You know you work that your engineering company is the best out there, but does the public know? What makes your company better than the competition? Do your potential customers know? What advantages and benefits do your clients have when using your firm? This is marketing; spread the word about you and your company.
An important part of marketing is describing how your business is different from the competition and how that benefits your customers. Most engineering firms do very little marketing outside of word of mouth and maintain customer relationships. Most of the time, this may be all you need to do to keep yourself busy, but if you want to grow your business, you’ll need more clients and contracts. What happens when your clients start to fade or decide to use someone else? To stay busy, you’ll need to employ several well-planned marketing tactics.
One of the best ways to market is to let your audience know how different you are from the competition by creating a unique selling proposition, or USP. A USP is what sets your business apart from the competition. If you want to immediately stand out in the engineering community, have a clearly defined USP. Ask yourself the question “Why would your potential customers choose to do business with your company over the competition?” What sets your engineering company apart from the competition? The answer is its USP. Your engineering company has better services, warranty, better selection of services, longer hours of operation, more flexible payment options or a combination of all these and more. You should be able to sum up your USP in one sentence. A great USP will make your prospects think or say, “I’ve got to do business with these guys.” Most companies inadvertently talk about creating a USP but don’t actually implement it.
Unfortunately, most USPs are not unique; because many companies will review other USPs and copy the best words. They will search the internet, review various business books, and might even ask other people and then combine the results into their own USP. If most of the USPs the client reads are similar, then they are meaningless.
Again, most of the marketing books available at the bookstore are not for professional service businesses like engineering. A personal service client seeks benefits more than any other type of client. A customer at a large chain store is probably looking for a low-priced product. A designer client is looking for a quality brand and not necessarily the lowest price. But a client of a professional services firm is looking for something very different. What do you want from a lawyer, a doctor, an accountant or a designer? Are you looking for bonuses, sales and discounts? Of course not!
A true USP responds to customer needs. What are customers looking for? In our experience, most buyers want their professional service provider to have one or more of the following characteristics:
1 – Reliability: Do what you say you are going to do and be on time. This is listed first, because it is very important. How many times have you heard that engineers don’t meet the deadlines they promised? Developers work to tight schedules and rely on sub-consultants to meet their deadlines. Delays cost money and often more than the engineering contract amounts. This is also where most of the litigation occurs.
2 – Accessibility: In today’s age of cell phone engineers are very accessible at any time and any day of the week. Customers expect you to answer their phone, and if they leave a message, they are called back as soon as possible. What the client wants is for the engineer to be there when needed.
3 – Impact: Due to the nature of the profession, every job is different and no one solution can solve every problem. So, the engineer must first understand the customer’s need and then provide the best services that solve the need. In addition, the proposed engineering services must be oriented to allow the client to achieve its final objective.
4 – Adjustment: All clients are different and you cannot work with all of them. Depending on your business management style, you may be a better fit for a demanding customer, a newbie who needs to be guided through every step, or a hands-off customer. To keep your clients happy, it may be best to suggest another engineer from time to time who may be a better fit. At some point it’s better to let them go and then stick it out and ruin your reputation.
5 – Meaning: There is no better feeling for your client than knowing that they are part of the design team. It is extremely important that your client knows that they are part of your team, letting them know the design options and your recommendations.
6 – Services: Exceed your customer’s expectations by delivering great service. This may mean meeting personally with the client on a regular basis throughout the life of the project. Hand-deliver correspondence and plans, and take the time to talk with your client. Keep them informed about the status of the project by constantly providing them with the best possible service.
7 – Caution: There is more to a project than engineering design. Understanding the consequences of a design choice or process and how it affects the overall project is extremely important to the client. Although the value engineering review determines that a design review would save the client $50,000 to build, it may not be a good decision to add an additional two months to the project schedule to process the review. These additional months can cost the client $200,000 in loan foreclosure and construction delays. Be careful and do your homework before suggesting a course of action for your clients.
8 – Investigation: The basics of engineering never really change, but technology and products are constantly being improved. The latest trend in engineering is green technologies, and this is affecting all categories of the profession. Staying on top of technologies is an ongoing study.
9 – Listen: Understanding what the client needs is essential to provide a tailored service. Your client may only want to develop the front half of their property with a convenience store. It would be unwise to provide plans that develop the entire property. It is possible that they do not want to develop the rear area of the property at this time? Unless you are listening, you will not know. The customer may have a multitude of reasons that do not include engineering.
10 – Teaching: Your client comes to you for help in completing their project. They know they don’t know everything, but they expect you, the expert, to know exactly what to do. Teaching them the process makes them better customers. They will come back to you with your next project, because you took the time to explain the process and involved them in the design. The more they understand, the more information they can provide you and will have the necessary documents ready for you as needed.
11-Business Management: The client does not understand why the agency reviewing the engineering drawings needs to comment. In his opinion, a good set of plans should have no comments. In fact, they are mostly right. If the company has a good quality control and assurance program in place, then there should be little or no feedback on the plans. Especially, any comments that require a review of the plans due to a poorly designed or non-code compliant concept. Any comments received must be for an alternative that may not have been considered. No customer wants to pay to train inexperienced personnel or lack information that should have been included in the initial design.
12 – Relationship management: There are two types of business relationships; good and bad. Everyone in your office needs to feel and say good things about all clients. If your staff are making mean or derogatory comments about your customers, you want a long time before your customers find out. Once your customers think you consider them an adversary, they’ll start looking elsewhere for a new engineer. Without customers you have no business.
Now, take these ideas and create your own unique selling proposition, giving the customer what they want. Even if your business has one employee, being unique will make your business stand out from the crowd.
Most engineers have excellent technical skills, but not necessarily the same level of business management and marketing experience. It is the engineer’s responsibility to develop these managerial skills through continuing education. This continuing education can be obtained through community colleges, universities, professional training programs, professional organizations, and online training courses. In most states, these continuing education courses qualify for continuing education units (CEUs) or professional development hours (PDHs).
In this article we discuss the unique selling proposition as a marketing strategy. Managers are often called upon to improve the company’s marketing efforts, having a list of other strategies that can be easily implemented may be the difference between a good manager and a bad one.
