Sales Techniques - Getting more sales for a manufacturing company - Ask Evan

Hi, I'm Evan Carmichael. Welcome to another edition of Ask Evan. Today I'm going to answer a question from one of our newsletter readers, Cecilyne, who wrote in asking about how to increase sales at his company. So he says that it's a manufacturing business, they create bowler pistons, and he's trying to figure out how to get more sales. Thank you for the question. A great question. And what I love about this business is that it's B2B. If you can, especially at the beginning, if you can sell to a business, it's a lot easier to get the money you need to grow your business than if you're selling to customers. And the reason being, they'll order more from you, so the order values are usually a lot higher than going after individual consumers. And they usually make repeat purchases. Your idea of selling to B2B is you wanna make yourself a really valuable and important part of their company. And if you are, if you're providing great value, then they're going to keep hiring you back and buying more, whatever your product or service is. So if you can, ideally go after B2B market at the start because it gives you the money you need to launch and grow your business. So this is great that it's a manufacturing company selling B2B. Now I don't know much about boiler pistons, but it doesn't matter too much. What the first piece of advice I would give you is you need to come up with what makes you stand out against your competition. So it's great that you sell boiler pistons, but what's so great about your boiler pistons? Hopefully there's something that you have that you can stand by. If it's your guarantee of quality, or you do things with your boiler pistons that other companies can't, you want to make sure that that's really clear so that when people are making a decision between your company and somebody else, they know you're the guys who do XYZ. And it may not make sure that you win every single order because they might not have a specific need that matches up with what you offer, but they'll be able to clearly understand what separates you from your competition and know if they should be buying from you or not. So that would be the first step, is understand really what separates you from your competition. The next thing that I would do, and this works especially well when you're selling a business, is overdeliver like crazy. So you, you overdeliver on the service side of your business. So you wanna think about all the different areas you can add amazing service so that they wanna keep coming back to you. If you think about businesses, they want to work with companies who will basically give them everything that they need, right? They don't want to have any problems, they want to have a smooth relationship. And if you can provide amazing service, that's an awesome way to first get a really small order and then explode from there. So the basics of service are obviously giving the client what they want, being available, answering their questions very quickly, doing everything you can to help them with their orders. But you want to try to go above and beyond. Try to give them information or knowledge or service or anything else you can think of that can help them grow their business beyond what you're just doing for them as a supplier. So can you give them some customers? Can you, you know, refer media or partners to them? Can you help them raise capital if that's what they're looking for? Can you give them knowledge about what's happening in your industry that might make them have better information and give them better information to grow their business? You want to keep thinking of different ways to really overdeliver so that they want to hire you back. What I love doing is when I go into businesses is I try to take on a really small project. So I don't go in and bid on, you know, the huge project because if they have incumbent suppliers, which is probably going to be the case for you, there's already a supplier that's helping them, it can be really hard to dislodge them. So what you want to do is go in with just trying to get one small, simple, tiny order from them. Make it low risk, you know, you're just trying it out, you're not asking for a lot of money or a lot of time, it's not really going to damage your relationship with the other supplier, it's just a trial. It's easy to get them to say yes, and that's your goal, just get them to say yes on a small, simple trial. And then you blow their mind with the service that you provide. So I'm assuming that your product is good and will do everything that you say it's going to do. If your boiler pistons are not great, then you can't really count on repeat orders. But I'm assuming that you have a good product. So from there, it's all the service you add on top of it. So what can you do to really stand out from your competition and give them more service and more information compared to everybody else so that they love working with you, they're gonna order more from you on the next project, they're gonna double, triple, quadruple, 10 times the order size from you and refer other divisions to you, refer other clients to you. It grows and it grows from providing that awesome service. So it's the Just a thin wedge in, tiny little order, low risk. Just get them to try you out and from there blow their minds away. It's really got to be something special. They've got a supplier they're dealing with and they're already happy with them. You've got to really blow their socks off to make an impression and make them want to do more business with you. So that's your challenge, but it's an exciting opportunity. A lot of businesses don't do that extra mile. They just do, you know, what's required, the basics. So there's an opportunity for you to jump in there, especially with established industries like, you know, manufacturing. Typically, things are done a certain way and people don't really go too far above and beyond. So that's an awesome opportunity for you. So hopefully that helps. For you watching the video, if you liked it, please give it a thumbs up. It makes me want to do more of these videos for you guys. It gives me a boost every day when I come in and see that there's been some thumbs up on the video. So thank you. And if you have a comment about this video or you have a question for your company, feel free to leave it in the comments below. I always read those and try to respond to as many as I can. So thank you, and we'll see you on the next episode.