I’m a big fan of the seller-doer model of business development – at least in concept. (Even if I  don’t like the term.) Clients have become more sophisticated – often even holding professional licensure or certification – and they have extreme time constraints. So when they take a meeting

If there is one thing that came through loudly and clearly at the recent   SMPS Build Business   conference in Los Angeles, it is that firms aren’t doing enough to analyze the external environment and prepare for the changes headed their way. We’ve long known that architecture, engineering,

I recently had the opportunity to present on the topic of blogging at the SMPS Fellows Leadership Symposium, held in conjunction with the annual  Society for Marketing Professional Services   Build Business  conference. The overall focus of the session was better integrating technology into digital marketing,

There’s a term in the A/E/C industry that most firms will do anything to avoid, whispering it in quiet rooms as little as possible: sales. Drop the “s” and “sales” becomes a four-letter word. And we too often treat it that way. Instead, as an industry we’ve adopted “business

A/E/C firms struggle with the best metrics to manage their sales and marketing effectiveness. Which ones make the most sense?  Part of that depends upon how you are tracing the performance of departments verses individuals. Part of it depends upon goals outlined in your strategic plans. There are quite a few

In my new book, Reputation Design+Build: Creating Winning Personal Brands for Engineering, Design, and Construction Professionals,  I demonstrate a series of tools that you can use to build or maintain your personal reputation. These are broken down by Baseline Tools and Reputation-Building Tools. The Baseline Tools

During my 25 years in the A/E/C industry, I’ve attended a fair amount of client panels. A lot of them. Sometimes they are revealing and provide useful information to help me do my job better. Sometimes they provide a “soft” introduction to a potential client – instead of a “hard” cold

How does your firm handle business development? The answer varies greatly depending upon who’s answering the question. Maybe it’s a “rainmaker” – often a principal who brings in a lion’s share of a firm’s business, sometimes the president and other times a senior executive or market