How disruptive has design-build been to project delivery? The once-dominant “traditional” design-bid-build approach is projected to soon account for just 14% of spending in 2026, with construction management at risk representing much of the balance. As an owner stated in A/E/C Business Development – The Decade Ahead, “I see design-build as a future delivery model. Design-bid-build is a horrible waste of time and resources.” As for Integrated Project Delivery, it has not materialized to the extent that many people expected, although an IPD-Lite approach has emerged, driving the collaborative aspects without the contractual and risk/reward sharing elements.

How have things trended? The research findings noted that a client preference toward meeting with technical professionals during the business development stage. Over the past decade, the environment in which A/E/C firms operate has changed significantly. Companies have increasingly become busy, with seller-doers spending so much time doing that they turned to dedicated business developers for selling. The global pandemic changed the game, and severely limited opportunities to get in front of prospective clients. Digital tools proliferated, creating new business development opportunities via virtual meetings, allowing technical experts and nontechnical business developers to jointly meet with prospects without out-of-office time. Dedicated, and often nontechnical, business developers continue to be a critical component of business development for A/E/C firms.

However, Scott Braley is concerned about a trend he has witnessed, declining communication skills: “In 2013, technical people were cited as stereotypical ‘poor communicators.’ Today that criticism can be extended to nontechnical business developers. Too many rely on impersonal technology – they’ve lost their edge in verbal communication.” This concern is certainly not unique to BD professionals as recent studies from sources from LinkedIn to Forbes have reported that employers are increasingly seeing a lack of soft skills, driving the need for more training across all levels of organizations.

“I want to talk to the project manager,” a hospital facility manager told our researchers. “The project manager is the one I see on a regular basis. That’s who I need to interact with.” A college representative shared, “I want to see the person who I’m going to look across the table to and be held accountable.” And a commercial real estate developer offered that he doesn’t want to meet with “a person hired solely for new business that has never actually executed a project.”

While the buyers were telling us that they didn’t want sales pitches about what a firm did yesterday, had no interest in meeting with “order-takers,” and preferred specific conversations about their project and what an A/E/C firm can do for their future, sellers were telling us that they were working to make business development cultural. Some firms indicated that they were training business development and communication skills to technical professionals. Others shared that technical staff who weren’t fully utilized were taking on business development responsibilities.

Based upon these findings, a second research effort was undertaken by SMPS and the SMPS Foundation, resulting in the report Sell. Do. Win Business. How A/E/C Firms are Using Staff to Win More Work. Released three years after A/E/C Business Development – The Decade Ahead, this research found that design and construction firms utilize a mix of seller-doers and dedicated business developers. The larger the company, the more likely they are to have professional business developers. Roughly half of firms with 10-25 employees utilize business developers, while that number is 92% for firms with 500 employees. Additionally, approximately three-quarters of all firms reported using seller-doers, with 84% of engineering firms, 70% of architectural firms, and 66% of construction firms employing the model.

Today the seller-doer approach continues to be prevalent, often in tandem with business developers. While the seller-doers are the subject matter experts and frequently the closers, the business developers are coaches, strategists, and door openers.

Although one owner commented “I do not like virtual firms,” no one could have anticipated the shift to a virtual existence during the pandemic, much less that the ways of doing business would forever change as a result. Business developers have robust digital tools at their disposal today, creating opportunities to improve productivity (you can have more virtual meetings than in-person meetings in a day), have more people attend meetings (allowing greater business developer / seller-doer collaboration), and meet with people you may never have been able to meet with in the past. However, the cost of this digital proliferation has been a continued decline in interpersonal skills, and relationships that are not as deep – and even loyal – as they used to be before these tools were commonplace.

In hindsight, Scott Braley feels that we overestimated the promise of ‘pure’ CRM in 2013. “Outside of zealous the marketers and BD’ers, we did not see enthusiastic adoption of CRM. Today’s more advanced integrated technology is eclipsing the CRM possibilities we saw in 2013.” How will automation and artificial intelligence change the way we approach business development? We’re only now beginning to understand the possibilities.

In 2019, SMPS published Marketing 2022: A Survey Exploring Current and Future A/E/C Marketing Practices. The goal of the research was to look at how A/E/C firms were incorporating newer marketing approaches, including those popular in the business-to-consumer realm, and better understand how these approaches would evolve over the next three years. A few short months after the report was released, COVID-19 reared its ugly head.

Interestingly, because many of the findings related to digital marketing approaches, there seemed to be – anecdotally, at least – an acceleration in the adoption of certain approaches during the pandemic. Thought leadership was certainly one of those areas. When you couldn’t meet with clients much less get in front of prospects, thought leadership became a preferred alternative to generate touchpoints and stay in front of these connections. Firms launched webinars, accelerated blog production, and conducted and published research.

One of the most powerful findings in the research, and a further demonstration of the importance of thought leadership, was that 85% of A/E/C firms surveyed intended to spend at least half of their marketing resources on education-based marketing (as opposed to promotion-based marketing) by the end of 2022.

