Best sellers need support too

Your experts may be your best sellers, but they shouldn’t be your only marketers

In most AEC firms, the people who bring in the work are the same people who do it. The principal who's known the client fifteen years. The project lead who keeps getting asked back. The specialist who turns a good site meeting into the next three jobs. The sector has a name for this: the seller-doer. It's how professional services firms have won work for as long as anyone can remember, and in the built environment it's usually the right model.

It works because it's honest. Clients here want to talk to the person who'll actually run their project, not a business development manager who vanishes once the contract's signed. The trust sits with the technical expert, so the selling sits with them too. Fine.

The trouble is what we then ask that person to do, and how little we give them to do it with. Some of your experts are naturals at the client side. Plenty aren't, and a few would rather do almost anything than sell. That's not the problem it looks like. You don't need to turn your technical experts into marketers, or into salespeople. You need them doing less of the winning-work job, not more, only the part that genuinely needs them in the room, with marketing doing the rest. There are three pieces to the rest.

Arm them properly

We take the experts clients trust most, tell them to go and win work, and hand them very little to do it with. No materials worth sending anyway. A website that undersells what your firm actually does. Case studies three years out of date, or irrelevant to the prospect - if they exist at all. A capability statement that three people rewrite the night before the deadline.

The fix is specific and unglamorous. A project sheets that say what the problem was, what you did and what it was worth, rather than a photo and a logo. A capability statement that's current and ready, cut by sector so it isn't rebuilt from scratch on every bid. The key people's LinkedIn profiles tidied up, so they stand up to being looked at. A library of relevant proof, projects, references, accreditations, that the expert can actually pull from when they say "I'll send something over." This is the obvious piece, and it's where most firms stop or do badly. Worth doing. On its own, it’s the quickest to fix but arguably the least valuable of the three.

Get the right people in front of them, warmed up

Your technical experts' time is the most expensive and scarcest thing the firm has. Every hour one of them spends on a speculative coffee with the wrong contact, or a meeting that was never going anywhere, is an hour not billed and not spent on a prospect worth winning.

So the job isn't only better materials. It's working out who's actually worth their time, and warming those people up first. That means knowing which framework clients come up for retender next year and using account based marketing to get the firm in front of them well before the bid. Getting your experts published in the trade press your buyers read, on the problems those buyers are wrestling with, so the name is familiar before any call. A few CPD sessions delivered to the practices you want to be specified by. A LinkedIn presence for the firm and its key people that puts useful sector thinking in front of the right feeds. Being findable when someone searches for the specific thing you do. None of it needs your expert until the meeting itself, by which point the prospect is warm, well-matched and half-expecting the call.

Get that right and your best people spend their limited selling time in front of warm prospects instead of cold ones. That's the difference between a seller-doer model that quietly drains your experts and one that pays them back.

Keep the relationship warm without leaning on them for all of it

There's a quieter weakness in the model. The relationship usually lives entirely in one person's head and inbox. Fine while they're around and have the time. Less fine when they're buried in a project for six months, or on leave, or they move on and take the contact list with them.

So the third job is keeping past and prospective clients warm without it depending on one person remembering to. A regular client update that's worth opening, a read on what's changing in their sector rather than company news. A note to a past client when something relevant to them lands: a regulation change, a project like the one you did for them. Past clients held in a CRM the firm owns, not in someone's phone. The firm's name staying visible in the feeds where those clients spend their time. Done properly, you're remembered when the next opportunity comes round, and the relationship belongs to the firm rather than to one person's goodwill. When a good client moves to a new firm, and they will, you want them still hearing from you rather than quietly forgetting you existed.

You may already have someone for this

If you've got a marketing person, you might be thinking they cover all this. Worth checking what they actually spend their week on. In most firms this size, the marketer is set up to support proposals and run the stand: formatting PQQ responses, chasing logos and case study sign-off, booking the awards entries, keeping the website ticking over. Useful work, all of it. But it's support work, not winning-work, and it's a different job from the three above. A firm can have a busy marketer and still have nobody doing the part that actually fills the diary.

Your technical experts will always be your best sellers. Whether they're also your only marketers is a choice, and usually an accidental one. If you'd rather it weren't, that's worth a chat. clare@clarewatson.uk.