About Keats Manufacturing Company When you turn the key in the ignition of your vehicle, set the timer on your oven or click the remote to open your garage door, you experience the benefit of small custom-built metal components. Those are the types of parts Keats Manufacturing Co. designs and builds, all essential to making those systems perform properly.

Family owned and operated since 1958, Keats is a custom manufacturer of small metal stampings, wire forms and assemblies for most major industries, including automotive, medical, electronics, aerospace, military and construction. Keats combines technological innovation with 25 of the industry's most experienced die makers, to create parts of the highest level of precision and quality. They will satisfy any order, from small-scale prototypes to production runs of over 500 million pieces.

Headquartered in Wheeling, Illinois, Keats has grown to 170 employees, and operates additional manufacturing facilities in El Paso, Texas and Ft. Lauderdale, Florida. Their job shops are equipped with more than 150 metal stamping and wire forming machines. Each location is ISO 9001:2000 compliant, with the Illinois and Texas facilities carrying the certification for TS 16949 compliance as well, to give their typical engineering customers and prospects the confidence that the parts they purchase adhere to the strictest quality standards.


Challenge: Recovering sales momentum in midst of recession

When the economic downturn hit the industrial market, Keats was not immune. Fifty years of word-of-mouth references from satisfied and repeat customers was still not enough to carry the company, especially when many long time customers were forced to cut back or worse, went out of business.

As revenues began to shrink, the company looked to make changes – quickly – to recapture lost revenue. They needed to widen the net of prospects, and delve into other industries to find new business. They also needed to refresh their sales approach. At the time, Keats' outbound lead generation hinged on mailers, magazine advertising, tradeshows and cold calling. And although these tools complemented the company's growth for nearly half a century, they'd become expensive, inefficient and ineffective, especially in a turbulent sales environment.

Keats' management recognized that a growing number of their customers, primarily design engineers working at OEM's, were routinely turning to the Internet as a starting point to research and evaluate custom manufacturers. "Putting money into tradeshows and magazine advertising just wasn't helping us grow anymore. It was getting more difficult to justify the cost, when we're getting little results," said Matt Eggemeyer, vice president and chief operating officer at Keats Manufacturing. "Our potential buyers are going online. We needed a strategy to reach those customers there, on the web."

Although Keats had a website, it functioned more like an online brochure than the high-performing sales channel it needed to be for the company to get its "mojo" back, and it was not easily found on search engines.

"We realized that automotive engineers don't care as much about the details of our history, that we started in Chicago as a one-man shop on Cicero Avenue," said Mr. Eggemeyer. "What they want to know is, 'Can you make a small terminal that's tin-plated, and can it hold a plus or minus 003 spec?' Our site was woefully inadequate at giving engineers what they're looking for."


Solution: Building an online sales channel to uncover new business leads, across diverse industries To emerge stronger from the recession, Keats' leadership devised a long-term plan to diversify the industries it serviced, and needed an online strategy to pull it off. Mr. Eggemeyer was selective in choosing to partner with ThomasNet to make it happen. "I didn't want to deal with just anyone," recalled Mr. Eggemeyer. "I wanted a company that understands my custom business, and the type of people I want to reach. That's why we chose ThomasNet. They are 100 percent focused on serving the industrial market."

Step one was building a new website. The team collected organized and uploaded text and images showing the full-range of Keats' capabilities. It includes examples of Keats' prior custom work, so prospects can find an item similar to their own project, and feel comfortable proceeding. It includes the detail-rich descriptions that Mr. Eggemeyer knows engineers are looking for, like alloys, thickness, width, plating specs, etc., which helps drive Keats to the top of the search engine rankings. A high ranking is especially important to Mr. Eggemeyer, who estimates that an engineer starting a job looks at five or six different machine shops during the research phase.

Step two was developing an intuitive user experience. Keats culled its product and services information into six main product categories. Clicking on any one of them takes the user directly to the information they'd need to complete a job, including material types, shapes and machining capabilities. All this information combines to give engineers the confidence that Keats can create the precise custom part they've specified for their products.

Once a customer is ready to request more information or even a quote, the process is simple. At any point they can click to submit detailed RFQ's online, and attach their custom design and requirements to ensure precision and accuracy back from Keats.


Results: Keats gets its "mojo" back with new customers, 30 percent bump in sales Since Keats' new site went live in April 2009, the results have been incredible, defying the down economy. Sales are up 30 percent since the site's launch, with the number of quotes more than doubling, growing from 600 to 1,400 in one year.

"Keeping our pipeline full like this is critical because our sales cycle can be long – anywhere from six months to two years," said Mr. Eggemeyer.

Many of these new quotes have converted into significant accounts. Mr. Eggemeyer credits the new website for delivering a million dollar project to develop a lightweight metal clip for a plastic bullet for soldiers to carry machine gun ammunition in the field. "It was the depth of information and ease-of-use of our new website that assured the client that we were a company he could depend on to produce the part he needed, on time and at a fair price. Had we not had a strong online presence, we would never have been considered."

The online strategy has also helped surface former Keats customers for quick sales. One example is a cell phone manufacturer that, because of its growth, lost track of how to manufacture a long dormant part. Through searching ThomasNet.com they found Keats again, and placed a $25,000 order.

The success of Keats' online strategy from ThomasNet gave the company the confidence to cut its tradeshow and magazine advertising spending. "I'm getting almost 2,000 qualified buyers to my site every month now," said Mr. Eggemeyer. "It far surpasses the results of our former sales activities and that's what I need to grow my business."

If you are interested in learning more about the successes of other ThomasNet clients, go to www.promoteyourbusiness. thomasnet.com or call (800) 879-6757.

October 2010

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