It’s Monday morning, and the RFP you’ve been waiting on finally hits the street.
You forward it to the project team with a note: “This is perfect for us. Go/no-go Wednesday.”
Ten minutes later, your PM replies. “Oh yeah. They mentioned this back in the spring when we were closing out phase one.”
Back in the spring. Six months ago. Six months when you could have been in front of the selection committee, learning what they cared about, maybe even helping shape what they asked for. Instead, you’re reading the scope at the same time as everyone else, including the competitor who’s already had three interactions with the client.
If you work in BD or marketing at an AEC firm, you’ve had some version of that Monday. Maybe it wasn’t the PM. Maybe it was the engineer who talked to the facilities director for twenty minutes at the site walk and never told anyone. The principal who says yes to the client coffee and cancels the morning of. The principal who walks into the shortlist interview having never met a single person on the selection committee.
On Tuesday, I wrote to the principals and project leads: the people whose calendars are on fire, and why relationship time keeps losing to the fire. This piece is for the other side of the table. The person doing the asking.
Here’s the uncomfortable math of your job: you own the pipeline, but you don’t own the relationships. The people who do (principals, project managers, project architects, engineers, superintendents) don’t report to you. They report to their projects, their clients, and their utilization number. Every hour they give BD is an hour that doesn’t bill.
So most of us do what feels logical. We push harder. More reminders. A CRM mandate. A lunch-and-learn on “BD for technical professionals” that half the room spends answering email. A pipeline report with everyone’s names on it, hoping a little public pressure does the work.
It doesn’t. And not because your seller-doers are lazy or don’t care. Most of them care a lot. The problem is the ask.
Think about what that PM was actually asked to do. Probably something like “keep your ears open for opportunities.” That isn’t an ask. It’s a wish. Nobody told them what to listen for, who to tell, or why it mattered. And the last time they did pass something along, they likely never heard what came of it. So they stopped.
It’s the same with your principals. “We should really get in front of them” gets a yes in the room. But yes in the room isn’t yes on the calendar. Once it leaves the room, it becomes an open-ended task nobody owns, competing with clients who need an answer today. Of course it loses.
That’s the shape of almost every BD ask that fails. It’s too big for the week people are actually having. It’s vague about who does what and when. It feels like somebody else’s goal. And when it works, nobody sees it.
The fix isn’t pushing harder. It’s changing the shape of the ask so that yes is easier than no. I call it the Easy Yes Framework, and it comes down to four moves:
-
Make it small.
-
Make it theirs.
-
Make it ready.
-
Make it seen.
Below, I’ll walk through each one with the exact language to use: the ask ladder for every role on your team, the scripts for asking a principal versus a PM, the five-line brief that gets people to show up prepared, the scheduling fix that ends the endless back-and-forth, and the two-line message that turns a one-time favor into a habit.
