Estimated reading time: 6 minutes

It’s Only Common Sense: Selling for the Best

So, your company got its act together. They bought the right equipment, increased their technology to the highest level—the cutting, nay, the bleeding-edge level. All the right players are in place. You are now poised to be among the best, most elite of the PCB companies in the world. Now what do you do? How do you market a company like yours? How do you sell the best?

First, don’t waste your time telling people you are the best. You cannot run around bragging that your company is the best; do that and you’ll just be one of the crowd. Every company says they are the best, whether they are or not. Nobody brags about being “pretty good” or “no worse than anyone else.” In the words of the inimitable Dr. House (from the Fox television show House), “Everybody lies.” And when you are dealing with purchasing people who are incentivized by how much money they can save their company, their justification for buying from the lowest-priced company is to hide behind the age-weary comment, “All of you are exactly alike, so I just chose the one who had the cheapest price.” An absurd statement, and a true testament to sheer laziness on their part.

How many people do you know who walk around bragging about living in the cheapest house, driving the cheapest car, buying the cheapest food, dressing in the cheapest clothes, and going to the cheapest doctors, ending up in the cheapest casket, at the cheapest funeral home, buried in the cheapest part of the cheapest cemetery?

So, don’t play that game when you are marketing and selling for the best you have to show. Better yet, you have to demonstrate that you are the best and then show how you are the best.

This means appealing to your customers’ process engineers, quality managers, program managers, and other lead people: the people who will actually use and value your products. Those people will see value in doing business with you and will put that value ahead of anything else—including price.

When you are selling for the best, demonstrate it by focusing on your:

• Value
• Knowledge
• Technology
• Quality
• Reliability
• Consistency
• Superiority

But you can’t just talk the talk, you have to walk it as well. As I mentioned earlier, you can’t just sell through buyers. It isn’t enough to be waiting around in a lobby for the chance to go into that little room and spend 10 minutes with that harried buyer who looks nervously at his watch making sure he blocks out everything you’re saying. To him, your words—no matter what you say—sound like the parents’ mumbled words in the Peanuts comic strip. Instead, you must get beyond that guy. You must get to the people who cherish and value using the best products and services available today.

All your marketing and sales tactics must be focused on demonstrating how good you are, how you are truly the best. Here is how this is done:

• White papers: This shows that you are on the forefront of technology. Publish them and present them at trade shows and conferences.
• Webinars and seminars: Now that everyone is acclimated to using Zoom, it’s easy to set up, publicize, and present webinars. You can give a very technical presentation to an unlimited number of very interested potential customers—people who have signed up and divulged their contact information to hear what you have to say. How much time, effort, and money would that take normally?
• Technical columns: Writing regular columns which are published in magazines such as this one is the surest way to get your name and your capabilities out to the market. A monthly column will get to people who don’t know your company or what you do. You can establish your reputation as the best by writing a column.
• Technical bulletins: Reach out and touch people. Accumulate lists of qualified potential customers and send them bulletins filled with technical advice about the exact subject you know they care about, based of course, on the lists you have accumulated.
• Website: Your website should be a place that the right potential customers want to visit repeatedly. This means filling your site with valuable information, as well as tips and tools that will help them with what they are working on. Everything you do, all the marketing you do, is designed to get people to your website; don’t let them be disappointed when they get there.
• Research and development: Years ago, your customers—those large OEMs—had their own board shops and their own experts doing their R&D. They don’t any longer and they have to rely on us to provide it for them. They need to turn to their PCB vendors for not only the high-tech products they need today but, more importantly, to help them get where they need to be tomorrow. Get them to rely on you.
• Trade shows: Shows are where you demonstrate how good you are. This is when you get to talk to people who are seeking help with their own products. Develop a good trade show strategy including a well-thought-out plan to get the right people to your booth. Go to the right trade shows, the ones where the right people will be looking for your expertise in the technology they need. Remember, do not go to a trade show without taking the opportunity to present a white paper.
• Technical micro-ebooks: Imagine being the company that wrote the book on that technology, the one that your potential customers are reading and which they downloaded for free in exchange for their contact information—and that they refer to time and again when they need to check on something. I-Connect007 has gained a reputation for producing high-quality, educational books for their customers. They handle everything from editing and layout to strategic marketing. An I-007EBook will position your company as the true industry leader, the true experts in your field and in your market.

In the end, the goal is to get potential and current customers’ technical people on your side: operators, quality, and program managers. These strategies will get them to want to work with your company so they will overrule that buyer who only wants to go with the lowest price.

Selling the best, means being so valuable that, when one of your customers hires a new accountant/controller and that person wants to know why they are paying a 20% premium on your products (while bragging about saving them money by using the mediocre supplier they used at the last company), everyone will tell that person to shut up and mind their own business. They will go on to talk about the extra value that they get from working with your company. They will talk about the value your company brings that far exceeds any amount of savings they can bring with their mediocre supplier. Then they will say to be quiet and never mention that cheap and mediocre supplier to them again. That’s how much they will value buying from the best.  

It’s only common sense.

This column origiinally appeared in the April 2021 issue of PCB007 Magazine.