Katie [00:00:02]:
Welcome to the AEC Marketing for Principles podcast. This show is designed as a conversation between sales and marketing principles to address trends, challenges, and best practices that are driving growth for professional service firms. Through our collection of discussions with subject matter experts, industry legends, and leaders, we aim to share thoughts and practical tips with our listeners that you can use for growing your AEC brands. Hosted by me, Katie Cash, senior vice president at SmartEgies, the AEC growth consulting firm that’s been developing smart business strategies for design and construction firms since 2008. Hi, everyone. Welcome to AEC Marketing for Principles. This is your host, Katie Cash here. And as you all know, this season, we are diving deep into the intersection of innovation and strategy here on the show, and we want to make sure we’re bringing together representation from our different AEC owners as well as some of the project partners that we use throughout the industry that make us more efficient and better at our jobs.
Katie [00:01:11]:
And today, I’m talking with one of those. Today on the show, I have Tom Dean, who is the cofounder and CEO of Project Mark. And, Tom, I think you and your team are really redefining how AEC firms approach winning work through a unified sales and marketing infrastructure. I really do love your product offering because it puts business development and marketing together, and we really like to silo those, but we play really well together if we can just get our data in the same place and have it feed to the different phases of Project Pursuit World. And I really support your mission of trying to streamline the work and the acquisition process and helping firms work smarter, not harder. At SmarterG’s, we’re all about smart strategies, so that’s something we can get on board with. So I’m really excited to have you here. I’m excited to learn about your journey.
Katie [00:02:03]:
And why don’t we go ahead and kick it off and let you tell the listeners about you and what inspired you to to start Project Mark and what you’re all about?
Tom Deane [00:02:13]:
Awesome. Thanks, Katie. Hello, everybody, and thanks a million for having me. So, yeah, we started Project Mark about it was best part of four and a half years ago. Prior to starting Project Mark, I had spent over 10 years in construction. So my life was in construction. I grew up my family were in construction. I worked in building sites as a teenager, studied construction economics and management.
Tom Deane [00:02:38]:
I actually always wanted to be an architect, but I wasn’t smart enough to get the degree. So I moved into more so the economics and the construction management side of things. So one of the things for me, I was always really inspired to move over to the United States, as many Irish people do. It’s just an amazing economy, and there’s just so many amazing construction projects to be involved in. And that was that. I moved over 14 years ago. So spending 10 years in the industry here, I was that sort of technical, just for the listeners, I spent most of my time in the construction industry in pre construction. So all things to estimate and planning change over management, things like that.
Tom Deane [00:03:20]:
I just love that space. But one thing that I was always really passionate about was business development. And as everybody knows in the construction industry, there are sort of 3 prongs to winning work. You’ve got your marketing team who are like the bedrock and the foundation of creating the content and the communication practice in order to share a really compelling story and really prep teams for interview situations and things like that. Then you’ve got the BD team who may have past experience in the industry that I’ve now moved into an independent BD role, and sometimes that role doesn’t even exist. It’s more so that up to the technical team that are building relationships and getting into the project into. So that was my role in the space. Like, love to do my day job, but always like to chase clients, build relationships, attend social events, and get involved in the project into process.
Tom Deane [00:04:11]:
So fast forward to four and a half years ago, we really started to see the emergence of technology come into the space. Right? You’ve got the building connectors and PlanGrid and all the Autodesk tooling. And we often thought, who’s building stuff for marketing business development right now? Because that is an absolutely critical workflow that all the other systems were bringing in sort of new innovative players. And we felt like that was one of the 4 or 5 massive areas to revolutionize based on our experience. And it’s exactly what you had mentioned, Katie. It’s oftentimes we heard and and even some of our earliest investors were in this situation where marketing is in one silo, and they’re pushing CRM and and innovative software, but they’re stuck being the only user. And then you’ve got BD in another silo, and they’re sharing information, but they’re not sharing with sort of the executive team and marketing team. So everybody’s doing business development and everybody’s trying to figure out who knows who, but there’s no real centralized place.
