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OPINION
Bridging the gap
Winning work in the AEC industry takes teamwork, trust, and humility to bridge gaps between marketing and technical staff.
F or AEC firms, winning work is a team sport. It takes many different types of people in various roles and departments to collaborate on building the firm’s brand, contacting clients, preparing proposals, and closing the deal. I recently had the pleasure of participating in a panel discussion led by my friend Janki DePalma on high performing marketing teams, and a key topic was how friction can develop between staff on the marketing team and staff serving primarily technical roles (the architects, engineers, and contractors that make up our beloved AEC acronym).
Morgan Stinson
In this article, I’ll discuss common reasons this conflict can manifest and offer some suggestions for how to reframe the problem and bridge the gap between our marketing and technical staff. FAULTY ASSUMPTIONS. In any professional services firm, the technical staff (whether they be engineers, lawyers, or accountants) are the firm; the business exists as a vehicle to offer their unique skills to the world at large. They are
the product on offer, and while these positions are obviously important, they are not important to the exclusion of all the other roles and functions within the firm. Venerating these positions at the expense of others, especially the marketing staff, can lead us into a trap of three dangerous faulty assumptions: ■ Assumption 1: Marketing staff doesn’t generate revenue because they are “overhead.”
See MORGAN STINSON, page 4
THE ZWEIG LETTER DECEMBER 29, 2025, ISSUE 1614
ELEVATE THE INDUSTRY®
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