Getting your masonry products specified for LEED projects isn’t rocket science. First of all, you need to manufacture a great masonry product. For example, if your CMU block is a cheap knock-off of a competitor’s product riddled with design deficiencies, filled with toxic substances, and assembled by underage children in a country ruled by a ruthless dictator, then you might want to rethink your plan. However, if you manufacture a great masonry product, there are simple steps you can take to improve your chances of product specification.

The Three Pillars of Masonry Product Specification

There are three main pillars of masonry product specification. These pillars are the foundation for nearly every building product to get specified with a few variations. The three pillars are education, documentation, and architectural specification visits. If your company is missing one of these three, than you are at a significant disadvantage. If your team integrates all three into your specification and outreach programs, you will expand your LEED project opportunities.

Education For LEED Professionals

Many large masonry product manufacturers already host online AIA courses or deliver AIA webinars. However, several masonry product manufacturers do not have a course registered with the GBCI for LEED professionals to obtain their mandatory education courses for their credential. There are over 200,000 LEED professionals and over 100,000 are required to have mandatory CE hours. This is a huge market for manufacturers.

How can masonry product manufacturers increase brand awareness? Brand awareness is the extent to which your product is recognized by architects, specifiers, contractors, and other design professionals. Brand awareness is one of the first steps for masonry product manufacturers as it affects the specification opportunities that are made when it comes to the phase of product selection.

Online courses registered for both AIA and GBCI CE hours offer a significant marketing advantage over traditional AIA-only courses. Masonry product manufacturers can discuss their products LEED contributions, sustainability attributes, and how they can solve design professional’s problems. Education equals specification. Out of sight is out of mind, and if your product is not in front of LEED professionals you have less of a chance getting specified on LEED projects.

Documentation For Specifiers

There has been a surge in AEC firms asking masonry product manufacturers for transparency documentation. The top three types of sustainability documentation include Health Product Declarations (HPDs), Environmental Product Declarations (EPDs), and Declare Labels. Manufacturers who possess all or some of these documents are more likely to be specified for LEED projects.

LEED v4 launched in 2013, yet it took many years for product manufacturers years to finally develop transparency documentation. Masonry product manufacturers would be well advised to develop at least HPDs to increase their specification opportunities. AEC firms such as Perkins + Will, HKS, and ZGF require documentation such as HPDs for specification. Surprisingly, many AEC firms are requesting HPDs for masonry products outside the building envelope which is quite unusual.

Another important document for getting masonry products specified on LEED projects, is a LEED data sheet, green sheet, credit sheet, etc. There is no uniform name for this document, but it basically lists your products LEED credit contributions. LEED documentation should be on a manufacturers website, easy to download, and current with LEED v4 and LEED v4.1 standards.

Architectural Specification Visits

The final pillar for getting masonry products specified on LEED projects is architectural specification visits. These visits are different than an AIA lunch and learn at the firm. Making the wrong type of marketing call or visit at the wrong time is a problem that uninformed building product representatives face. In addition to getting the timing of your visit right, you will need to learn to identify the decision makers in an AEC office, which varies primarily due to the size of the firm.

It can take time to gain a design professional’s trust. This is not a short-term effort; it can take years to work your way into a specifier’s or architect’s good graces, but once you do, you will be his/her unpaid consultant for years to come. The average building construction project requires several thousand product decisions. Some of these are easy, while others are much more difficult, requiring extensive research and coordination. The design professional is constantly inundated with new products from multiple manufacturers, each of them trying to set themselves apart from the competition. How and when you approach the Design Professional can make the difference.

A product specific meeting with a design professional should follow generally the same approach. An appointment should be set, a time slot of 30 minutes or so set aside, and documentation such as guide specs, LEED documentation, and samples provided. Visits during the design development phase or contract documents phase will prove useful. The design team needs to know how your product will help their LEED project.

“Getting the specification” is nothing more than getting the design professional to either write a project specification around your masonry product or add it to a list of approved manufacturers/products contained in a project specification. Product substitutions are a fact of life, so be ready to defend the use of your product. Many design professionals, owners, contractors, and other decision makers will be convinced to spend a bit more up front if their downside risk is reduced or eliminated.

What are your three pillars for product specification for LEED projects? How does your team increase your specification opportunities for green-building projects?