Tom Deane [00:05:08]:
And even the CRMs that they’re using are hard to adopt and really get going. So we felt like starting on the marketing side was a really interesting play. And then as we continue to dive deeper into workflows, we felt there was a huge opportunity in sort of accelerating our roadmap to get to the CRM, and that’s what’s taken us to where we are today.
Katie [00:05:32]:
I really like it. And I know a lot of our clients adopted technology where out of the box, they thought it was gonna help solve this issue, but it either was so cumbersome that it really was a deterrent for their to use it, or they had to customize it so much to actually make sense in the world of selling professional services where a deal may take 2, 3, 5 years, or your client acquisition costs could be astronomical, right, and all these different things. And so I really was introduced to your product through a client of mine, a small general contractor here in Atlanta that I would say is has always been fairly innovative at finding ways to plug operational challenges with technology and systems and tools. And they started using your product, I feel like, pretty pretty early on, and I got exposure to that. And I was like, oh my gosh. Number 1, super intuitive. Like, even for people that I didn’t go through formal training, they were just like, hey. Here’s access, and you can play around and pull this up.
Katie [00:06:36]:
And I was like, oh my god. Okay. So I could fumble my way around in the dark, and it worked really well. And then super easy to manage the data. I found some of the other systems to be really, really hard in terms of who’s gonna own the data and who’s gonna keep up with that record. And then how do you have systems in place for accountability over that client acquisition time span, which I mentioned could take a while and there’s multiple levels involved. So maybe let’s talk a little bit about really what the tool brings and how having a tool such as Project Mark can make a really big impact on the design and construction professionals listening today on how they think more strategically in that client or project acquisition phase and how they could work smarter, really, instead of managing by spreadsheet and Outlook reminders.
Tom Deane [00:07:27]:
For sure. Yeah. You you touched on, like, the deterrent and and, really, it’s about how easy can this be and how customized to your liking. Right? There’s no fixed parameters that we wanna try to box you or any of our clients into. It’s what makes sense for your business, and here’s the tools to be able to customize it for you. That is still very specific to construction. So it really starts with the data set up and the data infrastructure. Just making sure it’s really, really simple, and you’re understanding the data, and everybody is is all on the same page.
Tom Deane [00:08:00]:
Right? Okay. What do we wanna track around the project opportunity? Right? What makes sense? Do we wanna start adding our project directories to our project opportunities? Do we wanna, you know, understand the sector or who the client is? Because that allows us to understand win rates and who else was involved in the project. So once you start to create a structure, then there’s so much you can learn from that sort of dataset. So I think that’s 1st and foremost. And then, you know, just talking through our modules, we have a pipeline manager, so it’s super simple to just track information along the stages that you would create in the system. Everybody’s stages. It’s funny, everybody’s stages is like always slightly different, like the contact management system. So, if you think about every single project directory that you are ever on, imagine that being in one place where you can understand, like, all your project partners and the history of them relationships or the companies that you’ve worked with.
Tom Deane [00:08:49]:
Imagine how powerful that would be. I know the last 10 years, I would love to have every single sort of project directory that I was involved in because that’s where true relationships are are are built. Yeah. So a very simple contact management system with that sort of project connector. You’ve got then the task manager component. So how do we make it really collaborative and easy for folks to log tasks in the system and and tag people and say, hey, I’m bringing Katie out to our particular game, or I need to follow-up with Katie on a particular opportunity. I wanna tag that task to that particular opportunity. So it allows every team on a weekly basis to come together and say, okay, Tom, what have you got going on this week? Katie, what have you got going on this and it’s really collective and and streamlined.
Tom Deane [00:09:33]:
We then have analytics and reporting. So touched on the data, It’s understanding things about your business that the whole point of the CRM is really understanding, okay, what have we got going on in the next 2 or 3 quarters? Like, where are we successful? Are we spending too much time with x client that never gives us any work? All sort of project reporting from a preconstruction or preproject reward level, you can develop in the analytics section. And then lastly is sort of the content plus proposal piece. So how do you then leverage all the work that you’ve ever done? Or let’s say you’ve just won an opportunity and you wanna move it into a closed one status. That is really, really valuable data for marketing teams, BD teams, even executives come in and understand, okay, how much work are we doing with x to architect? Find that information, but also you leverage that information to plug into Adobe InDesign there, which we’ve just finished a plug in there or our proposal to. So it’s really from soup to nuts, like, as you go through them, sort of modules, marketing are are involved there. BD are involved, technical are involved, C suite are involved. Now that’s really to go about it’s incredibly collaborative and in in, you know, in one area.
