How to: Start in Specification Sales
By: Justin Lacaillade, Northwestern Kellogg School MBA '18
Where to begin? This is often the toughest question in any endeavor, and the one that makes it most difficult to move past the status quo.
The most important act of any endeavor is the act of beginning it, and as you know, “well begun is half done.” - Aristotle
As someone who has built and executed effective specification sales organizations in two industries and two vastly different companies, I am sharing my thoughts on how to approach this specialized aspect of sales. While working as Channel Sales Manager and later leading the Midwest for General Electric as Region Manager for the professional lighting business, I coached my team to develop new selling skills and the strategy needed to secure specifications for wireless controls and indoor and outdoor LED lighting for ground maintenance buildings with two of the largest global airlines and major automotive OEMs. Later, while developing the sales and customer service operations of Guardian, a manufacturer of emergency equipment for the life science, semi-conductor, & chemical industries, I parlayed the knowledge gained in the automotive and aerospace industries to optimize my companies positioning in the research, pharmaceutical, and life science market.
Contrary to what many specification sales professionals will have you believe, succeeding is not as one of my (highly effective) friends and former colleague likes to say ‘rock science’. However, it does require
1) Patience
2) Consistency
3) High touch
4) Comprehensive approach
5) Bringing real value
In the following paragraphs, I hope to impart to a framework that will be helpful for those wondering where to begin. This guide is applicable to all technical sales professionals of infrastructure, construction, or building automation products in the industrial, commercial, and municipal verticals. While this approach has worked for me and my teams, it is not the only way, and is open to customization and augmentation.
With those caveats aside, let’s jump in and look at a rough step by step approach.
Study – your product and the competitors
The most important success factor with your as of yet to be identified targeted audience is your facility with your own products, their applications, and your competitors’ offerings. There is no substitute for this foundational knowledge. It is absolutely essential to establishing your confidence and credibility with your audience that you know the specifics of your own offering front and back. You should be aware of the differentiated value proposition that your product presents (if any) to each member of the spec->bid->buy value chain – architecture/engineering firm, contractor, distributor, and end-user. And how to communicate that value in a succinct and compelling fashion.
Identify – Who you need to talk to
After gaining a familiarity with your product, you will have a better understanding of where it adds the most value and what specialized applications it can be of the most use in. You will further increase your credibility and leverage if you begin to understand exactly where in your end-user’s process your product is used and what implications that has on the product they are providing their customer. After identifying these applications, study up on who the key end-users are in these industrial verticals. Who are the key contractors and sub-contractors that are winning the bids? What architectural & engineering, engineering procurement construction firms are focusing on the industrial verticals where you win or have potential for growth? Importantly, and not to be overlooked, where do these firms like to buy? Who are their preferred partners? Major capital projects are complex endeavors, and the players involved like to hit the easy button as often as possible. Help them find the ‘Easy Button’ and don’t make your life more difficult. These are the firms that will constitute the focus of your outreach.
Invest – in information
O.k., you’ve narrowed it down, you know your widget, you know where it goes, and you know who puts it there. There are thousands of engineering firms. Hundreds of thousands of decision makers. Sure, you’ve got a CRM to help you track your funnel and opportunities, but what active intelligence do you have to tell you where to focus your activities? If you are in a local market or region and have been embedded with the trades for years, this intel will flow to you as a matter of course and you will know who to call to set up a meeting or who to call to tell you who to call. But if you’re leading an international team or you’re coming into a new industry, you may need some additional intel to point your efforts in the right direction. I recommend researching information services that serve the industry you are working within and investing in the one that brings you the most value vis-à-vis the end users you are targeting. For me and my teams in past roles, these companies included services like Dodge Analytics and CB Insights. These are powerful platforms that aggregate bid and financial data for construction and MRO RFPs, bids, and tenders happening not only in North America but the world over. You can tailor the results of these services to return information about projects occurring in certain industrial verticals like, say, biopharmaceutical production facilities, semi-conductor wafer fabrication foundries, or new construction projects for schools, hospitals, or government buildings of all stripes. These services are not cheap; however, their ROI is high as the cost of the service is a fraction of what your company stands to gain from landing just one project. The possibilities are as varied as there are industrial verticals. Results include information about who is creating the specification, what architectural and engineering (A&E) or Engineering Procurement Construction Firms are either bidding the project or have won the project. Once you’ve identified who your team needs to be talking to, you can formulate an outreach plan to get in front of these decision makers. Conveniently, results can be further refined to only return projects at certain phases in the spec-bid-buy process, allowing you and your team to get out in front of opportunities at just the point in the construction planning process when your message will resonate most strongly.
Outreach – take the plunge - pick up the phone!
