5
FROM THE FOUNDER
W hen you think about marketing for the businesses our readers are in – architecture, engineering, planning, and other related professional services – we tend to talk about how we can create an image for the company that helps it sell more work. Selling work is the point of marketing after all, so that makes sense. In a relationship-driven business, clients hire people they know and trust — not just the firms they represent. Promoting the company … or yourself?
Mark Zweig
We get into the projects we do and how we do them. We talk about how innovative we have been. We talk about our mission and vision and history. We list our rewards and recognitions. We get into our design and quality assurance processes and programs, and our budgeted to actual cost record. We talk about the professional backgrounds qualifications of our employees and ourselves. All of this stuff works to a certain extent. The typical firm has around a 15% to 20% success rate on the work it goes after. But it takes a lot of grinding away to achieve that. Responding to RFPs and submitting SOQs, going to trade shows, doing expensive photography, submitting for design awards, writing and sending press releases, and doing a whole bunch of other stuff that costs a significant amount of time and money and then gives us the results we get.
But one critical ingredient is missing in all of this that will greatly improve the number of inquiries we get and our success rate on closing them. And that is we spend little if any effort at all to share information about ourselves as individuals. If you accept the premise of my very successful friend Matt Lewis (whom I regularly run in front of my students) that “people need to know you, like you, and trust you,” in that order before they will buy from you, but then ignore that simple equation in all of your marketing, is it any wonder we aren’t more effective than we are? I think there are a whole host of reasons we don’t get into more personal stuff about ourselves. Many of us are introverts. We don’t believe that our personal
See MARK ZWEIG , page 6
THE ZWEIG LETTER OCTOBER 13, 2025, ISSUE 1605
ELEVATE THE INDUSTRY®
Made with FlippingBook flipbook maker