Every month the Business Development Committee reaches out to small business owners, marketing directors, and public relations specialists to gather valuable insight into the rapidly growing construction industry.
If you're looking to create marketing proposals, build relationships with customers, and increase sales, our Best Practices article series can help.
To say the last two years has been challenging for everyone in both our professional and personal lives, is quite possibly the understatement of the past 20 months. The construction industry has certainly faced a myriad of challenges, economic fallouts and other setbacks over the years, but none as far-reaching as COVID and its continued impact on all of our lives. As we reassess and begin 2022 with at least some sense of hope, the “challenge” now posed to the construction industry is to redefine our notion of success – more specifically, how we measure and celebrate successes both externally with our clients and partners, as well as internally with our employees.
As we trudge through the pandemic and its economic uncertainty, one thing is clear: we must continue to win work. While there seems to be no shortage of RFPs, our ability to build relationships with the clients behind the RFPs and to truly do the early work of discovery is heavily weighted towards the established relationships we built pre-pandemic. The old rule that 80-percent of our work comes from existing clients and 20-percent is from new is in question. In a recent, very informal poll, 50-percent of respondents said the 80/20 rule was still relatively valid, while the other half erred on the side that its more likely 90/10 at best. With traditional methods of meeting new clients (conferences, networking events, meals, and happy hours) almost non-existent in some places, I wondered how business developers are making connections and succeeding at winning new work. I found two fascinating examples that tell us a lot about what’s working.
A lot of contractors and managers still struggle to track and understand their sales data. It’s a constant battle of wrangling information from spreadsheets, paper forms, emails, and even word of mouth.
This current, messy way of doing business is bogging down your processes and best people. It’s difficult to track your daily sales activity, qualified opportunities, and recently won projects and dollar amounts. And, unfortunately, there’s no clear path to efficiency.
So, why are you still stuck with these methods? Because they’re familiar and what worked in the past. It’s hard to change to something new.
But the industry is now at a tipping point. Digitization is the way forward.
In my many years in the general contracting industry, I ran across many prospective clients that could have benefited greatly from a negotiated team build approach, but were so committed to their traditional Bid-Build delivery model that they were not willing to deviate. First, I will admit that a negotiated approach is not always the right solution, but whenever a project has complicating factors, whether it be logistical, schedule, constructability, or its a unique one of a kind structure, a negotiated team build approach can bring early solutions to a client's most worrisome issues. Regardless of the benefits, some of these "Hard Bidders" are true believers that general contractors are all the same and that price is all that mattered.
Business development (BD) in the construction industry is a continual building and re-building of mutually beneficial relationships. Although this practice of building and re-building relationships was surely tested over the past year, BD professionals still found unique and creative ways to connect. Whether that was through a LinkedIn virtual leads group or setting records for the greatest number of video meetings in one day, BD professionals certainly adopted their practices to fit the needs of their clientele.
Marketing and business development take months, sometimes years, to turn into something big. It’s the consistency of doing these things on a daily basis that produces results. It’s like running a marathon. If you decide today you are going to run a marathon and you haven’t typically been a runner in the past, then you are going to have to train for it. You can’t just go out and run a marathon. It’s your daily routine and plan you must follow, so in 4 or 6 months, you are prepared and ready to run that marathon. It’s following that plan and consistently implementing those tactics that will get you to race day and across the finish line.
During a recent meeting of the AGC Business Development Forum, members discussed the various hurdles from this past year. As the conversation shifted from the obstacles to important lessons, it became apparent that the topic my fellow BD Forum members were sharing would be beneficial to the entire AGC community.
The ability to establish and then nurture connections is a valuable skill that makes for a happy and well-rounded life — and a happy and secure company! And all the market research in the world – while quite valuable — can’t match the power of genuine human chemistry. As a managing director of business development at Columbia, I focus every day on our relationships with prospective and existing clients. But helping to identify and develop new ones and strengthening those that already exist isn’t something a successful business development manager does alone: in fact, business development and retainment is much more successful when your entire team is empowered to contribute.
Everyone knows the key to successful business development efforts is relationships with a capital “R”. However, 2020 threw a wrench into maintaining those relationships both personally and professionally.
As we step into 2021, most of us are ready to accept this "new normal" that includes telecommuting as a part of daily life while juggling the usual demands of work and maintaining relationships. Of course, we are looking forward to the day we can be together again and travel more freely to make contacts, but in the interest of innovation and adaptation, we should focus on the silver linings and the upsides to dealing electronically. Maintaining strong business relationships are as important as ever, and in many ways more so now, as we don’t want to become “out of sight, out of mind” with our customers.
My grandfather was a brick mason. If he met you on a jobsite, you would be greeted with a handshake from deeply calloused hands and a smile that would not betray the amount of work he was about to put in. He was a “Good Old Boy” and ran his own company while working in the field. He knew how to do things right, and he lived off a reputation that would earn him credibility with complete strangers. People learned his name, his quality of work, saw his logo on his truck, and eventually called him up to quote work or even gave him a no competition award as a subcontractor. The trust he earned with owners and GCs and the friends he made, spread the word to second degree connections who trusted these contacts.
