Eric Willis follows my blog and is a manufacturer of fasteners in the UK. Eric works as a distribution manager at EJOT UK providing high tension custom fasteners to the aerospace and defense market. EJOT’s global distribution network makes it one of the largest fastener suppliers based in Europe.

He’d like to share his insights on how to stay ahead of the game.

How to Stay Ahead of the Game in the Fastener World

The volatile and unpredictable economy we live in today has wreaked havoc not only for consumers but also for businesses and offices in all markets and industries. The global recession has brought about certain impacts and effects that have rattled businesses to their knees and has made business stability seem like an utter dream.

In the fastener manufacturing market, the level of competition is high and continues to escalate in rampant proportions. It looks as if new manufacturers and suppliers of fasteners are established every day. Unfortunately, the rates of consumers and prospective buyers looking for these materials and supplies have not significantly increased throughout the course of time. This has made the level of competition fiercer than ever.

So what do you do? In the mind of a true businessman, staying ahead of competitors are of paramount concern, one that should be above all else in your list of priorities as a business executive or owner. Staying ahead of the game in the world of fastener manufacturing and distribution is something one cannot simply plan overnight even for the versed and experienced owner or director. To stay ahead and ensure that traffic flows come your way, meticulously planning and perfectly executing the plan is of key essence, and can make or break your business.

For people who know little or have no familiarity or knowledge at all regarding the market or industry of manufacturing fasteners, you won’t likely think of the difficulty owners face when competing with each other. Making sure your business is always competitively operating in multinational markets is also very difficult with lots of variables outside of your control. With the ubiquity of outsourcing and the access of global resources in today’s modern day and age, the manufacturing world is actually in a consistent struggle with rivals.

Here are 3 tips and guidelines on how you can add a competitive edge on your game in the vast and “dog-eat-dog” world of manufacturing, in this case manufacturing of fasteners.

First, lower the expenses of your business. In a simpler and more comprehensible context, if you can make the fasteners while consuming fewer funds for the same quality and quantity as compared with rivals, you’ll be able to provide more savings and discounts to your consumers and tilt the game to your advantage. Several of the most effective means of lowering expenditures involve tactics like outsourced manufacturing of the product, correctly forecasting to allow demand-based manufacturing, eliminating all delays in prefabricated parts and creating shared utilities. When provided with respective applicability to your facility, these techniques may yield a substantial benefit over competitors who opt not to play strategically.

Secondly, understand the standards and demands of your clients. Avoid leaving any worries or doubts in your customer’s mind when they opt to work with you in the future. Meet your client’s needs and demands by rendering them with the fastener supplies they need quicker and cheaper as compared with rivals.

Thirdly, find or create a unique selling point. These could be large brand awareness campaigns through supplying high-profile events such as F1 cars, Prototype Aeroplanes or Extreme engineering designs. Brand awareness in a saturated market can be the difference between stagnated growth and true development of a business.

I’ve always been a big supporter of promoting manufacturing and tradesmen jobs. I recently came across a post from a client of ours, PMPA (Precision Machined Products Association). Miles Free, their Director of Industry Research and Technology, writes their blog, Speaking of Precision and I wanted to share his post.

The reality is you can’t be all things to all people. Pick a side, draw a line in the sand. Your company will be better for it.

Content marketing over the last few years has become the big buzz word and is often associated with social media. While it can be used to foster social media relationships, content marketing goes way beyond that. As a matter of a fact, it defines who you are and what you stand for.

Years ago you had limited ways to communicate your value proposition, not so today. Today specialists not generalists (no matter what field) are the preferred choice when folks are looking for something and they have a multitude of ways to get information about your company. And people like to be associated with leaders.

Let me ask you a question. If you think this assumption is correct, what do you or your company stand for? Have you chosen a niche? Are you considered the leading expert in it? If not, you’d better do it soon or you may not be around in 10 years. So how are you going to define and get the word out about your specialty? Content marketing.

By creating good content and sharing it, you can establish yourself as the thought leader in your niche. You can attract and retain customers by creating and curating valuable and compelling content on a consistent basis.

Ten years ago before anyone heard of social media, companies still stood for something. I believe you’ve heard of IBM or Apple? You knew one was known for main frames and the other for PCs. Today when you think of either brand, what do you think of…computers or other things? IBM may still make main frames, but they got their butt kicked in PCs and are known more now for their consulting services. Apple was defined by the PC, but not today. When you think of Apple, you think phone, tablet and soon TV.

The point is, both of these companies reinvented themselves and used content marketing to help spread the word in different ways. IBM took advantage of both traditional and social media methods to communicate their position. Apple, on the other hand, didn’t rely on social media directly, but worked the social media system by getting great content out to bloggers and others on the social network to create the buzz for them.

What are you doing to spread the word? Are you using content marketing?

I’d like to hear your thoughts.

Here’s a few other posts you might find interesting:

How Are You Managing Your Content Marketing?

