New Business/sales

How do most folks here go after new business and grow sales? Salaried sales force or outside Sales Reps or some other creative solution? Be interested to hear how you go about it and how successful it has been

I have found that for a small shop the best sales force you can have is the owner himself.
I end up putting the majority of my time into selling.
I have found that potential customers/customers want to talk to someone who has the ability to provide on the spot answers/assurances.

topsales:

This is your first post here and your screen name is a dead givaway.

This is a discussion forum and not a platform for launching or advertizing consulting services.

Fair warning -

Jim Kizale

Moderator

JimK, we know you're serious when you use your full name!

Jim,
no intention of using the forum for anything other than what it is for-information-just thought it was a good place to hear people's experiences and preferences-don't worry-not trying to sell anything here

Sales is always something we are working on and it takes a lot of time. I would like to hear how other people are doing it. How do you find your leads? What do you do to differentiate yourself from the 20 other shops trying for the same work. My method seems do be sort of dumb luck, tons of cold calls, a few visits, several quotes and a job or two.

Customers can be an effective sales force. They talk amongst like minded people an when the question "where do you get your machining done?" comes up, if your customer likes doing business with you, he will pass your name on.

Hearing from a user of your services carries much more weight than any sales pitch that you can give. Remember that works both ways.

There may seem to be a lot of competition out there but I am sure that there is a good bit of dissatisfaction. You want you name to find the ears or eyes of one of the ones who have had just about enough of their present supplier.

Marketing for a job shop, where you basically will take any work that will fit on your machines, is one thing.
And its something I know nothing about- because ever since I started working, way back in the early 70's, I realized that it was pretty pointless to try to race to the bottom against everybody out there.
So, like many people on this site, I have gone after certain markets, niches that I know something about, and therefore can easily talk about why I would be a better choice to hire.

It seems like in this day and age, with China doing everything for less than my cost of materials, more and more people are specialising-
I know on this site, we have people who specialise in paintguns, vintage auto engines, steering wheels for english sports cars, racing fuel injection, boat propellers, bike building tools, european racing motorcylces, harley engine rebuilding, micro minature EDM, precision machining workholding tools, printing presses, aerospace electronics, RC Model airplane parts, model train parts, all sorts of specialised firearms parts, obsolete tractor parts, swiveling vises, minature roller skates, high end woodworking planes, knives, and on and on.

None of these people would particularly benefit from a normal sales rep- usually they know much more about their respective markets than any rep would, and just trying to explain to a rep the ins and outs of their product and marketplace is more work than just selling the stuff themselves.

The old idea of a sales rep goes along with the old, pre 1980 version of the american wholesale/retail/distributor marketing system- which, in most industries, is long gone.
In the old days, a sales rep would get a guaranteed geographic area, and be responsible for writing every order in that area.
That is all shot to hell these days- the big accounts want direct factory pricing, with them dictating product design, price points, packaging, and so on.
The small accounts want internet ordering, and play off different manufacturers or even distributors against each other for product, price, and delivery times.

And for custom work- heck, the last thing I enjoy doing is talking to an independant sales rep. I want to talk to a guy who knows exactly the machine capacities, shop experience, material on hand, and all the other little details of the shop. I dont want to hear "I'll have to check on that and get back to you".

Word of mouth is best - I have to say that sales guys are in most cases purely motivated by money and while that isn't entirely bad (only mostly bad ) it rarely speaks to the real interests of the customer OR the company whos product he is selling.

We always start by getting a call from Joe Maintenance guy at the plant - "this piece of crap machine is making my life miserable and Jim Vendor over here says you can help . . . can you come in and look at it with me?"

We go in, look at it, if it is something we can do we see if they will actually pay us to do it and we get the work done, if it is something we can't do - well, we see if we know someone who can do a good job and send them to that person.

After doing this a few dozen times, pretty soon Joe Maintenance guy is catching the attention of Bob Boss Guy who is catching the attention of Charley Corporate bean counter and everyone wants to know how come Joe's plant is kicking all the other plants butt in productivity. Joe says he used this little local company who is then invited to do the same at the other plants and on and on and on.

BTW - we just had a meeting with the senior VPs of manufacturing of the largest privately held manufacturing company in the world . . . we started with Joe 10 years ago and now we are talking to Charlie Head Cheese who wants to know how we can handle an extra $10 - $20 million a year in sales.

We still don't have any dedicated sales guys . . . well, except that every employee we have is a salesman when it comes to doing good work. Word of mouth is where it is at.

Warning:

What follows talks about what we sell so I can explain how we do it. If you see this as a sales pitch and are going to be offended then don’t read it.

What works for us in sales.

We do contract brazing as well as selling carbide, braze alloy and filter systems.

Our own outside salespeople have never worked out. Working well with our distributors does.

We do a monthly newsletter to sawmills and saw shops combined with phone calls from a perky young lady. We use a mail - call - mail approach. We ask if they are getting the free newsletter and if we can help them. Typically our first order is something too small for the big guys as well as something that they need right now. If we take the small orders and move really fast on quotes (I mean less than 15 minutes) then we get the order and build from there.

Our prices are pretty good but the service and quality are excellent.

We use the Internet a great deal. See www.carbideprocessors.com We have a huge amount of information on brazing and building brazed tools. The equivalent of several hundred pages of printed text. This works very well. We get a lot of young engineers and people who are new in their position. They don’t know who to use so they go to the Internet. We also get very senior R&D folks who have tried a couple places where it didn’t work. Here we sell the fact that we are the best at what we do. When we get challenged on this we say that we aren’t the best at everything but that we can do things that no one else can do. This is the same thing that some of the other guys said about specialization.

We have some fun premiums we use as gifts. See http://www.cafepress.com/workingheroes

Google Adwords work for us but the ad we are running at the top of this page hasn’t done anything for us. Neither do magazine ads.

We also “middle man” work. We sub out to other shops as well as buying and reselling parts. We have tried to telling customers to order parts themselves as it would be cheaper but mostly they just went away and never came back. Now we figure out what they really want and give it to them. They are much happier and much more likely to buy and we make more money.

Tom

Please keep this on topic, there is always someone who will comment and offend someone else. Lets move on and share some more info.

Anybody out there have luck cold calling? Any techniques that got you a meeting with a customer? For me if I can get the meeting I can usually get at least a quote and a "trial" job out of them.

Word of mouth is great but I think there are times when you need to do more than that.

Sales guys get you work when you're already busy, and when you're hungry they can't get any work in. Do quality work first off, focus on end-user customers (not other shops, middlemen, etc) and customers will come. If you can find a niche, go for it. For a long time, we were one of very few shops in the area to have a Blanchard grinder. It was nothing fancy, but it was always busy because it was rare.

David S