4 Sales Tools Manufacturers Can Use to Crush Their Quotas

Posted on February 9, 2021 in Industrial & Manufacturing

The Best Tools Manufacturers Need to Close More Business

It’s no secret that Industrial / Manufacturing brands have had a rough go of it in 2020. Now more than ever, manufacturers need lead gen and sales funnels that are firing on all cylinders. Sales are down for the vast majority of companies and brands are struggling to find stability on the sales side. 

The importance of manufacturing to the US economy can’t be underestimated. Every dollar spent in manufacturing adds roughly $2.75 to the economy through retailing, transportation, and business services. Manufacturing is part of the lifeblood that drives US-based businesses and our economy. 

The industrial and manufacturing industries have been hit hard – but there is hope for your sales teams.

Now is a terrific time for companies to transition away from outdated lead generation models. There’s never been a better opportunity to start moving prospects through a predictable, scalable, and modern process.

It’s really about transitioning your mindset about how leads are being generated and how your sales teams close those leads. The goal should always be to attract qualified leads, period. 

Even with the best sales process in the world, it won’t help you if the leads aren’t a great fit for your company. You can nurture a bad lead, but should you? The answer is always no. 

Here are a few tools that you should be using to produce better leads, shorten your sales cycle, and close more business. 

 

Website

Your website is the hub for all of your marketing efforts and sales activities. It’s traditionally your best option for lead generation in the digital age. It should be responsive, engaging, and interactive. Your website should showcase what you do, how you do it, and who you do it for. It’s that simple. 

Design and Messaging

Getting prospects to quickly understand who you are and the types of problems that you can solve for them is challenging. It’s crucial to have the right messaging and design on your website to help convert prospects into leads. 

Once a prospect lands on your website, it should be easy for them to understand what your full capabilities are. Your website needs to build credibility and showcase who you have worked within the past. This is all about building brand awareness and demonstrating that you have the expertise and capabilities to solve challenges for the client.

SEO (Search Engine Optimization)

Your website doesn’t rank well on its own. It needs help from SEO. By performing the right ongoing SEO tactics and strategies, the right traffic can be driven to your site. Read more about SEO for manufacturers here.

So if a prospect is searching for EV (Electric Vehicle) prototyping and you do that, it makes it easier for them to find you and engage with your team. It’s obviously more complicated than that, but that’s a great example of how it works at a high level. 

Once you have the website set up properly, there are a ton of activities that your team should be doing to assist in driving the right kinds of prospects to your sales funnels. Besides SEO, having a steady stream of great content can draw in more traffic, showcase your capabilities, and drive leads to sales.

 

Content

Case Studies

Well-crafted case studies are amazing at nurturing a potential lead in the funnel (read more about that here). They showcase your capabilities in real-world applications with real results. It’s easy for a prospect that may be in a similar vertical or situation to relate to the story about how you helped someone just like them. That resonates with a lead and helps them see the true value of what you may offer them. 

Blogging

Blogging is a great way to showcase your knowledge base and demonstrate that you are an authority in your space. If your company specializes in hydraulic stamping and you have tons of value-added information and examples to talk about that process, blogging is a great way for you to tell that story. 

A huge added benefit is that it also helps drive prospects to your website and your sales teams to engage with. It’s all about pulling in the right kinds of traffic to your website and sales teams. 

Video Content

Video is the simplest way to show what you do and who you do it for. You can say more in a 60-second video than in 20 pages of content. With video, you can show the size of your facility, your capabilities, and your team easily. Plus, you can do separate video series on some of the different services that you offer to reach more specific audiences. So if you want to capitalize more on your ability to do more EV prototyping, then you can do a video series just on that and how you can help customers all the way through full-body assembly. 

Video is so versatile in telling different aspects of your business that the value add is huge to prospects. It can help bring in new customers, help with recruiting better talent, help companies stand shoulder-to-shoulder with larger competitors, and so much more. 

Once you have a responsive website with great messaging, SEO, and dynamic content that drives the right kinds of leads to your sales funnel, It’s time to talk about increasing your closing rate. 

 

Sales Collateral

Does your sales team have sales collateral that matches everything else that you’re doing? Are they outdated or do they have the same look and feel of your website and videos? It’s important to have solid brand cohesion across your entire company. 

Developing the right sales collateral can have a huge impact on closing new business. Making sure that your sales brochures, pitch decks, sales sheets, shock and awe package all have the same look and feel as your website and trade show collateral is crucial. Once you have the right prospect in your funnel, their experience should be seamless through the close and always speak to solving their business challenges. 

 

CRM (Customer Relationship Management)

Having a great CRM is crucial to increasing your opportunities to close more business. To better optimize your sales team’s time and efforts, most quality CRM’s feature some level of automation. Just like anything else, setting your CRM will take time, and consistently working to improve it will increase your results. 

Once the right leads are in your sales funnel, cultivating those leads should be simple. The right CRM should deliver prospect emails, call reminders, appointment setting, etc. This is a massive time saver for your sales teams and helps ensure that nothing falls through the cracks. 

When used correctly, your CRM will:

• Automate much of your prospect outreach
• Make for simple follow-up
• Create a measurable sales funnel system 

Overall, it’s about all of these tools working together for your sales teams to grow your new business development. You have to remember that most companies, especially companies in the industrial and manufacturing space, are unique and some of these tools will work better than others, but it’s about the consistency of utilizing these tools and working to improve the efficiency to create the best sales pipeline possible. 

These are just some of the tools that will help you on your road to sales success, but there are more. The single most important thing is to create an overall strategy that ties all of these activities together. With the right strategy, these tactics can work together to generate a much larger momentum shift than they would be siloed away. 

Creating the right marketing strategy that delivers quality leads to your sales team is more important now than ever. 

If you need help or have questions about how to get started, contact us today through our website at https://drivecreativeagency.com/ or call us today at (248) 579-9972.