Prospects have the answers to all of your questions. Have you asked them? Every manufacturer we work with wants more leads. To that end, they prefer leads that are more qualified and prospects that are inclined to do business with your company. So, why is it so hard to find “qualified” leads?

While every company has a definition of what qualifies as a good lead, there are some common traits amongst prospects. Do they hail from a particular industry vertical? Do they hold a certain title or professional certification? Or, perhaps they share common challenges with your existing customers (challenges of course that you have proven your company can meet). Another indicator of qualification is where is this prospect on the buyer’s journey. What signals are they showing, such as having a CAD drawing already designed or perhaps, they have bought similar products previously?

The answer may already be on your website – forms. When we onboard new manufacturing clients, we ask what are the top 5 questions (and the answers) you ask every prospect when you first engage them? The qualifying questions can easily be placed in a descriptive form that, when filled out by your prospect, provides your sales team with a more detailed image of the prospect’s potential to turn into a customer. Two examples of great forms used by our clients can be found at these links:

• 3D metal printer Fabrisonic
• Lathe cut rubber gasket manufacturer Grand River Rubber

So, how do you attract them to your website and to the actual form itself? You must have an engaging offer on your website. Perhaps you can offer an industry report, trend analysis or insightful eBook. Or, demonstrate your expertise with case studies or published industry articles. Having a valuable offer with certainly, drive prospects to your forms. Then, let them qualify themselves. Read about how content plays a critical role in lead generation.

Why Manufacturers Need a Content Map for Inbound Marketing Success

Need help with driving prospects to your new and improved form? Engage with us and we’ll show you how we can help.

They like me, they really like me!

Manufacturers have learned that LinkedIn is a great resource for connecting to professionals, promoting your brand and message. Many manufacturers attend trade shows, host webinars and engage in philanthropic activities, which they promote on social media. While these posts are great, manufacturers are missing one critical piece–reviewing their likes and comments.

You might be asking yourself, are likes and comments really worth anything? The answer: You bet! As prospects and customers become more and more insulated, hiding behind voicemail and email, sales teams are having a rough time reaching prospects, let alone establishing a relationship. Enter social selling. After all, isn’t that why you are building your LinkedIn network in the first place?

Social selling will help you initiate and even build on relationships. You need a systematic, repeatable way to build your prospect pipeline. What better way to build relationships and create sales opportunities than engaging with people that are already liking and commenting on the variety of your content? Whether you are posting company news, white papers, photos of new products or blogs, people are engaging with you on social media should not be forgotten.

You already target a specific prospect persona (see our article Why Developing Buyer Personas is Invaluable for Manufacturers to learn more about personas). And, you already know that they buy on their timeline. Your sales cycle might often be 6, 12 or even 36 months long. This fact alone screams nurturing these prospects with content until they are ready to purchase your products. Here in lies the reasoning behind social selling and inputting those “like and comment” folks into your database.

If you are not connected to the person you’d like to thank for the like or comment, send them a request with a personal note thanking them for their engagement on your post. Along with thanking them for liking your post, you will want to enter them quickly into your prospect database.  It is common, with people changing jobs routinely, that the email address listed for your newly-connected prospect is a Gmail, Hotmail or even AOL. Since you want the business email for your content nurturing program (reference: Why Manufacturers Need a Content Map for Inbound Marketing Success ), here are a few ways to secure the correct email.

Start with their company website. If they’re listed great. You’re done. But, if the website does not list personnel, what can you do? Try the free Chrome add-on www.hunter.io This cool site helps you search for and even anticipate the email structure (e.g. first_last@abcmanucturing.com) that the company uses.

Another free Chrome add-on for use while on the LinkedIn contact’s screen is www.contactout.com. Now that you have the correct business email, you can continue to build, nurture and engage your prospect with your brilliant content. Happy social selling.

 

Guest blog post

Employee engagement has been a hot topic amongst corporations, large and small, for almost two decades now. Most organizations recognize the importance of an engaged team; it helps you lower your risk of turnover, boost customer satisfaction, realize higher productivity, improve the bottom line and increase your company’s overall chance of success.   Yet less than 33% of employees are engaged in their jobs in any given year.

