In recent years, you have watched your shop make nearly every aspect of its process more efficient. If you run a competitive job shop, it's a safe bet this is true. New equipment and new ideas have both played a role in your shop's improvement. And as a result, out of the many functions that are essential to the business—ordering, scheduling, programming, setup, machining, inspection—perhaps every one has been streamlined.

Now...have you considered making the shop more efficient in the way it looks for new business?

This can also be an essential function. Maybe the shop wants to grow. Or maybe you know that today's customer base may not always be so strong.

In fact, the search for new business may be the aspect of your process where improved efficiency can do the most good. Real jobs, from real customers, make real demands on your time. Particularly if the shop has all the work it needs today, it may be difficult to find more than a little time for the uncertain exercise of searching out work for tomorrow. Speaking practically, time spent on this task needs to be spent efficiently if it is to have any value at all.

However, new tools and new thinking may be able to streamline this function, too. Can your job shop be more efficient in the way it looks for customers? Today, the question has particular relevance.

Consider:

When you search for new business leads, you search for the answers to certain questions. They include: Who has a need for contract machining services? And more specifically: Who might be willing to place a large order for exactly the sort of contract machining that we do well?

In other words, much of your search for new business is a search for information. And today—you know where I'm going with this—you have far more information at your fingertips than you had even a few years ago.

The Web is out there. It can be a tool for finding new business. You can draw potential customers to your own Web site. You can also learn about potential customers using the vast amount of information the Web makes available. These are two aspects of the Web: your own site, and the Web at large. And at least one shop has had success at using both aspects strategically—and in harmony.

The shop is Power Manufacturing (San Jose, California). It employs 45 and has 17 CNC machining centers. Many of the machining centers offer capacity for larger-envelope work. The largest has an X-axis travel of 120 inches.

Information technology has always been important to this shop. It's located in Silicon Valley, and that's where most of its business has come from. Historically, the shop has made its living making components for the systems that make components for computers—like disk drives and semiconductors. However, demand from computer industry manufacturers has dropped off in recent years. So in response, the shop committed itself to growing its business outside this sector. That meant penetrating industries where the shop has no experience, and where shop management has no contacts. And the best tool for accomplishing this, the shop decided, was the World Wide Web.

Tim Wolfe now leads Power Manu-facturing's Web-based marketing effort. Vice president and general manager of the shop, he is also an information systems engineer. His description of the shop's efforts to grow its customer base served as the basis for this article.

The effort has begun to pay off, he says. Thanks in part to the Web, the shop has found work in industries not only in which it had no experience, but also in which it would never have thought to look for the work.

A little guardedness is required here. The shop asked that specifically which niche markets it now serves not be published (so as not to inspire potential competitors). But Mr. Wolfe offers this summary of shop's successes so far:

"If we've learned one thing, it's that the work is out there," he says. "You just have to know how to go get it."

Getting Ready

Not that any amount of Web savvy can take the place of an effective manufacturing process. Any investment Power Manufacturing has made in marketing itself to unfamiliar prospects is minor compared to the shop's investments in preparing itself to take on new jobs and turn them around effectively. Two examples—both of them software purchases—are worth a few words. Both of these investments
are particularly relevant to the shop's effort to court new business.

Beyond the home page, visitors are asked to log in. This is part of the shop's filtering process for getting at new business leads. The shop believes serious prospects will at least take the time to enter a user name.

One is CAD/CAM translators. Mr. Wolfe says one of Power Manufacturing's goals is to be "the shop that can read in any type of data file." The shop uses Pro/Engineer and related products. It also uses Mastercam. In several cases where the shop has received CAD data in a format it was unable to use in one of these systems, it invested in appropriate translators for itself instead of obtaining the file in a different format by some other means. As a result, the shop now has the utilities to work with data across a range of file formats without delay—including both common formats and infrequently used ones.

Another important investment was estimating software. Even before the increased pursuit of new business began to result in more requests-for-quote, cost estimating was a major source of delay. By contrast, though the shop now receives between 200 and 300 RFQs per week, it turns around essentially all quotes within 24 hours. The key to getting to this level of efficiency was to transform quoting from a manual, paper-driven process into an electronic one which can be streamlined through software automation. In the electronic process, software reads in basic cost information instantaneously, eliminating the need for a human to look up the same information on a piece of paper. Power Manufacturing realized such a process after it purchased estimating software from Micro Estimating Systems (New Berlin, Wisconsin). The shop now uses this software for all of its quoting.

One of the reasons why reducing the amount of time spent on quoting is so essential is that much of the effort makes no money for the company. "Probably 30 percent of our quoting work is solely for the customer's budgeting purposes, not for any actual job," says Mr. Wolfe. "But you still have to do it."

You have to do it, he says, because some of these quotes do lead to work. For example, the shop recently won a major order based on a quote that was 18 months old. In the past, the shop would have had to recreate such a dated quote essentially from scratch, and might have lost the job while the customer was waiting. But with the estimating software, generating this quote was simply a matter of reopening the original file and letting the software recalculate the price based on updated costs. The shop had the revised estimate almost instantaneously.

