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.
Along with many of you, I receive many marketing journals and articles about the newest trends in managing marketing and business development processes. I bring most of these articles home and highlight what might be relevant to me and my firm. Of course, if I did half the things I highlighted, I would run around frantically, driving senior leadership crazy. Unfortunately, what many people do instead of selectively committing to some of the work is do none of it. What is the best process or metric or program that will give you the biggest return on your investment?
Grow, increase, expand. These concepts form the foundation of a companys strategic goals. Although not all strategies require entering new markets, at some point, firms must expand beyond existing clients or geographies to achieve significant growth. Whether youre on the executive team or serve in the business development space, answering these questions honestly can help your team determine where your company should focus its resources to achieve realistic and meaningful growth.
Have you ever had to sit through a presentation where you spend the entire time checking your phone for emails and messages even though you know you havent received any new ones? At some point in your career, whether you are in business development, sales, marketing, management, or otherwise, most of us will have to get up in front of a group of people and make a presentation. Here are FIVE tips that may help you give a meaningful presentation.
Networking is all about cultivating relationships to develop your business. Everyone in a firm, regardless of title, is involved in securing clients, nurturing that relationship, and-most important- retaining their customer status. Through effective networking, practice, and focus, you can realize this success.
There are just some clients that your business cannot afford to have - you know who they are: the ones who are highly commodity-based and have limited experience, whose projects result in little or no profit, and who are a drain on your firm and its resources. Instead of trying to find projects that suit the firm, client-based firms identify clients with whom they can develop and nurture a partnership over time. Its a philosophy that is primarily interested in owning the client, not the project. Most importantly, the focus of a client-based business is maintaining the relationship at all costs.
The acronym BIM is showing up more and more in our industry. Owners are requiring it on projects, countries are setting standards for it, and firms are touting expertise in it. But what is Building Information Modeling (BIM) and, as marketers and business developers, why should we care?
Contractors get work departments can be like a car with a bad alignment. While everyone is working hard to get where they want to go, some of the effort is being pulled toward the ditch of low hit rates, missed opportunities and undeveloped client relationships. All that is needed are a few key adjustments to win your fair share of work.
As a professional working in the Business Development world, you are probably acutely aware that the reason for your existence is to Develop Business and that entails more than fine dining and golf! Pre-Winning plays a large role in your companys ability to secure the type of work, and build the type of relationships, that will produce the desired results.
Has all of the romance drained out of your business proposals? You used to spend hours thinking about the clients needs and wants. What would their ideal contractor look like? How could I show that were the perfect match? But lately, things have become stale. Youre less interested in them and would much rather talk about yourself. If your win rate is going down the tubes, nows the time to rethink your proposal writing strategy.
LinkedIn has been called Facebook for professionals, the virtual rolodex, and the headhunters haven to name a few. Regardless of what you call this online network, LinkedIn can be important for business development. Before delving into LinkedIn business development advice, lets look at why LinkedIn is beneficial for the construction industry.