Katie [00:10:52]:
One thing that we do at at SmarterGees, a lot of times, we’re helping clients with some form of go to market strategy. Right? You know, they’re trying to expand share of wallet in a certain market sector or geography or even within a certain client organization. And one of our homework items we often give them is, okay. Think of your ideal customer. Think of Gary. Right? Yeah. And how did Gary become a client? What were all of those touch points along their their buyer’s journey? Were they face to face and they were through the sales channel? Did he have some marketing touch points maybe with some communications that the brand team was putting out? You know, did you do x y z? And let’s chart all of that, and let’s understand at which pieces of that journey did it actually convert to the next level of the relationship, and how can we take that model and really amplify it and start getting more folks that look like Gary? And so what I love about what you just described is, hey, we can go in there and we can pull some records on what it took to get, say, that particular client in the system. And when was the last time we took Gary to a game? Let’s see about that.
Katie [00:12:02]:
And let’s make sure that he’s on the, you know, on the carousel for the next opportunity. And then the other piece I really like about it is a lot of our clients we work with, some of them are becoming more and more sophisticated. And if if you’re listening today and you haven’t done this yet, this is something where we would really encourage you to consider for 2025, is starting to track their project opportunity cost really, really early in kind of that whisper phase. Right? Because your development team is doing things that are adding expenses to the firm, whether that’s taking people out to golf or to lunch, or your project manager’s bringing donuts to encourage the next conversation, or you’re sponsoring a conference or whatever it might be. And then you get into, okay, the RFPs come out. Now we’re preparing proposals, so you’ve got some extra labor involved, or maybe you’re a design team and you’re putting some design ideas to the table. You know, some of our clients have started tracking this and they’re realizing they’re spending 6 figures chasing a job that’s barely 6 figures. And it’s just just the juice is not worth the squeeze.
Katie [00:13:08]:
And so when firms have data at their fingertips through a tool like Project Mark, they can make informed decisions. And I think that data also empowers them to change behaviors and to inspire new processes, new standards, new expectations with their team that tends to just do things instinctively. Right? And so you think, well, I’m an architect. I need to design something in order to sell it in the interview. Well, sure. But maybe instead of spending $200,000 on this concept, maybe you do it this way or do it that way. So I really do appreciate the modules that you have and how it does inform the users with TrueBlue data on how they can move forward in those areas.
Tom Deane [00:13:55]:
100%. And and one thing that I’d add as well, Katie, is, like, sometimes we get business developers coming to us and and requesting sort of the accountability task too. Some sometimes it’s c suites and saying, hey. Can we start to understand, okay, how many lunches are we tagging here? How much activity are we dealing with? I thought it’s really interesting from a BD perspective because they’re saying, look. These project life cycles maybe a year out, and people are asking me, what do I do? I’m like, I’m doing all this work here, and I’m trying to move the needle. So it’s just equally as important, but, yeah, you hit the nail on the head as it’s so easy. And I’ve fallen into this in the past to think short term around business, like the next quarter, the next 6 months, but, like, the data and the learnings from the data really can set you up for the next 3, 5, 10 year plan, especially as you continue to monitor it. And and like you said, find them avenues, find them sort of patterns that that work, and double down on sort of that strategy.
Tom Deane [00:14:53]:
And there’s so many other things to to to think about when you think about, like, account based marketing and things like that, how they sort of complement them as well.
Katie [00:15:02]:
Yeah. We’re we’re big proponents on the account based sales and marketing strategy. We think it really does make a lot of business sense. And I just got back from the PSMJ Thrive conference and just want to share with our listeners. The average b to b buyer, 97% of them are not ready to buy when we’re actively trying to sell to them. You meet them on the trade show floor. You bump into them at an industry event. You do a initial meet and greet, and it’s all to push the brand and start establishing some relationships, but they’re not ready to buy right then.
