The Ultimate Guide to Getting Specified
Find Out what Specifiers are Really Looking For
Every year, architects and interior designers specify millions of architectural products and building materials, representing billions of dollars in sales. Getting your products on their preferred list requires a deep understanding of how they think, how they work, what they value and how your products solve their problems. If you want to have a part of this billion-dollar industry, you must understand who is specifying and why.
“But wait,” you might think, “I’m already paying sales reps to do this. Why should I buy a dog and bark myself?”. The truth is, you can’t give your sales reps the necessary marketing support unless you understand their customers and what motivates them. This is a common problem for smaller companies with limited resources. They often skip the time investment required to understand their audience and arm their sales reps with the right ammo. And, as a result, they miss out on countless specifications.
If you want your product to be successful, it’s crucial to position it correctly in the marketplace. You’ll need to know which aspects of your product and brand are most valuable to your target market so you can fulfill their needs. But giving your audience what they want might not be as straightforward as you think...
That’s where this guide can help. We’ve worked both sides of this industry—helping architects and interior designers grow their businesses as well as helping companies like yours get their products specified. After years of observation, we can tell you that the building and architectural product companies that understand this unique audience and tailor their marketing efforts to them become industry leaders
This Guide Will Cover
1. Understanding and Developing the Architect and Interior Designer Personas
2. How to Speak Their Language
3. The #1 Way to Beat Your Competitors: The Brand Strategy Approach
4. How to Win the Price War
5. How to Implement the Ultimate Specifier Marketing System
6. Marketing to Architects and Interior Designers Using Your Brand and Website
7. Marketing to Architects and Interior Designers Using Social Media
8. Marketing to Architects and Interior Designers Using Print, Campaigns and Collateral
9. Marketing to Architects and Interior Designers Using a Sales Team
10. Marketing to Architects and Interior Designers Using Samples and Sales Materials
11. Marketing to Architects and Interior Designers Using Trade Shows and Events
Chapter1
Understanding and Developing the Architect and Interior Designer Personas.
(And the factors that Influence their decisions)
Architects and Interior Designers are a unique group.
They are artists, first and foremost—tactile beings who not only utilize form, function and beauty in their work, but also appreciate these characteristics in the rest of the world. These creatives are also problem solvers. Whether they’re envisioning the ways in which patients flow through healthcare environments, developing processes for sustainable community growth, or contributing to institutional and social change by, for instance, re-imagining a classroom for the 21st century, architects and designers seek a marriage of form and function—and that’s exactly what they’re looking for in the products and materials they specify.
To successfully market building and architectural products to architects and designers, it’s imperative to understand them as professionals: who they are, what they value, where they go to discover new products, who their key influencers are and where specification is vulnerable in the sales chain.
It’s no longer enough to deliver great design, it must be measurable.
Access to technology has both eased the process of design and increased accountability for architects and designers. The industry is shifting towards design based on proven research, putting architects and designers under increased pressure to deliver measurable results. This means your product stands the best chance of being specified if it can help solve a problem and deliver the data needed to prove that the goals of the project were met.
Focus has turned to outcomes. In healthcare, for example, lean and evidence-based design (EBD) strategies require architects and designers to have an intimate understanding of staff operations and patient experiences. By reducing the number of steps it takes for a nurse to reach supplies, time available for patient care increases. Quiet, comfortable rooms allow for faster patient healing while reducing the need for pain medications.
Clients now expect additional deliverables beyond specs and drawings. BIM software allows architects to produce datasets that facility management teams can use to project the efficiency of buildings before they’re even built. Buildings have become data generators as the era of the Internet of Things (IoT) has moved in. Thermostats, refrigerators and a growing number of other building components are now connected to mobile devices. Now that building performance has become more measurable, performance-based contracts have become more common.
Why is there so much fear around specification?
Architects and designers fear product failure. To understand why, you must first understand the high stakes role specification plays in their professional lives. The 2008 market crash had a prodigious impact on the design and construction industries. As a result, architects’ and designers’ career advancement hinges on either becoming a principal at a firm or starting one of their own. In either case, it’s their responsibility to grow the business and they must do this by finding new clients or increasing revenue from existing ones. For architects and designers, it can be years between the RFP and breaking ground on a project’s construction. Once the project is complete, it will be featured in the firm’s portfolio for years. The client will be asked to be an ongoing referral as well as a source of new projects. But these options go out the window if a specification fails. The promotional value of a past project and client can be ruined, jeopardizing years of work and future revenue.
To combat the fear around specification, your building or architectural product company must communicate with architects and designers in a way that addresses their concerns and builds confidence in your products. This is where a complete understanding of the specifier becomes invaluable.
The Value of Specifier Personas
External pressures and internal politics can majorly impact how, when and why architects and designers decide to specify a product. Building a buyer persona is a useful exercise that creates a three-dimensional view of your target. It helps define how they think, what (or who) their influencers are and what stake they have in the sale—think of it as a field guide to your typical customer.
By identifying the common needs, wants, concerns and priorities of a collective group—in this case, architects and designers—you cultivate a rich understanding of their professional roles and, as a result, communicate with them more effectively—in a language they understand. This will not only win you sales, it will also build trust and establish your company as a reliable source of knowledge that architects and designers can turn to anytime they specify a product.
We’ve included a buyer persona for both the Architect and the Interior Designer. Both are based on a combination of real data, educated inferences as well as a curated understanding of specifier demographics, behavioral patterns, motivations and goals. Keep reading to get to know them a little better.
Targeting more than just architects and interior designers? Create personas for all of your targets including general contractor, brand manager, property developer and reit management executive to gain insight into who they are and what they want from companies like yours.
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How to build and Use Personas
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