How Architecture Firms Get Commercial Clients Before the RFP

Architecture firms get commercial clients by reaching the person who appoints the design team before that person writes a shortlist. In practice that comes down to this:

1. Go back through your past commercial projects and write down who actually signed your appointment.
2. Build a list of local organizations that look like those clients: developers, corporate occupiers and institutions.
3. Reach that buyer on LinkedIn first and email second, with short messages that carry proof from similar work and ask for a meeting.
4. Stay in the conversation through a long sales cycle, so the buyer already knows your work when they decide who to invite.

About a third of design revenue at U.S. architecture firms comes from the private commercial and industrial category, according to the AIA's 2024 Firm Survey Report on 2023 data (AIA).

Awards and design press build a name among other architects. Referrals reach only whoever your last client knows. Neither puts you in front of one development director planning a scheme in your city next year. A target list and a short message can.

Who actually buys architecture services for commercial projects?

Commercial work comes from three kinds of client:

• Developers build to sell or to lease. Their buyer cares about yield, planning risk and schedule, because a scheme lives or dies on its numbers.
• Corporate occupiers build, fit out or relocate for their own use: headquarters, labs, logistics sites, retail rollouts.
• Institutions such as universities, hospital groups and schools run long capital plans and buy through formal procurement.

In each of them, one person puts their name on your fee letter. Project managers, cost consultants, facilities teams, finance and future occupants can shape the brief, recommend you or slow things down. They are influencers, and the table below lists them separately. Your outreach goes to the signer.

The easy mistake is to write to whoever was friendliest during the last job. That may be a project manager who answered every email and never chose the architect.

When I build a target list for a client, the first thing I open is their project history, and for each past project I identify the person who made the final call. Then I search with the titles that niche actually uses and leave the vague ones out. For a practice, that review starts with the appointment letters from your last ten commercial jobs.

Every name on the list should answer one question: what does this person decide about whether you get appointed? If you have no answer, they come off.

What should architecture firms target first if referrals slow down?

Start with the clients who already paid you. I always check past and current clients before anything else, then hunt for organizations that look like them.

For each commercial client from recent years, note the sector, the organization's size, the project type and where the site was. That profile is targeting data no competitor can copy. Then ask two questions. Does this client have another site, another division or a sister company you have not met? And which organizations in your region match the same profile?

Geography comes next. Wherever the market is big enough, I prefer a local audience, because people start a conversation more easily with someone they know works nearby. For an architect, proximity is practical: you know the planning officers, the local context and the contractors, and you can be on site in an hour.

Use this split for the first list.

Target first:

• Former commercial clients, their other sites and their sister companies.
• Lookalikes of your best past clients within a radius you can serve.
• Sectors where you can point to a finished project.

Deprioritize:

• Other architects and the design press. They can build your name, but they rarely commission buildings.
• Sectors where you have nothing built to show.
• Distant markets, unless your proof clearly travels there.
• Organizations where the only reachable contact is a general inbox.

Keep the market small and specific. I would rather see a practice commit to one offer for one audience for twelve months than test five sectors at once. A message written to suit every kind of client lands with none of them. I explain why depth comes before width in how I pick a market.

Pick the sector with your numbers. Rank your sectors by fee income over the last three years. Then push where the fees and the finished projects overlap.

Then count the market. Multiply the organizations in your chosen sector and region by the real buyers inside each one. If that number is small, no message will save you. A thin list is a coin flip: a few good months, a few dead ones, and no idea which one is coming next.

Volume is what takes the luck out. So go deeper: two or three people per organization, longer sequences, and later a second geography. If two principals both send, split the list so they never write to the same organization.

When do commercial buyers shortlist an architecture firm?

Earlier than a tender notice suggests. I have no architecture-specific data on this; it is my view from B2B outbound generally. By the time a formal invitation arrives, the buyer has usually checked out the firms they plan to invite.

Nobody hires from a single email. They hire after they have looked you up. Take, as an example, a development director who gets two messages from architects on the same morning. Both emails read about the same, so the choice gets made on the websites, the project pages and the principals' LinkedIn profiles, well before either firm gets on a call.

If those show a comparable scheme with a clear outcome, the reply comes easily. Renders with no context end the audit right there.

The decision rule: put your outreach effort into the first three rows.

Institutions that buy through formal procurement may limit contact with bidders once a tender is live, so reach them before any notice is published and read their procurement rules first. If an RFP lands from a buyer you have never spoken to, treat it as a long shot and price your bid effort accordingly.

B2B sales cycles often run 6, 9 or 12 months, so plan a commercial architecture pipeline on that clock. In some sectors people simply decide slowly, so a pipeline that looks quiet now can still be filling up.

How do you write outreach that commercial clients will actually open?

Ask for a meeting, nothing more. In a first message I sell a short conversation and leave the service for later. Pitch in message one and you get ignored.

The message also needs proof. I put real past clients, results and case studies straight into the outreach. For an architect, proof means one finished project close to what the buyer is planning: same building type, same area, an outcome they care about, such as planning consent on the first submission or a fit-out finished while the business stayed open.

