Why I Call It an Opossum

Image from www.npr.org

This may sound like an odd title for a construction marketing blog, but it is really about knowing your clients and their needs, which in many cases is about serving their client’s needs. My wife worked at our local zoo for over five years as an educator and presenter (and I volunteered there for several years as well) and one of her favorite animals became the opossum. Note, I called it an Opossum, not a possum because that is the correct term even though the general public still calls it a possum.

Now why am I talking about opossums? It’s to point out that you need to know your client.  I know if I don’t use the “O” around my wife, she will correct me and if she were a client, she’d probably fire me for not caring enough to get it right. As a construction marketer I have to know about BIM and EMR. I don’t need to be able to work in BIM, but I better understand it because construction is the industry we serve. If you work in the medical sector, your team probably knows terminology that other contractors wouldn’t know or understand. This is important to your clients because when you are talking their language they feel confident that you understand their business and they don’t have to spend time bringing you up to speed.

Years ago, a construction business developer friend paid me to go to lunch with the design firm his boss picked and explain to them that his company didn’t build buildings, they built roads. After a over a year of working with this heavy highway contractor, the design company still didn’t understand how a construction company didn’t build buildings. Part of my team’s value is that we understand the construction industry, how subcontracting works, the role EMR plays in your pricing, and the difference between a vertical and a highway contractor etc.

Do you understand your client’s clients? One of my favorite sessions at build industry marketing conferences, like SMPS, are the client panels. I attend them to help my clients develop their marketing strategies and to ensure their messaging is on0point with their clients’ needs. Most of our work involves positioning construction companies away from their competitors using their differentiators, but you have to know if the clients even care about those differentiators. No point promoting something a client doesn’t care about anyway.

So, how do you get to know your client’s clients and what types of expertise do your clients expect and need you to know? If you build hospitals, you need to understand hospitals from the patients to the doctors and nurses to the cleaning and maintenance teams. You learn this through your own experiences of working in the industry, visiting past projects that are similar in scope, and by attending your clients’ associations. But by in large, one of the best ways to learn is to ask. Asking the right questions will tell you volumes about the end users needs and pain points. Then you must do something very important: You must LISTEN. You can listen even without asking questions merely by visiting a hospital to watch and listen to what is going on. Listen to the everyday common complaints of the staff and the patients to get a sense of any added value that you can bring to the project. Have the staff create a wish list because occasionally something that is a big wish for them can an inexpensive added value that you can bring to the table to give you a leg up.

So, how well do you know your clients’ customers? Opossum or Possum?