You're contemplating a new product launch and you're digging into where you think you might be able to sell your product.  At some point, you are going to want to determine what size company your are targeting.  This post should provide you with some food for thought.

To understand the above Pie Chart you're going to need to spend just a few minutes looking.  That Pink area on the right with the bar graph depicts only those companies in the pie chart with greater than 100 employees.

That is in the entire US machine shop market.

As you can see, the bulk of the business is in small business.  Machine Shops with under 20 employees.  Granted, it's great to get the really big machine shops to convert to your products and implement it throughout their facilities, but the smaller companies are going to require much much more work to get to them.

If you decide that you want to target the smaller machines shops there's both good news and bad news:

The Good
Smaller Shops can make decisions quicker.
The owner is generally the decision maker and not far removed from the production floor.  
Payment is generally quicker.  Larger shops tend to be slower pay than small shops that value the importance of maintaining credit.

The Bad
You will have to make many more calls and learn to establish credibility and rapport.
You can't hide any minor errors or omissions.  Each of your products that are purchased are going to be needed and quality is going to be expected.

“We’ve been doing it this way for years and no one else has complained”  If I’ve heard that once I heard it a thousand times.  Maybe, they stopped complaining years ago and maybe, just maybe, your never even heard the complaint.  Let’s look at some dollar and cents.

If someone at an end user keys in an order and faxes it to a distributor, that distributor keys in the order and faxes it into the manufacturer.  The manufacturer keys it into their system.  The product ships and a hard copy of the invoice is sent to the distributor who must key in some more information,  then the manufacturer sends out a printed copy of the invoices to their agents.  The agents then key in the sales again.  

That’s an awful lot of repetitive keystrokes folks.  

​It’s pretty easy to see why moving to electronic databases and communication is happening and is going to move to a standard.

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But there is ONE error in the picture. Can you see what it is?  To be honest, you would probably not even catch the error.  Take a look at the FORMULA in the highlighted cell.  It’s a formula and not text.  The pricing columns all have dollar signs in them.  That’s a nice thing to do if people are going to read it but the computer has to import it.

There have been cases where distributors said “Wow this is a great file and ready to import!”  but then the import went south with strange errors.  It wasn’t the dollar signs,  it was the rounding.  There was multiple column pricing for quantity breaks.  

Everything was a formula and when it was converted to text it had numbers that where out 6 decimal places. Because the formula’s where all based upon one cell as a baseline, the rounding errors got bigger and bigger and when the import happened the pricing was up to .27 cents off on certain items.  That can add up if they standard package quanity is 144 pieces. Why did it happen? Because when the import was done it only imported the first two decimal places.

Once you’ve completed your spreadsheet save all of the fields as TEXT and this problem will go away.

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Some other things to consider: What software system do your distributors use to run THEIR BUSINESS?  It’s a good idea to ask.  You may have field length issues when importing.  

​If you have a Description 1 field that is 100 characters long but the field in the software only permits 43 characters, with the rest being parsed, that information IS NOT going to be in the database.  If you have one critical dimension at the end of the description and upon import an entire group of items is parsed all of the part numbers will be different but the descriptions will all be the same.

“Well, we can’t make 100’s of special prices list for EVERY distributor” you say.  You don’t have to.  Just find out what the software is at your key distributors and accommodate them.

“Again, no one has really complained about this before so we don’t think it’s a big issue”

When do you update price lists? When you introduce a new product or have a price increase. Right?

Now, what does a good outside sales force do when there is a change?  They have a sales meeting with the distributors to review the new products (and new catalog) and get the distributor salespeople pumped up to go out and sell.  In many cases this is happening as soon as the new price list is put out… in some cases your sales force is brining it with them.

Is the IT person in the room for the meeting?  Generally the answer is no.  Does your outside sales force commonly work with the IT people at a distributor?  Do they even know who does it if you ask them?  Generally, the answer is no.  When the IT person gets the file, if they discover it’s going to take some time to clean up it gets put on the backburner, especially if their primary responsibility is accounting or other back office work.
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So what happens in the field? Your salespeople go out, make calls with the distributor salespeople and get some orders.  They place the orders.  The price list isn’t updated so they spend the next couple of days fielding questions, dealing with distributor inside salespeople and your customer service people.  They aren’t selling.  You’re losing money and you’re getting a “difficult” to deal with reputation.