Companies have been focused on this metric for years, but the engagement numbers haven’t changed much since 2000. In one of Gallop’s recent reports, The State of the American Manager, they determined that managers account for as much as 70% of variance in employee engagement scores. Thus, bringing truth to the phrase “people don’t leave jobs, they leave managers.” So, is there anything you can do to make your employees feel involved in and enthusiastic about their work and workplace? Happily, YES!

Leaders should view every interaction with an employee as one with the potential to influence engagement and inspire effort. How leaders interact with and manage their employees can substantially affect engagement levels in the workplace, which in turn influences the company’s bottom line. Here are few strategies organizations can use to help build engagement with their employees:

 

1. Have and Communicate a Clear Vision

Engagement starts with the leadership communicating a clear vision for the organization. People naturally want to belong to something greater than themselves. Your vision should inspire passion and commitment from your employees (and other stakeholders) and should serve as the rally cry for your organization. If you team knows, understands and believes in the direction you are moving they are much more likely to engage.

 

2. Explain the Why

People need to understand why they are being asked to do things. The best managers and leaders are transparent with their teams (to the extent they can be). Let your team know why they are doing things (or not doing them) and how their work fits into the bigger picture. The more they understand, the more likely they will be to want to help.

 

 

3. Set Processes, Procedure and Expectations

From the first day of employment, make sure you have clearly laid out processes, procedures and expectations for each employee. People crave certainty and they find it stressful when they are unsure of what is expected of them from day to day. If you are clear from the beginning, neither you nor the employee should encounter surprises.

 

4. Get to Know Each Individual Employee

The strongest leaders take the time to personally connect with their teams. They get to know them at a personal level, outside of just their work, and remember that they are human with real thoughts, feelings, responsibilities, families and challenges. These leaders are interested in their team’s hobbies and families and allow each employee to bring their “whole self” to work. Showing you care creates trust and loyalty. Knowing that they are respected as individuals at work can have a significant impact on how employees view not only their jobs, but their overall lives.

 

5. Understand Individual Motivators

We each have different motivators that drive our desires and our decisions. As a leader, it is your duty to identify the motivators for your team. Each person is likely driven by a different factor, so by understanding them you will be better equipped to tap into the right ways to engage your team.

 

6. Create an Incentive Structure

Now that you know what motivates the individuals on your team, you can create incentives that speak to those motivators. Great organizations have at least six different incentives available for their teams. Here are a few examples of motivators and incentives to support them:

• Security – benefits, job stability
• Financial – fair salary, bonus opportunities, one-time incentives
• Learning – on-going training and development opportunities
• Leadership – opportunity for advancement into management roles
• Expert Status/Recognition – new hire mentor, trainer
• Altruistic – community service projects
• Relationships/Connections – committees (i.e. safety, employee engagement), team building events

 

7. Encourage Regular Feedback

People want to feel valued and know their input matters. Give your team a safe forum to let you know what is happening within your organization. Be open to ideas and suggestions from your team. Often the best ideas and solutions come from the people living through the pain points or those who are closest to the customer. Remember, you don’t need to act on everything. However, you should address and acknowledge each suggestion and explain why you are tabling it for now.

 

The best leaders ensure that all their employee engagement efforts are aligned. They find ways to communicate the impact of the engagement efforts to the entire team throughout the year and they share best practices across the organization. Strong leaders use every opportunity, every touchpoint and every communication vehicle to reinforce the organization’s commitment to employee satisfaction and engagement.  Employee engagement becomes a piece of the organization’s strategy.  Your team is your organization’s most important asset, make caring for them a priority.  If done right, these seven strategies will help you inspire trust with your team.

Stacie Riffert is a certified FocalPoint business coach and is the owner of Empowered Leadership, LLC. Stacie’s 20 years of business experience, as a General Manager and Sales Director with PepsiCo, and the proven FocalPoint tools combine to powerfully empower business owners to maximize their productivity and profitability. For more information visit https://stacieriffert.focalpointcoaching.com or contact her directly at sriffert@focalpointcoaching.com

 

 

Tomorrow, October 5, 2018, is  Manufacturing Day. This month, across the country, people will join in celebrating modern manufacturing. Students, educators, media, and business people into their facilities to educate them on manufacturing careers and change the public’s perception of the manufacturing sector.

