Repeat clients keep AEC firms stable, but winning new work is what determines long-term growth and resilience.
Repeat clients make up 75% of business for architecture and engineering firms, according to Zweig Group. On the one hand, that speaks to the depth of certain client relationships that can sustain AEC firms.
On the other hand, that raises all sorts of questions:
- How much client concentration is there?
- What happens if the firm loses a large client?
- What growth rate might the firm achieve with a more balanced ratio?
- Why isn’t the firm winning more new clients?
On that last point, I consistently hear firm leaders asking how to win more business. Sessions about proposals, branding, etc. tend to be among the biggest draws.
I’ve worked with the sales organizations at more than a dozen technology-enabled companies and distilled my learnings down to five themes:
1. Differentiate your firm. There are nearly 70,000 A/E firms in the U.S. Even when narrowing that down to regional or local markets, there’s plenty of competition. What does your firm do to stand out? Are you an expert in a particular type of project for a particular type of client? Be sure your focus is clear.
Then, communicate what your firm does better than others within your area of focus. This isn't easy to do – honing a message is difficult. Spend time reflecting and getting feedback from clients about your strengths.
Most firms are tempted to lean too hard into assertions at this stage. Firms might communicate that they are “innovative” or “client-focused,” but without data, these claims can ring hollow. Rather than asserting yourself, get clients to say it for you. Client quotes or success stories are better proof than self-proclaimed attributes. Second, leverage what I like to call RTBs, or “reasons to believe.” These are objective statements that give your firm credibility, like “30 years serving the community” or “95% projects completed on schedule.”
2. Lead with curiosity. The entire client evaluation process should be about … the client. Fundamentally, success in selling comes from understanding the client’s needs and pain points and crafting a solution around them. (If you want to save yourself some reading, this has been the premise of just about every book on sales since 1936.)
Once you’ve researched the client and project, it’s time to conduct “discovery” with them. What is their scope? What are their challenges? What are they trying to achieve? What really matters to them?
A few tactics that tend to help:
- Come prepared with a list of questions you want to answer. Don’t just “wing it.”
That said, this shouldn’t feel like an interrogation. Don’t forget to engage and listen - Don’t stop at the first question – dig deeper. Understand why. “Tell me more” and “What is the reason behind that?” are good simple questions.
- How can you make it easier for them? Are there ways to clarify their criteria? Other projects you can compare against?
- The one “tactic” that’s tough to teach: be curious about your client. If you’re not genuinely curious about them, this is all a lot tougher on you and on them.
One note: According to Gong, a sales coaching platform, a 60% talk/40% listen ratio is an effective one. Early in the sales process, it tilts even more to listen. If your ratios are much different (i.e., you're taking up most of the airtime), that might be a negative indicator.
3. Craft a low-FUD solution. Your goal should be to address the needs and pain points – and limit noise beyond that. Resist the urge to include everything but the kitchen sink – every project, capability, consideration – when presenting to prospects. Rather, express clearly and succinctly how your solution will best solve their problems.
Covering too much is one way to introduce FUD, which stands for fear, uncertainty, and doubt. And these three unfortunate feelings drive indecision in your clients. That indecision is often keeping you from winning business. While you might lose business to other firms, are you also losing business to “no decision”?
It’s not necessarily that the status quo is ideal – people usually recognize its flaws. But doing nothing often feels safer and less risky than doing something new. The book The JOLT Effect calls this “indecision inertia” and indicates (among other things):
- People are “loss-averse,” or wired to avoid losses more strongly than to pursue gains.
- People have “omission bias,” or feel less regret about a bad outcome caused by inaction than one caused by action.
- People can feel overwhelmed by change and self-doubt.
Even when clients are much better off working with you, these factors lead them to stand still. Your role in the process is to help them overcome these intrinsic tendencies. To help, you can:
- Unpack the objections that are really holding your client back.
- Offer a recommendation rather than an extensive menu of options, and even express trade-offs that might not be value-maximizing for you.
- Define a threshold for decision rather than “boiling the ocean.”
- Reduce the risk (e.g., communicating clearly the process that will lead to a good outcome, creating stage-gates).
4. Demonstrate good client hands. I was on a call with the new owner of an engineering firm – one of our customers. He wasn’t an engineer himself. I asked him what led him to believe he could buy and run an engineering firm successfully. His response: “I’m going to respond to client emails within a week.”
I started my career at a management consulting firm, and we would always talk about having good “client hands” – effectively handling client interactions and relationships in a way that delivers a positive experience and builds trust.
A/E firms can differentiate on having good “client hands” throughout a process. A few habits to build that can help:
- Ask good questions and really listen to the responses.
- Set targets for response times, i.e., under 24 hours. And hit those targets.
- Miss a call? Pick up the phone and call back.
- Provide process updates even during the evaluation process – make it easier for the client to “buy.”
- Find a way to engage with multiple people at the client firm, and connect them with multiple people at your firm.
- Ensure the look/feel of the client experience is consistent.
- These may seem minor but contribute to the full client evaluation experience and can help reduce FUD. Remember, it’s natural for a client to assume they’re getting your best behavior during your sales pitch. If that behavior is anything less than stellar, they’ll be worried about what it’s like to work with you after that.
Two ideas to check how you’re doing:
- Ask a friend to “secret shop” the early part of the process with your firm.
- Ask several clients (or better yet, clients you didn’t win) how you did across a few key “client hands” dimensions.
5. Collect and use data. Firms are more successful when they have systems in place to collect data and learn from it. This doesn’t have to be dedicated software (although that can certainly help). It can simply be a process to collect information and a place to record it.
A few common metrics firms track:
- Quantitative: Opportunities/proposals; funnel progression (through different stages); win rates.
- Qualitative: Call or meeting reviews; won/loss reasons; prospect feedback.
Lots of organizations lean heavily into the quantitative results, but depending on the circumstances, getting a “signal” may be difficult. If you’re a firm with a low volume of proposals, getting to any real statistical significance might take too long. Qualitative feedback might help your firm learn faster – and ultimately win more business.
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Matt Cooper is CEO of BQE Software, Inc. Connect with him on LinkedIn. |