Manufacturing is a crucial component of the global economy — recently, the industry represented nearly 16% of the global GDP. Today, manufacturing is more critical than ever but faces a host of new challenges.
Supply chains are continually being disrupted while skilled labor is becoming harder to find and keep. Consumers are becoming more challenging to reach and engage. Technology is changing, competitions are getting more fierce, and growing a manufacturing business is extremely difficult with the number of challenges locally and globally. Innovation to meet customer demands and needs are essential.
One way manufacturers are evolving is the shift toward virtual sales which can lower the cost per visit, extend your reach, and significantly improve sales effectiveness, and in the end delight customers who are likely to reward suppliers that do it well.
Manufacturers are faced with a number of challenges as mentioned above. More specifically, they are challenged with content creation and production, technology that is outdated, targeting leads based on buyer persona, and having limited skilled personnel for handling sales and marketing needs.
Content Challenges
When we look closer at the content challenges facing manufacturers, we see they’re struggling to create content that connects to their buyers in human ways. Often times, manufacturers struggle to create all the product and technical documentation they need and struggle to ensure that the stakeholders in their ecosystem have the right information when they need it.
Outdated Technology Challenges
Outdated technologies are also a big challenge for manufacturers. They have historically been tech-light and now are scrambling to adopt cloud-based solutions. Until now, customer data and account information has been stored in disorganized files like spreadsheets, and sales and customer service have different views of customer account information.
Targeting Challenges
Sales managers in manufacturing have struggled to assign territories based on geographic locations, and reps have struggled to prioritize sales leads and opportunities, while the marketing department struggles to create campaigns that truly target buyers based on their preferences.
Limited Resource Challenges
Limited resources is something hitting many industries. In manufacturing specifically, the average sales rep is 3-5 years from retirement and finding and hiring new sales reps is difficult. Marketing departments in manufacturing are often underfunded and most of their time is spent on product brochures and event prep. Like most industries, many staff members wear a number of hats as it is and struggle to accomplish their daily tasks, let alone take on any extra sales and marketing task overflows.
Digital Impact on Manufacturing
Let’s look at how digitization has impacted manufacturing: 70% of manufacturers are attending webinars to grow their business. It is important to note that the customers of manufacturers prefer to learn about products and installation via video, and 84% of customers use search engines like Google to find products. How can you use this information to grow and improve your business model?
https://biteable.com/blog/video-marketing-statistics/
https://www.addsearch.com/blog/site-search-statistics/
Top Four Buyer Expectations
What are buyers’ expectations? They want current product information and technical specifications. They also want the content to be personalized and relevant to them. Equally important is transparency about product availability and delivery.
Manufacturing Companies Grow Better with HubSpot
Manufacturers utilizing HubSpot are seeing a 40% increase in website visitors, 163% increase in inbound leads, and 196% in deal closed-WON, and 65% improvement in deal close rates. Impressive.
Here’s another graph that clearly demonstrates the positive effects HubSpot can have on your manufacturing business.
HubSpot’s CRM platform has all the tools and integrations you need to solve for the many challenges mentioned above. HubSpot was created so that never again do you have multiple platforms you’re trying to force to work together, and instead everyone is operating from one single source of truth. Likewise, each one is intuitive and easy to use for the ultimate customer experience. Each product in the HubSpot CRM platform is powerful alone, but the real magic happens when you use them together.
HubSpot helps you to create a connected customer experience for individuals and companies seeking your services. It allows you to automate and unify your sales, marketing, and service teams so everyone is on the same page. It allows you to create workflows that make communication more efficient, while at the same time tracking them to ensure all leads are followed-through and buyer’s needs are met.
Sales Hub, Marketing Hub, Service Hub, CMS Hub, and Operations Hub are each part of HubSpot’s connected CRM platform to help you grow better. When you use two or more hubs together, your data is automatically connected on the platform, enabling you to easily (and powerfully) track your entire customer journey from first website visit, to closed deal, to happy customer.
Sales Hub
HubSpot Sales Hub is a time-saving sales CRM that provides you with an in-depth 360 degree view of your prospects, while minimizing busy work and giving your sales team time to close deals. Sales Hub can also help you leverage documents, and track bids and proposals, ensuring the right follow-up communications occur. Sales Hub helps you track revenue by deal stage across various pipelines. Create email onboarding sequences to automate deal stage communications and reduce manual follow-up for recurring communications. And, that is just the tip of the iceberg.
Rather than using multiple tools to accomplish each of these tasks separately, HubSpot’s sales software enables teams to do all their work under one roof. Save time and energy by using a single tool, rather than splitting up your team’s energy (and information) across multiple platforms..
Marketing Hub
HubSpot Marketing Hub is a CRM-powered marketing platform that allows you to create, manage, and track your marketing campaigns. It provides everything you need to get found, connect with new prospects, and nurture them into buyers.
With Marketing Hub, all your marketing tools and data are in one place, so you don’t have to juggle multiple solutions and waste time stitching together reporting. It’s deeply powerful and easy to use. Last but not least, you can easily sync Marketing Hub with more than 1,250 custom integrations so your marketing team has all its favorite tools on one platform.
Popular features in HubSpot’s marketing software include the ability to:
- Build personalized, automated email campaigns
- Track marketing performance with built-in analytics and custom reporting
- Manage all your social media accounts in one place
- Design and host SEO optimized blog posts and web pages
- Get your whole team speaking with one voice with campaign management tools
Service Hub
Service Hub allows you to provide superior customer service. Among other things, it allows you to manage the onboarding of new customers, collect, organize, and respond to customer support requests, and ensure the growth and satisfaction of your customers.
While most customer service software solutions solve for a specific use case, Service Hub is unique in its connection to the HubSpot CRM platform. With features that make it easy to deliver authentic, personalized service, Service Hub empowers you to prioritize the customer experience.
CMS Hub
CMS Hub is a content management system (CMS) that facilitates creating, managing, and modifying information on a website. With a CMS, your developers can build flexible, beautiful website themes that your marketing team can use to make website updates on their own, creating and personalizing your website for every visitor.
HubSpot’s CMS Hub allows marketers to take ownership over their website. You won’t have to worry about security concerns or broken pages, freeing you up to focus on the experience you’re providing customers instead. And with flexible themes, you can ensure your brand and design stay consistent across pages.
Operations Hub
The Operations Hub seamlessly integrates with all the tools above, and allows you to connect data and automate processes for a friction-free experience between your teams. You are essentially aligning large amounts of data around a secure, single source of truth and presenting it in a clean, consistent, and easily accessible manner. Likewise, the Operations Hub helps you streamline processes that allow you to reduce manual work while at the same time personalizing your messaging and improving customer experience.
Wondering if HubSpot is right for you? Schedule a call with Carrie Gallagher at Lovable Marketing and learn how to start generating and nurturing the right leads for your business.