6 Tips to Impress Owners and Win More Pursuits

Want to win more business during pursuit? Communication and transparency between your project team and the owner is critical for a successful project, and that starts during project pursuit.

In this post, we’ll focus on the Owner and how Join can help you differentiate yourself from the outset. Check out “3 Ways to Leverage Your Team to Win More Bids” which covers your internal processes and how to best leverage Join so that your presentation highlights your commitment to collaboration and project success.

Your team and the owner must be aligned on the project’s goals to ensure you’re delivering value that the owner will recognize. Doing so will ensure you’re well on your way to both successful project execution and the opportunity for repeat business from your existing clients.

This is where construction technology like Join can help. Join customers set themselves apart from the competition by promoting their use of more transparent and collaborative decision-making processes, which lead to successfully getting a project to its target budget.

This post will cover six themes to cover during pursuit, during both the interview and RFP. In these presentations, you should highlight:

1. Your understanding of owner and project-specific drivers
2. How the owner measures value
3. How you will promote collaboration and communication
4. Your embracement transparency and accountability
5. Your confidence and consistency
6. Your commitment to innovation

Let’s take a look at these key points.

Understand Owner and Project-Specific Drivers

First and foremost, know the business drivers and project-specific priorities that are important to the owner. Your business development team is already gathering information during pre-interview fact finding; leverage that by ensuring everyone involved in pursuit is aware of the owner’s business and project-specific motivations for the project:

• Business drivers can include their company’s core values, what types of projects they have experience working on, how they prefer to work (i.e., do they tend to use external sources like owners’ representatives and cost consultants), who will be doing the interview, etc.
• Project drivers include clear definition of project scope and purpose, critical project milestones, stakeholder expectations, program clarity and site logistics that might need to be addressed, etc.

This information is critical to ensure your team can effectively tailor your pursuit and presentation using tools like Join.

Speak to How the Owner Measures Value

Owners want the best value for their projects. There are many ways to measure value, and knowing how this owner does so is critical to your success. Each owner and project is different, so value can be different from project to project: lifecycle cost versus first-cost, project sustainability in the form of locally sourced materials, hitting a critical fixed delivery date, etc.

Regardless of how value is qualified or quantified, every owner wants to see it as you evaluate and present different options. This requires a robust and transparent way to track all the value-related information that’s relevant so an owner can clearly evaluate the impacts of the decisions that are made.

The Items chart in Join filtered by “Owner Priority”: incorporate custom categories into your pursuit projects so owners can easily identify their value criteria.

Decision-making tools, like Join, can transform this complex data into meaningful, easy-to-understand visualizations for owners.

Promote Collaboration and Communication

A key objective consistently cited by owners is for the project to have a highly collaborative team. This isn’t surprising since numerous studies have shown that the more collaborative the team, the better the project outcome.

An owner wants the ability to have teams share ideas, discuss them, and mutually provide information from the stakeholders with knowledge to share. Unfortunately, the process of collecting ideas is currently managed through spreadsheets. Spreadsheets are infinitely flexible but inherently fragile and not easy to share. And when conversations around ideas occur through email and phone calls, essential details remain disconnected from the item being discussed.

Showing the owner how easy collaboration can be through a web-based decision-making platform like Join can be very impactful during your pursuit presentation. It demonstrates that you take collaboration seriously and are comfortable with full transparency. Project teams using Join often tell us how much the platform resonates with owners and how it’s been a big contributor towards being selected for the project.

Embrace Transparency and Accountability

No owner wants surprises or bad news, and experienced owners have seen many contentious OAC meetings because information isn’t readily available and there isn’t clear responsibility for who owns what. During pursuit, you can address these historical challenges by demonstrating:

• Every idea has an owner: there’s full accountability, so you always know who’s responsible for the next step or action item.
• All stakeholders can see what’s under consideration: no surprises.
• There’s a full audit log of everything that has happened for an item: you know about every change that was made, including when and by whom. This is really hard to do in a spreadsheet.

Display Confidence and Consistency

Owners want to be confident they’re picking a team that is going to listen to them and know they’re being heard. And keeping an owner’s confidence during preconstruction and execution is critical to their ability to make timely decisions.

A proven way to keep an owner‘s confidence is to ensure information is presented to them in a consistent way from meeting to meeting. Being able to do so both graphically and numerically is especially helpful for greater comprehension and trust. This helps them quickly understand what’s different so that they feel empowered to make decisions and move forward.

Show Your Commitment to Innovation

Demonstrating that your company is investing in innovative technologies like Join will positively change the project experience for the owner.

Most owners are tired of having to digest complex spreadsheets to get to details in OAC meetings and are demanding that data be presented in a more consumable way. Knowing that you’re investing in modern technologies to help overcome past challenges with the contentious nature of value engineering can clearly differentiate you from your competition.

A healthy Target Value Design trendline for your project instills confidence for your owner that the team will successfully get to the target budget.

Using cloud technologies, like Join, have many benefits for owners, including:

• Information is readily available anywhere at any time
• A historical log of of every change made during the decision-making process is recorded
• A single source of truth exists in place of many file-based versions of documents
• Their data is securely stored and redundantly backed up

You may be asked specific questions in an RFP about topics like security and backups around your technologies and processes. Don’t hesitate to reach out to your product vendors for input or guidance on these questions. Here at Join, we’re always happy to help: feel free to reach out to us at support@join.build with any requests.

Conclusion

Every project has countless numbers of iterations, concepts to explore, and ideas that need to be vetted. Juggling these changes can be complicated, but it doesn’t have to be contentious. Ensuring that your owner understands there are new ways to collaborate transparently and with full accountability can be a winning argument during pursuit.

You should emphasize in pursuit that the biggest winner in using Join is the Owner. Owners get all the benefits we’ve talked about, resulting in a more healthy dynamic for all stakeholders and ultimately a much better project outcome. Interested in winning more work with Join? Schedule a demo today!