THERE’S NOTHING STANDARD ABOUT IT: PERFECTION SPRING & STAMPING RE-ENGINEERS ITS BUSINESS TO BUILD SALES AND OPEN DOORS IN NEW MARKETS

Strategic partnership with Thomas Industrial Network allows this one-stop, custom-engineered parts maker to rebuild its business

About Perfection Spring & Stamping Corp. Perfection Spring & Stamping Corp. first opened its doors over five decades ago - and has been helping its customers ever since. The company was founded in 1955 as Perfection Spring Manufacturing Co., a custom manufacturer of springs and wireforms for the appliance industry. Today, it has expanded to include a wide variety of custom springs, metal stampings, four slide parts, wireforms and mechanical assemblies.

Perfection is a one-stop shop, providing custom engineering for every part’s specification, design and production. They even go further, providing sub-assembly services for their customers’ custom products. Historically, Perfection has served major players in the automotive and home appliance industries, including Whirlpool, Philips and General Motors. While continuing to serve those marketplaces, Perfection has made significant inroads into new manufacturing segments in the past decade, including construction, industrial equipment and medical devices.

A second-generation business founded by Louis S. Kahn, it is now operated by sons David and Joshua, president and executive vice president, respectively. Perfection Spring and Stamping is situated in Mt. Prospect, Ill., about 24 miles northwest of Chicago. They employ over 100 people, only three of whom are sales people.

Challenge: Building back from a down economy with a streamlined staff and lean customer base Companies like Perfection are particularly hard-hit in an economic downturn because they rely on other manufacturers’ performance. Unfortunately, a deepening recession over the past few years drove several of Perfection’s customers out of business, forcing the custom manufacturer into its own round of cutbacks. Perfection needed a new sales model if it were to successfully recover from the recession, grow its sales and expand into new markets.

As a custom manufacturer of engineered metal components, Perfection has unique needs. Unlike standard product and commodity manufacturers that can market through a product catalog and hold standard inventory, Perfection Spring and Stamping designs and builds new and unique items for each customer. The sales cycle is often lengthy – from six months to several years. It is also deeply consultative and collaborative. The unique nature of each product makes it difficult to know just what to showcase on a website or in sales materials. Additionally, the small family company’s sales team already wears several hats, giving them limited time and resources to dedicate to full time marketing efforts.

In order to build back the enterprise, Joshua Kahn sought a way to keep sales and marketing costs at a minimum, while at the same time trying to pursue new customers in new markets. The answer, it seemed to him, lay in fully leveraging the capabilities of the Internet to open up his business to the 24/7 global market of potential customers. A flat, outdated website, seen as cutting-edge when it was crafted in 1993 by Mr. Kahn himself, wasn’t helping to achieve the company’s newly articulated objectives: drive qualified leads to the company; generate interest in new markets; and streamline the efforts of his limited sales force, enabling them to focus more on selling, than on prospecting.

“In short, we needed to find a way to attract prospects at their time of need,” said Mr. Kahn. “And we knew that making more robust use of the Internet was the only way to achieve this.” He attempted to revamp the site on his own, creating new content and adding photos, but realized the “new” site hadn’t improved Perfection Spring and Stamping’s standing in search results, wasn’t attracting qualified leads, nor was the older platform able to deliver the image that Perfection wanted to portray. “It was clear we needed help from an expert,” he recalled.

Solution: A turnkey sales tool that taps into the Internet to attract qualified new business leads, affordably On the referral of a friendly competitor, Mr. Kahn spoke with a Thomas Industrial Network representative about possible solutions to his business needs. Central to the discussion was that it was a challenge for Perfection to attract qualified customers searching online for their company’s particular capabilities, engineering expertise, and ability to provide competitive metal components to a global market. Furthermore, prior to the collaboration with Thomas Industrial Network, Perfection’s previous website only had four indexed pages that could be found through general internet searches. Today, they boast about having over 100 searchable pages that can be located through standard internet searches.

“Not only did my colleague rave about what Thomas Industrial Network did for his company, but I found through conversations with ThomasNet that they really understood the fundamentals about our business: that we don’t sell based upon having the lowest price, but rather we provide a thoughtfully engineered quote, needs analysis, and suggestions for program savings customized for each prospect,” Mr. Kahn said.

