FILLING THE SALES PIPELINE: EXISTING CUSTOMERS AND NEW PROSPECTS by Nicole Mitchell, writer, The American Mold Builder
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ith product demand booming in nearly all consumer markets, now is the time to pursue aggressively additional business opportunities from existing customers and new prospects. “The gestation period on new customers is quite long in this business,” said Carl Jacobsen, estimator/tooling engineer, M&M Tool. “It’s very rare to have contact on a potential project and have a purchase order in three months – it’s closer to 18 to 24 months. So, you’ve got to keep the potential customer pipeline full to give everyone time to do their due diligence and make sure they’re a fit for what you offer.” EXPANDING EXISTING RELATIONSHIPS Businesses from all industries deal with customer retention and management. Anthony Smith, founder and CEO of Insightly, a customer relationship management company, wrote for Forbes magazine that a strategy focused on building customer relationships should keep current customers at the center of any marketing attempts. “Keep track of how many customers return to you and why,” Smith wrote. “Then, make sure that repeat customers hold a central focus in your company’s marketing plan.”1
During the early stages of the pandemic, M&M Tool & Mold, Green Bay, Wisconsin, stopped all in person on/off site sales calls with potential customers. The company had recognized the challenges in reaching prospects during a time when many businesses weren’t allowing visitors or had locked down new product launches. Instead, M&M Tool focused on serving customers that it already had and expanding those business lines. “It’s a learning curve,”, Jacobsen said. “Once we’ve worked with someone, we start to know what they need, so we could use email and phone calls to have discussions about potential projects. With our established customers, many of them have their own RFQs, but we also have a proposal worksheet that we can use to get information about what type of mold they need, how they want to gate it, the press size and other things 14
the american MOLD BUILDER | Issue 4 2021
like that. Then it’s a matter of giving them some time for review before touching base.” Jacobsen also acknowledged the benefits of getting past the frontline gatekeeper when working with existing customers. “Once you get some work from a customer, you begin talking to the tooling engineers rather than a purchasing officer,” he said. Kelly Kasner, director of sales for Mishawaka, Indiana’s Michiana Global Mold (MGM), reaches out to customers – new and old – on a weekly basis. “Are you experiencing a disruption right now? Are you having a hard time with your current suppliers who may be offshore? Are you having delivery lead time issues?” she said, providing examples of questions she asks. “I try to suggest pain points, and maybe someone reading my email says, ‘You know, I really hadn’t thought of that’.” By asking these detailed questions, Kasner believes she improves the quality of dialogue between MGM and its customers and better identifies the potential needs of those customers. Current customers are evaluating which suppliers are adding value to their product and exceeding their expectations. Instead of selling a service, mold builders need to show how that service returns value. “At the end of the day, your customers don’t care how much revenue you generate, what your shareholders expect, or what your sales quota may be,” wrote Ritika Puri in an article titled “7 Subtle Yet Powerful Ways to Build Stronger B2B Relationships,” for Sales Force.2 “They’re looking for solutions to specific business challenges and ways to increase their own revenues.” “One of my goals is to ensure that our customers are at the leading edge of the marketplace with their products,” Kasner said. “If our customers are successful and we helped with that, we get to be their hero.” CHALLENGES FOR SALES TEAMS Even though an established sales relationship makes it easier to talk about additional opportunities with current customers, there still are challenges to overcome.
