In an industry long governed by "we've always done it this way," Chris Martinez saw opportunity where others saw convention.
As Director of Marketing at KW Landscape Architects, Chris faced a challenge familiar in the Architecture, Engineering, and Construction (AEC) space: his firm had 35 years of exceptional work, new leadership ready to compete nationally, and a portfolio worthy of prestigious projects, but no way to present themselves that matched their ambition.
The AEC industry has historically leaned on tradition: printed proposals, static PDFs, and rigid PowerPoint presentations. For an industry built on relationships, Chris saw the irony.
Traditional tools weren't cutting it. PDFs disappeared into inboxes with no engagement tracking, printed materials were expensive to produce and update, and PowerPoint turned dynamic conversations into one-way presentations where questions waited until the end (if they were asked at all!).
Chris began searching for something different. "I was googling all kinds of stuff, and I came across Tiled. I told our team, I think I have a solution here."
Chris assembled a focused initiative team from across the organization. "We have a graphic designer on staff who did magazine layouts before joining us, so her editorial layout, her eye for spacing and typography is amazing," Chris explains. "We had an in-house photographer, videographer who had his own creative agency before. And then we have a storyteller on our team who's really a great writer."
The team started experimenting with Tiled in late 2024, committed to full implementation at the start of 2025, and within months had transformed their client experience strategy:
"The analytics have been really helpful for us to see what's working, what projects clients are caring about more. I can see every click, the engagement, the heat maps. It's allowed me to be a lot more effective."
For KW's leadership, the transformation went beyond tactical improvements. "Integrating this platform has transformed how we present to both existing and potential clients," reflects Darin Weinheimer, PLA, Founding Partner, and Wesley Salazar, PLA, Partner. "What I love most is the ability to seamlessly jump between sections to match the natural flow of our conversations during presentations. It's become an integral tool in our business development process, setting us apart in the industry and reinforcing our progressive, design-first mentality."
By August 2025, the Society for Marketing Professional Services (SMPS), a national organization with over 7,400 members across the AEC industry, named KW the 2025 SMPS Marketing Innovation Firm of the Year. The firm's use of Tiled technology was specifically cited in the award submission as a contributing factor to their innovative approach.
Perhaps more telling was the peer response. Architecture firms KW had collaborated with for over 20 years, firms with marketing teams three to four times their size, began requesting meetings to understand their approach.
“Owners from two firms came to our owner and said, I want your team to sit with my team and download us on what the heck y'all are doing, because it's working, and it's impressive," Chris shares. "Y'all are doing things that firms five times your size are not doing.”
Client feedback shifted from polite acknowledgment to genuine curiosity: "The selling point for us has been when clients come to us and say we've never seen anything like this. How did you do this?"
Within twelve months of serious implementation, KW secured a series of high-profile projects that signaled a fundamental shift in their competitive positioning: major projects in Houston including a residential tower for a world-renowned luxury hospitality brand and a downtown office-to-hotel conversion, as well as a high-end hotel project in Pennsylvania, representing meaningful geographic expansion beyond their traditional Texas markets.
"We're competing against nationally known landscape architects, and we're swinging with them," Chris says. "The feedback has always been, you were right there with them. The presentation was right there with them, if not better."
But the individual project wins weren't the most important metric. What mattered was the caliber shift, the types of projects they were being considered for, the sophistication of the clients engaging with them, and the national scope of opportunities emerging.
"What we've started realizing is the quality of projects we're winning. The fees we're charging are right in line. We're getting out of our league, which is what we want. We want to be that upper echelon of landscape architecture, and we're at that point where that's happening. The caliber of projects we're winning has fundamentally changed, and continues to grow as we push out more microapps."
Chris's influence extends beyond KW. As an elected member of the SMPS Foundation Board of Trustees and planner of regional conferences attracting hundreds of AEC marketing professionals, he's helping shape how the industry approaches client experience and presentation innovation.
A recent SMPS Foundation research report identified client experience and team structure as critical competitive differentiators, themes that reflect broader changes as generational leadership transitions bring different expectations around digital sophistication and client engagement.
"One of the things that came out of this year's report was client experience," Chris notes. "The next step for the industry is helping people understand what is possible in this space and catch up to consumer products and other industries that are 20 years beyond where we're at."
That means deeper storytelling within projects, migrating to Figma to unlock more dynamic navigation and menu capabilities, and developing enhanced animation that brings their design work to life using Tiled’s platform. The firm is also expanding applications beyond client work, from employee onboarding to presentations for peer advisory group meetings.
One year into this transformation, Chris remains committed to pushing further: "I'm a believer in the platform. We're going to keep investing in this, and we're going to continually innovate with it, the best we can.”
For AEC firms watching from the sidelines as client expectations evolve, KW's story offers a blueprint: start with your creative strengths, build the infrastructure deliberately, and let the results speak for themselves. The conversation-led future of client engagement isn't coming, it's already here.
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