Multiple Buyer Personas and Customer Journeys

Sales in manufacturing generally follow one of three paths:

The distinctions are important as they represent different buyer personas, each requiring different sales approaches and precisely crafted buying journeys.

Selling to B2B and B2C via mid-sized distributors

Selling through SMB distributors or retailers means one is selling to a business owner, president, or other top-level executive. Not only do you need to convince them to stock your brand(s), but you also need to either:

• Secure an exclusive stocking relationship, OR

• Convince their field-sales and support staff to favor and push your brands over other competing brands

Either way, you win by:

• Being transparent around margins; enabling them to earn sufficient profits 

• Being the most responsive, supportive, and easiest manufacturer to do business with

• Extending enabling technologies (for example, offering partner portals that seamlessly integrate with your manufacturing CRM to enable efficient prospecting, selling, quoting, and marketing on your behalf)

• Supporting them with content and collateral for marketing your brand via partner portals. Consistently training them and discussing distribution strategies in niche markets

• Attaining strong brand recognition in their local markets

• Ensuring ready availability of innovative, high-quality products 

The first four fall generally within the purview of manufacturing sales organizations. So, let us consider relevant opportunities for using technology to improve sales process efficiency in manufacturing—

Step 1: Work to maximize distributor/retailer profitability

Improve forecast accuracy — for revenue control, pipeline visibility, better margins, more accurate demand

Industrial distributors and retailers make money in two ways: first, by marking up your products and second, by minimizing inventory carrying costs. To minimize carrying costs, they need to be accurate at forecasting demand, and require the manufacturer to be highly reliable in terms of product availability, delivery lead times, and product quality. 

To deliver that reliability, you also need to excel at forecasting your own sales and demand. From a sales efficiency perspective, key questions for manufacturing sales leaders to explore:

• Are we efficiently leveraging the demand-forecasting capabilities of our distributor partners?

• Do we have tools — such as a manufacturing CRM with complex sales pipeline management and forecasting capabilities — that enable us to efficiently capture, roll up predictive information from our distributors and hand it off to demand planners for ensuring product availability?

• Are there AI-powered sales technologies we can leverage to predict the likelihood of deal closings/future revenue from the account as well as any risks to ongoing sales opportunities ?

• Do we have extendable tools such as dealer / distributor partner portals to enable distributors to register new deals and claim credit after a closure ?
   

Step 2: Become a preferred manufacturer with personalized sales and service

Personalize customer journeys for multiple buying personas

Ask any industrial distributor why they prefer doing business with one specific manufacturer and they always cite personalized service, responsiveness, product superiority and ease of doing business. They love having knowledgeable, local sales reps on call to educate them, respond to their inquiries, and so forth. But broad field sales networks are expensive to fund, not always feasible, and difficult to keep staffed especially under today’s tight-labor conditions. Modern, fully integrated manufacturing CRM solutions can help to fill the gap by:

• Making it easy and efficient to personalize sales interactions

• Enabling manufacturers to plan, design, and tune multiple buying journeys to suit varying customer personas (for example, big-box retail buyer, large distribution procurement professional, SMB distributor owner, and so forth).

An integrated manufacturing CRM offers access to complete account histories, including what prices, average delivery lead times, deal sizes, payment terms, and margins satisfy specific customers in negotiation to carry and sell products. By capturing all interactions — from email and web ad clicks to web-site hits, sales inquiries, support interactions, event attendance, requests for quote/RFx assistance, pricing negotiations and so forth — a manufacturing CRM enables reps to easily interact and emulate those highly personalized local-rep experiences. 

This is an area where Artificial Intelligence (AI) can play a big role in bridging the gap between flexibility and personalization on one hand and maintaining sales efficiency on the other. It also means being able to detect, early on, when an individual distributor might be losing faith or becoming disgruntled with your brand by recommending corrective actions and timing for such interventions. 

Now, imagine the potential sales efficiencies and insights to be gained from centralizing management of that content using a manufacturing CRM integrated with digital asset management (DAM) and learning management (LMS) platforms: 

• You can deploy templates to streamline content creation and ensure messaging is consistent on-brand with easy-to-use sales cheat sheets

• You have one version of truth for each asset; everyone always has access to the most recent versions of approved files

• You can organize and make content searchable to support personalization of sales interactions for different roles, phases of the journey

• You gain deep insights into who is accessing and using your content, which enables you to design, customize, and refine learning pathways   
   

Selling to large corporate distributors 

Selling to large manufacturers and corporate distributors usually means interacting with trained procurement professionals who can be:

• Difficult to access for new sales conversations with an existing strong competitor relationship / partnership in place

• Likely to tightly control sales interactions in request for negotiation processes

• Well-armed with information and insights about the history of your customer relationships when sitting down to negotiate deals

Step 1: Improve your RFx response game 

Re-level playing field when dealing with procurement professionals

Professional procurement teams are more likely than SMB counterparts to use sophisticated AI tools to give them negotiating advantages. For example, they might deploy a tool for analyzing conversations to determine how far they can push your rep in a price negotiation. Manufacturing sales leaders can re-level the playing field by adding tools that can analyze multiple discovery call notes, discounted quotes and overall deal cycles to help them on the sales side. 

One example is a manufacturing CRM that uses AI to streamline RFP response management. It might prefill standard fields, lookup and retrieve pre-written responses to common RFx questions, or analyze RFx responses for high-risk SLAs. AI might also be used to compare RFP responses from different deals to identify the responses typically associated with wins, high-profitability deals, and so forth.

Manufacturers selling through multiple channels — OEM direct, retail, distribution, and SMB clients — often struggle with pipeline management and forecasting as they have different cadences, intent signals, gates, etc. A CRM for manufacturing can help alleviate those issues by automatically adding RFP pipeline to an existing sales pipeline.

Support less knowledgeable reps with CPQ for complex dealmaking

In addition to streamlining complex quotations, CPQ functionality can assist newer reps by avoiding unnecessary discounting or yearly billing errors and ensuring bundled configurations are accurately priced. CPQ modules also enable detailed call logging in complex deals, creating opportunities for sales leaders to capture knowledge their teams can leverage for closing future deals.