Marketing KPIs in AEC Industry

Key performance indicators. KPIs. Everyone wants them. Not a lot of people know how to create them.

My first rule of thumb is to have your marketing KPIs aligned with company goals.

I mentioned this to someone recently and they said, "My company doesn't have annual goals."

I. CLUTCHED. MY. PEARLS.

I'm not living under a rock. I'm very aware a lot of companies are operating by the seat of their pants. So many companies are successful because of dumb luck.

But when you want to scale and grow, dumb luck doesn't always follow.

I am sharing two marketing KPIs for the AEC industry that don't require company goals.

(And even if you do have documented company goals, these KPIs are still very solid to track and they can be easily aligned with any growth goal.)

I get asked a lot of what KPIs should marketing teams use in the AEC industry. And to be completely transparent, my first question back to them is "what are your company goals?" Because your marketing KPIs should be aligned to your company goals. However, not every marketing team leader knows their company goals, or maybe a company hasn't gone through a formal strategic plan and have developed long-term goals. I get it.

So here's going to be my answer: if you don't have anything to go by, there's only two things that I think AEC marketing teams that are focused on winning new projects should measure and it aligns with a proposal win rate. However, that is a metric and it doesn't really say if your company is doing well as an operation of the business.

So the two things that I want marketing people to track for a KPI are:
1. The amount of time it takes to complete a won proposal.
I don't want to measure the amount of time it takes to complete a proposal of a project you didn't win. What I want to measure is the amount of time it took to win a project. Because if I have that baseline then I want to see how can we make it more efficient the next time around?

You become more analytical as you start to dig into who was on the team? How quickly were we able to get red lines done? How quickly were we to get reviews from team members? All of that starts to compound and that makes your department, your business unit a lot more efficient.

2. The cost of a won proposal.
I'm going to track how many people are spending their time on this project pursuit? How many meetings are we having? And I'm going to take an average of everyone's hourly rate and I'm going to start compiling that data. Because, again, if I can get the cost of our won proposals down then that makes us a more efficient company.

Reducing the time it takes to complete a won proposal is fantastic. Reducing the cost it takes your company to win a project is even better.

Again, if you don't have solid company goals that you can align your marketing department's KPIs to in the AEC world, these are the two that I would recommend.