ProjectMark News

The SMPS Heartland Conference "Dialed It Up" last week at the iconic Pfister Hotel in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. We loved meeting marketers and business developers from SMPS Chicago, SMPS Columbus, SMPS Greater Cincinnati, SMPS Indiana, SMPS Kentucky, SMPS West Michigan, SMPS Southeast Michigan, and SMPS Northeast Ohio Chapters and appreciated all of you who stopped by the booth. Thank you to the Co-Chairs Justin Juley, CPSM, and Patti Keillor Rohde for your event leadership and your team, including John Ferguson and Kim D'Amato.  We attended some great sessions (and we're also bummed about some of the ones we missed) but would like to share a little of what we learned.

Learning and growing from your competitors is key to elevating your firm's proposals and most proposal writers will tell you it was a key aspect of their career growth. Competitive intelligence in the realm of AEC pursuits can be a dicey subject based on where you live in the United States. In this blog post, we'll give you a few ideas on how to elevate your proposals by looking at competitor proposals as well as ways to use your professional network to gain insights on how to improve your proposal content. 

In this blog post, we'll talk about thinking outside the page and how to leverage digital assets to engage your clients. We live in exciting times! Gone are the days of the past when we were confined to an 8.5 x 11 cell, with 12-point Times New Roman font, double-spaced and printed front to back. Marketers are finding ways to grab readers' attention and draw them outside the page. Sure, we can put hyperlinks into our PDFs, but the good news is there are a lot more options available to us today.  

If you have great graphics in your proposals, your readers and reviewers will thank you. Instead of giving your readers pages of text to read, create tables, charts, images, or other graphics to make it as easy as possible for your audience to understand the information you are presenting in your proposals. Before you start using clip art, we've got a few suggestions on how to get the most bang for your buck in your proposal graphics. 

Wait! Don't start writing it yet! The first thing you should know about writing an executive summary is not to start writing it until you have a solid understanding of what solution you are providing for your prospective client. The purpose of an executive summary is to convince your prospective customer in one to three pages that he or she needs to buy your solution, so it's not actually a summary. As Tom Sant says in his book, Persuasive Business Proposals, "The executive summary is the single most important part of your proposal. It's the only part that's likely to be read by everybody involved in making a decision."  

Cover letters are one of the most important documents you'll write and include in your proposals, although they are often an afterthought to most proposal submittals. A cover letter is the first impression of your proposal. How you tell your story in your cover letter demonstrates you have a critical understanding of all the data you've acquired over the past months prior to the RFP being released. In this post, we'll talk more about how to write a winning cover letter and not bore the selection committee member reading it in the process. 

Every AEC marketer knows, it can sometimes be a challenge to get project information from project teams. In this post, we’ll give five ideas to make the process easier.

Last week Society for Marketing Professional Services  (SMPS) kicked off the Southeast Regional Conference (SERC) where ProjectMark was a proud exhibitor. This post summarizes some key points from a few of the great sessions at the conference. It was a great experience to connect and learn with so many great AEC marketers face-to-face!

We are pleased to announce Steve Dell’Orto has joined our Advisory Board. Steve’s in-depth AEC industry experience coupled with our focus on new project acquisition will create a strategic vision and roadmap that will elevate our platform to the next level.

ProjectMark is excited to welcome Jake Murphy to the team! Jake joins us with an extensive background in business development from several leading...