Manufacturers spend a tremendous amount of time thinking about how they sell. They work on sales processes, train salespeople, attend trade shows, develop marketing campaigns, improve quoting systems and look for more ways to generate leads. What gets much less attention is the other side of the equation: how easy have you made it for someone to actually buy from you?
That may sound like a small distinction, but it can have a significant impact on revenue. Your sales process is designed from the inside of your company, while your buying experience is judged from the outside. Your employees know who handles an RFQ, what information engineering needs, how long a quote typically takes and what happens after a proposal goes out. A prospective customer doesn’t have that knowledge. They are simply trying to determine whether you can solve their problem and whether working with you is going to be straightforward or frustrating.
One of the best ways to find out is to mystery shop your own company.
Start Where Your Customer Starts
Forget what you know about your company and approach it as though you were a prospective customer who had never heard of you. Go to your website and try to determine what the company actually does, what types of customers you serve, what kinds of work you are equipped to handle and whether you appear to be a good fit for the particular problem you are trying to solve.
This exercise can be surprisingly revealing for manufacturers because internal knowledge tends to fill in the gaps. Your employees know what a particular piece of equipment does, which industries you really want to work with and what your capabilities mean in practical terms. A prospective customer doesn’t have that background, so if your website simply lists machines, certifications and capabilities without connecting them to customer problems, the buyer may still be left wondering whether you can actually help them.
Then try to contact your company. How long does it take to figure out who you should contact? Is there an obvious way to submit an RFQ? Does the contact form ask for information that a new prospect may not have available? Once you send something, how quickly do you receive a response, and does that response tell you what happens next?
Those details are part of your sales process whether you have deliberately designed them that way or not.
Your Process Isn’t the Buyer’s Experience
I see this disconnect frequently in manufacturing. Inside the company, the process can look perfectly logical. An RFQ comes in, someone reviews the drawings, engineering evaluates the requirements, estimating works through the numbers, sales follows up and eventually a quote gets sent. Everyone understands their role, so from the inside it feels like a functioning process.
The customer doesn’t see any of that.
The customer experiences the amount of time it takes to get an acknowledgement, whether they have to follow up to find out what is happening, whether they are asked for information they already provided and whether the quote gives them enough information to make a decision. They are also forming an opinion about what it will be like to work with you based on those interactions. If getting a quote feels difficult, they may reasonably wonder whether getting answers after they become a customer will be difficult, too.
That is why being technically capable isn’t enough. A manufacturer can have excellent equipment, outstanding quality and decades of experience and still create unnecessary friction in the buying process.
Look at How Much Work You’re Asking the Buyer to Do
Buyers are already doing a lot of work before they contact a new supplier. They may be researching companies, comparing capabilities, reviewing drawings, gathering specifications, checking certifications and trying to determine whether a supplier can meet their requirements and deadlines. The last thing they need is to take on the job of figuring out how your company works.
If your website doesn’t answer basic questions, they have to contact you to get the answers. If your RFQ process isn’t clear, they have to figure out what you need. If your response is slow, they have to follow up. If your quote is difficult to understand, they have to call and ask for clarification. None of those things necessarily means you will lose the opportunity, but each one creates another point where the buyer can become frustrated or decide that another supplier seems easier to work with.
This is particularly important in manufacturing because buyers aren’t always looking for the cheapest supplier. Many are looking for a supplier they can trust with a complicated part, a demanding application, a recurring production schedule or a problem that their current supplier can’t solve. If your company can provide that value, you don’t want the buying experience to make it harder for the prospect to discover it.
Go Through the Process Yourself
If you really want to understand what your customers experience, don’t just ask your sales team whether the process works. Go through it yourself from the outside.
Search for your company as though you were a new prospect. Read the website without relying on your existing knowledge. Try to find the information you would need to determine whether you are a fit. Then submit an inquiry or request a quote and pay attention to everything that happens afterward.
How many steps did it take to get where you needed to go? How long did it take to receive a response? Did anyone acknowledge your request? Were you told what would happen next? Did you have to provide the same information more than once? Was the quote easy to understand, and did someone help you understand the next step?
I would even have someone outside your company perform the exercise because employees are often too close to the process to see the friction. What feels obvious to someone who has worked there for five years may be completely unclear to someone encountering your company for the first time.
Ask Your Customers, Too
Your customers can also tell you where the buying process is creating friction, particularly if you ask questions that go beyond whether they are satisfied with your product.
During a Voice of the Customer interview, ask what made it easy to choose your company and what made it difficult. Find out what information they needed before contacting you, what they couldn’t find, how they felt about the quoting process and whether anything surprised or frustrated them along the way. You may hear things your internal team has never considered because the people inside the company have become accustomed to the way things work.
Don’t overlook lost opportunities, either. Someone who decided not to buy from you may be able to tell you something incredibly valuable about the experience. You don’t have to agree with every piece of feedback, but if the same issue comes up repeatedly, you have identified something worth investigating.
That is where this becomes more than a customer service exercise. You’re looking for patterns that can affect revenue.
Sometimes the Growth Opportunity Is Already in Your Pipeline
Manufacturers often assume that the answer to a sales problem is more leads. More trade shows, more outreach, more advertising, more website traffic and more names entering the CRM can all sound like reasonable solutions when the pipeline isn’t where you want it to be.
But before you put more prospects into the funnel, it is worth examining what happens to the people who are already there. If qualified prospects are struggling to understand your capabilities, waiting too long for responses, encountering a confusing RFQ process or receiving proposals that don’t make the decision easy, generating more leads won’t solve the underlying problem.
This is one of the reasons I believe marketing, sales and operations have to work together. The buyer doesn’t separate your website from your sales team or your quoting process from your operations. They experience all of it as one company.
So take a fresh look at your business from the buyer’s side of the table. Search for yourself, navigate your website, submit an inquiry, request a quote and pay attention to every point where you have to stop and figure something out. Then ask your customers and lost prospects where they experienced friction.
You may discover that your next growth opportunity isn’t another lead-generation program. It may be making it easier for the right customers to say yes once they find you.