Katie [00:15:38]:
And so you do have to have some of those business development systems of accountability to keep your brand top of mind, make sure you’re continuing to invest in building those relationships, whether it’s 1 to 1 and it’s through those lunches or if it’s more through a digital platform and leveraging tools like LinkedIn Sales Navigator and those other pieces. But you’ve got to find a way to stay current with them and nurture them along the way so that when they are ready to buy, your brand still remains top of mind. And something else that I really do appreciate about your product is you’ve got all that record keeping in there. And if the really good business developers keep copious notes with their conversations. When that RFP drops, as a marketer, I’m ready to have, you know, that proposal kickoff meeting. I’ve read the RFP. I’ve done my own research. I can go into the system and pull the information to know about this client courtship and know a little bit of our competitive intelligence, so I feel more empowered as a marketer to lead that kickoff conversation and make recommendations around what project stories we wanna share and how we might position ourselves to be more successful because the business developers put notes in there that lets me know, okay.
Katie [00:16:53]:
This buyer is really data driven, and we need to talk about strength of performance because there’s a lot of uncertainty around schedule delivery. And so how can we talk about that? And so as a marketer, I really do appreciate that because it makes me feel like I’m being set up for success, and it also provides that baton handoff that sometimes is hard when you don’t have a system knowing that your business developer has been hoarding them along with, say, 20, 30, 40 other clients. And I’m sitting there across the table from him, and I’m like, okay, Tom. Tell me what we know about this buyer, and what do they care about? And he’s like, well, you know, it’s been a minute since I met with them. And but if he’s been taking really good notes, I can pull that out and then kinda spark those those memories from him. And I start seeing a lot of collaboration happen, and I start seeing a lot of trust built between the sales and marketing teams together that’s really fueled by transparency around data and and those pieces. Alright, listeners. Let’s talk about something that we all want, and that is how to win more projects.
Katie [00:18:00]:
If you’re looking to sharpen your approach from attracting leads to closing deals, then Smartwin 2025 is for you. This event is taking place live and in person, not on demand. You have to be in the room to get the knowledge. It is going down February 11th at the Commerce Club in Atlanta, Georgia. I want to personally invite you to join myself and the Smartery’s team for a full day of insights and strategies to help you win more business. We will be talking through the sales and marketing funnel and how to leverage it for growth for your business as you look at overlaying the AEC sales process. And we want you to save some money, so use discount code smart 40, s m a r t 40, and get 40% off your ticket. Thanks so much for being a listener.
Katie [00:18:49]:
I hope to see you in Atlanta on February 11th.
Tom Deane [00:19:00]:
For sure. I feel like if you think about asking any owner, like, why did you select x company? Or what what are the key criteria in on our future or project? It’s like they read the RFP. They listened to us. They understood us as a client and our client needs. And if your BD team are picking up nuggets of information along the way around challenges and things like that, to your point around, like, you now being teed up in order to really communicate the story to differentiate yourselves from any competition because it’s, yeah, we’ve been listening to you, and we know exactly who you are, what your challenges are, and who you said we’re gonna solve them by partnering together.
Katie [00:19:37]:
One thing you I think you started to touch on, Tom, that I think our listeners would really appreciate is the design and construction industry, it’s a team sport. None of us can do a project independently. We all rely on other disciplines and other project partners to help us get things done, and it’s not too dissimilar on the sales and marketing front. So one thing you started to talk about is a little bit about this collaborative nature that just kinda happens within Project Mark where you can have shared roles and responsibilities and access. Can you maybe talk a little bit more about that and maybe give our listeners an example of how that helps some of your clients who are active subscribers work a little bit smarter and have some of those internal victories?