At Felber PR & Marketing, we love the excitement that comes with Manufacturing Day and work with our clients to develop great content that portrays manufacturing progress. Content is an excellent tool to highlight your company’s expertise, educate your prospects and customers, and add value. In order to stay competitive, manufacturers need to have a strong digital marketing and content strategy. Case studies provide your company an opportunity to showcases specific projects or work with your customers. Case studies also add third-party credibility and could be the difference between your prospects choosing you over your competition during the decision process of the buyer’s journey.

Why Case Studies Are Effective

Since the invention of the white picket fence, neighbors have stood on both sides and asked each other for advice. Who’s the best landscaper, which store has the best produce, or even which doctor do you prefer? Humans trust opinions before sales pitches and case studies provide your prospects with the assurance that other credible companies have purchased your products. What’s the biggest white picket fence (e.g. platform) in the world? Social media such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and Instagram  – all social for that matter, are the platforms for the world’s conversations. Ever seen ISO______. In search of (insert your product here).

 

Third-Person Credibility

How often are we asked for referrals? Almost every prospect we meet asks if they can talk to our customers. Case studies are written proof that other companies, real people, have trusted (and not been burned) by your work. We’re often amazed by the great stories our clients tell us about the solutions they provide. Unfortunately, these great salespeople, owners, and technicians have never committed these stories to writing. I mean NEVER have they posted a blog, NEVER told their story an industry reporter or printed a one-page document about their achievements. Stumped on how to ask your manufacturing customers for case studies? Read our blog: How to Convince Your Stubborn Manufacturing Clients to Participate in Case Studies

 

Case studies can be featured on your website (like our success stories), sent in follow up emails to engaged prospects, or used in a coordinated media relations program. We speak to a lot of editors on behalf of our clients. Editors and reporters love case studies. It is the single biggest request we get from these media professions. Why? Media inherently want to stay neutral in the content they present to readers. Readers trust the content in magazines to be journalistically vetted. Remember the neighbor giving his opinion? This is just as powerful. Could your company improve their position in the marketplace by posting, emailing and tweeting an article in one of these trusted publications?

 

So how do our writers learn about and actually help these stories come to life? We love factory tours. We renamed them ‘content tours’ as they provide the material needed for case studies. I can already hear you. “But we’re engineers, not writers!” No worries, we are! Learn about this service here.

There I was, having a nice conversation with a colleague I had not seen in a while. Then it happened… a classic case of device interruption. I got a notification through my smartwatch. Reflexively I turned my wrist for just a brief glance. It could have been an appointment reminder, a weather channel alert or even the notification that I made my steps for the day). It didn’t matter. That slight twist of the wrist and glance down killed the conversation.

 

Almost immediately she said, “I’m interrupting you.” Conversation over. I quickly said “no it’s just a text,” but I knew we were done. I felt like I had done something wrong. Afterward, I could not shake the feeling that I had been rude.

 

We’ve fully transitioned to the point where nearly everyone has a smartphone. Every other article we read (on and about devices) warns of overuse. We’re connected like never before. We know where our teenagers are 24/7, can bank from the pool, respond to customers in just about every channel they prefer, text, email, snapchat, etc. So, why are we often disconnected?

 

Look around the line at the post office or a doctor’s waiting room. WiFi has been the glue that keeps us connected…and the solvent that keeps us separated. We’re losing the art of conversation. The opportunity to engage with the person next to you, to learn from them and make a human connection. Don’t read this as yet another rant on the dangers of self-isolation. I’m bucking those AARP applications and I have always loved my technology. I miss my StarTac flip and I was on the bleeding edge of the Palm Pilot. There just needs to be some balance.

 

Have a conversation with those around you. Ask if they are reading anything cool. You can text them later how much you enjoyed the conversation. I was always the guy at the grocery store that would start a conversation with the person that forgot to take off the hello my name is name tag. (my kids quickly blended into the frozen foods or worse ran the other direction. Trailing voices echoed, Dad, really?!

 

Do you have a similar story? Have a good rant? Share with us hear or better yet, arrange a time to meet in person.