Before a buyer opens your project page, they look at who sent the message. If the buyer finds an empty profile behind a good message, the message loses. Send the same words from two different senders and the results can split wide: one company saw a 2% reply rate, another saw 7.5%.

Keep it short and human. A polished template that reads like a machine wrote it gets skipped.

Leave these out of a first message:

• Your design philosophy.
• The firm's history and headcount.
• A list of every service you offer.
• Awards.
• A request for a full presentation.

A made-up example, written to a development director. Swap in a real project of yours:

Subject: Hollis Road site

Hi Priya, I saw your team bought the Hollis Road site in Leeds this spring. We designed a 120-unit build-to-rent scheme a mile from there and took it through planning on the first submission. Before you appoint a design team, would a 20-minute call on what the planning officers pushed back on be useful? Happy to come to your office.

It runs about 60 words, names one site and one comparable project, offers something useful to the reader, and asks one small question. The offer to visit only works because the practice is local.

Should architecture firms use cold email, LinkedIn, or both?

Both, in a set order. Connect on LinkedIn first and send the email afterward, so your face and profile are familiar by the time the email lands. That order suits architecture, because buyers check your built work before they answer anyone. A stranger's email gets ignored faster than a message from someone whose profile the buyer has already looked at.

Across our campaigns, replies most often arrive after the third follow-up, once a real gap has passed since the second. I lay out the touches and the gaps between them in my follow-up sequence post.

Cold email needs its own setup. Send from separate domains, never the one your invoices and project correspondence use. Authenticate those domains with SPF, DKIM and DMARC records, the DNS settings that prove to inbox providers you are allowed to send from them, while volume is still low. Give each new mailbox 10 to 14 days of warm-up before its first prospect.

What does a realistic commercial client pipeline look like?

Plan with ranges. In my team's campaigns, reply rates usually sit around 1%, and closer to 0.5% once sending reaches thousands of emails a day. Between 10% and 50% of replies usually become booked meetings.

When the list is narrow and each message is written for one reader, replies can climb to 15% to 17%, and roughly three in four of those people are interested. The bigger the volume, the lower the averages. None of these figures is a promise.

That rule matters more for architects than for most sellers, because the market is small. Take a made-up practice with 400 real buyers across its region and sector:

• Floor, a generic message at about 1%: 400 contacts -> about 4 replies over one full sequence -> roughly 0 to 2 meetings at the 10% to 50% range.
• Ceiling, a message written for each reader that hits 15%: 400 contacts -> about 60 replies over one full sequence -> 6 to 30 meetings.

Budget on the floor; 15% only happens with a tight list and heavy personalization. In a market this small, a contact spent on a generic message is a buyer you cannot easily write to again.

A tiny list of perfect-fit names will not save you either. Even an ideal buyer is often busy, not ready yet or simply not interested this quarter, so reach more people inside each organization instead of hunting for more perfect names.

Count conversations before you count meetings. I would rather a team set its goal as conversations started than as calls booked. Agree up front what counts as a real meeting, so nobody celebrates a chat with the wrong person.

Fix the sending side first, then count; the setup order is in my cold email sending setup post.

Track the leading numbers first, in this order:

1. Connections accepted by people with buyer titles.
2. Replies and conversations started.
3. Meetings held with the person who signs.
4. Invitations onto shortlists or early feasibility work.
5. Fee proposals, then appointments.

Be honest about timing before you judge anything. Meetings can come in the first 30 days after launch, while the deals behind them may close 4 or more months later.

We recommend running for at least 3 months, because outbound needs time for feedback and changes, and getting it fully working takes about 6 months on average. A practice that judges outbound on month one is judging rows 1 and 2 of that list, nothing more.

What should an architecture firm do in the first 90 days?

Work through these in order; each step depends on the one before it. The weeks are a planning guide for a small practice doing this alongside live projects.

Weeks 1 and 2: decide who you are writing to

1. Pull the appointment letters from your last ten commercial jobs. Write the signer's title, the buyer type and the project type next to each.
2. Choose one buyer type and one region where you have a finished project to show. Park the rest.
3. Buy the sending domains and start the mailbox warm-up now, so the warm-up runs in parallel with the list work. Keep volume low until it is finished.

Weeks 3 and 4: build the list and the proof 4. Build the list of lookalikes: organizations matching your best past clients, within reach of your office, with two or three real buyers at each. 5. Verify every email address before sending. I keep bounces under 0.5%. 6. Fix what the buyer will audit: project pages with outcomes, and principals' LinkedIn profiles that say what the firm does and for whom. 7. Write one proof-led message track around a single comparable project, in the shape of the sample above.

Month 2: launch 8. Send LinkedIn connection requests first and email behind them, then test openings and proof points against each other, because the more you test, the sooner one wins.

Month 3: review 9. Review against the leading numbers at the end of each month, and keep going through month three before deciding anything about revenue. Count the recommended 3 months from launch, so treat these 90 days as the start of the run.

If you do one thing this week, do step 1. The signatures on those letters are your first target list.

If you run an architecture practice and want to check your list of past clients before your first message goes out, book a call and bring the letters you signed.