Beyond the trade show: How to win over specifiers

It’s rare to find a manufacturing brand supplying developers and architects that maintains its momentum and focus. More often than not, senior management lose patience. Under pressure for immediate results, non-marketeers begin to question the strategy, and the brand panics. 

The conclusion tends to be a sudden retreat to switch to predictable, short-term sales tactics rather than sticking to a long-term strategic marketing plan.

I’m talking about those brands selling to architects, designers and developers, across both workspace and residential. Make no mistake, manufacturing for the workspace and residential sectors is a tough gig, particularly right now, but being consistently seen, innovative and at the forefront of the industry cannot be overstated.

Beyond the showstopper events

Brands in this space love to make a splash at the big events – KBB in Birmingham, Salone in Milan, Clerkenwell Design Week and 3 Days of Design in Copenhagen. As more than a handful of senior execs admitted to me at these events, FOMO is a big driver. They can’t afford not to be there, particularly if all their competitors are showing up.

Being at those events is important, but it’s not everything. 

The bigger issue is away from these showstopper events. With so much time, energy and funds invested in those annual calendar dates, what happens in between often falls off the radar. 

This makes it difficult to break into a specifier’s list of ‘usual suspects’. How can you build truly deep and meaningful relationships when you only engage with clients when they are completely bamboozled by the noise of a major trade show?

The answer is in the question. You don’t. 

Consistent year-round engagement

If you want to successfully build relationships with specifiers, you need to break the cycle and build genuine loyalty by doing these things:

• Go where specifiers are. Understand where your audience is genuinely interested and willing to engage, not where you think they should be. A little research can go a long way. Remember, it’s not about you, it’s about them.
• Give them what they want. What will make their lives easier? Do you truly understand their daily challenges? It could be as simple as the format in which you deliver your information. After consulting with our core group of regular specifiers, we discovered that they actually wanted hard copies of the product catalogue over digital ones. But suppliers in that sector were not thinking about how their clients would use it, navigate it or even how they would store it in their office. Make life easy.
• Go beyond your product, your sector. People see in ‘spaces’ not segments. If you can collaborate with another brand, or even better, brands from an adjacent sector that share the same values, this makes for a more engaging and enticing offer. Take a step back from the sale and show passion for the wider industry. We proposed this to one manufacturer, creating a ‘collective’ that didn’t use the brand’s name, and the result was more authentic and had greater longevity.