For the past few years, Richard Rubin has done his holiday shopping online. The contents of his virtual shopping carts don’t quite match those of the industrial customers he serves as president of Maxi Container, but he sees his personal habits signaling a bigger change. If he’s buying online, what about his customers?
“I noticed that more and more of our business was moving to the Web,” Rubin says. “More and more of our customers were communicating to us via e-mail. More and more of our customers wanted us to do electronic data interchange or electronic funds transfer.”
This observation came at a crucial time, especially for a Detroit-based distributor like Maxi that traditionally relied on the automotive business. Cold calls from a four-person sales team wouldn’t cut it anymore. Rubin realized that long-term survival depended on the company’s ability to explode its customer base into other industries and geographies. And a web presence was key to doing that.
But making the website an effective sales tool to convert searchers into customers — especially when they’re industrial manufacturers — that’s another challenge. And across the business world, it had resulted in plenty of “websites that were just, for lack of a better word, horrendous,” says Linda Rigano, executive director of strategic services at Thomas Industrial Network, which connects buyers and suppliers of industrial products and services through its sourcing site, ThomasNet.com. “It was just a picture of the facility, a picture of mom and dad, how great we are but not really delivering on what the buyer wants.”
Enter Thomas’ Web Solutions group, which was created to help those companies improve the performance of their websites.
“How do I get my website to sell more for me?” Rigano asks — a question she gets from companies that recognize traditional print resources aren’t holding up. “Always be where your buyer is looking, and then make sure that you’re delivering the answers that they’re looking for.”
Replicating your sales process online
Sounds simple enough. In fact, Rubin can sum it up in three words from high school.
“My 10th grade English teacher always said to me, ‘Know your audience,’ and that’s true in everything,” Rubin says. “You need to know who you’re trying to reach in a Web strategy, and you have to tailor it to get them the information they want.”
Merely by being online, Rubin was tuning into his audience’s requests for digital services. But Maxi’s first website wasn’t tailored at all — in fact, it was basically a print ad with a Web address.
“Before, it was a very static website,” he says. “It listed our name, our address, our e-mail. It listed products we offered. But it was not interactive. You couldn’t click through to get more information. It didn’t send an e-mail. It didn’t do anything. It was just information.”
Maxi was already listed on ThomasNet’s directory, so Rubin sought Web Solutions help to turn referred traffic into sales. First, he had to understand what customers search for online and how.
“Buyers want to be able to answer the same questions that they were once getting on the telephone,” says Rigano, who helps manufacturers and distributors deliver answers by replicating sales processes online.
Her advice: Envision your website as a new sales rep, and equip your virtual salesman by arming it with the right information. ThomasNet uses a VSET strategy as a formula of that information.
