Grow Your Business: Identify your sales and marketing gaps

Editor’s Note: This is the first installment in a series of articles intended to help metal fabricators manage their commercial engines and grow their businesses.

Shouldn’t developing great products and providing great service be enough to retain and attract customers? Well, it often is enough to retain customers, but not enough to attract them.

Attracting new customers requires focusing on the commercial side of the business, a focus that doesn’t come naturally to some otherwise skilled manufacturing leaders. After all, they are dealing with all the complexities that come with designing, sourcing, and producing products. The result? Manufacturing companies consistently underspend on marketing and sales.

To make matters worse, when manufacturers decide to increase staff and allocate funds to the commercial side of their business, the rapid rate of change in the world of marketing makes it hard to know what to do. Search the web for the latest marketing trends and you can quickly become overwhelmed. How has Google changed its search algorithms, and how do I adjust my website search engine optimization (SEO) to match? What is machine learning; is it different from artificial intelligence and how can it possibly help me? What’s “remarketing”; isn’t once enough? Will I get a return on investment if I add marketing automation software to improve lead nurturing, and will it work seamlessly with my customer relationship management system?

Many of you are left asking, “Where do we start?”

Building Your Skyscraper on a Strong Foundation

The answer often is simply to start with the fundamentals. Don’t buy the latest software, launch into a new market, or hire a lead-generation company until you have taken a step back and objectively analyzed your commercial engine (everything from generating leads through earning customer loyalty) to identify what’s working and what needs some work. You have limited resources and funds, so be sure you’re employing measures that will deliver the fastest ROI.

To assess your commercial engine, evaluate your company performance in 10 key areas shown to have significant impact:

1. Finding your best end markets
2. Uncovering the customer’s voice
3. Creating great messaging
4. Generating more leads
5. Nurturing your existing leads
6. Building a great sales team
7. Creating customer loyalty
8. Rightsizing the marketing budget
9. Making your current offerings more attractive
10. Hitting your profit goals

If you can obtain an accurate and realistic assessment of your company’s performance in these 10 areas, you will be able to zero in on your biggest weaknesses and avoid pouring limited funds and resources into improvement projects that deliver less-than-optimal benefits.

The topics are not about techniques or technology. They are about fundamental performance. Solid performance in these areas results in a healthy commercial engine and a financially strong company. You can employ technology as needed, but only as a means of improving the area you’ve identified as a weakness.

Assessing Your Commercial Engine

There are several ways to assess your commercial engine on these 10 topics. One is to gather your team, discuss your performance in each area, and prioritize them from weakest to strongest performance. This approach has drawbacks, the most significant being the possibility that the loudest or highest-ranking voice might dominate.

Another approach is to bring in outside resources to conduct an analysis, but you often find they will regurgitate what you already know (or worse, side with the opinions of the one cutting the check).

Another fast and effective way to find and fix what ails your commercial engine is to take the Business Health Checkup. This online questionnaire allows you to perform the checkup yourself. It takes about three minutes to complete, is free, and requires no commitment.

The series of simple questions are merged together to provide a rating of the 10 key areas, ultimately delivering a priority ranking from weaknesses to strengths. The more people in your company who take the checkup, the more accurate the results and the stronger the buy-in regarding the results. Responses can be left anonymously, if desired.

The average number of people per company who take the checkup is four, but dozens can take it. In a perfect scenario, at least a manager in sales, marketing, service, and a senior leader such as president or CEO would take the checkup. With these four functions involved, you should get high-quality results.

If possible, involve other staff who are familiar with the customers and the inner workings of your company, such as product managers, salespeople, product engineers, and service staff.

Advantages of the Self-Assessment

Whether you conduct the analysis on these 10 topics through internal meetings, bringing in consultants, or employing the online business health checkup, you will gain many benefits by taking a step back and analyzing your commercial engine before launching improvement initiatives.

Too often manufacturing companies address issues based on recent incidents. “Fix this problem right away” is heard from the president’s office. When you and your team pause to assess your entire commercial engine before jumping into action, you have an opportunity to work on the problems that will deliver the best ROI, not just the problems that are the most visible at the moment.

In addition, by including a cross section of peers and leaders, you benefit in two ways. You gain wisdom and insight through many perspectives (all of us are smarter than one of us), and you build alignment that focuses organizational energy (a necessary ingredient when it comes time to execute solutions).

Interpreting Results – An Example

A manufacturing company with revenue of $100 million per year completed its self-assessment. The vice president of sales, CEO, service manager, product manager, an experienced salesperson, and the vice president of marketing all were involved.

Although a few topics produced disparate opinions, there was enough consistency that the team, including the CEO, felt the final result was a fair representation of current company performance. Here are the company’s assessment results shown in priority, with the weakest areas first (Figure 1).

The assessment indicates that the company has a strong sales team and has identified its best end markets (the two topics at the bottom of the priority list). On the other hand, nurturing existing leads (at the top of the priority list) is its No. 1 weakness, followed by generating more leads, uncovering the voice of the customer, and creating great messaging.

Should this company launch an initiative to improve its top problem – lead nurturing? Should it purchase a subscription to marketing automation software that links to its CRM?

It’s tempting just to dive right in. After all, marketing automation software will track which potential customers are visiting its website, track what content they consume, and automatically send out nurturing content that aligns with their interests. In addition to implementing marketing automation software, should the company launch new lead-generation campaigns to address the No. 2 weakness?

No, not yet.

Before addressing lead nurturing or lead generation, the company needs to ensure that it has a strong marketing foundation. Its No. 3 weakness was uncovering the voice of the customer (VOC), and No. 4 was creating great messaging. These two areas must be addressed first, before addressing lead nurturing or lead generation.

This manufacturer should focus on conducting VOC research to uncover customer needs and then use that information to create compelling messages that resonate with the market. With this work completed, it is then ready to make changes and employ technology to generate more sales with lead nurturing and lead generation.

So, this manufacturer did not follow exactly the same sequence determined by the self-assessment. The top four issues were reordered to ensure the completion of foundational items first.

The fact is, reordering is common. In most cases, it is necessary to adjust the priority list a bit to ensure prerequisites are covered, thereby enabling effective improvement of top issues.

What Comes Next?

After you’ve obtained the results for your company, it’s time to get to work improving your areas of weakness. Your prioritized results will put you in a position to move ahead with confidence, knowing you’re working on issues that will bring top ROI and that your team is aligned.

Subsequent articles in this series will offer real-world answers to the 10 areas affecting manufacturers’ commercial performance. All can be completed in weeks or months, not quarters or years.