Tek Pak sets itself apart by doing what most in the industry won't: agreeing to produce short-runs, to engineering trial prototypes that might never develop into a full-blown production order, and to delivering products fast. Its carrier tape is a safe and reliable medium for storing and transporting the components used in most electronic devices, from cell phones to computer circuit boards. Its innovative thermoform trays meet the needs of medical device and drug companies, by taking into account industry mandated criteria like sterilization, FDA-approved materials and source traceability. Beyond packaging, the company also thermoforms end devices too, such as certain proprietary components for mobile devices.
Tek Pak's team of engineers and manufacturing support staff has long outgrown the confines of a garage, and today operates from more than 40,000 square feet of offices and manufacturing plants and warehouses in Batavia, IL, St. Charles, IL and San Jose, CA. Tek Pak also maintains an office in Sweden to accommodate an ever-growing overseas clientele.
Challenge: Building an in-house sales strategy from scratch Over the years Tek Pak built its business organically, thanks to customer references by word of mouth, and mostly from a reliance on a distributor network: nearly 90 percent of company sales were made through distributors. The company never had a dedicated sales force and no single person was tasked with a strategic sales role.
Early in 2008, as the global economy began to retract, it became evident throughout the organization that the company needed a more effective method to generate sales. For Tek Pak to keep growing, it could no longer depend on others to fill the sales pipeline. Vice President of Research and Development Scott Carter determined a more sophisticated and strategic internet strategy would enable Tek Pak to capture new business. "We needed to be more proactive internally in ramping up our sales leads," Mr. Carter said. "We had no system in place to capture new prospects as we needed to."
Solution: Building a New, Online Sales Force While Mr. Carter believed the corporate website had the potential to be a powerful, in-house sales channel, he felt that no web developer fully understood Tek Pak's business and customer base. That is, until he met ThomasNet. Mr. Carter considers ThomasNet unique for its understanding of Tek Pak's marketplace, and most importantly, the product managers and engineers who are Tek Pak's customers. It didn't hurt, Mr. Carter added that ThomasNet was able to provide a web solution at a cost that was about 30 percent less than its competitors. "The fact that ThomasNet has developed thousands of websites for companies like ours gave me a high degree of confidence in its ability to help us," Mr. Carter said.
With direction to develop a website that could serve as a virtual sales force, ThomasNet's team built an online catalog tailored specifically to how Tek Pak's customers source products. The catalog is built on ThomasNet's Navigator platform technology, which helps companies replicate sales and business processes online. For instance, ThomasNet took into account that cell phones, computer components and other electronics are increasingly manufactured in Asia and Mexico. Knowing that, the team built an online catalog with the sort of rich, precise language that Tek Pak prospects working anywhere in the world would use in an online search to find the carrier tape, take up reels, tape feeders, custom trays and packaging they're seeking.
"One thing that impressed me since going live with the online catalog is how our organic search rankings went up dramatically within a very short period of time, all because of the content we put in the online catalog," Mr. Carter said.
Once a prospective tape and reel customer arrives at Tek Pak's online catalog, he can search for the right item for his job in three ways: drilling down through categories like carrier tape, cover tape and take up reels, or by key word. Whether Tek Pak's top of the line patented NITRO carrier tape or its protective Pro Tek Reel bands, engineers can submit a request for quote directly to Tek Pak for a fast response.
The process is the same for prospects seeking rapid thermoform prototypes and custom trays for other industries. Whether a pharmaceutical engineer developing a small batch drug delivery system or an electrical engineer working on a prototype defense telecommunications system, they can easily navigate the site and request a detailed quote from any page.
Results: New customers from around the globe drive double digit revenue growth Tek Pak's new web solution from ThomasNet became the high performing sales vehicle Mr. Carter hoped it would be. Comparing year on year months, Tek Pak invoiced 37.5 percent more customers in January 2010 than in January 2008. "That's pretty significant," Mr. Carter said. "We wouldn't have done it without ThomasNet."
Tek Pak has been steadily surfacing new leads from customers in the US and abroad, and converting them into sales. The new online catalog has delivered an order for a manual carrier tape feeder from a major cell phone producer (leading to more orders), an open tool carrier tape list order from a major manufacturer, an order for a prototype rapid carrier tape from an electronics company in Mexico and a carrier tape order from a Malaysian electronics manufacturer.
"A few weeks after launching the site, we were already receiving orders through the catalog," Mr. Carter noted. "We're excited because it's led to even more orders. Several of the engineers visiting our site told us that without the online catalog, they would not have realized our product breadth."
Accelerating sales and a growing export business have more than grown the bottom line, leading Tek Pak to move into a new research and development center this year. Building on the success of its custom manufacturing and thermoforming business, Tek Pak has also become a distributor for C-Pak, one of the world's top carrier tape suppliers, based in Asia.
The online catalog metrics support Tek Pak's optimistic forecast for new capacity. The company saw its website user sessions soar, from a total of 803 in all of 2008 to 1,069 in just the first nine months of 2009, an increase of over 77 percent. Conversion actions — behaviors that draw a visitor closer to a sale, like viewing a new page or submitting a request for information — moved up nearly 40 percent. The upward trajectory is expected to continue, especially because through the use of ThomasNet WebTraxs, Mr. Carter can see how his customers use the online catalog. With that added intelligence, he can customize the information he puts on the website to help sell even more.
Getting down to brass tacks, Mr. Carter spells his delight in the new online catalog. "How's this for cost justification: it took all of three months to realize a complete return on our investment in ThomasNet."
If you are interested in learning about the successes of other ThomasNet clients, go to www.promoteyourbusiness.com or call (800) 879-6757.
June 2010
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