It’s the ultimate challenge in components industry marketing – is what we are doing working? What does our marketing spend get us? Is it impacting sales, and if so, how do we see it? It’s not easy in an industry where a new customer is often the result of the combined efforts of manufacturers, distributors, and sales reps.
But there is an effective way to do this. Over the last several years, Lectrix has developed a list of 8 marketing metrics that directly precede sales activity, and they are all common to the components industry. You might also call them leading indicators, or KPIs. Most likely one or two of them are directly tied to your sales activity. Simply ask yourself which of these things happen every time you get an inquiry, an RFQ or whatever sales activity leads you to an opportunity. If you can identify it and focus your marketing plan on increasing that number, then you can confidently grow sales. For example, increased inbound inquiries may directly precede increased RFQs, increased traffic to your distributor pages may lead to higher POS, or increased meetings at a high-value account may lead directly to deeper account penetration.
Would you like to see a case study or two?
And when I say focus on it, I mean really focus. I mean agree internally that this is the shared sales-marketing goal; use that metric as your decision-making tool to decide what stays in the plan and what goes. Be ruthless – don’t let old habits get in the way. Ask marketing vendors for performance metrics before you buy. Look hard for supporting evidence from past campaigns. And if it doesn’t move the needle on that marketing metric, it should go.
But this is where some folks can get off track:
a. Either they choose a metric that DOES NOT DIRECTLY PRECEDE the sales activity
b. Or, they try to measure too many metrics, which leads to confusion about which is the most important. Let me give you two easy examples:
Client X
Sells customized specialist connectors, and only to the mil aero market.
Q: What is their marketing metric?
A: Customized sample requests.
Why? Because every connector they sell is custom. No custom sample request = no sale. So, their marketing plan is focused entirely on generating custom sample requests with an annual goal, tied to business goals.
Q: What is their marketing metric?
A: Distributor page traffic.
Why? Because all purchases include at least one visit to the manufacturers page on the distributor’s site. And if that web page traffic is not growing, then sales are not growing.
So, their marketing plan is focused entirely on generating the right kind of distributor traffic, either directly by manufacturer campaigns, or campaigns conducted in conjunction with the distributor. Or simply by ensuring their pages are working optimally on each distributor’s site.
If you would like help identifying the marketing metric that precedes your company’s sales activity, give us a call. Or, download “8 Marketing Metrics That Drive Component Sales” below, and then talk to your sales team.
Until next time, remember: Problem First, Product Last.
Graham Kilshaw
CEO, Lectrix