Revitalizing Sales for Manufacturers

I had a conversation the other day with a gentleman who is on the executive team at a manufacturing company with five production facilities that all support 4 major customers. He joined the team a few years ago, and was shocked to find out they have had one sales guy who has pulled down commission checks in the tens of thousands per month for the past 10 years, all from those same 4 customers. 

Something's horribly wrong with this picture. I asked him a handful of questions after learning this, and I thought I would share parts of our conversation with those of you in the manufacturing space to see how many of these you're wrestling with yourself. 

Does that sales guy commission fall off after a period of time? 

His answer was no. That sales guy was paid the same commission for every order that came through. All he had to do to make a fat commission check was to make sure he kept his customers and that they came back and ordered again and again.  

That's not necessarily the wrong behavior to incentivize. You obviously want to make sure that your sales and customer support teams are aligned with the goal of keeping every customer you have and losing none of them to a competitor. But it's not a very complete way to incentivize sales. 

Consider revamping the commission structure to incentivize sales to be hunting new, unique customers. Sure, they still need commission for maintaining customer loyalty, but perhaps dropping the percentage after two years and again after five years will keep the sales team from resting on their laurels too long. 

What happens if one of those customer leaves? 

If this organization lost one of their four major customers, they would have to shut down at least one, if not two of their 5 production facilities, including lay-offs, unemployment, and thousands in lost production. 

The idea that four people in the world hold the employment of how many hundreds of people in their hands should be enough to keep any executive awake at night. I went through a season with one company when one major customer left and took 40% of the revenue with them.  

The key issue here is diversification. Sure, you need whales, and your sales team should be hunting whales. But you also need a whole bunch of trout just to keep the boat from tipping too far in one direction. Obviously, commission on these isn't quite as enticing as it is with whales, so get creative on how you incentivize your sales team to go find you a hundred small customers to balance out your 4 whales. 

Do you do secondary operations, direct to consumer, or through distribution? 

A little bit of all that, actually. Some of their facilities do secondary ops for other manufacturers, others manufacture consumer items that are sold through distribution and online through an eCommerce site. 

Obviously, this may be less the norm and more an exception, but let's dig into each of those a little bit. If you do secondary ops, you may consider conducting a market survey to get a better grasp of the scope of your prospect universe, the reasons they buy, and the triggers that would cause them to switch out members of their process. 

If you are among the few (and growing) number of manufacturers who are selling direct to consumer, eCommerce isn't slowing down. Look into selling on Amazon, or using a platform like Shopify or Magento to build your own eCommerce sire. Sales from eCommerce are easy to track, and through a proper application of data analytics and marketing, can quickly become predictable and repeating. 

Selling through wholesale and distribution is about putting your sales team in front of purchasing teams at the right stores. Again, a market survey may give you insight into the scope of the universe, their motivators and triggers. This data can be used to segment the market and leveraged to create strategic sales initiatives. 

What kind of content marketing or lead generation are you doing? 

Obviously, the gentleman's team does almost no content marketing, because they haven't properly prioritized new-customer acquisition.  

There's a lot of buzz lately around becoming a "thought leader" in your industry. Sure, this can be done by releasing some good white papers, publishing a study you conducted, or speaking at conferences and trade shows, but you can also become a thought leader by consistently pumping out high quality, relevant, engaging content. Even if it's only engaging to other members of whatever niche market you're in, let them all know that you know your stuff, and you're doing things better than the competition. 

Lead generation usually refers to creating enough interest that prospects are calling you to buy from you. It can also refer to phone-based sales, generating interest through personal connections with your prospect base. Either way, generating interest among your prospect base has to become a priority for growth and sustainability in an increasingly competitive manufacturing landscape. 

To sum it up, revitalizing thesales process for manufacturers involves lighting a fire under a complacent sales team, setting goals for a diversified client base, understanding your verticals and using data to approach each, and keeping yourselves at the forefront of your prospects minds.  

Should I Use A CRM For My Sales Process?

I've been asked this question by customers and prospects in just about every industry. From start-ups to 50-year old manufacturers, security companies to a dentist's office, folks are wondering how much attention they should pay to this term CRM. To be clear, I run in circles where things have always been done a certain way, so even many of them are just now starting to pick up on buzz words like CRM, inbound marketing, content, etc. 

