How to Use Your ERP to Supercharge Your Marketing

By: Paul Van Metre
Co-Founder
ProShop ERP

Machine shops are great at making incredibly precise and intricate machined parts, but many of them aren’t very good at marketing. They don’t put enough energy into letting the world know how great they are, and how they are a great and safe option to be a vendor. If shops want to grow to their full potential, they need to be marketing and sales driven organizations. When shops put an inconsistent effort into sales and marketing, the inevitable swings in sales demand can be brutal on company profitability! One slow month without enough work to cover the break-even of your shop can wipe out several months of good profit. But there is a right and a wrong way to focus your marketing efforts.

There is a lot of marketing hype and fluff out there, some bordering on hyperbole, that discerning buyers will see right through. It’s important to share details of your equipment and the types of parts you specialize in, but claiming that you have 100% quality and delivery performance, or that you are THE leader in CNC machining will have your prospective clients rolling their eyes and moving along.

Three Key Points to Supercharge Your Marketing

1. Focus on building trust and credibility
2. Highlight the processes that set your shop apart
3. Do this consistently, month in and month out

We know that going deeper into HOW you are such an excellent supplier is what buyers really want to know more about. If everyone claims to be the best but don’t back that up with facts, it holds no weight. Buyers, after all, are primarily in the business of reducing risk for their companies. Both in total cost, and in logistical risk of potential late deliveries. And savvy buyers know that many companies are actually a complete mess when they pull back the curtain and look at their business processes. Job travelers get buried in piles of others in the office, and they get lost out on the shop floor. Inspection is tracked on paper, if at all. Files accidentally get lost, deleted or moved on the disorganized file network. Customer job data is in 10 different spreadsheets which are all disconnected. It’s a miracle that jobs show up on time as much as they do, and it’s only because of sheer will and determination of the team trying to do their absolute best. If key people were out sick or left their jobs, things would come crashing to a halt. Sound like the place a customer wants to place their work? I didn’t think so. I had a senior aerospace supply chain executive tell me once:

“I can walk into a shop and smell the disorganization within 5 minutes. They can’t hide it!”

So much of the goal of your marketing efforts should be to set your company apart from the others, by focusing on being transparent about HOW you can prove you are a stable, high performing and reliable supplier, without having a team of people scrambling every day to get jobs out the door.

Machine Shop Marketing at its Finest

I recently saw a social media post from one of our customers, Focused On Machining in Colorado, who was doing exactly what I described above. The post was highlighting how they help to ensure that the outside processors get their plating requirements right, helping to ensure that the parts don’t get scrapped or have to get redone, thereby helping ensure that Focused On Machining can deliver high quality parts, on-time to their customers.
 

These are the type of concrete details that will cut through the hyperbole and demonstrate tangible ways that Focused On Machining is an exceptional supplier. When they pique the interest of a company who can appreciate the level of detail that they bring to their processes, Justin Quinn, the owner and his team can then go into more detail about how they help ensure high quality, on-time parts. And they’ll be doing so by demonstrating that they manage all these important aspects of their business with ProShop ERP. It’s not common to use your ERP system as a sales tool, but it is highly effective to cut through the noise and connect in a meaningful way with your potential customers.

Focus on Highlighting Your ERP Features

Here is an example of how ProShop manages an “Outside Processing Approved Drawing” which can be specifically marked up as shown in the image above to clarify specific outside processing requirements to improve success on those critical outside process operations.

By leveraging a simple feature within ProShop, as a marketing strategy to build trust and expertise with potential customers, Focused On Machining is cutting through the noise of marketing fluff from other shops and demonstrating that they should be the go-to shop for high value parts with complex outside processes, and helping to attract the right customers who value and are willing to pay for such expertise. It is precisely this strategy that has helped Focused on Machining grow over 40% in the past year. Now that sounds like a winning strategy in practice.

Need More Information?
Paul Van Metre
ProShop ERP
Bellingham, WA
www.ProShopERP.com
800-990-4046
LinkedIn

About the Author

Paul Van Metre

Paul is the president of ProShop USA and co-founder of ProShop ERP, a revolutionary web based and paperless ERP/MES/QMS system specifically designed for the metalworking industry. They partner with shops who seek to push the edge of technology by going completely paperless, strengthen their ISO or AS9100 systems, combine all their shop software into one system and build robust business processes to achieve high rates of growth, profitability and performance.

Paul holds a BS in Industrial Technology and founded a precision aerospace machine shop directly out of college in 1997. The company quickly realized that current ERP systems on the market were inadequate for machine shops and started developing ProShop. After growing the company to 75 employees and over $11M in revenue, Paul and his partners sold the company in 2014 to focus on bringing ProShop to the metalworking industry.