Tom Deane [00:20:21]:
Yeah. So so you touched on transparency of data. And 1st and foremost, within the settings, like, you can go over in the system how you want to set up permissions. So who sees what in the system and things like that. So that’s you’ve full flexibility there. Let’s say, for example, I was technical, sort of doer seller, got a wind of project ABC, and now I need to share that information to everybody on the team. I can open up my Outlook, or I can open up my mobile or desktop and open up the CRM and and create that information. I can start to tag people as Katie, who’s our marketer, John, who’s c suite, and 2 or 3 other folks that may be involved in that particular pursuit.
Tom Deane [00:21:05]:
I can drop a note and tag everybody. Hey. Just met this person. No tasks needed right now, apart from myself who needs to follow-up in 2 months’ time. I create a task for myself. But from the very beginning, everybody is engaged and understand that project ABC is now on the boards. Now project ABC is communicated in every single BD and marketing meeting, and everybody is fully up to speed on sort of the task side of things. So you now know that that is in the pipeline.
Tom Deane [00:21:38]:
We can start to develop if there’s a strategy, if there’s a campaign marketing strategy that I need to create a a set of subtasks around that Katie and Tom are gonna collaborate. Tom is gonna start to generate some thought leadership pieces on LinkedIn. It’s very vertical and specific to this particular client. We’re gonna chop up that content. We’re gonna push it through email marketing newsletters, and we’re gonna use as much of what we know about this project in more broader terms so that our client is watching and clients are always watching social media and content and things like that as well. And then moving to the actual RFP phase and the collaboration around building a proposal and attaching files and assets and things like that. So the system is typically and sometimes we’ve often said this in terms of, like, our platform isn’t really intended to be built for marketing and BD because we know they are the champions of CRM software. We know if, like, we build a great product, they will always be there because they will always innovate.
Tom Deane [00:22:41]:
The 3rd piece is, like, how do we get that doer seller that hates a CRM system and barely knows what a CRM system is? Yeah. This is me 5 or 6 years ago in terms of, like, why do we need to enter this information because we’re all moving so fast. If we can make it incredibly easy for them to adopt, well, then then you’ve got incredibly power powerful dataset and incredibly powerful mentality around the approach to winning work and getting a project across the line. It’s really just providing a place where everybody can contribute. When that happens and that’s successful, then, like you you touched on, and we just repeat that.
Katie [00:23:23]:
Yeah. I wanna touch on something that you just mentioned that I feel like sometimes our industry, we get a little too segmented internally where sometimes I see really large marketing departments, and there’s a group that’s really focused on sales enablement. They’re doing the proposals, the interviews. They’re getting all of that ready. Then you have brand comms or internal comms. And one piece that I think makes a huge difference, and you talked about this, hey, your clients are always looking on social media. Your clients are always doing their own research, and they’re doing their own vetting, and they’re kind of forming their own opinions. So the one piece of advice I wanna give our listeners is make sure your editorial calendar that your marketing and communications team is putting out on behalf of the brand is in support of the projects that you’re chasing.
Katie [00:24:13]:
It always surprises me when I’m working with a client and we’re doing our early phases of discovery. And part of that includes some audits and I realize, okay, here’s everything they’re chasing. And then I look at communications and I’m like, okay, well, you’ve got 8 projects that you’re chasing right now that are supposed to be advertised and selected within the next, say, order. And they’re all IDIQs. You don’t have anything on your website or in your newsletters or on your social media that talks about your experience with IDIQ. I would never know that you even know how to handle this type of project response. How do we let’s plug that gap. And I see it all the time, someone pursuing neuroscience facilities, and it’s completely absent from the conversation, someone wanting to position as a national expert in all of their social talks about being local.
Katie [00:25:08]:
Let’s make sure we’re we’re coming together and we’re not working hard against ourselves. But that’s just my little tip for the listeners. Tom, for you, you’ve mentioned you came out of preconstruction. You really do like the economy budgeting side of the business, and then you started doing project mark. It just so happens that a lot of my calls I’m having currently with clients is in preparation of 2025 budgeting. So for our listeners that might also be having some of those strategic discussions, and they’re on the fence on whether or not they’ve reached a point where they need a tool like yours. Can you maybe talk through the signs that a firm should start considering utilizing a tool like Project Mark and maybe some ideas around a budget number that they should expect to invest in a tool like yours?
