Why shouldn’t the Internet help us sell?

Even you will now have realized that the sales game isn’t really a walk in the park.

Acquiring new customers all the time while managing existing ones is becoming increasingly difficult.

This is true of every sector: mechanical engineering, electronics, and automation included.

So, if you supply solutions for designers and engineers who are going to have to spend their days in front of a workstation working on CAD, this article directly applies to you and contains a few solutions to help you sell not only more of your products, but also better.

Why shouldn’t the Internet help us?

It wasn’t enough just to be on the Internet to overcome all the restrictions, was it?

Not really… although the Internet remains part of the solution, in actual fact, we have too much (confusing) information and a lot of competition.

This is the way I see it:

• We are literally snowed under with information
• All this background «noise» makes it difficult to break through and attract attention
• Companies communicate in a boring, nondescript manner

Need more than good products

It’s not enough to have a good product, or even an excellent product to offer because if you don’t have the tools to raise awareness about it, any effort you make will be a waste of time. In fact, the most critical situations are where excellent products fail to find a way to reach those customers who desperately need them at that precise moment.

Practical solution for component vendors

The solution, as simple as it may seem, is to place your offering right under the noses of those looking for it and who are also prepared to pay a fortune for it. Not bad really?

It’s about knowing your typical customers’ habits and the tools that they use to find solutions to their problems (problems that are resolved using the products that you sell).

Obviously, I don’t know the details about what area your company specializes in. But whether you produce bearings, valves, cylinders, motors, connectors, jacks, sensors, etc., you will be amazed to learn a few things that I’ve come to realize during the 16 years of experience I have behind me (having lost quite a few sales).

Customers – especially in the design sector – while looking for different products, are looking for solutions that offer the same characteristics.

Do you have exactly the solutions that customers are looking for?

What I mean are solutions that are accurate, rapid, easily accessible, adaptable to their work tools and with minimal human interaction.

Let me explain it better to you because I’m sure that, when you think about it, you too might have had the same impression.

When an engineer or designer is looking for solutions, there are a lot of things they don’t like to do: waste time, repeat things twice, send emails, wait for order confirmations, consult a 500-page paper catalog, and so on.

While there are no such things as miracles, it is definitely possible to eliminate all those actions that you needlessly ask your customers to do because this is what is keeping them away from you.

These are precisely the obstacles that are keeping customers away from you.

It’s not the competition undercutting you, the economic crisis or alleged technical features.

Becoming the solution to meet your customer’s requirements, by selling what you produce, means perfect interaction with their work approach.

How do your typical customers design?

How do they communicate (using which tools)?

How do they like to interact with suppliers?

…

These are just a few of the useful questions you should ask to test how viable your sales systems are. This is because the manner in which you sell and present your products should be tailored to your customer and not to what is convenient for you.

3D cataloging is actually a solution that connects with customers’ requirements nowadays. So, I’m not talking about miracles, but just simple features that enable supply to meet demand in the most natural way.

Why not think about this and examine objectively your sales approach nowadays. Can you see room for improvement? Do the systems you use make life easy for your customers?

If the answer is «yes» and you would like to find out more about how to do this, please send me an email to gplodi@traceparts.it, and I will be able to offer you the benefit of my experience. 

P.S. Have you never heard of 3D cataloging before? Take the first step HERE.