Is your selling process failing? Are you in a situation where virtually all aspects of your company operations are optimized and running smoothly except your selling process? Do you believe that if you could get your selling process straightened out that you could really grow your company?
When working with manufacturing CEOs and other senior manufacturing executives during my industrial marketing consulting engagements I encounter innumerable challenges. One area in particular seems to recur with alarming frequency. A significant percentage of manufacturing executives tell me that their products are great, their pricing is spot on, their distribution channels are optimized, and they are able to create effective promotions.
They often mention that the single biggest deterrent to growth is the inability of their sales force to convert sales leads into new customers or to get current customers to sign on the dotted line.
So what to do? Well the following process will help.
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Industrial marketing success can be an elusive outcome for many manufacturing companies. While industrial marketing is a wide-ranging subject, there are some fundamental steps you can follow that will provide you with the signposts that lead to clear direction in your decision-making. For purposes of this post let’s assume we are not in the realm of business strategy, product, price, or place but are considering a promotion.
A question I am often asked by my industrial marketing consulting clients is how to minimize the risk in rolling out a promotion. While there is no “one size fits all” answer to minimizing risk, by following these five simple steps you will greatly increase the odds of your next promotion resulting in an industrial marketing success for your company.
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Industrial marketing is viewed by many as having many shades of grey. So often, what seems to be straightforward is actually quite complicated. Paradoxically, what seems to be complicated is actually quite simple. Confused yet? Well actually it’s all pretty clear when you even give it some passing thought. Well somewhat clear. Well, anyway.
I would like to provide you with an example of a very simple industrial marketing practice that is unnecessarily complicated by many manufacturing companies. This example will illustrate that many of the grey areas found within industrial marketing are actually quite clear. What you will discover is that much of the “black art” of industrial marketing is not all that mysterious at all.
So, away we go.
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Industrial marketing professionals and manufacturing executives all know the critical importance of content-rich websites. What they may not know is that an ever-increasing percentage of web users are accessing the web on their mobile devices, particularly smartphones. The question each manufacturing executive needs to ask is what are these mobile web users seeing when they view your website on their phones?
If you really want to be cutting-edge in terms of branding your company and maximizing the effectiveness of your industrial marketing, you must provide these mobile web users with a mobile website.
So what is a mobile website?
A mobile website is a website that is designed to look good and operate efficiently on a mobile device. Ideally, a mobile website will provide an excellent user experience when it is viewed on a smartphone or other mobile device. Generally speaking, an effective mobile website will offer a subset of critical pages that provide mobile web users with key information about the company (although some mobile websites are quite extensive). Lastly, a mobile website should be fast-loading and simple to navigate.
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Industrial marketing would be far simpler if there was no need to deal with those pesky and persistent competitors. Imagine a world filled with manufacturing companies, each with their own unique and unassailable monopolies. There would be no need for any kind of competitive advantage based on superior performance. There would be no need to offer anything that was valuable or even remotely unique to your marketplace.
In this idealized world manufacturing executives could idle their time away, count their cash, and expand their equity in an unending dizzying dance of delightful dollars, or enchanting Euros, or, well you get the picture.
Unfortunately we all must deal with competition. In order to do so we need tactics that derive from our competitive strategy. But that leads to the challenge of understanding competitive strategy.
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