By the time your rep gets a meeting with a specifier, the shortlist is often already decided. The specifier built it earlier, working through your data sheet, your BIM object, and whatever case study or project reference they could find online. The meeting mostly confirms what your collateral already won or lost.
That’s the shift marketing teams need to plan around. Specifiers aren’t waiting for a sales call to start comparing suppliers. They’re doing it themselves, at their own desk, narrowing a list of products before anyone from your side is in the room. If the collateral doesn’t do the convincing at that stage, the meeting either doesn’t happen, or it happens too late to change the outcome.
Here’s where that shortlisting actually takes place, and what it means for what your team puts out. The data sheet has to answer the technical question first. A specifier checking ten products for a project is scanning for compliance and performance numbers: SANS ratings, fire ratings, load specs, warranty terms. Not your brand’s history. If those numbers sit on page three behind product story copy, the specifier has often moved to the next supplier’s sheet before they’d reach them. Put the numbers a specifier needs to tick the box at the front, and tell the brand story after.
No BIM object, no shortlist. An architect building a model in Revit searches the object library by category, not by brand. A product without a current BIM object can’t go into the model, which means it’s out of the running before a rep would ever get a call back, whatever the pitch behind it might have been. An outdated object that no longer matches your current spec causes a quieter version of the same problem: the architect builds around the wrong numbers, finds the mismatch later, and drops the product rather than fix it. Keeping every active product’s BIM object current isn’t background technical housekeeping anymore. It’s part of how you get specified.
The case study does the persuading a rep used to do live. A specifier or QS wants to see your product already working on something like the project in front of them: comparable scale, comparable building type, before they’ll put their name behind it. A brochure claim doesn’t do that work. A project reference with real, specific detail does. This is the one part of the shortlist that still rewards a story, but it has to be a true, specific one, not a general claim about quality.
So what do you check this week? Pull the collateral for your top three or four products and look at it the way a specifier would, not the way your brand would. Does the data sheet lead with compliance numbers or with copy? Does every active SKU have a current BIM object, checked against the latest spec? Is there a project reference for each of the main building types you sell into?
Fix what’s missing before your rep’s next meeting. By the time they’re in the room, the real test has usually already happened somewhere else.
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