Specifiers play an essential, sometimes even decisive role for manufacturers. In the construction and housing sector, having your solutions and techniques recommended by a design office or a quantity surveyor has a direct impact on the growth of your revenue. Given that one specifier can win you ten end customers, how do you build a privileged relationship with these strategic intermediaries, so crucial to your products' visibility and your growth?
Boosting specification is a long, delicate and demanding exercise. It means building a lasting relationship, a win-win partnership with the brand!
Proof-based messaging: building a high-quality technical case
The first point is knowing how to present, explain, showcase and stage your technical information, and to demonstrate what it brings that is new to the market and to your specifiers' clients (and yours too)! Proof-based messaging is decisive. It calls for genuine, in-depth thinking about the messages to convey and the best way to deliver them... The traditional product and technical arguments must also be paired with elements of credibility and reassurance.
Getting the form right
You know it as well as we do: specifiers are "specimens" heavily courted by brands, with little time to spare and largely immune to traditional communication levers. The success of your campaign will hinge on your ability to capture their interest within a limited window. So you need to engage them in an original way. At Convergence, we recommend, among other approaches, event-based formats as the most relevant way to get your messages across to these audiences. Most often, we suggest focusing on taking specifiers out of their usual workplace so that they are physically and mentally available to listen to you. This might mean a dedicated event at a trade show, or creating a bespoke event to facilitate that contact and build rapport.
Daring to leave the beaten track
How do you engage and win over this prized audience? From experience, we advise our clients to break with their usual communication codes and to devise tailor-made, differentiating and original initiatives for this highly demanding (and, once again, heavily courted) audience: something playful and something concrete! But this strategy cannot be improvised; it needs to be carefully thought through, meticulously prepared and scheduled many months in advance. An operation aimed at design offices and quantity surveyors deserves all the more preparation given that you will not get a second chance to make a good impression.
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Proximity and repetition
Unless you operate in an ultra-niche market, your specifiers are numerous and spread across the whole country: indeed, you most likely know only a modest proportion of them. Since regional roots are essential for a manufacturer's brand, we advise you to develop several local initiatives, involving your account managers. The idea is to create strong, genuine contact with these intermediaries as part of a win-win relationship. They need to feel they have as much to gain from working with you as you do from them. That means nurturing these relationships over time, with the long term in mind.
Interested in this topic? Good news: we explore it in depth in our special report on specification.