How to go about Meeting / Soliciting Private Developers?
Hi all,

I am a AVP at a small construction management / owners representation firm in a major market. Before my current job,I was at a large firm before and never had to do any sort of marketing as the company was an industry giant and i had projects fall into my lap by my boss. With the new company I am with you can imagine things are quite different, I am expected to now go after work and market the company as part of my job duties.

Can anyone offer any advice on how to market to private developers? I thought a good way to try and reach these individuals would be by soliciting real estate attorneys. My first thought was, well whats in it for the attorney to try and hook us in with a prospective client? Then I came up with the idea to offer a referral fee based on contract size to whomever could initiate said introduction. A financial incentive if you will for getting us in the door.
I've started sending emails via mailchimp, and cold calling as well. What do you guys think of the incentive strategy? Anyone care to weigh in with some sage advice? Also, would a similar strategy be enticing to commercial brokers? After all you all have relationships with developers as well. 
[{"id": "coomf23", "text": "Are there ethical issues for attorneys to take referral fees? In competitive bids, it's all about the proposal. In 'friendly' or unbid deals, it's definitely a who know know affair. IMO it's going to be tough cracking in unless you find a niche and be the GD best contractor in that niche. ", "replies": [{"id": "coonz5b", "text": "Hmm, good point about the potential ethical issues of a referral fee. But at the end of the day, isn't it simply just a thank you for the introduction to a developer? In no way are we guaranteed to be selected by said developer, its just an incentive for an attorney to get us in the door so we can do our sales pitch.\n\nAs for the niche aspect we're a construction management firm. We're on the management side of a project, we basically run a project from A to Z for an owner/developer. The problem is developers are usually low key people other than your Donald Trumps of the world etc. It's not as if a directory of these peoples names is available to start calling. We need that initial introduction to whom we can pitch, hence I figured real estate attorneys would be a great conduit for an introduction seeing as these people are clients of theirs.", "replies": [{"id": "cooteik", "text": "Host a free lunch event at which an attorney will speak on a topic of interest to your target audience. Pay the attorney a speaking fee. Promote your free event and give the attorney tools to promote it as well.   This allows the attorney to benefit from promoting your company without creating any conflicts. ", "replies": [{"id": "cop7zdk", "text": "This is a great idea, thanks for the input!", "replies": [], "depth": 4}], "depth": 3}], "depth": 2}, {"id": "cop7ksw", "text": "One of the determining factors in how we choose bids is how much money the companies have donated to things we are associated with. If all things are even, it will be what we make the decision on. \n\n\nI don't see an issue with it at all. ", "replies": [], "depth": 2}], "depth": 1}, {"id": "cop8d2u", "text": "I don't know about other people, but I can tell you that I ignore 100% of emails I get from service providers that we don't already use. Networking is the only way.", "replies": [], "depth": 1}, {"id": "covg69b", "text": "Your company's business development person should be doing mostly all this work.  There's no one answer, but a few requirements is obviously keeping up-to-date with any slight developments and networking with all your company's contacts, etc. Most importantly, once designs of the scope of a project are completed or near completed, the project's architects will list the projects for bids.  \n\nConstruction companies, atleast for hotel projects, can call/email the developer for an interest in bidding on the project and provide some documents to prove that they have handled similar projects. \n\nDeveloper selects the best bid and thus the GC is selected", "replies": [], "depth": 1}]