I've been working in and around small manufacturers and their suppliers (machinery and tooling dealers, mostly) in southern Ontario for the better part of 15 years now, and I have to say, when it comes to marketing, the whole sector needs help. For many suppliers, their entire strategy for creating demand for their products rests on the notion of relationship selling, executed by putting salesmen in territories and tasking them to knock on as many doors as possible. The salesman may get brochures to give prospects, though often these are supplied by the OEM and may not even be in English. Most, but by no means all, distributors have websites, usually of the most basic and amateurish kind with content that is rarely updated and no measures for search engine optimization at all. Advertising is probably the least-understood and worst-executed part of the marketing plan. Dull, feature-heavy ads are placed sporadically in trade magazines that abuse the intelligence of their readers. The same ads are run over and over with the expectation that each run will cause business to increase. Testing and measuring response is entirely absent. The very concept of branding is alien, or executed through a logo and not much else. One thing industrial suppliers do well is trade shows, though they chafe at the cost and flirt constantly with the idea of staying away. This drives down the prices trade show organizers can command and leaves the channel in the hands of lowest-cost providers, which further devalues the show and ensures exhibitors will be even less satisfied with their return on investment. No successful dealers make all these mistakes, but I have yet to see one that doesn't make at least one of them.
None of this is to say that industrial suppliers are poor businessmen or that they don't know how to make money. On the contrary, sales and marketing executives at industrial suppliers tend to be extremely accomplished relationship sellers in their own right — that's how they got the job. Upper management hopes they will be able to find or train others like themselves, and with a stable of top-drawer relationship salesmen on staff the company will never need to spend a nickel on another marketing channel.
The problem with this approach is, top-flight salesmen are rare, and they are born, not made. A superior relationship salesman may very well not be a superior trainer of new relationship salesmen. Add in the inevitable attrition all sales forces experience from burnout, poaching and retirements, and it becomes very difficult to maintain a complete crew of excellent salesmen for any long period of time. Most offices have one or two top performers and a group of also-rans.
Even if a supplier manages to pull together a top crew of relationship salesmen, he still has to ask himself if he is getting all the growth he could. Even the best salesman has prospects in his territory he cannot reach for one reason or another. And no salesman can be more than one place at one time, which means there will always be missed opportunities. This is one reason why smart marketers use different channels. A guy who does not want to see salesmen has to be getting his information about suppliers from somewhere. A comprehensive marketing campaign means the marketer has his message in front of that guy, no matter where he looks.
Little of what I have said here would come as a surprise to anyone in the industry. I think the main reason industrial suppliers don't do more marketing in more sophisticated ways is because no one has been able to make a convincing case that investment in a particular channel is highly likely to pay off. One reason for this is the degradation of the channels themselves, as I mentioned above. Another is the atrocious execution when the supplier does finally decide to do some promotion. There is no question that the investment in marketing and good marketing channels has to come before the investor will see benefit, and any investment carries risk. Industrial suppliers should seek out professional marketers with proven track records so they can make those investments at minimum risk and reap the benefits. Suppliers often talk themselves out of marketing investments by theorizing that mediated approaches don't work in their industry. I'm here to say that the history of business teaches us that the right message, delivered through the right medium to the right audience will always work. Industrial suppliers need to put more effort into finding those messages, media and audiences.
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