BuiltEnvironment

Loose cannon on the marketing team

Many years ago, in the days of dedicated word processing machines (1970s and 1980s), I was employed by a major environmental consulting firm as a word processor and then a word processing manager (of a 10-person word processing center using Xerox 850s and 860s). I was specifically tasked with responsibility for proposal production, including the upkeep of standard proposal components (resumes, project descriptions, awards, and other boilerplate).

During all the years I worked for that firm, our environmental and engineering staff members were constantly pushed to maximize their billable hours ("real" work). So there was a strong tendency to leave any overhead or administrative work for last, after all the billable work was finished.

Non-technical folks involved in the proposal effort were particularly frustrated by this drive. Many of our environmental projects were huge, multi-year studies with annual or quarterly reports, but proposals had a maximum of 30 days between issuance of the RFP and delivery of the proposal. So it was a constant effort to have technical staff put aside a billable project to complete their proposal assignments, regardless of whether that assignment involved 15 minutes to update a project description or resume, or many hours to create a project approach or Quality Assurance/Quality Control (QA/QC) process for the project.

One of our senior terrestrial biologists was a particular challenge to marketing staff. Jim was a dedicated and gifted scientist, as well as a pretty good writer. So he was as much value to field efforts as he was to subsequent reporting efforts. When he finally got around to it, he could turn in many more pages of information than we had asked for or needed, all of it interesting and well written. And his proposal text could generally be counted on to need very little editing, except when the RFP stipulated very strict page limits.

The problem was that Jim was absolutely convinced that he wrote better under extreme pressure. So he would put off proposal-writing chores until the very last minute. In fact, he rarely started writing before the due date for sections from all technical folks working on the proposal. It never seemed to matter to him that his procrastination caused great problems for others who couldn't start their own proposal assignments until his draft was typed, printed, and shared.

The last three or four days of proposal production became a nightmare when Jim was on the proposal team. Everyone started getting anxious long before the due date, just anticipating how his habitual procrastination would make their jobs harder than necessary. His division manager had numerous "talks" with him, but because he was considered so valuable to the firm's projects, there were no consequences when he created such a nightmarish final three days for everyone else on the proposal team.

The firm's ultimate solution was to take another senior biologist and impress him with the fact that proposal deadlines were just as serious as project deadlines, teach him how to manage his time to respond to proposal needs while keeping his projects moving along, and improve our proposals and our hit rate by reducing the anxiety levels associated with pursuit of new work.

When they need your skills, but don't value them

Teachers are a prime example of this disconnect. Parents send their children to school 25-30 hours week for nine months of the year. They hope the teachers will help socialize their children and impart important skills and knowledge to them. They are pleased that teachers spend additional hours outside the classroom. They also expect teachers in the early years to pay out-of-pocket to stock their classrooms with basic materials like crayons, construction paper, paste, scissors, rulers, etc. But when it comes to paychecks, they think of teachers as glorified baby sitters for whom $40,000 is adequate compensation. Parents value the skills their children are taught, but don't value the people teaching those skills.

On a more personal note, I spent many years as a cabaret entertainer. In many clubs, the piano was played eight hours each day, seven days each week. So these pianos get out of tune quickly. But when an entertainer asks the manager for a tuning, it gets chalked up to a "prima donna pianist" wanting perfection. The tuner never got called until the piano was so badly out of tune that customers complained.

In a former A/E/C marketing position, an engineering leader complained that the planning/environmental group had a much higher proposal success rate, and asked what our marketers did for that group that we weren't doing for the engineers. We replied, "We're doing our jobs, because they recognize our skills and knowledge, and let us do what we are trained to do; we will do the same for you if you let us." Marketing staff were paid reasonably well, but many technical folks seemed to think the professional initials after their own names meant they knew everything about everything. So with no knowledge of marketing, they insisted on telling the marketing staff what to do, and how and when to do it. Then, when they weren't selected for a project, it was OUR fault.

In another assignment, my firm acquired a well-respected municipal engineering firm specializing in municipal utility infrastructure. As a branch office, the acquired group was led by the man (Bill) who had been their primary owner. As we worked together on their first post-acquisition proposal, Bill mentioned that he hated to write proposals and any other non-technical pieces.

So I offered him a deal: "Bill, if you will promise not to write any proposals, I promise not to design any wastewater treatment plants."

"DONE!" he said, and shook my hand to seal the deal. I became a valued member of his team, providing a service to him that he deemed important.

The A/E/C industry is a profession populated mostly by experts. Whether they are engineers, architects, planners, surveyors, environmental scientists, or others, every A/E/C firm is aware of the value of its technical expertise and the people who provide it.

Marketers are trained to understand and provide great marketing and business development skills. We have skills in areas for which technical folks get no training. We know how to plan and write proposals, SOQs, website text, articles, newsletters, and other related pieces. And we like talking to people, and relish opportunities to interact with clients.

So help us when we ask, but please let the marketing/business development experts do their jobs.

Getting the paperwork done

I was recently reminded of a poster I saw when I was much younger, probably in my early twenties. While the original poster actually had a picture of a young child seated on a potty, during toilet training, the version at right has the same text and works for the purpose of this discussion.

Now to the real subject of this post.

Recently, there has been discussion in one or two MySMPS groups about suggestions for getting technical folks (architecture, engineering, planning, surveying, construction management, landscape architecture, environmental staff) to help with the creation of marketing documents that require their skills, knowledge, and experience to write—more specifically, project descriptions and cut sheets, website text, professional articles and white papers, and technical sections of proposals, all with appropriate photographs and other images.

It is a fact of A/E/C life that the technical staff in every firm have supervisors standing over them, pushing them to maximize billable hours. So they tend to shy away from, or totally ignore, or refuse to participate in any task(s) they perceive to be overhead—i.e. unbillable hours. Any task not billable as part of their current project(s) falls into this category. The task can be marketing-related, drafting project invoices, making presentations at conferences, and others.

My response to the question of how to get technical staff to participate is to open a discussion with Human Resources staff about altering the job descriptions of all technical staff at or above the level of project manager (PM). This alteration involves a statement that relevant paperwork is part of their job. So a PM must get invoicing done timely, get paperwork on new projects to the Accounting department timely, create new project descriptions and/or get information to the marketing staff timely, update project information for marketing every time a project modification is filed, and do a final edit of all marketing information when a project has been completed.

Once the new job descriptions have been approved by senior management, rolled out to the relevant staff, signed-off on by that staff, and implemented, these new tasks become "part of the job" and must be done as part of project opening, project modification, and/or project close-out. If they are not done timely, the result could be a smaller raise or no raise at all when someone's anniversary date comes around, because they haven't done the whole job. The result could also include a smaller annual bonus or no bonus at all, regardless of the profitability of that PM's projects over the previous year.

In pursuing new work by responding to an RFQ or RFP, one of the owner's main questions is, "what have you done lately that is like my project?" The technical staff are the ones best equipped to answer that question, whether it involves generic project sheets, specific project challenges and solutions, individual professional resumes, or discussion of awards and other peripheral information.

Getting this cooperation and the needed information requires that marketing staff build and maintain strong relationships with technical staff, based on respect for their responsibilities and schedule challenges, and a commitment to taking as little of their time away from billable ("real") work as possible. How marketing staff do that is a subject I have addressed elsewhere, and will be happy to discuss with any readers who contact me for more information.