Tom Deane [00:26:03]:
Yeah, for sure. I think a tool like ourselves or any CRM tool for that matter is an absolutely necessary expense, especially, like, for us who like, the technology that we are using today and what we have in planning. The firms that are using a a system of record are just gonna have a massive advantage over folks that are still sort of growing out of Excel or trying to figure or have no contacts management system if one executive leaves, like, there’s no paper trail. Like, that is just going to set you up for complete failure. So I truly believe if used really, really well, it’s an absolute game changing software, whether it be ourselves or a system of record that truly makes sense for a company. It’s a necessary investment. In terms of pricing, it really depends on on the product offering and implementation. I think for ourselves, going back to what you said about going in and jumping in, we actually have a hard time in implementation, like, maintaining training because they have one training session.
Tom Deane [00:27:12]:
They’re like, yeah, we’re gone. And we’re just like, come back. Like, we need to show you more, but they feel so comfortable in the product that they’re already up and running. So we have that advantage that our implementation is really, really simple, and we can be competitive from a price point. But you’re talking for any sort of system is is anywhere between, like, a 1000 to $2,000 per user per year, depending on sort of who you, go for. Yeah. I think the folks that are listening that are struggling today with an existing system, we almost had a bit of an identity crisis when we started to position ourselves with a CRM. We we we were thinking, should we call ourselves a CRM because of that sort of the, the, the rhetoric around like CRMs are 10 months to get going and nobody uses them.
Tom Deane [00:27:58]:
And we’re like, but we don’t want to be in that sort of bracket, but there is solutions out there that will get you going within 4 weeks and a really simple transition as well. So like I know firms, like, find it really hard to include another project per se to transfer everything over. But if you really feel like a CRM can be incredible value to the business, it’s absolutely worth making the switch sooner rather than later. And that doesn’t mean to be a plug for ourselves. It’s just find a solution that is is gonna be a real fit for you.
Katie [00:28:34]:
I don’t think it really ever gets any easier. Right? I mean Yeah. You’re gonna get bigger. You’re gonna have more complex. Like, you might as well make some investment. Think about how it’s gonna set you up for success moving forward because it’s it’s not gonna get any easier. You talked about clients coming in with Excel files or working from this, that, the other. I had a very sophisticated client.
Katie [00:28:55]:
You’ve been in business for a long time, a market leader in their area of expertise, and the leadership was retiring. And, you know, they they did a an equity buyout, and so we’re working with the next gen of leaders kind of how we’re gonna handle the communication pieces. And we get on the topic of CRM, and the leader that was retiring brings me a 3 ring binder, Tom, like a trapper keeper looking kinda deal just full of business cards. And I’m like, what am I supposed to do with that? You know? So that’s on the extreme side of things. But gone are the days of the physical Rolodex and having really nice clean data in your CRM that’s easy to maintain because people move around and, you know, somebody that was a project partner here might become a owner that could hire you over there, or they move to a different organization. They can bring you along. All those things happen. And so I think you’re only set up for success if you if you’ve got some tools in place.
Tom Deane [00:29:56]:
One thing that I would mention as well, Katie, it’s like when you’re thinking about budget and, let’s say, economy slowing down, I feel like a lot of firms think, they find it hard to measure the value of marketing because marketing is is much longer play, and it’s not short term by any means. And that is, like, the last place where you wanna call.
Katie [00:30:16]:
Thanks for that plug.
Tom Deane [00:30:17]:
We support it. No. But it’s just like everybody content is not going away, and people consume content and are want and and content every day of the week. And the thing about the industry is, like, everybody that I’ve ever met in construction is super passionate about construction, and we love to learn about projects, and we love to learn about, like, different complications and challenges, like why folds sharing your story back and Cray. There’s just so much opportunity with a great marketing strategy and internal comms as well is just, if not equally as important, making sure that employees feel that they’re contributing. Because that’s a big part of the your winning work is have you created the right culture within the business that everybody feels like You always remember the project partners when somebody from X logo comes in the room, they’re just impressive. Like, that was just an amazing experience. That’s what you want to body for everybody in your organization.
