In a relationship-driven business, clients hire people they know and trust — not just the firms they represent.
When you think about marketing for the businesses our readers are in – architecture, engineering, planning, and other related professional services – we tend to talk about how we can create an image for the company that helps it sell more work. Selling work is the point of marketing after all, so that makes sense.
We get into the projects we do and how we do them. We talk about how innovative we have been. We talk about our mission and vision and history. We list our rewards and recognitions. We get into our design and quality assurance processes and programs, and our budgeted to actual cost record. We talk about the professional backgrounds qualifications of our employees and ourselves.
All of this stuff works to a certain extent. The typical firm has around a 15% to 20% success rate on the work it goes after. But it takes a lot of grinding away to achieve that. Responding to RFPs and submitting SOQs, going to trade shows, doing expensive photography, submitting for design awards, writing and sending press releases, and doing a whole bunch of other stuff that costs a significant amount of time and money and then gives us the results we get.
But one critical ingredient is missing in all of this that will greatly improve the number of inquiries we get and our success rate on closing them. And that is we spend little if any effort at all to share information about ourselves as individuals.
If you accept the premise of my very successful friend Matt Lewis (whom I regularly run in front of my students) that “people need to know you, like you, and trust you” in that order before they will buy from you, but then ignore that simple equation in all of your marketing, is it any wonder we aren’t more effective than we are?
I think there are a whole host of reasons we don’t get into more personal stuff about ourselves. Many of us are introverts. We don’t believe that our personal views and philosophy and life history are relevant to selling work. And if we are the top person in the firm, we hold back because we are trying to promote everyone else who works for us so we don’t tie all of our success as a business to ourselves – in large part because that makes the firm too dependent on us as individuals being there and therefore reduces the value of the business as a going concern that we are going to try to harvest upon exit.
The other thing is that some of us don’t have a good sense of the boundaries of this sharing. We are afraid we will share too much and stray into politics and contentious social topics (for good reason, in my opinion), so instead we share nothing. Does all this make sense?
But if it does – how do we get back to what has to happen if potential clients need to know us and like us to build enough trust for them to contract with us? We have to share a lot more information about ourselves as individuals than we do. And it cannot all happen one-on-one in our relationship-building business development meetings or through actually working on projects with clients. That’s too slow. And we will never get a chance to build that working relationship if we don’t get a chance to work together on a job in the first place. That’s analogous to saying “word of mouth” is the most effective marketing, but if you never get a job to do you will never have anyone singing your praises.
So what other methods are available to us to share the more personal stuff? Social media is probably best. We have Facebook, Instagram, X, and LinkedIn, among others. I understand why many of our readers avoid it. I took a multi-year long break from social media myself at one point. It can be a huge time suck. There is a lot of negative stuff there. But my belief is most of our clients are there, also, and it’s a great way to share our thinking, philosophies of work and life, personal insights, lessons learned, bits about our families and of our life history, and more. It’s one way to get people to KNOW us so they can decide if they like us or not. This is mandatory before we can establish the trust required to spend six, seven, or sometimes even eight figures or more hiring our firms to work on very expensive projects with total costs being multiples of what they are spending with us.
AI isn’t going to do this stuff for us. We need to do it ourselves so it is “authentic” (sorry to use the term as it has become a cliche). But the payoff can be enormous. With enough sharing of the right stuff over an extended period of time, we can grow our networks ten- or twentyfold. People we have never met will feel they know us. They will spread information on us to others. We will help build relationships and trust, get more leads, and improve our selling success rates over other firms whose people won’t do this.
None of this will happen overnight. Better to start now versus later.
Mark Zweig is Zweig Group’s chairman and founder. Contact him at mzweig@zweiggroup.com.