How to earn 40+ customers in 30 Days
“It almost feels like free business”, Quentin Walker, VP of Scurlock Electric.
How do you shake up a $22.1 billion industry? For starters, make your products a solution for customers on the web with a simple search. Today, Quentin Walker and his sales team are handshaking with a larger number of new customers and establishing new professional connections through RFPs at greater volumes than before. Scurlock Electric connected with 43+ new customers and issued extra product RFQs in excess of $200,000, on top of traditional yearly averages during the month of June. Here’s how.
During the first week of June, Scurlockelectric.com launched their first website in the 35-year history of Scurlock Electric. It’s not a regular website because scurlockelectric.com is a business-to-business (B2B) e-commerce platform for marine vendors powered by Maritant. By making product part numbers plainly visible to professional buyers looking for them, Scurlock is connecting with a growing number of customers and new industrial verticals.
Industrial trade between manufacturing and wholesale businesses generates $25 trillion in revenue a year. By 2020, 27% of this business-to-business (B2B) trade is projected to move through online e-commerce platforms, see latest report.
Scurlock Electric is an electrical distributor, family owned and operating for over 35 years in South Louisiana. Over the years, the Walker family and their amazing sales team have serviced purchase orders for thousands of companies. Similar to many other Marine industry vendors, Scurlock Electric’s sales process requires a great deal of high touch, very personal, and very time consuming customary processes. This process includes time spent maintaining client relationships by shaking hands and looking customers in the eye, servicing inbound sales inquiries typically in the form of phone calls, emails, and even faxes (not kidding). This is how business gets done and while it’s effective and has worked for literally generations, it’s extremely inefficient, time consuming and expensive.
“We’ve invested $2 million to open new branches before, but never have we brought in 20 inquiries in the first week.” Quentin Walker, Scurlock Electric
An e-commerce website is today’s new storefront and typically, a customer’s first impression of your organization. Here’s three reasons why e-commerce works:
- THE POWER OF DATA — Scurlockelectric.com is a search powered site, equipment data is accessible to major search engines and their global users.
- ACCESSIBILITY — Scurlock Electric is a 24-hour storefront, customers connect all hours of the day. All the while, this platform expands a marine vendor’s ability to reach customers from alternative verticals with a real-time solution.
- GlOBAL BUYERS — Regardless of geography, scurlockelectric.com is about expansion and generating solutions for existing customers and a completely new buyer base. As a result, SE issued quotes for products from various industry buyers as close as Louisiana, as far away as New Jersey, California, Puerto Rico and Vietnam.
Considering that Scurlock Electric did not even have a simple web presence until May 2015, scurlockelectric.com is generating an average of 700 users per business day, with no advertising. This means that SE is receiving requests for product quotes 24 hours a day from omnichannel customers within the region and around the globe, long after the store’s normal business hours. Product specifications in the form of equipment details and boring alpha-numeric ‘part numbers’ are attracting serious buyers to Scurlock Electric and generating sales.
“The B2B e-commerce network will generate $6.7 trillion in revenue by 2020”, reports Frost & Sullivan. Over the next few years, many traditional marine vendor sales practices will begin to adapt to a new form of connectivity that embraces buyers accessibility to speed, efficiency, quality and transparency. Look to Royal IHC as an example of growing B2B e-commerce success, 7% of $100 million in sales will happen online this year, 5% higher than 2014. At this rate, Scurlock Electric could close an estimated half-million in online sales for 2015.
While Maritant doesn’t ‘know everyone’ in the Shipbuilding Industry, what our team of professionals do know- the Marine Industry is comprised of smart individuals communicating more efficiently today. And, procurement teams are operating more effectively because they’re connecting more quickly with solution makers, like Scurlock Electric.
Today, if your organization is serious about selling more products found in your warehouse, you must start connecting with more omnichannel professional buyers in the ways they want to communicate with your sales team.
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Chris Stuckey — Grew up along the banks of the Ohio River in Indiana. At 18 years old, moved to New Orleans to study Naval Architecture & Marine Engineering at the University of New Orleans and worked as a NAME in the Marine Industry. Today, Stuckey is the Founder and CEO of Maritant.com, and SNAME Gulf Section Membership Chair. His mission is to help network Marine Industry professionals and streamline communication efficiency for marine businesses excited about the future success of the Shipbuilding Industry.
