As construction sales professionals, there’s a tension that we have to address with every new client. It’s something that anyone setting out on a dedicated sales strategy will encounter too. If you’re developing your marketing or investing in sales, it’s worth knowing about ahead of time. It could save a lot of stress along the way – both for managers and for sales and marketing staff.
The tension is between the need for patience, and the desire for a quick win.
Let’s look at each side of that tug-of-war in turn. The first part is that the sales process in construction is almost always medium to long term in its effectiveness. Building projects can be quite slow moving. We might identify a promising sales lead for a new client, but then with planning applications it can be two or three or four months before that gets approval. Then you add on another month for building regs, and you’re looking at five months down the line before you can even start talking about tendering.
That’s the first part of the tension. There has to be an acceptance that marketing has to be a medium to long term commitment.
Pulling against that is the reality that money can be limited, especially in smaller companies. They may come to us short of money in the first place, and we have to go out of our way to reassure them that what we do works. We’ve been here a long time and we have a lot of clients who are winning work – we know they’ll see results, but we know we have to pull out all the stops to make things happen quickly.
So with a new client, there’s a very high level of attention on our side to getting quick wins. Those can come in a number of different ways. Sometimes you’re just plain lucky. We’ve had clients where on the very first day we’ve pulled in a tender or two – but that’s far from usual. Normally it happens the hard way. We try to embed ourselves into the organisation as fast as possible, invest in the client relationship and understand their business inside out.
But there is an art to the quick win, read our next article for more.
