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Article first appeared in the December 2020 issue of Marketer

As we trudge through the pandemic and its economic uncertainty, one thing is clear: we must continue to win work. While there seems to be no shortage of RFPs, our ability to build relationships with the clients behind the RFPs and to truly do the early work of discovery is heavily weighted towards the established relationships we built pre-pandemic. The old rule that 80-percent of our work comes from existing clients and 20-percent is from new is in question. In a recent, very informal poll, 50-percent of respondents said the 80/20 rule was still relatively valid, while the other half erred on the side that its more likely 90/10 at best. With traditional methods of meeting new clients (conferences, networking events, meals, and happy hours) almost non-existent in some places, I wondered how business developers are making connections and succeeding at winning new work. I found two fascinating examples that tell us a lot about what’s working.

Amy Collins and Bob Weidner, Gannett Fleming

In early March 2020, Bob (seller/doer) came to Amy (marketer) with a passion for informing others about a little-known virus-fighting electronic air cleaning technology called bipolar ionization. In the heart of the coronavirus pandemic, Bob saw the 50-year-old technology as a game changer for all types of organizations and building owners seeking smart, healthy buildings with an environment that minimizes the risk of spreading COVID-19.

Amy recognized this as an opportunity for a thought leadership campaign and with her team worked together to develop a marcom plan and set a course to get the word out. Beginning with blog posts and social media outreach on the topic, they transitioned into live webinars for client organizations and virtual speaking gigs for professional organizations like AIA, where Bob’s expertise could be seen as a value-add to architects helping clients with plans for recovery. By June, the emails started to come in – cold emails that basically started with “Hi, I attended your webinar and I think I have a client.” Bob’s expertise and visibility resulted in brand new relationships for him and the company. “We did a lot of video calls back and forth, a lot of education, in a very short period of time,” Bob reported. He did meet in-person (socially distant and safely) with the end client at a building walk-through on a significant, turn-key project. But that was the only in-person contact he had.

Thought leadership is critical here. Having a strategy and tactics helped guide the process and keep the team on task. In this case, the technology (bipolar ionization) and the timing (viral pandemic) lined up perfectly. The key takeaway is that thoughtful planning and actions are needed to execute thought leadership effectively. Amy and Bob are building relationships, creating opportunities, and winning work without the traditional handshakes, lunches, and in-person meetings.

Mack Astorga, AECOM

Mack is one of those people you meet and instantly like. He’s a straight-forward communicator and a genuinely helpful human being. He was the program manager for AECOM's "Return with Confidence" pandemic response offering to the sports industry, which included supporting a professional league's successful implementation of its play-off bubble .  The offering, created at the onset of the pandemic, included cross discipline experts from across AECOM.

“It’s not uncommon at AECOM to work with tons of experts from around the globe that you never meet in person” he said.  You might say he had an advantage going into the pandemic. But, similarly to Bob at Gannett Fleming, Mack employed thought leadership to win work. I asked him if AECOM had done a lot of sports work in the past, and if his current client was a past client. He laughed "AECOM has a long history supporting the sports industry but is known primarily as a leading sports architecture and construction. These clients had no idea we had the environmental and biological hazard expertise required in this pandemic. I personally had never worked in the industry."

The work started with AECOM's role setting up an alternative medical facility project in Chicago. The same client asked him about sports-related work and he was in. In marketing terms, Mack proved his expertise and thought leadership on one project and it leapfrogged to a completely different client and different project all together. Marketing efforts are important, but realistically the best marketing happens as the work gets delivered. Mack’s highly intelligent, direct communication style, informed by his team's expertise and peppered with humor, won him the work. Having the global brand of AECOM and access to its wealth of resources was a prerequisite, but in the end, it came down to Mack quickly establishing a level of trust with a client he had never met in person, and didn't know a month earlier. Mack's experience supporting the pro league bubble was similarly unique. After working together for weeks of preparation, he met his main client contact face to face for the first time only after exiting a week of quarantine to enter the bubble. “It was kind of a profound moment when I stepped out of my room and met her, and she handed me my badge and credentials. I think we laughed and said ‘Good to meet you,’ even though we knew one another really, really well – we had weeks of video calls at all hours of the day and night.”

Big takeaways from Mack: embrace this weird video-laden world, “dive right in,” as he says. “In a lot of ways, doing business development this way is easier, cleaner. Encourage personal conversation right up front, build on what you see in the background. If I see a Penn State banner in their office, I tell them that I met my wife at Penn State. BD is still BD. Pandemic or not, we’re all in this together now.” Mack takes this to heart and has clearly given some thought to his surroundings for virtual calls. When he texted me some inside the bubble action pics, I thought, “Wow, I really want to have a beer with this guy someday.”

Building new relationships from the ground up may be getting easier in some respects. Many technical professionals are more comfortable, more themselves behind a computer screen. Genuineness sells. The two cases described above are among several popping up all over the place. They are all quick to point out that going from the first hello to signing a contract or teaming agreement is happening faster. Marketers, our time has arrived to help with strategy, tactics, and good coaching to bring us back to 80/20 again.

About the Author: Frank Lippert, FSMPS, CPSM is the founder/partner of Go Strategies, LLC. He provides strategic pursuit planning, strategic market capture planning, and the functional seller/doer training to clients throughout the U.S.

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