Tom Deane [00:31:19]:
And I think internal comms is a foundation of making sure that people feel a part of something. So that would be my other, like, when you think about marketing, think about them things when you’re thinking about a budget.
Katie [00:31:31]:
Yeah. I think everybody likes to work for a winning firm, and sometimes our project teams are so focused on the jobs they’re assigned to. They don’t realize all the great things that the firm is doing if they’re not part of that. And so internal comms can really help let everybody know what great things the organization is doing as a whole and have some special shout outs and, you know, opportunities for folks to really shine and feel attached and connected, especially when you’ve got folks that maybe work in office versus those out in this on the job side, out in the field, making them feel a little bit more connected.
Tom Deane [00:32:06]:
Daphne?
Katie [00:32:07]:
So, Tom, I think I would be silly not to ask a technology partner about this full evolution of technology and what you are envisioning as the next maybe iteration of Project Mark. Are you guys exploring AI integrations? What are you thinking about adding to the tool? What are your users asking for? What does that look like?
Tom Deane [00:32:32]:
Yeah. It’s a great question. So I think with AI, you we need to be really smart about chasing the bright and shiny object versus building core fundamentals before really introducing AI. And, you know, our strategy has been to build the easiest, most innovative system for folks to come in and use today because AI becomes incredibly valuable once data is easy and managed in one place. So Yeah. We have some really amazing plans from an AI perspective. Some of the things that we’ve built from a test perspective is just it’s crazy what, you know, AI can do and what will what you will be able to achieve with the CRM system. You essentially have an assistant to help you with all things data and input and leveraging that data.
Tom Deane [00:33:25]:
And from a content creation piece of this, well, it would be really, really helpful to be able to streamline certain parts of proposal generation and things like that. So, yeah, there is massive, massive opportunity with a very simple infrastructure once data’s in what what AI can then do to really streamline things. They are the areas that we’re really, really excited about. So, yeah, they they would be sort of the the 2 main places where where we’re thinking, how do we continue to build really innovative, simple solutions to really drive adoption? And then how does AI come in and propel that to a different workflow altogether?
Katie [00:34:09]:
I like that. I’ll be excited to see that roll out.
Tom Deane [00:34:12]:
Mhmm.
Katie [00:34:13]:
Tom, this has been great. But before we wrap up, what is the lasting, maybe, piece of advice or memento you wanna leave our listeners with?
Tom Deane [00:34:25]:
Yeah. I think the last piece of advice is just data driven decision making really supports long term business growth. So just ensuring that you have your data in order that you can leverage to the best of your ability is just it’s so powerful if done correct. So that would be my sort of advice for 2025. If you’re in that place, awesome. If you’re not in that place, there’s definitely solutions out there including ourselves. We’d force those to support but to really help streamline and and and get processes in place. So there’s real collaboration across the organization.
Katie [00:35:07]:
So for the listeners, if any of y’all want to learn more about Project Mark, you can find information on the web, projectmarkdot com. Really easy to navigate website. You can easily find Tom on there, connect with him on LinkedIn. I know he’s an avid LinkedIn user, very much still a relationship driven business, so you will find that he’s actually a person and is responsive and so is his team. So, Tom, thank you so much for joining us. And for all of the listeners out there, I’m gonna take a page out of Project Mark’s book and tell you all to continue to work smarter, and we’ll see you next time.
Tom Deane [00:35:42]:
Awesome. Thanks, Minnie, Katie. Thanks for having me.
Katie [00:35:47]:
AEC Marketing for Principles is presented by SmartEgies, the AEC growth consulting firm that has been developing smart business strategies for design and construction firms since 2008. The show is hosted by me, Katie Cash, senior VP at SmartEgies. I would love to hear from you. If you have a question, a guest request, or a topic request for a future episode, send an email or a voice memo to podcast at smartages.com. And if you’re looking for past episodes, be sure to visit our podcast page at smartages.com/podcast. We hope you’ll tell your friends and colleagues about our show and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss out on future episodes. Thanks for listening.