However, the pendulum might be swinging here. While the Infrastructure & Investment Jobs Act (IIJA) promises much work for transportation and other nonbuilding construction projects in the coming years, there is a concern about vertical construction and a tightening of the market based upon economic trends and forecasts.

And today? “Not only did we get this right, but it is also now more important than we expected,” says Scott Braley. “Buyers are very, very savvy – they expect the design professionals in particular to ‘understand the issues we face, and how to optimize our project’s possibilities in terms of our performance and enhance OUR mission and business results’.” However, Scott is concerned that while construction firms have been able to maintain a client focus, design professionals “have lost their laser-focus on the actual client and client’s specific needs/priorities.”

“Some may say we could have been more insightful at the time; however, in 2013 the industry was not experiencing the DEI cultural shift we have seen in the past three or four years,” according to Scott Braley. “Today’s buyers have extended their project goals to include some acknowledgement of sustainability, diversity, and inclusion – either out of genuine core beliefs and values or public relations necessity.”

When it comes to DEI, the A/E/C industry has a very long way to go. The number of licensed female architects and engineers hovers around 16-17%, while the percent of women construction managers is just above single digits. The racial/ethnicity make-up of college engineering programs is neither reflective of society nor overall college enrollment. For instance, Black/African American college enrollment represents 15.2% of all college students, yet only 4% of engineering students. Likewise, 19.8% of college students are Hispanic/Latino, and yet represent 11% of engineering students.

Beyond the society and firm culture implications, this lack of diversity has increasingly become a marketing and business development imperative. Buyers are focused on DEI and justice, and demanding to better understand the demographics and policies of the firms they are working with. Firm DEI strategies as well as employee gender, race/ethnicity, and age breakdowns are even sometimes requested in RFPs. Human resources staff are being pulled into business development discussions at the clients’ requests. A/E/C firms and teams with high levels of diversity may obtain additional scoring points or be eligible for certain projects that less diverse firms and teams are not.

They are also demanding team consistency, which has increasingly become a challenge. One of the seller strategies uncovered in the research was a focus on minimizing staff turnover as a marketing strategy. People come with knowledge, credentials, and relationships. And when they leave a company, those things go out the door. The Great Resignation of the past few years impacted the A/E/C industry, but the reality is that employee loyalty to design and construction firms was already declining. In 2012, the average architecture and engineering employee had been with their employer for 7 years. By 2022, that number had dropped to 5.2 years. On the construction side, the numbers went from 4.3 years in 2012 to 3.9 years in 2022. Employee loyalty is dropping, and clients are increasingly asking A/E/C firms to “guarantee” that their project teams will be in place for the duration of a project – something that is typically not possible to do.

With rapid integration of automation and artificial intelligence, the relationship between people will become even more critical – but companies must be providing communication and interpersonal skill training or risk losing business.

So how did we do?

The first factor to consider is that this wasn’t quantitative, statistical research. This was qualitative research through interviews with a diverse cross-section of A/E/C sellers and buyers. The researchers were looking for trends or patterns in the findings.

The second factor is that the world in 2012 was a vastly different place. Millennials were still relatively new to the workforce; many were still in college or even high school. Social media was in its infancy. The iPhone was only five years old and the iPad only three. Mobility was in its earliest stages. Many of the technologies we rely on today didn’t even exist.

And the third factor is that there’s only been one global pandemic in our lifetime, and we are still very much feeling the effects of it. Global pandemic was certainly not on our bingo card when conducting the research in 2012-2013, and it changed some things drastically – increased lack of access to decision-makers, inability to be in front of clients, and a move toward virtual business development, to name a few.

We are looking back in time with vastly different lenses that we had when conducting the research. And yet … the research still very much holds true in many ways. It is still about relationships – even if many of them are now virtual. Technology has permeated everything we do and, in some cases at least, is still a differentiator.

Thought leadership has become critical, clients are even more sophisticated, design-build is dominating in a lot of market sectors, and firms must be laser-focused on their clients to succeed.

But we didn’t anticipate the cultural change driven by the social equity movement, and the impact it would have on A/E/C firms. Some of the tools we thought would be commonplace today – like CRM – haven’t panned out the way we anticipated. Most of us weren’t thinking about an A/E/C workforce shortage, acceleration of A/E/C staff switching firms, and a significant drop in communication and interpersonal skills.

But perhaps we should revise the Burrus quote: “If it works today, it’s obsolete for some people.” We are in an era of hyper-personalization; prospects and clients have different preferences when it comes to communicating and how they buy A/E/C services. Successful business developers must understand prospect and client preferences, and adopt their approaches accordingly.

Now that we’ve looked to the past, we need to look to the future. How will business development change in the coming decade? Will virtual selling become the norm? How will AI impact BD approaches? How will dedicated business developer and seller-doer roles evolve? What huge disruption is on the horizon. Grab your crystal ball, and let’s go find out!