Tracks
Turning Experience into Influence and Impact
Ready to take a more strategic role within your firm? This track focuses on building influence, strengthening leadership skills, and connecting everyday marketing efforts to broader business goals. Explore everything from thinking like a principal and improving pursuit strategy to developing teams, navigating relationships, and using data to make smarter decisions.
The Proposal Review: From Compliant to Compelling (Live Proposal Workshop)
Workshop
THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 11 | 9:30 AM - 11:30 AM
Most AEC proposals are compliant, but few are compelling. In this interactive proposal review workshop, attendees will learn how to evaluate submittals through the lens of strategy, clarity, client focus, and selection committee impact. Using real-world proposal examples, we will walk through common proposal gaps, including generic messaging, weak executive summaries, unclear differentiators, dense resumes, missed proof points, and visuals that do not support the story. Attendees will learn what to fix first, how to strengthen content quickly, and how to move a proposal from “meets the requirements” to “makes the case.” This session is designed for AEC marketers, proposal managers, business developers, and seller-doers who want practical, immediately usable tools to improve proposal quality, reduce rework, and create submittals that are easier to evaluate and harder to forget.
Key Takeaways
- Participants will evaluate proposal sections for compliance, client focus, messaging strength, and evaluator clarity, then identify the highest-priority revisions needed before submission.
- Participants will revise generic proposal language into specific, proof-based positioning that connects firm experience, project relevance, and client decision factors.
- Participants will apply a proposal review checklist to prioritize improvements across executive summaries, cover letters, resumes, project sheets, graphics, and page flow.
- Participants will design a stronger internal review process that reduces rework, clarifies reviewer roles, and improves proposal quality under deadline pressure.
About Kelly Jo
Kelly Jo Jefferis, CPSM, LEED Green Associate, is the founder and president of Threaded Marketing Group (TMG), a boutique marketing and communications firm serving the architecture, engineering, and construction industry. With 25 years of experience, she has helped hundreds of organizations, from local firms to Fortune 500 companies, strengthen their brands, win work, and achieve strategic growth. Kelly Jo specializes in pursuit strategy, proposal development, brand positioning, executive communications, and marketing operations. She also serves as a fractional Chief Marketing Officer for a national AEC firm, providing executive-level leadership that bridges business strategy and marketing execution. A two-time Charlotte Business Journal Most Admired CEO, Kelly Jo is passionate about mentoring marketing professionals and sharing practical strategies that help individuals and organizations grow with confidence.
Take the Reins: Start Thinking Like a Principal
Lecture
THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 12 | 1:45 PM - 2:45 PM
Want to move up? Start thinking like the leaders above you. This session demystifies the business side of AEC, giving marketers and BD professionals a practical understanding of profitability, overhead, multipliers, contracts, project delivery, and client experience. Learn how these operational drivers shape firm decisions — and how understanding them can help you bridge the “missing middle,”contribute strategically, and prepare for your next leadership role.
Key Takeaways
- Explain how key financial and operational concepts—including profitability, overhead, and multipliers—drive AEC firm decisions.
- Connect pursuits, client relationships, staffing, project delivery, and marketing decisions to firm profitability and growth.
- Apply a principal-level perspective to evaluate business challenges, ask stronger questions, and make more strategic recommendations.
- Build the business acumen and leadership confidence needed to bridge the “missing middle” and prepare for greater strategic responsibility.
About Courtney
As owner of CKearney Consulting, Courtney Kearney, FSMPS, CPSM leads a team of approachable data nerds dedicated to helping AEC firms get the most out of their CRM and data. Courtney is a respected thought leader, author, and public speaker who has served in leadership roles within SMPS at the local, regional, and national levels as well as earning the honored designation of Fellow.
