Complexities of Crafting a Positioning Strategy for A/E/C Firms

By Sylvia Montgomery

These are exciting and scary times for marketers of architecture, engineering and construction firms. In A/E/C, we have previously competing firms that are now fighting to stay alive, mid-sized firms disappearing and established firms that have plateaued and are seeking growth. What’s a marketer to do? Marketing is fluid in today’s economy. So, dream big, I say!

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A New Era for A/E/C Professionals: The Making of Visible Experts

By Sylvia Montgomery

Consider the names Oprah Winfrey, Steve Jobs, Lady Gaga and Hillary Clinton. These names conjure images of celebrities, polarizing figures and evangelizers and we can probably all agree that they are experts in their craft. These “experts” may be out of reach for most of us. They have high visibility and acknowledge expertise that just so happens to be with a large population. Nevertheless, they channel lessons for technical professionals.

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Business Development in A/E/C: How Buyers Buy Professional Services

By Sylvia Montgomery

Many architects, engineers and construction professionals still believe that the only way to sell services is through face-to-face connections. Indeed, personal connections can be evolved into professional relationships through trust-building situations.

However, buying and selling professional services, particularly buying and selling architecture, engineering and construction services, has changed dramatically. Wouldn’t it be nice to know what buyers of A/E/C services are thinking and what is driving their buying decisions today? As A/E/C professionals, we simply must know which dynamics have changed the business development cycles.

At Hinge, we set out to find the answer to those same questions. A recent webinar on How Buyers Buy A/E/C Services presented the high-level findings of a new study of 822 Buyers and 533 Sellers. If you missed the webinar, you can find it in our Library.

The research highlights such findings as:

• A strong brand, both online and offline, is important to being considered by potential clients. Reputation, visibility and the ability to be found online really do matter when it comes to making the list of potential new firms that buyers consider.
• Reputation is the top deciding factor when it comes to a buyer’s final decision on a new firm. A reputation for broken promises and a failure to distinguish your firm are most likely to lose you a new prospect.
• Delivering on your promises is the single best predictor of client loyalty. When it comes to considering a new firm, 22% of Buyers are in the persuadable range.

Looking for an A/E/C Firm

During the webinar, we asked our attendees to predict the top criterion when buyers are looking for an A/E/C firm.

Consistent with our research, the top criterion that webinar attendees identified was reputation. For comparison, Figure 1 below represents research findings.

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5 Tips on How To Get Referrals in the AEC Industry

By Katie Sanner

Through our recent research on How Buyers Buy for the AEC industry, I found the results on how to get referrals quite interesting.  To quickly recap: 

• 68% of buyers said they would be very likely to recommend sellers’ services
• 80% of buyers said they had already referred sellers’ services
• Of buyers that have referred sellers, 25% of them brought the recommendation up themselves

This all sounds pretty great, right!  AEC firms are demonstrating specific expertise, gaining confidence from buyers, and receiving glowing recommendations…sometimes without even being asked!  But what about the 20% of buyers who haven’t recommended sellers? 

When buyers were asked why they didn’t make a referral, it was shocking to me that 80% of respondents said it was because they hadn’t been asked and that only 5% of non-referrals were due to the buyer not being satisfied. 

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The Importance of Brand Strength For Marketing A/E/C Firms

By Katie Sanner

During the five years I spent working as a marketer in the Architecture/Engineering/Construction (A/E/C) industry, I produced my fair share of prime proposals.  Most times with the belief that for each submission ‘we had to showcase our past performance to win.’  Based on the results from our A/E/C How Buyers Buy Research Study however, this does not seem to be true. 

Past Performance vs. Reputation

What the research showed was actually quite surprising. When buyers were asked about selection criteria, leading the way with a response of 58% was a Good Reputation followed by a Good Fit/Share Our Values at 43%. Those statistics may not have been what shocked me the most though. Take a look at the chart and try to find what’s missing.

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How to Reach Professional Services Buyers

By Lee Frederiksen

How do you reach professional services buyers? This should be one of the first questions that any professional services marketer should ask themselves. Hinge Research Institute (our research arm) has just released a new study that tackles that issue head on. 

One of the questions we asked the over 800 buyers in the study was how they would go about finding a new professional services firm. The results are shown in the figure below (buyers often use multiple strategies, so the numbers add up to over 100%).

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