What’s a Supplier to Do?
Let’s get right to it. You’re a Supplier of some sort of a Textile product – garments, fabrics, technical textiles, home textiles – doesn’t matter. If you are a Supplier let’s say you fall into one of two camps; a.) A Supplier is who completely booked full for the next 6-9 months and will be again thereafter, or b.) A Supplier that is looking for new business to keep the machines humming.
If you’re that first Supplier, that’s great, keep it up. But if you’re that second kind of Supplier (the one looking for new customers and PO’s, then you have an array of ways to get new leads – and that’s what I want to look at here and now.
How do you get a new client and what does it cost to do it?
Trade show: This lasts anywhere from 3-5 days and costs you in the zone of $5000 to $20,000 and up depending on the show. You have to consider the floor cost, the travel costs, the hotel costs, meals, staff (1or 2 people min), time away from the office – and usually you have to lug your samples to a show. Think about this math – at even only $6000 for a 3 day show that’s $2000 per day – and there is no guarantee you get the business.
Business trip: You could get on a plane and fly from your factory to some city (say Los Angeles or NewYork) to meet with 5-10 clients in a week. This will run you a minimum of $10,000 if you’re 5000 miles away and the there is no guarantee you get the business. If you spend $10,000 for a 5 day business trip this is $2000 per day. If you’re “in-country” already this is still a one-at-a-time effort and costly.
Sales Rep: you could hire a sales rep for $50,000 to $100,000 or more per year to drive new customer leads – this is expensive and is not a 24/7 lead generator.
Then there is the company I work for, MFG.com. Consider the following:
You’re a Supplier anywhere in the world. You set yourself up with an MFG.com Supplier Website. This is essentially a factory profile that is a single page and contains all the details any Buyer would immediately want to know about you. This one-page site is not only available inside the MFG.com marketplace for any relevant Buyer to review, it is also available outside the MFG.com marketplace because this Supplier Website is Search Engine Optimized (SEO). This is a big deal and on it’s own companies that do only this would charge you a small fortune to get your own site ranked high on major search engines. MFG.com gives it to you as a part of the marketplace membership.
Then what? You then set up a short series of saved search filters on your MFG.com account so that you see only the sort of production requests you care about. MFG.com received tens of thousands of RFQs (requests for quotes) into the marketplace each year and your saved search filter delivers right into your hands only those sort of production runs that you say you want to know about.
Stop and think about that for a moment….. you’re going about your day and as the right types of production run requests flow into the marketplace you know about it in real time. It’s in your hand.
What do you do? You run with it – you quote on the business you want, you call the Buyer and introduce yourself – you work the account you didn’t even know about only yesterday.
What else? Intellience on leads. Wouldn’t it be nice if you knew exactly who looked at your website, or you phone book listing, or whatever register you might be listed in? Sure it would. MFG.com delivers this. When someone looks at your MFG.com Website (Supplier profile page), MFG.com tells you exactly who it is.
Question – What would you do if you knew the full contact info of the last 30 people that simply reviewed your profile?
Answer – You might call them back and say “hello, how can we help you?” – that’s what you’d do. You work the account that you didn’t even know about only yesterday.
The point is, MFG.com delivers to you a regular stream of leads that make sense for you each day/week/month as they happen. Leads find you. Leads find you in the form of profile views, phone calls, emails, and actual RFQs for real work from real buyers, really sourcing right now – all for a few bucks a day (instead of a few thousand $$$ a day at a trade show).
Think about this – You use email to communicate. You use bill pay to pay bills. You use the web to consume news. You use a smart phone to work on the go. Think about now using a web-based sourcing platform to get new production leads – harness this power and free yourself up to focus on making things instead of looking for leads.
When a Buyer is looking for a Supplier they’re no longer pulling out a book – they’re going the Google and they’re not finding you. They are finding the Suppliers on MFG.com – so start using the at-your-fingertips technology that MFG.com sets in your lap and start selecting your leads instead of looking for them.
Check out http://www.mfg.com/textiles and get plugged in.
posted by tony forcucci
