by Scott D. Butcher, FSMPS, CPSM “How many licks does it take to get to the Tootsie Roll center of a Tootsie Pop?” If you were a kid growing up in the 1970s, you heard this question in a series of commercials in which a boy queried a cow, fox, turtle, and owl. While the […]
Category Archives: Business Development
By Scott D. Butcher, FSMPS, CPSM Note: this blog post originally appeared as a LinkedIn Article as “Proposals: Red Flags and Dirty Tricks.” If you’ve spent any amount of time creating proposals, then you’ve undoubtedly seen all sorts of questionable behavior by proposal requestors. Sure, they send out an RFP (or post it online), […]
By Scott D. Butcher, FSMPS, CPSM In previous posts within the Seller-Doer Tools series, we looked at several techniques that involve limited personal interaction with prospects and clients – content marketing, which takes many forms including blogs, and social media, which is a way to connect with prospects online and create a “virtual network.” We […]
By Scott D. Butcher, FSMPS, CPSM You’ve probably heard the one about the company that got so busy working on projects that they stopped doing business development. And why not? Their phone just kept ringing with new opportunities. But then the phone stopped ringing – that was okay, it seemed, because there was still work […]
by Scott D. Butcher, FSMPS, CPSM In a prior post, we looked at the value of social media and social selling as a business development tool for seller-doers. In this post we’re going to review a related, but totally different approach: content marketing. Sometimes referred to as education-based marketing, inbound marketing, or thought leadership […]
by Scott D. Butcher, FSMPS, CPSM Should seller-doers be engaged on social media, or is it a waste of time – a series of distractions about cat videos and what your friends had for dinner last night? Social media has changed greatly since the early days, and today most A/E/C firms have some level […]
by Scott D. Butcher, FSMPS, CPSM What’s happening in the architecture, engineering, and construction (A/E/C) industry right now? Firms should always be paying attention to the industry indicators, whether those metrics are leading or lagging. Below you’ll find a current snapshot of some of the best-known metrics in our industry. American Institute of Architects The […]
by Scott D. Butcher, FSMPS, CPSM If you’re like most A/E/C professionals, you probably don’t enjoy conducting sales over the telephone, especially if you are prospecting. Yet sometimes you still need to pick up the phone, no matter how much you hate it. It makes sense. Traditional “cold calling” is now considering “interruption marketing,” meaning […]
by Scott D. Butcher, FSMPS, CPSM Seller-doer, doer-seller, closer-doer, rainmaker … these are all terms used to reference a technical professional (architect, engineer, scientist, construction manager, etc.) tasked with bringing in business to his or her firm. We know why this model is important: clients are increasingly demanding it. We know who is typically involved […]