Firms that standardize how they track, pursue, and convert opportunities can spend less time scrambling and more time winning the right work.
A couple months ago, Mark Zweig wrote a great piece in The Zweig Letter: “Stop Selling the Work – Sell the Feeling.” His point: most architecture and engineering firms sell on the wrong value proposition, leaning on process and credentials instead of the outcomes clients are actually buying.
That's the softer side of selling. But there's another side of marketing and business development that firms often neglect: the operational side.
A/E firms spend a lot of time thinking about how to deliver projects. They build processes around budgeting, staffing, designing, billing, and collections. There is at least some effort put into standardizing and scrutinizing how the business executes the work and the admin behind it.
However, before a project is won, we see much less effort to drive consistency in attracting leads and building a reliable pipeline of work. Many firms manage contacts and outreach by memory, relying on personal relationships. Spreadsheets and individual inboxes are the "system of record" for most firms. Others leverage disconnected point solutions: a CRM system here, a proposal tool there. Proposals are often assembled separately and require a huge lift from the team.
It's time we brought more operational rigor to the process of winning projects. Here's why.
Winning work should be a fluid workflow, not a scramble
Without operational rigor, A/E firms spend excessive amounts of time on the mechanics of winning work. Some of the more common complaints we hear: when creating a proposal, people start hunting for the right bios or project experience from past proposals. Or they spend time crafting a plan, only to recreate the work breakdown structure in the firm's project management system.
This shouldn't be the case. Tracking an opportunity, responding to an RFP, assembling a proposal, and converting a pursuit into an active project should be seamless. The right processes and systems should make it easy to find the relevant data, recycle information, and carry data forward into project delivery. And that should be accessible to anyone on the team, not dependent on any individual.
Firms are always strapped for time and must balance winning work with executing on the projects already in hand. But response times matter when it comes to winning business. Ad hoc approaches lead to lower win rates and lower margin.
Visibility drives BD performance
Most A/E firms don't have armies of marketing or business development staff. Often these roles are filled by trained architects or engineers, not specialists. Much of the effort is distributed across principals, project managers, and technical leaders, many of whom didn't choose their careers because they love selling. The challenge is creating enough structure and visibility around that activity to fit the realities A/E firms face.
That means clear data around the pipeline, and around wins and losses. It also means clarity around who owns the relationship, when the last touchpoint was, what the next step is, and who is responsible for taking it. Without that visibility, pursuits stall quietly. A promising lead goes six weeks without a follow up and nobody notices until the prospect has already signed with someone else.
The right approach creates visibility and accountability without being overbearing. It also allows for delegation, and for training others to step into business development roles as firms grow.
Firms need end-to-end data, not disconnected systems
For leadership to manage an A/E firm effectively, they need great data. For an A/E firm, so much of the essential data lives before the project is even won. When that data is disconnected, or not leveraged as an input to running the firm, leadership only has partial information.
For example, many firms don't directly capture the investment associated with pursuing a project. If time and expense aren't tracked against that pursuit, the profitability picture for the resulting project is incomplete. Or if firms don't have a reliable view of pipeline, with dollar values, timelines, and likelihood to win, connected to forecasting and staffing, the planning process becomes unnecessarily onerous, and financial health can be at risk without anyone knowing it.
Running an A/E firm well requires end-to-end data, including the work coming down the pike tomorrow. Yet the pursuit and the project are surprisingly disconnected at most firms. Strategic firms are closing that gap.
Operational excellence starts before the project is won
We see more A/E firms improving how they manage and deliver projects. But operational excellence shouldn't suddenly begin the moment a client signs and someone clicks "create project."
The firms pulling ahead are the ones treating the pursuit itself as part of the system, not a separate scramble that happens before the "real" work starts. They're connecting the pipeline to the proposal, the proposal to the project, and the project back to the numbers that tell them whether the pursuit was worth it. That's a mindset shift as much as a tooling one, but the tooling has to catch up to make it practical.
Take a hard look at what happens earlier in your pursuit process. Do you have full data from proposal to paid, giving you a complete financial picture of the project and your business? Can anyone on the team step in and follow a standardized process, or does it live in the memory and relationships of a few individuals? Does your pipeline data feed your forecasting and staffing decisions, or is that connection missing?
Ultimately, operational excellence in architecture and engineering should start at the very beginning, with the pursuit. This will lead to firms winning more work, securing the right projects, and rapidly growing their business.
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Matt Cooper is CEO of BQE Software, Inc. Connect with him on LinkedIn. |
