With broad application in the lawn & garden and fitness sectors (among others), Innovative employs 100 people in two locations: its 30,000-square-foot headquarters in Schaumburg, Illinois, and the 7,000-square-foot plant home to wholly owned subsidiary Componentes Innovadores in Cartago, Costa Rica. Its factory in Costa Rica allows the company to run large runs at a competitive price. Conversely, in Schaumberg, they can do short runs of highly engineered products. The combination allows Innovative Components to provide customers with the quick service that you would expect from a domestic manufacturer, at the low cost that you would look for from an import source.
Challenges: How to Replicate the Sales Process and Make It Easier to Conduct Business Online
While Innovative knows its buyers – primarily, they are engineers working in lawn and garden and in fitness product industries – the company still sought a ‘pull’ strategy that could bring highly qualified leads and serious buyers. To find fertile sales ground, Mr. O’Connor knew the company had to expand beyond the confines of the telephone as its primary selling tool.
“Prospects didn’t need a live sales rep anymore; they needed an automated system that could efficiently display a large number of products and guide them to the absolute ideal solution,” Mr. O’Connor observed. Unfortunately, the Innovative Components website was rudimentary, sprinkled with some product PDFs and without a mechanism for the customer to ask questions or share their needs.
In 2007 Mr. O’Connor saw signs that a tightening economy threatened some of Innovative’s biggest clients, specifically those depending on new housing starts as the cornerstone of their business. He recognized the company would need to ratchet up its lead generation efforts, with an eye toward new business.
Solution: An Integrated Website that Works Like a Sales Team Needing to alter its approach – from paper-based marketing and phone-centered sales to a comprehensive Internet-powered strategy – Innovative reviewed its options and turned to a trusted partner, ThomasNet. “We looked at any source we felt would be a good investment for us, including GlobalSpec, Mfg.com, Medibix and Kelly Search” said Mr. O’Connor. “In the end, we found that ThomasNet just outperformed everyone else.”
ThomasNet helped Innovative articulate its business goals before beginning work on a new website that would help achieve them. Through its work with ThomasNet, Mr. O’Connor learned that, in order to jump start lead generation, Innovative needed to get its message out to a much larger and better qualified group of users than print catalogs and direct mail could ever reach.
Built and launched in 2008, the Innovative website and integrated catalog was the culmination of months of careful research, detailed development and close collaboration between the two companies. The final product offered two chief features: the ability to pull prospects to the company’s broad product offering, and the capacity to help prospects identify the exact solution to their needs while allowing Innovative to capture knowledge it could apply to the company’s strategic direction.
“The new site has genuine ‘searchability’,” said Mr. O’Connor. “Not only do we perform far better than we did in searches, but the incorporation of key search terms lets us see which products are most popular and sought-after, which helps us determine which lines we should further expand or limit in the future.”
While the old website produced rather general inquiries from engineers, like "I'd like a star knob," the new-and-improved website, with its online catalog, has generated far more specific requests, such as: "a black star knob, two-and-a-half inches in diameter, with a quarter-20 by three-quarter stud, in 18-8 stainless steel, packaged 500 per, and delivered in three weeks." Not only has the customer gained the ability to ask for and receive precisely what he needs, but Innovative Components has been able to gather precious data to guide future product marketing, sales and development endeavors. And easy-to-use back-end tools allow the company to make catalog changes and corrections in real-time, keeping the catalog fresh and up-to-date.
“The online catalog has become a real-time tool for our salespeople,” noted Mr. O’Connor. “When they're talking to customers, they direct them to our website, where they can walk them, step by step, through the process of fully qualifying the product they need, right down to the style, threads, color and texture they want. Our new site allows customers to express themselves as if they were speaking to a live salesperson.”
Results: Metrics Tell the Real StoryMr. O’Connor takes great satisfaction in contrasting the company’s old website, “static and of poor design,” with the site of today, which he calls “our number one sales tool.” But statistics are the coin of the realm for Innovative, and the numbers speak louder than words.
In fact, the numbers fairly shout out the success of both ThomasNet.com as a destination for Innovative to be in to reach qualified buyers, and for its technology that now powers the new Innovative website:
In 2008 ThomasNet.com brought Innovative 28 new customers worth about $227,000 in business, while Google produced 111 new accounts, but only $206,000 in revenues, quantifying ThomasNet.com’s ability to produce higher quality, more efficiently closed leads.
• Since the launch of the online catalog, Innovative’s user sessions have skyrocketed, from 6,300 in 2006 to over 181,000 in 2008
• Revenues from new business rose from $1.3 million in 2007 to $1.6 million in 2008, a 23% increase despite a darkening economy
• ThomasNet.com was the single largest source of new client revenue in 2008, accounting for 14% of all new business dollars
Bounce rate is a diagnostic metric near and dear to Mr. O’Connor’s heart, measuring the percentage of visitors who leave a particular landing page (to which he was directed by a search engine result) without viewing additional pages on the site. Using Web Traxs tracking technology to quantify bounce rates, Mr. O’Connor can gauge which pages on his new website deliver the information that visitors expect to receive, and which pages require different content so as to more accurately fulfill visitors’ expectations. Web Trax also helps Innovative to know which product lines do not justify expansion because they presently receive too few search engine hits.
Moreover, the backend analytics can be an excellent source of both lead generation and product refinement/expansion efforts. By identifying, for example, a company that has logged multiple sessions, Innovative Components can uncover an active prospect investigating several products. A timely call may not only lead to new business, but also new products. Said Mr. O’Connor, “Our lines have been developed by asking customers, ‘What else do you use, and how else can we help you?’”
As far as Mr. O’Connor is concerned, the Innovative Components website may be one of his hardest-working sales associates in the country. Not only does it generate the initial call, but also its user-friendly templates and parametric search capabilities allow customers to choose specifications, build products and submit requests for quotes in real time. “For us,” said Mr. O’Connor, “it’s a 24/7/365 salesperson that pulls its weight day in, day out, for 8,760 hours a year.”
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