Book More CPD Appointments with SpecifiedBy
We just launched a new feature which will help take a lot of the legwork and effort out of securing CPD bookings, and keep your teams’ calendar filled with high-quality CPD appointments.
I wanted to share some of the research and insights we uncovered which helped mould this feature.
Within the building product sector, CPD’s are still a key part of the sales and marketing process.
For many building product companies, the opportunity to get some face-to-face time with a group of Architects, educate them on a topic relevant to your products and position yourself as a ‘trusted advisor’, is considered to be one of the most effective way to reach and sell to specifiers — in particular, Architects.
But there’s a BIG problem with CPD’s…
Someone still needs to do the legwork of getting appointments booked in the diary — and as anyone who has sold or marketed products to Architects will attest — this is no mean feat.
Architects can be notoriously difficult to get hold of for a 5 minute phone call, never mind getting them to commit to a 30 minute presentation (even if you do bribe them with a Pret sandwich platter!).
A common solution to try to address this is to list your CPD content through websites like RIBA CPD or the CPD UK website.
This might result in a couple, maybe even a handful of enquiries or bookings each year, but this approach has one big flaw…
It relies on Architects to be proactively searching for and looking to book CPD content — which doesn’t happen that often.
Architects actually have a relatively low requirement for CPD’s in relation to maintaining their professional status or memberships — so the demand is probably a bit lower than you expect.
For many of these time-poor professionals, this is something that gets passed to a single person within the office (an office / practice manager for example) — or perhaps they view it as little more than a box-ticking exercise and scramble around near the end of the year to ensure they have met their requirements.
Because of the above, Architects are very rarely, if ever, actively visiting these websites because they are really interested in a particular topic and want to learn more about it from a product manufacturer.
All of this means that the pressure is always on your sales or marketing teams to be pushing very hard to get CPD appointments secured.
Time that would perhaps be better spent on creating more appealing CPD content, putting in the work required to deliver a great presentation or following up with Architects from previous events so you can ultimately get specified and win more projects.
Our CPD Solution
This leads us on to the solution we have come with on SpecifiedBy, which aims to automatically fill your calendar with CPD appointments.
And the premise is quite simple…
We know which categories of products Architects are interested in at any point in time, based on their search and browsing behaviour.
So if we proactively surface and share relevant CPD content with them, they are more likely to engage and make bookings (and therefore removing the requirement for them to actively go searching for CPD content).
At the simplest level this could mean highlighting a ‘Carpet Tile’ related CPD whilst an Architect is browsing ‘Carpet Tile’ products on SpecifiedBy.
But it can also be much more complex, based on algorithms which can track and predict patterns in order to surface the most relevant content to the most relevant Architects and specifiers:
Perhaps most powerful of all, this is all backed up and reinforced with personalised emails, sent monthly to each user of SpecifiedBy, with tailored CPD recommendations based on their unique behaviours and interests:
And finally, we’ve got a aggregated feed with all the latest CPD content from product manufacturers on SpecifiedBy for specifiers who do wish to browse for content:
It’s very early days with this feature (just launched for everyone on SpecifiedBy this January 2020), but the initial results from testing before launch and with some of the earliest users of the service has been extremely positive (with companies seeing up to a 40% increase compared to their normal monthly CPD bookings from other sources).
If CPDs are an important part of your building product sales and marketing mix or something you want to start using, you should join me for a live webinar I am hosting on Friday 24th January, which I’ll use to share more of our research on CPDs and provide more details about how the feature works (we’ll also have a special launch offer for new customers).
Full details and Registration here.
Alternatively, you can schedule a 1:1 demo with one of our team here.
