5 Signs Your BD/Marketing Efforts Are Falling Behind
5 Signs Your BD/Marketing Efforts Are Falling Behind
Most business development problems don't announce themselves. They show up quietly — a shortlist you weren't on, a new hire who isn't landing, a dashboard that looks fine while win rates slide. By the time they're obvious, you've already lost work you never knew you were competing for.
The tricky part is that many of these warning signs look, at first, like normal friction. But our second annual survey of A/E/C buyers — the VPs of Facilities, Directors of Plant Operations, and COOs who actually purchase these services — reveals that several of them are symptoms of the same underlying problem: a BD and marketing model that no longer matches how buyers actually decide.
Most AEC BD/Marketing research ends with a PDF. My work ends with Results. Data only matters if someone with field-tested experience can help you act on it while also owning the outcome.
With nearly three decades leading AEC business development in the field with firms including Haskell, CRB, and BSA, I help firms restructure BD and marketing around how buyers actually buy — and I stay accountable for the results.
Here are five signs worth watching for.
Here are five signs worth watching for.
None of them mean your team isn't working hard. Most of them mean the structure around that work has fallen out of step with the buyer.
Sign 1: You're being left off shortlists for projects you didn't know existed
This is the one that should get every Principal's attention, because you often can't see it happening.
You find out — sometimes months later — that a current or prospective client ran a selection process, built a shortlist, and awarded work. And your firm was never on it. Not rejected. Never considered.
What the data reveals: The buyer's evaluation now happens privately, before any contact. In our survey, 66% of buyers research providers online six or more times per week, and 36% now use AI tools to build an initial shortlist of firms — often before an RFP is ever written. Broad B2B research shows the same pattern beyond A/E/C: Forrester finds 68% of business buyers enter a purchase with a front-runner already in mind, and that front-runner wins about 80% of the time.
What it means:
If your firm isn't discoverable and credible during that private research phase, you're not losing the pursuit — you're being eliminated before the pursuit begins. A thin or generic digital presence doesn't just underperform; it quietly removes you from consideration sets you'll never see.
Sign 2: Your new BD hire can't convert their "relationships" into meetings
You hired an experienced business developer partly on the strength of the relationships they promised to bring. Months in, those relationships aren't turning into meetings — and certainly not into work.
This isn't necessarily a hiring mistake. It's a myth the whole industry has believed for years: that client relationships are portable assets a BD person carries from firm to firm.
What the data reveals: Buyers told us otherwise. 69% stay loyal to a Principal or Project Leader who changes firms — but only 30% stay responsive to a BD contact who moves. The relationship a buyer values is with the person who solved their technical problem, not the person who managed the account.
What it means: BD relationships built on facilitation don't transfer, because they were never the relationship the buyer cared about. This has real implications for how you hire, what you promise your partners about a new BD hire's "book," and where you invest in relationship continuity.
The durable relationships in your firm belong to your technical leaders — protect and build those first.
Sign 3: Clients aren't responding to your team's relationship-building efforts
Your BD and marketing team is doing everything relationship-building is supposed to involve — the dinners, the events, the golf, and the check-ins. It's landing flat. Invitations go unanswered. The rapport isn't forming.
It's tempting to read that as an execution problem. It's usually a messenger problem.
What the data reveals: Buyers are roughly three times more likely to build an ongoing relationship with a Principal or Project Leader than with a BD person — 55% said they would "sometimes" or "always" invest in that relationship with a technical leader, versus just 13% for a BD contact. Buyers view time with technical leaders as a strategic investment: direct access to the people who will actually do the work. Time with BD staff, too often, reads as social obligation without strategic value.
What it means: Relationship-building isn't failing because your team isn't likable or persistent. It's failing because buyers increasingly want to invest their limited time in the people who will solve their problems.
The fix isn't more outreach from BD — it's putting your Principals and Project Leaders at the center of the relationships that matter, with BD and marketing structured to support and enable them.
Sign 4: Your billable staff are burning out on BD task
Your designers and project managers are stretched thin — not just on project work, but on the business development and marketing tasks piling onto their plates. Proposal contributions, interview prep, content, follow-ups. They're doing it, but it's costing them billable hours and, increasingly, their energy.
Unlike the first three, this one is an internal signal, not a buyer-facing one. But it's a symptom of the same root problem.
What it means: When buyers want to engage technical leaders directly — and they clearly do — those leaders necessarily take on more client-facing BD. That's correct and unavoidable. Burnout is the sign that your BD and marketing team is structured wrong for it: instead of setting principals and PMs up to win efficiently — doing the research, the qualification, the proposal machinery, the digital groundwork — the team is leaving the heavy lifting on your billable staff.
The answer isn't to pull technical leaders out of BD (buyers won't allow it). It's to restructure BD and marketing as an enablement engine behind them, so principal-led growth doesn't burn out the principals.
Sign 5: Your BD/Marketing team hits every KPI — but win rates have flattened
On paper, everything looks healthy. Meetings booked, emails sent, connections made, campaigns launched — the dashboard is green month after month. And yet your project win rate has plateaued or slipped.
This is the most dangerous sign, because the metrics are actively reassuring you while the results erode.
What the data reveals: The activity your KPIs reward may be the exact activity buyers are tuning out. 81% of buyers receive 7 to 15+ BD requests every week — several told us the sheer volume causes them to ignore BD outreach altogether. 96% are "never" or "not likely" to respond to a cold LinkedIn InMail from a BD person. High outreach volume generates impressive activity metrics and diminishing real results.
What it means: If you're measuring activity, you'll optimize for activity — more calls, more emails, more InMails — precisely the behavior buyers have learned to filter out. The dashboard stays green while your position erodes.
The fix is to change what you measure: shortlist inclusion, quality of engagement, principal-led relationship depth, and digital discoverability — the things that actually predict wins now, rather than the volume that used to.
The common thread
Notice what connects these five signs. None of them is a story about a lazy team or a bad hire. Each one is a symptom of the same underlying condition: a BD and marketing structure built for how buyers used to buy, running against buyers who have decisively changed how they decide.
Buyers now research privately, shortlist with AI, reward technical leaders, ignore high-volume outreach, and form the relationships that matter with the people who will actually do the work. A structure that hasn't caught up to that will keep generating activity — and keep quietly falling behind.
The good news: every one of these signs is fixable, and the fix is the same structural realignment.
Lead with targeted thought leadership so you're found and credible before contact.
Put Principals and Project Leaders at the front of client-facing BD.
Restructure marketing and BD as the enablement engine behind them.
Measure what predicts wins now, not the activity that used to.
If two or more of these sound familiar
If you recognized your firm in two or more of these signs, you're not behind because your people aren't trying. You're behind because the model is out of step with the buyer — and that's a structural problem with a structural solution.
That's the work I do. Most AEC BD research ends with a PDF. My work ends with Results. Data only matters if someone with field-tested experience can help you act on it and own the outcome.
With nearly three decades leading A/E/C business development in the field with firms including, Haskell, CRB, and BSA, I help firms restructure BD and marketing around how buyers actually buy — and I stay accountable for the results.
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