For those who are wondering and too afraid to ask anyone, here's a few reasons why you should use a CRM in your sales/customer acquisition process: 

Keep track of your contacts 

If you're responsible for selling, you get into at least 1 sales-related conversation each day.  

That's 22 new contacts per month, and north of 250 new contacts every year. If you factor in one or two conferences and a handful of networking events, you've got to be pushing 500. That's a ton of business cards! You don't actually want to hang onto that many business cards do you? 

A CRM can help you keep track of all those contacts, where you met, what they do, and what you last talked about. 

Maintain a log of touch-points 

Most sales processes take multiple touches with the same person or company. Phone calls, emails, and face-to-face visits can all be tricky to maintain from memory with multiple prospective customers at once. 

Within each contact record of your CRM, you can log calls, emails, and meetings with each prospect, so you don't have to rely on memory to recall where you left off and when you last made contact. 

Set reminders for yourself 

Even the most basic CRMs have certain functionality, including the ability to set reminders for yourself to follow up with a specific contact on a specific date and time. 

Jotting down reminders in the margins of planners or on the side of your desk calendar only goes so far. With a CRM, you can be automatically reminded via email to circle back around to a certain contact days, months, even years later (hopefully your sales cycle is a bit shorter than that!).

It's free! 

Need I say more? Most major CRM names have some sort of freemium account. These accounts have no or very low monthly fees, so it doesn't have to become a major line item on your budget quite yet. 

Most freemium accounts come with basic functionality, and you have to be diligent about maintaining it without some of the more robust automation that accompanies more expensive accounts, but if you're just looking to start out, it does the trick! 

Personally, I use the Hubspot Sales CRM, but have also used Salesforce, Dynamic, and Pipedrive. It's free and has a relatively robust set of sales tools that I leverage. I would love to hear from others what CRMs they use, recommend, love, or hate. 

4 Reasons Why Pay-Per-Lead Pricing Doesn't Make Sense

Sales organizations often boast how great their pay-per-lead pricing is, or include some sort of money-back guarantee that ensures you get the right number of leads. 

Most of the conversations we get into here at Incept are with companies and organizations that have utilized similar services in the past and gotten burned. Here's why: 

They end up with too many leads 

After signing an agreement to pay $X.00 per lead, it usually becomes the goal of your lead generation partner to send you as many leads as they can. Sounds good, right?  

The question is are you ready for them? Chances are even if you include language about a maximum monthly budget, their goal is to send you as many leads as possible to reach that budget in as few hours as possible, in order to maximize their own profitability. So they race through your list and send you anything that doesn't sound like a hard, "No." 

Are you and your sales team ready to handle that quantity?  

They'll be bad 

As mentioned above, most pay-per-lead partners aren't as concerned about sending you high-quality leads as they are about sending you what are called 'billable' leads, meaning leads that fit into whatever broad definition of a 'lead' you agreed upon so that they can be included in your invoice. 

These leads will be less-qualified, less warm, and harder to convert to revenue. But you still end up paying for them! 

That gets old really quick… 

They distract from the ultimate goal 

When you get sick of paying for bad leads, it suddenly becomes a major priority to screen the leads you're receiving from your lead generation partner, in order to keep the money you already have in your pocket. 

Now you're distracted from your ultimate goal: putting more money in your pocket. That lead generation partner was supposed to help you do that and instead has become a distraction from that goal because they require too much oversight. 

You'll spend more in the long run

You'll spend more in the long run, combining the lead generation test with the overhead of hiring after it fails.

After you get fed up with managing this lead generation partner, you inevitably decide to do things internally. After all, if you have to manage someone, why not have them in your office where you can keep an eye on them 24/7? 

Now you're in the hole the money you were invoiced by the lead generation company, plus the overhead that goes into hiring and maintaining a new employee to do it internally, and you're kicking yourself for not just hiring internally for it in the first place. 

Then after 6 months of managing this new employee and covering the cost of their overhead, they may end up not working out, and you're back to where you started. It's really a brutal cycle. 

So what is the alternative to pay-per-lead pricing? Check out this post on fractional inside sales and learn why a dedicated sales representative makes the most sense. 

RECAP: Marketing For Manufacturers

On October 11th and 12th, we brought together a group manufacturers who were interested in obtaining more quality leads using digital and inbound marketing and sales tactics in order to grow their businesses. Between the two days, more than 70 local manufacturers came together to learn and network with industry experts.