The turn-key nature of the solution was especially attractive to Mr. Kahn. Together, he and Thomas Industrial Network’s team of engineers and web specialists embarked on recreating the Perfection website, paying particular attention to developing content that shows the company’s technical capabilities. Through the use of video and photo galleries, as well as a “Learning Center” providing proven examples of cost reduction success stories, Perfection as able to present itself in the manner envisioned. “We knew that employing all types of media, not only showing the products we manufacture, but how they are manufactured would help us increase our hit rate and ranking in most search engines,” noted Mr. Kahn.

The content for Perfection’s new website was written by engineers, for engineers, making the information that much more impactful in driving results in online searches, as well as to make it crystal clear to the visitor what Perfection can do. Because so much of the consultative sales approach relies on sharing information via the Internet, the right content is essential to holding a prospect’s interest. That helps turn qualified leads into customers.

Thomas Industrial Network also provides Perfection administrators with tools to manage and update their site on short notice, enabling the company to provide real-time additions announcing everything from free technical seminars, to new equipment and services, and updated videos of manufacturing processes. Kahn said, “These new tools give us the ability to keep our website new and fresh, always giving our customers a reason to come back.”

Adding more muscle to its lead generation process is Perfection’s presence at ThomasNet.com, the leading online destination where engineers from across a variety of industries search for suppliers and manufacturers every day. Those engineers looking for a partner close to home in Illinois can find a link to Perfection too, by narrowing their search to companies in that state at ThomasNet.com.

“The website does the time-consuming work of prospecting, allowing our sales team to focus on closing the deal,” said Mr. Kahn.

Results: Surfacing better qualified leads and growing sales in new industries, all with lower costs per lead Mr. Kahn is happy to report that his company’s new method of selling is helping the business turn the corner, producing better prospects and more business at a lower cost per lead. Since Perfection’s new website went live in June 2010, the company has received more than 80 highly qualified opportunities where the company provided a quote.

“Traditionally, we receive hundreds of quotes per month and it’s a long and expensive process to qualify them through traditional sales calls.” said Mr. Kahn. “The new website has drawn a higher degree of “Qualified leads” right to our door. The 80 quotes completed are better opportunities then we have ever seen, even in the days when we were represented by no less than 18 sales agencies across the country.”

Importantly, not only is quoting up, but so are sales. In its first year of the program, Perfection landed several new and substantial customers, as well as achieving its goal of increasing its business in new markets:

• Tesla, the innovative automaker, found Perfection online and engaged them to assist in the design and manufacture of engineered metal components for its new Model S Sedan, including four-slide components and springs
• One new customer is a business that had long been on the company’s prospect list, but Perfection was never able to get past the front door. Navistar, a leading maker of trucks and diesel engines, found Perfection and asked for a quote on a 15,000 metal stampings annually for their engine cylinders. That inquiry resulted in and order with revenues exceeding $140,000 per year;
• A large manufacturer of commercial air filtration systems was impressed with Perfection’s engineering capabilities demonstrated on the website. According to Mr. Kahn, this new customer has already placed three new parts with Perfection and has the potential of becoming a one million dollar account;
• A manufacturer of anti-freezing devices for home water systems has also signed on with an early order of approximately $15,000, and offers a bright potential for future growth.

Among the companies that are currently in the quote pipeline are a U.S.-based maker of fire-suppression systems and an automotive supplier in Brazil. The latter illustrates the growing international inquiries, one of many now in the quote pipeline.

The volume of new business has allowed Perfection to invest one million dollars in new capital equipment, including punch presses and coiling machines. The company is also actively hiring for a variety of positions, from the machinists to work on this new equipment to engineers and a human resources professional.

“I think what I find most compelling about Thomas Industrial Network is that their company is just like ours — a single shop with a total web solution,” said Mr. Kahn. “Colleagues have asked whether the project has been worth the investment, and I tell them that not only would we do it again in a heartbeat, but they should not hesitate. The opportunities that Thomas Industrial Network has brought to us have far exceeded our expectations.”

October 2011