket called Pindos. And our team, spent 3 months eating all of the food that you can imagine that we ordered every day from the the competition, from our own clients, from, you know, stores that were on the streets, in local markets. So while trying to understand how people choose, you know, the food that they're going to eat, how they how they navigate the supermarket when so that they can get to the takeaway stand Mhmm. How they, you know, how they eat the food at home or at work and then place the packaging on the garbage.

Rui Quinta [00:24:29]:

Like, we had to understand the experience and for us to understand the experience and for understand how people take these decisions, like, we went through the experience of eating takeaway food for 3 months. Like, we gained an average of kilos per per per person. Like, each person gained weight during this this this process. So, like, you change your own body in order to understand, to understand, to understand the problem and to understand what you're trying to solve and to, in this case, to design a better service for, and a better and better products also for for the audience. I think this is one thing that we can say is that, in fact, using a lot of these examples that we bring to the reality of the projects And and we bring ourselves to try to be closer to the people who actually go through these things. Another way of talking about radical empathy, I think it's the fact that we we build other companies from with companies. So my company is called with company. You know, we work with people, not for them, but we work with them.

Rui Quinta [00:25:37]:

And and we have a lot of spin offs. And as as entrepreneurs, we've built other businesses. You know, I had a fish shop. I was running a fish shop and a chain of fish shops. Like, we had, 4, fish shops in Lisbon for around 9 months. And I and I say that, you know, having that business allows me to understand what other types of businesses

Helga Saraiva-Stewart [00:26:05]:

Mhmm.

Rui Quinta [00:26:05]:

Deal. You know? How does it feel to have an open door, you know, and bringing clients in? You know, I know how to talk about these things because this is also radical empathy. Because we use our own businesses. We use our own spin offs to really try, you know, to fail and to understand and to and to know about how to run a business that it's different from a consultancy. You know, it's different from a

Helga Saraiva-Stewart [00:26:31]:

Wow.

Rui Quinta [00:26:32]:

It's so true. Design consultancy that we are managing. So we have launched several, several, spin offs. And I think the most interesting one, maybe it's like it's this crazy fish

Helga Saraiva-Stewart [00:26:46]:

We're gonna you know, you I'm I'm gonna ask you to, share that example mega quick. I can't believe 26 minutes have gone past, Huy. I cannot believe that. Go on. Go on. Share it quickly with us. Give us give us the story in 30 seconds.

Rui Quinta [00:27:01]:

No. I, Yeah. I think it was come on. It's also, something that was inspired by more than a 100 years of family business. You know, it comes from from inspiration with my family, but we and and we did the first project we did actually was trying to help a company that that, that was my family company, and it worked pretty well. And from there, I think we felt inspired, you know, to to redesign, you know, the experience of of a fish shop. What it means to to to open a fish shop, after, you know, after, all almost all of the fish shops disappeared from the center of Lisbon. We have the culture of fish in Portugal.

Rui Quinta [00:27:42]:

And we just redesigned the whole experience of of a fish shop, and we opened the fish shop, a long time ago, a long time ago. And we were running that business and learning how to run a business, that is totally totally different again from from running a a a design consultancy.

Helga Saraiva-Stewart [00:27:58]:

Wow. So let me just, sum this up. Radical empathy. I I swear. I like, right now, I have a completely different, perspective, about about that, and I definitely want to see how I can apply it in my life. Futures thinking, responsible experience design. If you didn't think if you out there listening didn't think that these types of concepts, and clearly not just concepts, but ways of being and doing business and thinking and wanting to collaborate with clients, if you didn't think that that was useful to help you to sell better and build stronger connections and relationships with your customers, is your man. Please connect with him on LinkedIn.

Helga Saraiva-Stewart [00:28:44]:

Check him out. Huy, do you remember your days when you say you're a musician, was it?

Rui Quinta [00:28:50]:

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Helga Saraiva-Stewart [00:28:51]:

That was me. So here's what I'm gonna ask you to do now. I'm gonna ask you to take us right to the end because you're there with the camera, and I trust you loads. From me, I wanna send a big, big, big, big warm hug to everybody out there listening. Please take us away and and kick off the show to the end.

Rui Quinta [00:29:12]:

Yeah. I I would just I I take one of the sentences you said. You just said ways of being and I thought, wow. It's beautiful what you said. And at the same time, it's the name of a book of a recent book by James Bridle. So go and buy it because it's beautiful and it's gonna change the way you you relate yourself with the planet and with the world. So go and buy ways of being. I'm promoting a book.

Rui Quinta [00:29:39]:

So thanks a lot, miss Nelga. It was beautiful. Thanks for for

Helga Saraiva-Stewart [00:29:42]:

being away. Thank you so much for enduring these technical issues. You're an absolute trooper, and I can't wait to speak with you again soon. Thank you again. Cheerio. See you soon.

Rui Quinta [00:29:52]:

Thank you.

Helga Saraiva-Stewart [00:29:53]:

Bye, everyone.

Rui Quinta [00:29:54]:

Bye bye.

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