Incept and The Bonanno Group teamed up to present this conference – Marketing for Manufacturers – to manufacturing companies located in the Cleveland and Pittsburgh areas.  Hubspot and Google were also invited to speak about the changing digital landscape and what impact that has for manufacturers in the future. 

Below is a short summary of each session at Marketing for Manufacturers:

The Bonanno Group

Gene Bonanno, Owner of The Bonanno Group, shared the importance of defining business goals and how to best leverage the internet to achieve them. The session hit of the 5 important components to a Comprehensive Marketing Strategy, including:

1. Identify Your Business Goals
2. Know Your Audience
3. Benchmark 
4. Set In Stone
5. Analyze Your Results

Hubspot

Dan Vivian, Principal Account Executive at Hubspot, shared the importance of 'smarketing,' a strong sales and marketing relationship, and how Hubspot's software tool can aid in improving that relationship. Dan shared a live demonstration of the Hubspot software with attendees and showed them a few of the best tools manufacturing companies should be using to grow their businesses.

Incept

Sam Falletta, CEO of Incept, hosted two different sessions - a panel discussion in Cleveland and a workshop in Pittsburgh. Both sessions were geared towards helping manufacturers determine where they are on the outbound to inbound spectrum and how to make incremental improvements in the sales and marketing on that spectrum.  

Panelists from several local manufacturing companies joined Sam on stage in Cleveland and had a lot of great personal anecdotes to share. Panelists included:

• Jack Moore, President/CEO of West Roofing Systems, Inc.
• Allison Grealis, Vice President Membership & Association Services of Precision Metalforming Association
• Tony Mazzella, CEO of Mazzella Companies

Google

Richard Rondon, Account Development Manager, and PJ Vilsaint, Account Strategist at Google, shared some of the coolest Google tools that can help manufacturers engage their target audience. From micro-moments to Youtube, and changing search trends to GDN, there are so many ways that manufacturers can be using these digital tools to grow their business.

While every company struggles with developing and implementing a successful marketing strategy, it can be especially hard for manufacturers, and we heard a lot of that over the two days in Cleveland and Pittsburgh. We hope that this group of resources (session speakers and attendees) will help improve the overall growth of manufacturing businesses in the rust belt.

Want to stay in the loop and get updates for upcoming Marketing for Manufacturer events? Stay connected with us at https://www.marketingformanufacturers.us/. 

Why A Variable Cost Monthly Subscription Makes The Most Sense For Your Lead Generation Partner

Are you among the dozens of companies that have been burned by pay-per-lead lead generation companies?  Here are a few reasons to consider asking your next inside sales partner for a fractional subscription based inside sales representative: 

Higher quality leads 

Fractional inside sales representatives are generally compensated to some degree or another based on client retention. What this means for you is that they ultimately are responsible for making sure you are thrilled with the quality of leads being sent over. Unlike most lead-generation firms, a fractional inside sales representative is more concerned about meeting your business growth objectives, not just your monthly maximum budget. 

Since they want you to be thrilled, the sales rep ends up sending over only the highest quality leads, and doesn't send over garbage for the sake of billing for an extra lead. Higher quality leads mean higher revenue opportunity for you. 

Direct access 

You have direct access to your fractional inside sales representative. No need to go through an account manager, to a call center supervisor, to the lead-gen team; you can call or email your sales rep directly, as often as needed, in order to follow-up on lead status, make course corrections, script adjustments, or just to say "Hello!" 

Fractional monthly flexibility 

One of the reasons pay-per-lead doesn't work is that you often end up with more leads than your sales team can manage, coupled with the fact that they're not as high of quality as you'd prefer, which means they take more time and energy to close. 

With a fractional inside sales representative, you have the flexibility to adjust your monthly dedicated time to match your current business needs. If you and your team are swamped nurturing, closing, and support last month's leads, you can back you 1/2 FTE fractional sales rep down to a 1/4 FTE for a month until those new customers stabilize.  

No overhead 

Another pitfall of pay-per-lead pricing is that it usually culminates with firing the lead generation partner and hiring internally anyway, meaning you spent money on bad leads, and still ended up having to invest in the overhead of hiring. 

With a fractional inside sales representative, you get all the advantages of having a great employee without having to cover any benefits, equipment costs, or payroll. The overhead and management costs add up pretty quickly with an internal hire, but with a fractional sales rep, you know exactly what your monthly cost will be. You get predictability without having to sacrifice quality or lower your standards.