From First Day to First Pursuit: Onboarding That Works
Lecture
THURSDAY, FEBURARY 11 | 3:15 PM - 4:15 PM
Your firm’s brand is shaped by every pursuit, and by the people trusted to lead them. Great pursuit coordinators are not made by a fire hose of files and meetings. See how a regional A/E/C marketing team replaced information overload with a flexible onboarding model of peer-led training that moves new hires from industry basics to observation, shadowing, mentored leadership, and solo ownership, all while developing senior staff as leaders. Attendees will leave with a practical framework building a stronger bench and for turning new hires into connected, capable, and confident pursuit leaders.
Key Takeaways
- How to design a staged, 2-4 month onboarding pathway tailored to coordinators with various levels of A/E/C and pursuit experience.
- Sequence observation, shadowing, reverse shadowing and solo ownership to building confidence without placing new employees or active pursuits at unnecessary risk.
- How to develop a peer-led training model that distributes the onboarding workload and creates leadership opportunities for experienced staff.
About Lori
Lori Reza is a Regional Marketing Supervisor for based in Austin, Texas, with more than seven years of experience leading proposal efforts. She has managed efforts across several states, including Texas, Colorado, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Louisiana, Georgia and North Carolina. She also has experience with submittal requirements for a variety of clients, including municipalities, counties, state and federal agencies and water districts/river authorities. Lori manages seven Marketing Coordinators across three offices and focuses on building relationships between marketing and technical staff, providing guidance and training to both. She encourages collaboration and communication across teams and understands that the benefits of a solid marketing-technical partnership extend beyond a successful quality-deliverable and into the strength of the organization.
About Robin
Robin Buchanan, CPSM, is Regional Marketing Manager where she leads a team of pursuit coordinators supporting business development across several of the firm's regional markets. With more than three decades of AEC marketing experience, Robin has held marketing leadership roles at various construction and engineering firms including both small and large firms. She holds a B.A. from NC State University. A member of SMSP for over 20 years, Robin is a Past Treasurer of the SMPS Charlotte Chapter, has served on the SERC Programs Committee since 2023, and as Programs Co-Chair for the 2026 and upcoming 2027 SERC regional conference.
Better at People: How to Build Influence When You Don't Have Authority
Lecture
FRISDAY, FEBRUARY 12 | 8:30 AM - 9:30 AM
In A/E/C firms, marketers and business developers often have responsibility for outcomes without authority over the people whose input they need. This session shows how relational intelligence shapes influence, trust, and professional reputation. Participants will learn a practical framework for recognizing the questions and gaps beneath everyday interactions so they can reduce friction and communicate clearly to keep pursuits and projects moving.
Key Takeaways
- Identify the three underlying questions that influence how people interpret workplace interactions.
- Recognize perception and assumption gaps.
- Apply a relational intelligence framework to conversations with colleagues.
- Select communication approaches that strengthen trust and clarify expectations.
About Rachel
Rachel Andreoli is the owner of Andreoli Strategies, a training firm that teaches how to be human together. She helps teams spend less time dealing managing friction and more time doing work that matters. Her work is shaped by a degree in Communication and over 20 years behind the barber chair. She brings a practical, relatable approach to every room she's in. She is a human mom, a dog mom, a coffee snob and head over heels for the little village on a lake she calls home.
Garbage In, Garbage Out: Fixing AI's Data Problem
Lecture
FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 12 | 9:45 AM - 10:45 AM
Firms are racing to add AI to their proposal process, but AI can't manufacture accuracy from chaos. If resumes, project descriptions, and case studies live across five systems and three formats, AI will confidently generate content that's outdated, inconsistent, or just wrong. This session unpacks why AI performance depends on data structure, not clever prompting, and gives marketers a practical framework for assessing their firm's data readiness before scaling AI-assisted proposal work.
Key Takeaways
- Tell the difference between an AI accuracy problem and a data structure problem.
- Score their own firm's people and project data against a simple data-readiness framework.
- Spot where resume and project data goes stale, inconsistent, or missing across their systems.
- Leave with a practical roadmap for structuring data before, or alongside, adopting AI tools in proposals.
About Miles
Bio missing.
