The New Era of Building Product Marketing Has Just Begun

You might have a product that performs better, reduces energy use, lowers embodied carbon, improves indoor environmental quality or helps a project meet sustainability requirements. You may have the testing, certifications and environmental documentation to prove it. But, selling and marketing a high-performance building product is rarely simple. Getting it into a project can take months or even years.

Part of that is simply the nature of the building industry but long sales cycles aren't always inevitable. Sometimes they're a sign that you're making buyers work too hard to understand, evaluate and justify your product. The easier you make those things, the easier you make it for someone to say yes.

Understand how your product actually gets selected

One of the biggest mistakes building product manufacturers make is marketing to a generic customer. In reality, there may be half a dozen people involved in getting your product onto a project.

An architect may need to understand performance and design implications. A sustainability consultant may be evaluating environmental attributes. A contractor may be worried about cost, availability or installation. Procurement may be comparing you against an established alternative. The owner may be looking at operational performance, risk or return on investment.

And somewhere along the way, someone may simply ask, "Why don't we just use what we always use?" That's the real competition for many high-performance products.

If you're asking a project team to choose something different, you're also asking them to take on some degree of perceived risk. Your marketing and sales process should be designed to reduce that risk at every step.

That starts by understanding who influences the decision, what each person needs to know and when they need to know it.

Get specified before you're trying to get purchased

For many building products, the sales process starts long before procurement. If you're waiting until a project is under construction to introduce your product, you may already be too late.

You have to give architects a reason to consider the product and make it easy for them to do something about it. That means clear technical information, specification language, BIM or other design resources where relevant, certifications and sustainability documentation that are easy to find, and someone who can answer technical questions without turning every inquiry into a sales pitch.

It also means communicating the outcome, not just the attributes. Don't make the architect decipher six pages of technical data to understand why your product matters to the project.

Tell them! Does it help achieve a LEED credit? Reduce embodied carbon? Improve energy performance? Meet an owner's materials criteria? Solve a common installation problem? Reduce maintenance? Technical documentation proves the claim, whereas Marketing makes the value clear, and you need both.

Make your sustainability story easier to evaluate

High-performance building products often have an enormous amount of supporting information, but more information doesn't automatically make a product easier to buy. In fact, sometimes it does the opposite.

If an architect can't quickly determine whether your product contributes to the requirement they're working on, they may move on to a product where the answer is easier to find.

Your sustainability documentation and marketing should be treated as part of the customer experience.

Make it current and searchable. Explain what each document means and clearly connect it to the standards and requirements your customers are working with.

Answer the questions that stall the sale before they're asked

Where do deals slow down?

Proof removes risk

Building professionals tend to be cautious. Buildings last a long time, mistakes are expensive and nobody wants to be responsible for specifying a product that creates a problem later. That's why proof is especially important when you're selling something new or different.

Case studies need to say more than that a customer used your product and loved it. They should answer the questions the next buyer is asking.

What problem were they trying to solve? Why did they choose this product? Was it difficult to specify or install? What happened after it was installed? Did it perform as expected? What did it cost compared with the alternative? Would they use it again? The closer the example is to the buyer's situation, the more useful it becomes.

A hospital wants to see another hospital. A school district wants to see schools. A large contractor wants to know whether another contractor has successfully installed it.

Stop treating marketing and sales as separate journeys

Marketing shouldn't end when someone fills out a form. In a long, complex building-product sale, some of the most valuable marketing happens after the lead enters the pipeline.

Look at where opportunities tend to stall. Your marketing team should be sitting down with sales regularly and asking a very simple question: What's slowing deals down? Then build marketing around the answer.

Don't confuse more leads with faster growth

When growth slows, the instinct is often to put more into the top of the funnel (advertising, events, content). Sometimes this is what you need, but if you already have qualified opportunities sitting in your pipeline for nine, twelve, or eighteen months, there may be a much bigger opportunity further down the funnel.

What would happen if you shortened that cycle?

What if architects found the information they needed immediately? What if sustainability teams could evaluate your product without three emails back and forth? What if your champion had a compelling business case to present to the owner? Make the value easier to understand. Make the product easier to evaluate. Give every decision-maker the information they need. Reduce the perceived risk of choosing something different. And help the people who already believe in your product make the case to everyone else.

Because oftentimes the fastest way to grow isn't finding more people to sell to. It's making it easier for the right people to buy.