Consistent and scalable organic growth in this ‘e-world’ on a limited marketing & sales budget is a new challenge for all industrial manufacturing companies.
‘Online’ is now the biggest marketplace on earth!
The channels of communications have shifted over time for sure, however, the dictums of biology, i.e. the way a human brain operates, still hold true—Logic makes a person think but it’s the Emotions that makes a person act! It is these actions that, in time, enable unambiguous results!
We are firm believers in this principle and hence, we help our clients build a personalized relationship of trust followed with credibility by leveraging various off-the-shelf technology platforms.
Our team is uniquely equipped to help industrial companies and manufacturers grow. We help you land solid leads that turn into revenue-generating conversations. Customer growth in manufacturing shares some similarities with landing customers in any other niche such as the need to communicate purpose and show potential clients why your company is the solution to their needs. However, the manufacturing industry also deals with a unique set of circumstances other industries do not.
Your products are niche and lead generation for the complex sale must be focused on the specific type of person your product is intended for. When we get busy making leads, we focus on ways to add new customers in manufacturing niches with proven strategies that have worked time and time again.
We use a proven method of customer growth in manufacturing that focuses on finding solid leads while using the right content strategy. When it all comes together, we get the right message in front of the right person at the right time resulting in actionable leads that turn into solid customers.
Lead generation for the complex sale ideally produces potential clients who can be managed and monetized. Imagine your sales team speaking to leads that are ready to purchase your products. That’s what we can help provide. We focus on managing leads and keeping your company at the front of their mind. Then, over time, they’ll turn to you when they need a product or service you can deliver. This is how you add new customers in manufacturing.
Prospect Persona Development (Who are we talking to?) (Right Person)
It’s imperative we understand our target prospect else it’s garbage-in/garbage-out. Most times this involves us working in unison with both marketing & sales functions.
Marketing will typically rely on analytics to generate a proven ‘DNA’ based on a simple regression model that is based on disparate (but co-dependent) variables like past sales transactions (recency, frequency & average transaction size), life-time value, inventory turns, return rates, profit margin, etc. This exercise will yield an ideal Target Industry, Company Size, Job Function.
Sales, on the other hand, will have a clear perspective on the motivators for a prospect to switch current partners, typical objections faced and most importantly, the critical pain points for the prospect.
Content Strategy (What do we say to them?) (Right Message)
Most prospects usually enjoy a current supply chain partner when we approach them. Therefore, we need to tickle their fancy and draw on their curiosity to attract attention. This can be accomplished by capitalizing on the decision-making process of a human brain.
Contrary to common perception, the rational part of the human brain – the pre-frontal cortex, gets activated after the emotional part of the brain – the amygdala is triggered.
Once trust is established, we begin to serve the prospects with credibility-based content to help them rationalize the decision process. This is a perfect time to help define your identity using quantifiable metrics such as quality and quantity of products manufactured, typical return rates, etc.
Given the short attention span on the internet, it becomes imperative to find an equilibrium between what and how much is said to a prospect at any given touchpoint, i.e. identifying the ‘right message.’
Just like it is critical to know what to say to the prospect, it is just as important to identify the right vehicle (an appropriate marketing channel) to serve the information at the ‘right time and place’.
Marketing Infrastructure (How do we say it?) (Right time & place)
Any fruitful marketing and sales strategy inter-laces the ‘right message’ at the ‘right time and place’ for the ‘right person.’ Easier said than done, we admit.
There are plenty of marketing channels—Search Engine Optimization, Online Advertising, Social Media, Email Marketing, Direct Mail, Tele-verification and the list just goes on. In this day and age of immediate gratification and the attention span of a goldfish, it is vital to gauge the right marketing lever to pull at the right time else we lose the prospect for good.
Technology to the rescue! A Marketing Automation Platform is an integral foundation to a congruent marketing and sales strategy. These off-the-shelf platforms allow us to create and automate a personalized journey for each prospect depending on their level of interest and engagement which directly corelates to their specific buying cycle.
More importantly, the platform provides key insights and analytics that unambiguously quantify the overall effectiveness of the acquisition efforts. It is off-the-shelf platforms like these that allow us to boast about our accomplishments and hence, our tag line—Results … Period!
Typically, a high percentage of leads generated by Marketing don’t have an immediate need. Sales, ideally, would like to talk with prospects with an immediate need. The last thing we need is for these leads to fall through the cracks. Here’s where we would morph a typical marketing function to an inside-sales role. Again, technology to the rescue! Using an off-the-shelf marketing automation platform and a variety of marketing channels like Email, Tele, etc., we will maintain an on-going personalized relationship with the prospects to build trust and credibility. This allows you to stay top-of-mind until an opportunity arises.
On an on-going basis, we would gauge the quality of engagement throughout the life cycle of a lead to determine a ‘lead score’. This lead score would be an anchor to Marketing & Sales Alignment, i.e. when a lead stays with Marketing or gets forwarded to Sales. Thus, an automated yet personalized lead nurture program helps enhance the overall Return on Marketing Investments for a marketing team since it is quantifiable and scalable as needed.
It takes a lot of hard work, budget, time and resources for marketing to generate and nurture new leads. Key questions to monetize the leads generated are:
Again, technology to the rescue! Using an off-the-shelf technology platform like a marketing automation platform, we create marketing and sales alignment by configuring business rules on lead routing. Leads with a high lead score will get automatically routed to Sales along with all the intelligence collected during the marketing campaigns. This way Sales has a focused conversation based on areas of interest expressed by the prospect during the marketing campaigns, thus, picking up where marketing left off.
After Sales has an opportunity to qualify the leads, depending on the feedback, the leads could stay with Sales or might get re-routed to Marketing. This feedback is then used to further sharpen the criteria in the lead qualification process. It is this agile approach in incorporating the Sales feedback that builds trust for Marketing within the company. In summary, with this approach Sales is dealing with few leads but high quality leads which assures appropriate Sales attention to each one of them and optimizes their bandwidth allocation while Marketing maximizes the overall Return on Marketing Investment.
