It differs from generic ERP systems by tracking utilization, financials, and performance at the project level, which reflects how A&E firms manage work and profitability.

An AEC CRM is a customer relationship management platform built specifically for architecture, engineering, and construction firms — where firms win work by selling their reputation and past project experience rather than a standard product or service. Unlike horizontal CRMs such as Salesforce or HubSpot, an AEC CRM comes preconfigured for how project-based firms actually operate: tracking opportunities from an early rumor of work through pursuit, proposal, and win; managing teaming partners who may be a competitor on one pursuit and a partner on the next; and connecting project, personnel, and past-performance data to proposals. Generic CRMs typically require heavy customization to fit this workflow, and those customizations tend to break with updates. Unanet CRM is purpose-built for AEC, which is why it holds the largest market share among AEC firms that use a CRM. 

The most common reason AEC CRM initiatives fail is low user adoption — firms roll out a tool to the BD team, don’t change any underlying processes, and simply encourage everyone else to use it, which results in incomplete data and lost trust in the system. The most frequent complaint we hear is: “we had a CRM previously and adoption was really bad — nobody wanted to use it.” Successful adoption treats implementation as change management rather than a technology rollout: define a clear “why,” make required fields part of a standard workflow, and give users easy access points such as an Outlook plug-in, mobile app, and web app so updating records fits into their day. Ease of use matters because if a tool isn’t easy to enter notes and opportunities into, people won’t use it — and the resulting data is unreliable. 

Yes. A CRM built for AEC should connect to the ERP and accounting systems firms already use — including Deltek, Sage 100, Sage 300, Viewpoint, Procore, and Trimble Construction — so business development, finance, and executives work from shared, real-time data instead of siloed tools and multiple versions of the truth. A common frustration firms report is that custom-built integrations between a generic CRM and their ERP are “highly custom and very fragile,” making data hard to keep in sync. Because Unanet CRM shares a platform and data lake with Unanet’s ERP, project and contract data (such as updated contract values from change orders) flows between systems, which also means existing dashboards can be remapped rather than rebuilt.