Become the modern manufacturing shop your customers expect

Introducing your new way of doing business.

If you’re a growing manufacturing shop that’s hit your revenue goals, you’ve probably found yourself working longer hours than ever. You’re overstretched, spending more time quoting routine jobs when you know that time would be better spent focused on the big picture, and you know this is unsustainable.

Your business model needs to go from one-to-a-few, to one-to-many.

This means your customer profile will change a bit, too. The same way your internal processes need to change to get your shop to the next stage of growth, the customers you serve need to change as well.

Here’s the good news:

Your new customers actually need less from you: Less of your personalized attention, less of your time, and yes, less precise quoting.

Your new customers want to serve themselves online, not call you on the phone or email you with project details. They need their job quoted quickly, and they want to place an order and know their project is underway instantly.

This can only be done with automation.

We know what you’re thinking. What about the margins on those individual jobs? What if I quote too much or (gasp) too little on a given job?

More good news: That’s also OK. Say your automated quoting tool — a new widget on your company website that lets customers upload a file and choose quantities and materials — gives your customer a quote that’s slightly higher than the industry average.

Or, say the automated quote turns out something lower than what you would quote manually. Seems bad, right? It’s not. 80% of the time, customers end up purchasing from the shop that gives them the quickest quote, not the lowest.

This is because modern customers have become accustomed to internet shopping providing one-click purchases and same-day deliveries, and aren’t as patient as they used to be. In the past you had to hire charismatic salespeople to remember the names of your customer’s pets, or their favorite brand of scotch. Today’s customers spend 70% of their time online and want a quick quote and an easy way to order and pay.

More on Today’s Customer & Industry 4.0

The COVID-19 crisis only accelerated online trends and cemented them even further. According to McKinsey, B2B e-commerce accounted for $1.2 trillion in revenues in 2018, and their latest global survey showed revenues are up by more than 20% since the onset of COVID-19. Statista reports that U.S. B2B online sales are projected to reach 1.8 trillion U.S. dollars in 2023.

Digital interactions are also two times more important to customers now than they were before the pandemic, McKinsey also reports. A growing number of B2B transactions involve buyers who have only known the internet. They’ve literally grown up with Amazon and don’t understand a sales experience that’s anything other than quick and seamless. Your customers won’t be willing to spend as long waiting around for the cheapest quote, they’ll want to shop with whoever gets back to them first. To be competitive, shops have to become more nimble than precise. Quickly turning out pricing instead of spending more time to get it “perfect” is the name of the game.

By the time you get back to a customer with a quote you performed manually, they may have already accepted one from another shop who simply responded to them faster.

The only way to win over today’s customer is to deliver the same experience they expect from any other online transaction, which means automating your quotes.

Doing less for more customers will drive revenue.

You can only offer a precise and high-touch experience for a handful of customers. That handful alone can eat up most of your shop’s time, and it may be counter to what your larger customer base actually needs. An instant online solution for quoting, job orders, and payments is the best experience you can offer today’s customers. These tools communicate that you are a modern shop that’s respectful of your customer’s time. Your customers will be satisfied with the speed of service, so you can focus on the quality of production.

There’s also the customer retention piece:

With an e-commerce solution for your shop (an all-in-one online quoting, ordering, and payments tool) you no longer need to keep manual notes on your customers or spend hours updating a CRM. Modern e-commerce solutions allow customers to create accounts and store their delivery and payment info for even quicker checkout next time they visit your site. And on the backend, you’ll get customer insights that will inform and optimize all your acquisition and retention efforts in the future. You can see who your top customers are, analyze trends, and make decisions on how to better serve them.

This article is an excerpt from Is Win-Rate More Important Than Precise Quoting? a recent guidebook by DigiFabster.