You already know that that is not realistic.  But that is the same kind of thinking that is taking place in Social Media.

“Hey, we can just set up a Twitter account in a few minutes”

Well, yes you can, but, just like the first time buyer of a machine tool, there’s still an awful lot to learn. The sooner you start learning, the farther in front of your competitors you’ll be.  This is a pro-active approach.  Too many b-to-b companies, particularly exhibitors at IMTS, took a reactive approach. They jumped in and created their “social media brand names” without first having personal accounts so they understood how it works.

So the best way to learn is to set up some social media personal accounts.

Facebook – “That’s for kids.” Step back from any preconceived notions and think about this from a business standpoint.  There is a war going on.  Two data collection monoliths, Facebook & Google, are each trying to outdo each other. 

In April 2010 Facebook announced at their annual “F8” conference the “Open Graph”: That’s why you are seeing the “LIKE” button appear everywhere. Here’s why that’s important:  If you recall the first time you got a day planner you learned that you should not only put your business appointments down but also soccer games, weddings and personal events.

Time management 101. Your life is 24 hours a day. Facebook at it’s core is personal. But your personal life affects your business and vice-versa. Facebook collects personal data and associates it with your interests. If your title is “CNC machinist,” it permits advertisers to target that.

Although Google has a massive database, they have not “aggregated” demographics as deep down as Facebook. They are both competing for ad space. If you were at IMTS in Chicago and logged into Facebook, you may have seen some ads running.  But you would have only seen them if you were with in 5 miles of McCormick Place, between 7pm -10pm, were male, between 35-55, and had some keyword in your profile indicating you were in our industry.

​The “pay-per-click” cost .60 cents each and had a cap on the amount spent by the advertiser. Yes, you can do that level of targeted advertising. Creating a Facebook Page is a way to become “engaged’ and be in front of your customer when they get home from work.  The busiest time on Facebook is Wednesday and Friday evening, but we’ll talk about that more later…

They are “IN” all for the above digital spaces and probably another 1,000 more.

Have you ever purchased something online?  Have you looked down at the product reviews and decided against the purchase of something because of the reviews?  Then, did you think  “Wow, I wonder why that manufacturer isn’t reading that and fixing it? They’re getting really bad press”  The problem is that the manufacturer may not even know about the comments to address them. But B-to-B  consumers ARE researching and engaging each other.
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There are a number of free products out there to use to search for who’s talking about what.  I would recommend going to Social Mention and type in your company name and brands and see what appears.  You will find that you can drill down and drill down more and then drill down even more into exactly who is talking about what where.

Start with a personal account on:

• Twitter –  Set up Twitter account and follow some people. You can follow @RPMconsultants where we tweet about social media or my personal Twitter account, @bernardtmartin where I tweet about Education, STEM, F1, Economics and Foreign Affairs. You can then check out who we follow, learn some basics, ask some questions.
• Facebook – Set up a personal account, be sure to set your account settings to “friends only” across all categories and then search for “International Manufacturing Technology Show” or “AMTDA” on Facebook.  Look at whom they have made favorites on their Company page.  Hit the “LIKE” button.

• DON”T go out and set up accounts in YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook for your company right this minute! That’s would be like a customer saying “I want to buy the CNC with the Green Paint, I like that color.”
• Set up your personal accounts and then go to “Knowem” Search for some available names.  I’ve talked to many machinery distributor owners and employees over the years and heard “Yea, our website name is WAY too long, but it’s what we’re stuck with.”

Unlike registering your web address, your URL, with a service that reports to one central agency for verification, called ICANN, there is no single service registration of your “Social Media Brand name”
Places like Knowem allow you to search for brand names.

You want to use the same Brand name in ALL of your social media spaces.

​There are several considerations in the selection of THAT name:

• Shorter is better. Remember Twitter on permits 140 characters in “tweets” You don’t want to eat up half of it with your company name and be limited on your message.
• Use the same name in all social media spaces. That bears worth repeating. Remember that long tail search discussion?