Four B-to-B Marketing Efforts That Can Improve Your Results

Several years ago, marketing would generate leads for various sources and pass them onto sales for follow-up. Then one day someone from the C suite asked how much new business are we getting from our promotional efforts? Marketing said we developed X amount of leads and Sales would say they were all crap. Obviously the finger-pointing wasn’t going to solve the question of how much new business are we getting.

Thus started the process of lead management, qualification, nurturing and at some point turning it over to sales with a little more history behind the leads than there were several years ago. Russ Hill from Ultimate Leads calls it the “Transition Zone.” It is the place in time where marketing hands off the lead they so carefully nurtured to sales to close the loop. But in order to do it successfully, you must have a process  that everyone is in tune with, and sales needs to make sure to keep info on that lead current in your lead database so we know when a new customer has arrived, from where and what they bought.

A good follow-up marketing system should have three attributes:
1. It should be systematic.
2. It should generate consistent, predictable results.
3. It should require minimal physical interaction to make it run.

What are you doing to ensure you’re getting the most out of your leads?

If you like this post, you might want to read:

Where Are Your New Business Prospects in the Selling Cycle?

How Many Calls Does it Take to Make a Sale?

Does everyone within your organization understand your different stages in the selling cycle? Most sales funnels were set up for developing traditional leads. A question you must ask yourself is whether social media leads fit into your existing process and if so where? As a rule, social media leads take longer to convert because they are engaging  you earlier in the process.

Nurturing social leads needs to be handled differently.This will include decision-making content designed to answer questions, overcome objections and provide opportunities that arise during the purchasing process.

I recently read a good post by Nichole Kelly in Social Media Examiner, 5 Tips for Moving Social Media Leads Into the Sales Funnel that I thought might be of interest to you. She makes useful points from understanding the sales funnel to optimizing the path to conversion and explains why social media leads need to be nurtured differently.

What do you think? Have you successfully converted social media fans and followers into revenue? Are you still trying to figure out how to do this?

In theory, it’s a place where manufacturers and their distribution counterparts come together via a format of speed dating where the manufacturer requests meetings with distributors (both existing customers and potentials). Like anything else, there are no shows for appointments. The booth program is a two-day affair and while the traffic was light on the first day, it was almost non-existent the second day.

If I was a distributor and could talk to as many suppliers as I could in a period of a few days, I would think they would want to take advantage of it. The manufacturers, as in most associations, foot the bills. They have to bring in product, booths and their associated expenses. What’s most disturbing is that the ratio of manufacturers to distributors is probably 10 to 1.

I don’t have the answer and I’m not trying to pick on ISA. STAFDA, NAED, NAHAD and many more face the same dilemma. There’s got to be a better way in a shorter period of time to make the most out of these meetings. Back in the day, these meetings were a place to showcase new products and programs, but with internet and all the other tools we have, I would hope at least your current customers would know about anything new.

I do recall that the fall meetings in Chicago for a day and a half at the airport were both efficient and successful. I believe it was due in part because the distributors were in the booth and you did your speed dating, but only the roles were reversed. NAED does this at their regional meetings, and as far as I can tell, the manufacturers like the format.

Any suggestions on how we can get these distributor/supplier get togethers to be better for all parties involved?

If you’re doing a blog or thinking about starting one, make sure you identify the objectives and expectations at the onset.

Our objective when starting the blog was to talk to those interested in reaching the professional tradesmen and ways you could do that. We also wanted to help educate our target audience (manufacturers) on ways they could integrate social media tools into their marketing mix since most of them were very traditional on how they approach things and didn’t like change.

I can remember back in the mid 90s when websites were the big thing and how even back then manufacturers were the last group to come to the party. For those of you who have been around long enough, you will remember those days. Can you image a business today without a website?

To become a thought leader in marketing to the professional tradesmen was our primary goal. We knew that if folks like you (by the way, if you’re a regular, thanks for sticking around) got benefit out of my babblings, we would eventually connect and might even do some business.

We have established dialogs with several folks and have been fortunate to start doing business with several of them. It’s gratifying to be at a trade association meeting or shows and be introduced to people who know who we are because of the blog. And oh, by the way, we are getting business from our blog which was one of our other objectives.

If you do a blog,  make sure you have clear objectives and an audience that wants to learn more.

We all are facing the challenges of doing more things with sometimes fewer resources, so it stands to reason that what we do, do we want it to give us the best results. Where are you getting your leads and how are you qualifying them? I recently read an article by Dave Thomas on B2B Online Marketing that talks about the results of a recent nationwide survey from BtoB Magazine and Bizo that highlights marketers biggest challenges in 2012.

Among them were:

• Paid search came in as the second-ranked tool for marketing, followed by display advertising (35 percent);
• 60% of marketers claim their biggest challenge this year will be generating additional leads;
• 63% of marketers state that their marketing mix either falls short of sales demand or they are not entirely sure their mix is working;
• 56% note brand promotion as a major area of focus.

What I thought interesting was that their biggest challenge was that leads were falling short of sales demands. I guess does that mean that companies are forecasting growth and in order to attain it, they need more leads?

I guess the question I’d like to ask is are you experiencing these kinds of challenges, and if so, will you  share with the rest of us?