In my 35 years in the A/E/C industry, I have been employed by only four firms other than my own Siben Consult. All four firms had multiple offices in multiple states.
An engineer in a branch office in another state asked me to obtain an RFP from his state's Department of Transportation. He thought the DOT should be a strategic client of his office.
I asked if he had ever met and spoken with anyone from that DOT. He said he had not.
I asked how far away the DOT office was. He said it was a 15- to 20-minute drive.
I suggested that if he picked up the RFP in person, he might meet the DOT project manager, tell him a little about our firm and begin to establish a relationship, so that we wouldn't be strangers when our proposal was delivered.
He didn't want to take the time to do that.
I suggested he call the DOT project manager and ask if they could fax or email the RFP to him. That would at least allow him to make first contact on the phone. He said he would think about it.
Twenty minutes later, the office manager called. He was very angry. "Getting the RFP is the marketing department's job," he told me, stressing that his people were much too busy to be chasing down RFPs and meeting prospective clients.
I asked if he really believed he could make the DOT a strategic client if nobody on his staff thought enough of them to visit in person, or even call.
He said that if my marketing staff wrote a good enough proposal to win, his staff could take care of the relationship during normal project interactions. I wished him luck with that.
I called the DOT and got the RFP sent by mail to my office, 350 miles away, because I didn't want DOT to figure out that someone only 15 minutes away wasn't sufficiently interested to drive over. Three days were wasted. Then I faxed the RFP to the engineer.
We began to draft the proposal. Unfortunately, nobody in the branch office had a clue as to what the DOT did and didn't like, or how their internal processes would impact the schedule.
Needless to say, we weren't selected; we weren't even short-listed.
The branch manager tried to blame marketing for the loss, but the corporate engineering manager informed him that marketing staff knew as much about marketing as engineers knew about engineering, and that he shouldn't assume competence as an engineer granted competence in any other area, including marketing.
I was surprised and very grateful for the support.
Proper positioning of your firm can help you control your marketing costs. It helps you decide when to—and when not to—pursue a project. If lack of proper positioning indicates "No Go," you don't spend thousands of dollars on what will be a losing submittal. It is less expensive to spend a couple of hours on multiple visits to determine if you and a client have a good "fit," and if you are perceived as being strong enough (or not strong enough) to win the project.
More important, proper positioning can also predispose a client with whom you have already developed a relationship to anticipate that your proposal will be the best. In a sense, you will have been informally pre-selected for the project.