In order for your message to resonate, you have to get an audience. Scheduling meetings with A&E firms is not difficult. If you’re starting from square one, you just need to call their main number for each office and request to speak to the person who coordinates trainings or ‘lunch and learns’. Often, that will be the receptionist, so you will be talking to that individual already, be sure to be clear that you are from a manufacturer of XYZ products and that you can offer continuing education units on various topics that the staff may be interested in. And make sure you’re nice; you’re talking to an important gate keeper. Be sensitive to the fact that A&E firms and EPC firms occupy a competitive space themselves, and are quite busy bidding and working on projects they have already won. These firms bill by the hour, so their time is at a premium and you have to have some kind of hook for them to give you the time of day at first. Also, key to remember that once you do get the time, make it short and sweet. As Shakespeare instructed, ‘brevity is the soul of wit’. You want to always leave them wanting more of you, not less. Three things that will help you establish a beachhead at a specification firm are Continuing Education Units (CEUs) and the ability to grant them to attendees of talks you give, breakfast, lunch, and any combination thereof that you can think of. While the professionals working at A&E firms are busy, they must take a minimum number of CEU courses to maintain their professional certifications in order to continue to ply their trade. For this reason, it makes sense for you and your organization to invest in the capability to deliver accredited talks on the topics that matter to your potential audiences. I myself have delivered talks on topics as varied as Light and Color, Wireless Controls Strategies, and ANSI Z.358.1-2014 performance and use requirements of emergency eyewash stations. In order to find out more about the potential talks you can give, get involved with your industry’s trade association for example if you’re in Lighting - IESNA -Illuminating Engineers Society of North America, Plumbing - ASPE – American Society of Plumbing Engineers, Mechanical – ASHRAE American Society of Heating Refrigerating and Air-Conditioning, or if you’re focused on specific market segments like Pharmaceutical - ISPE International Society of Pharmaceutical Engineers, go to their websites and find resources for continuing education units to find out about the types of courses that people in the industry are interested in now, and what topics are available to you that might overlap with your product area of interest.
Once you’ve equipped yourself and your commercial team with the product and application expertise and the accreditation to make it worth your target’s while, you’ll want to find the ideal time to get everyone in a room. The easiest way is to remember everybody needs to eat, and everybody likes a free lunch. If you commit to the ‘Breakfast Club model’, you get the additional benefits, you differentiate yourself from the majority of manufacturers who stick to the lunch hour, you catch people at the start of their day when they don’t have a ton of other noise from their inbox, calls, and meetings clouding their consciousness, and you can squeeze in a lunch and learn with another firm later on that day! Regardless, of when you get in front of your target, you should treat it as a first contact. Your primary objective is to charm, endear yourself to them, and establish yourself a resource and a consultative problem solver for them and alongside them. Once you establish your reputation of competence, reliability, and responsiveness, you will be able to work with your design community partners to shape their work product in profound ways. This meeting is not about selling a product or a specific project which you may have in mind, because despite deep research you’ve done on the projects they are working, on your objective is to sell yourself and your company. The key is to LISTEN for pain-points, hints, and openings that they will give on where to take the conversation next, and how to tailor your message for subsequent emails, calls, and meetings. Make sure to ask if there are any pressing issues or projects that they may need help with, and hold something in reserve for a follow up meeting in two weeks to a month.
Tailor
After your meeting, make sure to follow up with your contacts at the A&E firm or EPC to close the loop and provide any answers to questions you may not have been able to answer while in person. Take time to recap your observations, learnings, and notes from the discussion, and then tailor your message for subsequent meetings to those areas you have identified as unique needs to the audience or that are pain-points that you identified. Review your offering and identify the products in your portfolio that will either A) resolve a problem they have articulated B) make the project overall lower cost for their end user through reduced material or reduced labor or both C) enable them to do something on the project that might not have been otherwise possible. Once you’ve identified this widget, you can use this as a wedge to open a wider conversation about the rest of your portfolio. Figure out what you want to say, and how you want to structure it for the most impact.
Follow Up – Begin to build the relationship –
Make sure you’re getting back in front of the audience or key members of the firm in short order. You want to create familiarity. In fact, you want to become friends; these are people that can make your future in the market, so if you can befriend them over time it becomes less transactional and the conversations, information, and opportunities flow more easily. Let them know you’re swinging through town and would like to offer a portfolio specific talk over lunch at their offices for products that will address some of their previously voiced concerns. Make the meeting more informal with just a couple of points you wish to make about a product/solution or two, and have an open conversation about what they’re working on and what is going on in the market. You might bring up the projects you’ve heard of in the Dodge Report or other information services and what they know of them and if they need assistance or new solutions on these projects. The key now is to begin building the relationship through regularly scheduled contact. When not actively working on a project, I think a good rule of thumb is to be in front of your key A&E firms and EPC partners once a quarter in their offices. It is crucial that you are responsive and thorough in response to questions and inquiries from these firms as you are working to establish your value as a resource for them moving forward.
Now that you’ve got an idea of where to start in your specification efforts, always remember that well begun is half done, so pick up the phone and start dialing!