Do you own a manufacturing business? Has your profit turnover been dwindling as of late? Manufacturing is a highly competitive industry, and growing a small business is no easy feat. Business owners must take every opportunity to maintain, regain, or improve their position in the marketplace.
Learning to manage your growth and ensuring you deliver excellent products and services to customers is essential for success. If you’ve been struggling to grow your customer base and boost your business's revenue, you might want to consider making some changes to the way you operate your business.
Let’s discuss five ways to increase your revenue in the manufacturing industry:
1. Focus on Increasing Revenue from Existing Customers First
Unless your business is in its infancy, you most likely have an existing customer base. Leveraging your existing customers is one of the easiest and cheapest ways to boost revenue for your business. This is because referrals and word of mouth cost nothing and both are likely to happen if your customers like your products.
If you don’t currently have a plan in place to promote existing customers to evangelists for your company, it’s time to start working on one. Start by building evangelists within specific industries, by product types, and other similar designations. You may not always have permission to use client names, some evangelists may be willing to speak to prospects about their experience with your company and products.
It’s also advantageous to get testimonials from your customers that you can add to your website as well as proposals and marketing materials. To further build trust, you can include a link or reference to their LinkedIn profile.
2. Improve Up-Sells, Cross-Sells, and Bundling
This tip goes hand-in-hand with focusing on existing customers, but it can be applied to new customers as well. I have talked to many manufacturers who struggle to expose their existing customers to their entire product and service portfolio.
The key to improving up-sells cross-sells, and bundling is to become better at assessing the needs of your clients and proposing the products and services that will result in optimal satisfaction. If your company offers higher-end products that provide better results than their lower-grade counterparts, it’s your job to educate the customer on the added benefits.
This has the dual benefit of increasing customer satisfaction while generating bigger profits for your company.
If your company has multiple product and service lines, it’s your job to make sure your customers are not only aware of but also educated on the full spectrum. Understand and anticipate pain points and challenges they need to solve and connect them with other solutions your company offers. It’s no different than banks cross-selling their customers on credit cards, mortgages, lines of credit, and investments.
This is where bundling comes in handy. If, for example, a customer is looking to buy a tent for camping, they may be interested in a bundle that includes sleeping bags, cooking utensils, a hatchet, and camping chairs. Offering this complete solution saves the customer time and also gives you the opportunity to charge a premium for the bundle. In other words, you make buying more easier for them.
3. Align Your Sales and Marketing Team on Revenue Boosting Efforts
Sales and marketing might seem similar enough; they are often even used interchangeably. Yet, sales and marketing consist of very different, though equally important, contributions to a business. Marketing is a way to gain attention and cultivate customers, so it’s more like an investment in the organization’s future financial success. Sales are the fuel for your company but, without marketing, are less effective and may hurt the bottom line.
At their cores, sales and marketing intend to drive sales and revenue. When your sales and marketing departments aren't aligned, you're putting your business at a disadvantage. Uniting your sales and marketing teams around a single revenue cycle can sizably improve the ROI of marketing initiatives, boost sales productivity, and generate more growth for the business.
4. Say “NO” to Bad Customers
This one might sound strange. Why shun bad customers when you need to boost revenue? Yet, learning to say “No” to bad customers and even worse prospects is another great way to build more revenue in the long run. Of course, this advice is more for business-to-business situations; companies with walk-in, public customers should abide by a different strategy.
If you want your business to flourish, then make sure to devote time and attention to your best customers and great opportunities. If you and your employees are constantly bogged down by unprofitable customers who are always complaining and bringing your energy down, you won’t be able to optimize your business for success.
5. Leverage Your Manufacturing Website as a Sales Tool
We build websites every day, and we remain busy with website projects because businesses need websites to succeed in 2020. It’s still all too common for businesses to treat websites as an information dump for their products and services instead of actively using the website as the sales tool that it is.
To truly compete in your vertical, your website MUST do the following things:
- Answer 80% of ALL questions your prospects ask your sales team.
- Help them self-qualify so your sales team can finish the deal instead of having to answer every question they may have.
- Be an active sales tool that is continuously improved to help your sales team close customers.
- Integrate with your CRM so you know when and where your prospects are in the sales funnel as they interact with your website.
- Observe user behavior so you can continually adjust and improve.
We help manufacturers build sales tools, not websites. If you are looking to transform your existing manufacturing website into a tool that will help your sales team be more successful, challenge us to deliver.
