By Hugh Seaton, Author of “The Construction Technology Handbook” and creator and host of the “Constructed Futures” Podcast
As a discipline, Sales has always had too many people promising shortcuts. Everyone has an app, a dataset, a training program, or a system that will vault your sales to new heights — or at least get them off the ground. The unfortunate reality is that everyone has access to the same data, systems, and software, so each “innovation” in sales almost immediately changes the market and makes that new approach less valuable.
No matter what tools or approach you are using, selling something still boils down to the simple philosophy of a person agreeing that what is being sold is worth the cost. In construction technology, that calculation has been changing in recent years. “Worth the cost” implies we have a benefit and set of costs that go into a decision.
That picture of benefit & costs is changing in construction in ways that matter to both buyers and sellers. What follows is a breakdown of the importance of selling technology to building contractors and what to look for no matter which side you are on. Starting with the benefits, or supply of technology:
Consumerization of technology — mostly through smartphones — really transformed construction technology through a boom in software and mobility, making it a viable proposition years ago. With new demand, more people made more technology; and as some ventures sold their companies or technology, it was replaced with more, new companies and technologies.
Unfortunately, enough of these early offerings were pretty tough on the field, causing a resistance to new technology amongst a field workforce that were already not inclined to digital technology, simply because it is not how they learned to do their jobs. To field teams, trades, and some contractors, it felt like an added burden that only really helped the “office” do their work — and often that was the case.
In recent years, however, providers of technology have become ever more focused on creating technology that explicitly benefits whole project teams, in the process making the “benefit” side of the sales process increasingly better. An example of this is DADO, a technology company based in San Francisco. DADO started out with a months-long project of listening to what trades teams actually needed, and they netted out with their founding hypothesis — that fast and accurate access to the right documents from anywhere is a huge gap in the market, one that they have since successfully addressed.
This type of customer-focused development can now be seen across the industry. Not everyone gets it right, but it is table-stakes to even get a pilot. As a technology supplier, companies must be focused on creating through diligent research efforts and then delivering value in the most frictionless way possible.
While the supply of construction technology has undergone a fundamental shift towards being more customer-centric, contractors themselves have dramatically changed how they learn about, pilot, and roll out the technology. The addition of innovation teams to many large general contractors, and many trade contractors, has allowed the creation of formal processes, and that in turn gives up & coming technology providers a place to start — you at least know who to call.
Contractor innovation teams are tasked with understanding what their internal project teams are looking for, surveying the landscape for solutions, and connecting those solutions to pilot opportunities. The specifics will differ from company to company, as some innovation teams will test things on their own, whereas others will only do so if there is a field pilot available.
The fact that there is this internal “clearinghouse”, a team that understands what the company overall is looking for, and can then connect an outside provider to an internal team, is a huge advance for all involved. It means providers can find partners in almost every stage of development, including the sales process itself. And it means the contractors themselves have a managed process for advancing their own toolkit to deliver better, faster, and safer projects.
However, for sales teams and investors, it is crucial to understand that a pilot is not an enterprise sale. The project-based nature of construction means that project managers retain a lot of discretion about what systems they will use, which in turn means that post-pilot, very few solutions become enterprise-wide relationships, and those that do aren’t a guarantee for use on every project. Usually, enterprise agreements lead to inclusion in an approved list and pricing agreement.
This internal adoption challenge is of course not new, as many SaaS products across industries face something similar, and as a result Customer Success as a discipline has arisen, both to drive new adoption and reduce churn. Customer Success is absolutely critical as a sales function in construction.
What is interesting is how many of the activities Customer Success teams find themselves performing have equivalents in the contractor innovation teams. Both put together materials that outline what a solution can do, how to use it, and how to make the most of it.
Just as a customer-centric development process is table stakes for technology providers, so too is a thought out and funded post-pilot Customer Success effort. The connection between innovation teams and these customer success teams is, at present, not as tight as it is likely to be in the future. Customer Success teams will learn in time that offering materials suited to the innovation teams is a faster way to meet their goals. As Stephen Poppe, CS Manager at Versatile points out, “it is critical to have a tactical implementation plan for both the project level and the enterprise overall.”
Contractor IT teams have been developing more and more sophisticated internal teams and processes for data, security, and integration of new solutions. Here again, the specifics differ by contractor, but technology providers increasingly have to assume that a security review will be part of the sale. Less obvious, and still less frequently than security reviews, are data ownership and sharing policy. Contractors and owners are starting to require that data ownership be spelled out in contracts. For solutions providers who rely on ongoing data to feed into their systems, especially for AI systems, this will be more of a factor than it has in the past.
Industries change by buying and adopting new technologies and developing the people and processes to use these technologies. To drive those sales, providers need to ensure they are listening to customers early and often, creating pre and post-sales support for adoption, and taking into account the IT security and data ownership demands of their customers.
In other words, there will always be a value equation, where fully loaded costs, which include learning time, downtime, and other “hidden” expenses, will be measured against promised but uncertain benefits. Rather than focus on outbound sales and a “numbers game”, it is critical that providers of technology to the construction industry work hard to ensure that, from the feature set to cybersecurity to a sales presentation to after-sales service, the expected value provided exceeds the costs.
All products require some level of adjustment, learning, or adaptation of how we were doing things previously. The complexity of a construction project takes this to a whole new level, where the use of a product, no matter how amazing that product may be, introduces risks to the buyer of technology, usually a contractor with a finely tuned sense of risk.
SaaS providers across industries have addressed this through theCustomer Success function, where a team of people helps customers to adopt and get the most out of software. There is no industry where this is more critical than construction — because of its complexity, but also because most sales are to a project team, not the whole enterprise. It is critical that Customer Success is viewed as a revenue center, not a cost center, and that real effort and resources are committed to making Customer Success a central function of the company.
In today’s rapidly evolving construction technology landscape, where there are simply too many software options for contractors to reasonably manage, re-introducing service in the form of a serious Customer Success team should be a critical part of every technology provider’s go-to market.
