Sales are no longer about selling anymore, but about building trust and educating your customers. When it comes to manufacturing, without a solid foundation and a certain level of trust between two parties, it’s going to be difficult to increase sales.
In this comprehensive guide, we’re going to cover a wide range of strategies and techniques to help your manufacturing company generate more sales. First, we will take a look at the traditional approach to sales and marketing in the manufacturing industry, before introducing you to a modern and streamlined digital marketing strategy designed to educate potential customers about your services and products.
So, if you have a manufacturing company but are struggling to increase sales, double your profits and gain a good reputation online, get ready to learn the tricks of the trade!
Traditional sales practices for manufacturing companies
Traditionally, sales were made in-person or over the phone. Businesses relied on taking part in tradeshows to make connections with prospects, and would print product catalogs and pay to have them distributed to reach remote buyers. Communication was more difficult, and the process was generally inconvenient. Selling to customers outside of your region was also particularly difficult.
To take this a step further, some manufacturers would also advertise on billboards, in newspapers, and on TV. Such marketing activities would require a considerable amount of money to do, not to mention the time it would take to plan, prepare, and execute effectively.
However, the way that manufacturers and other B2B businesses approach sales has seen a massive digital transformation over the past year. The global spread of COVID-19 in early 2020 sent the world into a frenzy. Any in-person activities had to be moved online. According to a recent McKinsey research1, with COVID-19, 75% of buyers and sellers say they now prefer digital self-serve and remote human engagement over face-to-face interactions. For many B2B companies, many businesses were still conducted in-person, so they were forced to think on their toes and quickly adapt to the new circumstances.
9 ways to increase manufacturing sales
The key to sustaining and growing your manufacturing business comes down to increasing your sales. Fortunately, there are small tweaks you can make to your sales processes and general approaches to business that will yield great results.
Let’s take a look at 9 things that you can do to take your sales game to the next level.
1. Automating processes
Automating tasks and processes gives you the power to allot time and resources in a way that makes more sense. Some tasks that can be automated include lead generation, marketing, email blasts, ordering, invoicing, recurring payments, and pipeline management.
By automating these things, your sales team can spend more time and resources on fostering relationships with prospects, current customers, and past customers.
This is not to imply that automation replaces genuine human interactions in the sales process. In fact, that is not what we’re saying at all! Simply use automation to streamline the steps of the process that don’t need manpower to be successful.
2. Building an online presence
Increasing your sales in the ever-growing digital world means building an online presence. The point of this is to make your manufacturing business discoverable so that you can generate leads.
In order to effectively generate leads, you’ll need to be intentional with how you go about this step. Simply having an online presence is not enough. The platforms you use to display your brand and products must be designed with lead generation and sales in mind.
Let’s take a look at how this applies to different online channels.
An on-brand website
A website of your manufacturing business can serve as a centralized platform that contains all relevant information about your business and products. Your website should clearly explain who you are, what you do, who you serve, and how you serve them.
Calls-to-action are very important to have on your website because they give viewers direction. Depending on your sales strategy, you can prompt viewers to contact you or you could send them to order products directly by integrating with an eCommerce system. You could also use lead magnets to collect email addresses to use for email marketing.
We recommend hiring a professional developer to build your website, so that it uses best practices to make it user-friendly, on-brand, and professional looking.
“Storefronts” on digital marketplaces
As we mentioned, eCommerce has been game-changing in the manufacturing industry over the past year. Adding your products to a custom page or “storefront” on a B2B eCommerce platform will put your products in front of the eyes of people who need them.
Alibaba.com, for example, is a platform that is built for manufacturers like you to list their products, showcase their production capabilities, and connect with millions of customers that are ready to buy. As a seller on our platform, you can upload your products to a custom-built storefront that automatically translates into over a dozen different languages depending on your viewer’s location.
The products that you upload to this storefront are automatically added to the platform’s search engine, so if a client is searching for something you have available, they will be directed to your listing where they can place an order or contact you directly. Launching a storefront on Alibaba.com is also easier and more cost-efficient than you hire a developer to build a website from scratch. No coding and design skills are required.
Optimized LinkedIn profiles
Every member of your sales team should have an optimized LinkedIn profile. This will help build connections with potential customers and give your team members the ability to build their professional networks in the online space.
Since these profiles will be representative of your company, it is important to set some standards to ensure that they are as professional as possible. Profile pictures should be professional headshots rather than cropped group photos or selfies. All of the text on the page should speak to people whose businesses fall into your target audience.
Additionally, you should set up a page for your business so that each of your employees can link to it in the “Experience” section of their profiles.
LinkedIn should be used as a tool to build genuine connections rather than simply finding contacts to cold pitch too.
Social media pages
Social media profiles are important for extending your reach. It is a good idea to have a profile with your business’s information on each of the major platforms, even if you’re not currently planning on going all-in with advertisements or content creation.
When we say “major platforms,” we’re referring to Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and YouTube. We will talk about which platforms to pour your resources into a little further along in this post, but it is important to be discoverable anywhere.
Source: Alibaba
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