Mapping the built environment: who engages with whom, and why
I spent the weekend mapping the construction and real estate sectors, the whole built environment, into a single stakeholder map. Sector mapping, if you want the term for it. It started as a way of collating as much information as possible into a way that I understand: a picture. New projects come to market at wildly different speeds depending on a wide variety of factors, which means the moments a consultant could actually win an appointment are scattered all over the place. So how do you stay front of mind with as many of the right people as possible, at any given time?
You have to do three things at once, to everyone in the sector, all the time:
- Provide value consistently.
- Come across as humble and authentic.
- Never, at any cost, look like you’re selling.
Which feels exhausting.
You have to, because you never know where your next intro is going to come from, and introductions matter more than anything else in this business. Referrals convert more easily, they pay more reliably, they compound, but most importantly those relationships last longer than single instructions. They tend to match your ICP too, because someone else has already done the filtering for you.
So I built a built-environment stakeholder map
I tried to map every stakeholder relationship in the sector from a B2B point of view. Who engages with whom, and what each one is actually worth to the other. I’ve almost certainly left some detail out, but I’ve tried to frame each relationship so it helps you start a conversation at any point in the process. I used the RIBA stages of work to anchor it, but the inflection points hold for any real estate project, anywhere in the world.
For every relationship I’ve set out five things:
- What you bring them
- How you’d open the conversation
- When to reach out, using one hypothetical scheme for the examples
- How the relationship gets built
- Why you should be engaging with that person or company
It runs both ways. Even the firms at the very top of the chain, where the money starts, have something worth offering the consultants below them, and the other way round.
It’s a simple doc. Open it, use it, slate it. Have a proper look and tell me where I’ve got it wrong.
How I’m actually using it
Every week I go looking for signals. They have to be fresh. If something happened more than a month ago, why would an email about it make you look up to date or relevant? So the cycle is weekly.
The signal has to fit the person. A planning application is a perfect signal for a technical sub-consultant, because it marks the start of the construction phase. The same signal is less valuable to an architect, unless you’re just saying well done, because an architect needs to know where the money is coming from before a site is even allocated.
Where the signals come from
They tend to fall into four buckets:
- Project milestones. Companies love to post their wins, so let them be your signal. A simple scraper pulls LinkedIn posts for about $1.75 per thousand, and you sift those for the milestones that matter to whoever you’re writing to.
- People changing jobs. Sales Navigator has a recently-changed-jobs filter. Search, say, Development Directors in the UK with “data centre” as a keyword, and you get the people who have just moved into exactly that kind of work. A good moment to be on their radar, if that’s your target customer.
- Funding. If a REIT opens a new fund, they announce it. That is a good moment for an architect to get in touch about where all that money could go. I have personally used this multiple times, and those relationships have lasted many years.
- Competitor moves. The same three, reversed. “Did you see who got appointed to that scheme? That should have been you.” Harder to sell, and you need a fairly stoic salesperson to watch a loss and go straight after the next one, but it works.
From signal to sent
Once I’ve found the signals, I work backwards. I look for the companies that piece of information is genuinely useful to. It’s a slightly back to front way of running an ICP campaign. Understand your value first, then go and find the people it’s valuable to. It means the homework is done before I reach out. I’ve found the relationship before I’ve contacted a single target client. That’s my value and that’s exactly what you should be displaying in any outbound copy; I’ve earned the right to expect a response.
That starts as a long list. I score it for fit, how well we could actually deliver for those companies, and it collapses to something small. Usually five to ten companies per signal.
Then I draft. The message is simple. Here’s the signal, and here’s an offer to help you start a conversation with the person it matters to. The emails go out through burner inboxes, a few a day each, so I never put the main domain at risk. You do not want the address you send invoices and client work from landing in spam because it got flagged for volume. Send timing is matched to the recipient’s mail server, and because every email is different and specific to the person, it doesn’t read as spam.
When someone says yes, I set the meeting up by hand. I don’t use Calendly. I like being in control of when it happens, and honestly it makes the other person feel like I’m doing them a favour by fitting them in. A booking link feels a bit impersonal for a first conversation.
One example, start to finish
The signal is that a REIT has opened a new fund. Here’s how one of these actually plays out, start to finish. This is a real thread. I’ve only changed the name.
It ends in a no-show (annoyingly), but we have to assume this will happen and not get discouraged. Some people are desperate to get on a call, some are keen right up until something more important lands, and every so often you get a flat “please remove me from your list”. It’s exactly why you have to expect one real reply a day, not hope for ten.
Why there are three emails
The first email is the one that does the work. It catches the people with a need right now, the ones already thinking they need more revenue, and when it lands it gets to the point fast.
The second and third do less, and I keep them on purpose. What I’m offering is genuinely complex, and nobody takes a complex pitch in one go. So I break it into three bite-sized pieces. The first flags the signal and makes the offer. The second is where I do the work for them, I write the message they could actually send, so all they have to do is copy, paste and send. The third leaves the last piece of the value and a simple way back in.
None of them push. Each one just adds a bit more to the inbox. If the first doesn’t catch someone this week, the next might, and if none of them do, I’ve still turned up three times with something useful. Which is the whole point.
The numbers
They’re deliberately unglamorous. Fifty emails a day. Two hundred and fifty a week. Every one plain text, because I care more about landing in the inbox than about tracking opens and clicks, so I don’t track either.
A positive reply, meaning someone actually asks for a meeting, comes back about two percent of the time. Two percent of fifty is one. One meeting a day, five a week. That’s the KPI, and it isn’t a vanity number. It’s worked backwards from the deals I need to sign and the revenue those deals represent.
Do I expect everyone to reply? No. Roughly two to three percent of any market is in a buying window at a given moment. The emails are built to catch those people, the ones who already know they need more revenue, where the message gets to the pain quickly and offers a way out.
Everyone else isn’t a failure. They’re a marketing channel of one. I have a specific thing to offer, and at some point, in a week, three months or two years, most of them will need it. The offer just sits there. If they’re on the list now, they’re on it then, unless they go bust. In the meantime we keep tracking their world for fresh signals, so when the moment comes we’ve already been useful. It’s a long game, and I think that’s the right way to build a business.
What I’m actually selling
Better, more systematic outbound for our clients. And the best way I can think of to show that is to do the exact thing we’d do for them. Honest, personal, humble, value-packed outreach to the people they want to work with, at a time that makes sense.
The outreach is the demo. If it works on you, that’s the pitch.
Our offer to the market is more binary than the one we hand our clients, because what we sell is easy to grasp. Do you want to make more money? Yes or no. Most of the people we talk to, leaders of SME consultancies, find business development genuinely hard, so it doesn’t take much explaining.
Our ICP is simple. Leaders, usually founders but not always, of professional consultancies doing five to twenty-five million in turnover, in business at least five years, still doing all the selling themselves, and either flat or shrinking over the last two years.
There’s a reason for that.
These people are usually tired. They’re still involved in almost every decision, and they carry the responsibility of everyone’s mortgage every month. They feel trapped by a business that was their life, is their life, and that they can’t picture ever not being their life. They’d like a holiday, or to get back to the project work they actually enjoy, but they can’t find the time, because every waking hour goes on chasing revenue. Which is miserable work, because you spend all of it hearing no from at least nine in ten conversations. And because of the way the business is built, they have almost no chance of selling it, because without them it’s worth f-all.
That’s the top of the funnel
It’s the simplest thing we run, and it’s a long way from the only thing. I’ll get into the rest in these Field Notes over the coming weeks.
For now, the doc’s up there. Open it, use it, slate it. Tell me what I’ve missed. All of it’s welcome.