Yesterday, I spent some time with my family as we successfully returned to the hotel we had been booked at originally. I also took in two sessions of the special “CPSM Day” at the Society for Marketing Professional Services conference in Boston. “CPSM” is the designation for “Certified Professional Services Marketer”, meaning you’ve passed an examination to prove you are competent fundamentally in marketing for the architectural, engineering and construction community.
I’m writing this posting in a dark hotel room early morning, so can’t review notes and other details. This rather significant limitation is offset by my clear memories of the general trends of discussion: The challenge of drawing out and developing worthy long-term relationships in areas of market priority, so when RFP and bidding opportunities arise, you are on the inside track to winning these bids. Members generally acknowledge that you are wasting your time bidding in open competitions if you don’t already have a relationship with the decision-makers in the selection boards. This relationship-success is extremely important, especially in the current highly competitive environment where dozens of purportedly qualified bidders can compete for even a single small job; and where (if price competition rules the day) you have a faint chance of making any kind of profit by winning a “low price wins the job” competition, especially if it is relatively small.
The next challenge is building and developing the relationships and seeing the opportunities under our noses. This is especially apparent when practices have multiple disciplines and decision-makers, where cross-selling and information sharing opportunities “should” exist but for one reason or another, they aren’t developed. Can current clients also tell us where to head in the future: What if a current client wants or could use a service you don’t currently offer, but could develop on demand?
Finally, how do you measure success and evaluate progress in these initiatives, which involve sometimes extremely long sales cycles, diverse connections and changing personalities? Worse, how do you implement effective strategies when in a downsizing environment, your resources are curtailed and you must do more with less, as panicked executives and ill-informed project managers push you to crank out multiple RFPs and proposals on the faint hope that they could succeed, even if your “go/no go” analysis suggests this is wasted effort.
Problems, problems, problems. Is there hope in this chaos? This is where groups like SMPS play such an important role. Besides knowing you are not alone in dealing with these challenges, you can find support, guidance and (yes) practical relationships to help you succeed. (The latter is especially the case when you are combining local connections with a specialized discipline, where a national or international player might work best with a qualified partner with appropriate local connections.)
Today is the conference’s main day. Hours of speakers, presentations, and a formal awards dinner. No free WIFI in the convention center, so I won’t be able to write and blog as freely as I’d like. But I’ll still learn much and have stories to share in the weeks ahead.
If you are in Boston and wish to share a connection or two, you can email me at buckshon@cnrgp.com.
