If you have been in the AEC industry long enough, you start to recognize the rhythm of the year.
January and February are full of planning meetings, budget conversations, and strategy discussions about where the firm wants to grow.
And if you were really paying attention this year, maybe you also grabbed a ticket to SmartWIN to before it sold out. The room was packed with firm leaders, marketers, and business developers talking openly about how the industry is changing and what it takes to stay competitive.
Now we arrive in March.
This is a quiet moment for many firms.
I think of it as the calm before procurement season storm.
Proposal teams catch their breath. Marketing departments update project sheets and resumes. Business developers and seller-doers start circling upcoming opportunities; hoping their targeted project makes it through the final motions of legislative budgeting.
The procurement storm is coming. Everyone knows it.
But this time of year always reminds me of something important.
Some firms are about to experience procurement season very differently than others.
Not because they are better designers or engineers.
Because they have been thinking about marketing differently for the past few years.
Most AEC firms still approach marketing in a very opportunity driven way. They track projects. They monitor pipelines. They chase RFQs and RFPs when they appear.
In other words, marketing activity starts when procurement begins, at the bottom of the funnel.
But the rest of the B2B world figured out something years ago.
If your audience is small and your projects are complex, marketing cannot start with the opportunity.
It has to start with the account.
That idea is what the broader business world calls Account Based Marketing, or ABM.
ABM did not originate in AEC. It came out of the technology sector in the early 2000s when companies selling high value enterprise systems realized that traditional marketing models did not make sense for them.
They were not selling to millions of buyers. They were selling to a few hundred companies. Sometimes fewer.
And each sale involved multiple stakeholders, long decision cycles, and significant financial risk.
Marketing had to evolve from sales support to building credibility with specific organizations early and often.
Instead of asking “How do we get more wins?” the question became:
Which accounts matter most to our future growth?
Who inside those organizations influences decisions?
And how do we build familiarity and trust with the people inside those organizations long before the buying process begins?
Now bring that thinking into the AEC world.
Most firms do not realize how small their audience actually is.
For example, if you work in corrections, there are 50 state Departments of Corrections in the entire United States. That is your market.
If you are a regional firm doing municipal work within a few hours of your office, your universe of potential clients might include a few dozen cities or counties. When you zoom out to the people in those jurisdictions who might influence the decision to hire you, you’re looking at 5-10 people per target account.
Healthcare teams may be targeting a few dozen health systems.
Higher education teams may be focused on a limited set of universities that fit their geographic reach and project profile.
When you really step back and look at it, most AEC practice areas are not marketing to thousands of buyers. They are marketing to dozens. Maybe a hundred. At most.
Which means that each of those organizations is not just a potential project.
They are a market unto themselves.
That is why ABM matters so much in our industry.
Instead of waiting for a project to appear and then scrambling to assemble a pursuit strategy, firms identify their highest value accounts and begin building visibility with those organizations across leadership relationships, thought leadership, digital channels, and industry presence.
Not for a specific project. But as an ongoing business strategy.
The firms that began adopting this mindset a few years ago are starting to feel the difference now.
Their marketing is not purely reactive.
Their relationships are broader. Their expertise is more visible. Their name comes up earlier in conversations about potential projects.
When procurement season arrives, they are not being introduced for the first time.
They are already familiar.
That does not mean proposals and interviews stop mattering.
They absolutely do.
But the context around them changes.
Because marketing started long before the RFQ.
This idea is something I wrote about extensively in my book. There is an entire chapter dedicated to how Account Based Marketing applies specifically to AEC firms and why our industry is actually one of the most natural environments for ABM to succeed. If you want to go deeper on the concept, you can pick up a copy here.
And next month we are going to take this conversation even further.
Our April 15th SmartSkills session will focus entirely on how AEC firms are implementing Account Based Marketing in practice. How they identify the right accounts, how marketing and business development align around them, and how firms shift their thinking from chasing opportunities to building strategic markets.
Because if your audience is less than fifty organizations, the question is not how many leads you generate. The question is whether those fifty organizations know who you are.
More soon.
Judy