Process improvements like these leave the shop better prepared to respond effectively when unexpected opportunities for work do come in. With a more responsive process in place, the company was ready to start pursuing these opportunities using its Web-based strategy.

Here is a summary of how that strategy works: Power Manufacturing uses a campaign of blind e-mails to entice visitors to its Web site. When these visitors come, they sometimes leave their company names behind—perhaps unintentionally (read on). The shop, and Mr. Wolfe more specifically, then uses information available on the Web to research these companies, to determine which ones are worth contacting directly. In some cases, this research even lets Mr. Wolfe anticipate companies' machining needs, allowing him to contact them with personalized information about the shop that addresses those needs directly.

Mr. Wolfe has the process down to a routine. He now spends 60 to 90 minutes per day sifting through the data this procedure generates in search of potential customers. The bait that lets him catch the data is the shop's Web site. So in the shop's strategy for finding new business, launching this site could be called Step One.

But it could also be called Step Zero. By itself, launching the site accomplished nothing.

The Launch

"I was disappointed when we first put up the site," Mr. Wolfe says. "We got very few hits." It didn't take him long to realize that he would have to tell people—tell everyone he could—that the site was out there. On the Web, no one can hear you upload.

That's how the e-mail campaign was born. He chose e-mail as his promotional medium because an e-mail—while less intrusive than an unsolicited phone call—is nevertheless still somewhat personal. Many people with a business e-mail address check their mail first, at the beginning of every work day.

To obtain relevant e-mail addresses—that is, addresses for people interested in the metalworking industry—the shop compiled lists of trade show attendees, investing in the data entry time necessary to key in these addresses from various sources.

The content of blind e-mails the shop sends to addresses like these is simple. It includes a brief description of Power Manufacturing's capabilities, as well as the Web address. In the subject line is a request that the recipient, if he or she is not a member of the engineering department, forward the message to someone who is.

The workpiece shown is part of a chamber used in disk drive manufacturing. Reduced demand for computer-related parts like this one drove the shop's decision to seek new business outside the computer industry.

The e-mail campaign accomplished the desired result. It increased traffic to the site. In fact, it has increased qualified traffic to the point where the shop now receives 10 to 15 RFQs per month from prospects who have never been contacted by the shop personally. They have only seen the Web site.

But these ones are the easy catches, says Mr. Wolfe. Far more prospects do require some form of pursuit—that is, personal e-mail and/or telephone follow-up. That's why his next important task in the process is to determine which hits on the site come from legitimate prospects who are likely to be worth the direct pursuit.

To qualify the site's visitors, he says, "I closed every door I could."

Working The Web

Mr. Wolfe designed the site so that, beyond the home page, the visitor is asked to log in by entering a user name before accessing any other page.

This makes Power Manufacturing's site different from most other sites to be found on the Web—even different from most other commercial sites.

For example, look at Modern Machine Shop Online www.mmsonline.com. The objective of this site is to build an audience—within the metalworking industry—and keep the members of this audience returning. (The size of the audience helps to sell advertising in the form of links within the site.) So as not to limit the size of this audience, the site aims to place no restrictions on access to the information it offers. Nowhere are visitors asked to register before accessing content, because even this small imposition would tend to turn casual visitors away.

By contrast, building an audience—even an audience of metalworkers—is not the primary goal of Power Manufacturing's site. This is closer to the goal of the e-mail campaign. Instead, the goal of the site itself is to generate business leads by gathering information about likely consumers of contract machining work. Asking visitors to register is the first step in the filtering process that gets at these leads. True, some prospects may turn away from the site because they don't care to register. Even so, the site is constructed around the theory that—in general—anyone who truly might be a potential customer will be interested enough in learning more about the shop at least to enter a user name.

The imposition is not large. The user name does not have to be the same as the visitor's real name. And the visitor is at liberty to enter as much or as little information about his or her company as the visitor wishes. Serious prospects are sometimes willing to enter enough information about themselves that they can be contacted directly off-line. However, in addition to this, visitors may also leave information about their company without intending to do so. And to Power Manufacturing, this is another value of the site.

Every hit on Power Manufacturing's site—or on any Web site, for that matter—leaves a trace back to the server from which that hit originated. And Mr. Wolfe knows how to retrieve this information. If the hit originated from an Internet service provider, he says he generally assumes the visitor is browsing from home, and therefore is less likely to be a serious prospect. But if the hit came from a company's own internal Internet server, then—at the very least—the hit leaves him with that company's name. Equipped with this name, he researches the company. And for efficiency, he conducts this research using only the Web.

Working The Web (Part 2)

This idea—using the Web for research because of its efficiency—may seem strange. To the uninitiated, the disorganization of the Web can make finding information difficult. Even to the initiated, the search can be frustrating. The Web offers as much information as a major library—but only if you can imagine that all of the books in that library have been dumped into one enormous pile on the floor.

So search engines are essential, says Mr. Wolfe. One tool he finds particularly useful is a utility called WebSeeker (www.bluesquirrel.com). This software simplifies an open-ended search for information by simultaneously querying numerous search engines and compiling the results. After a search using this product, Mr. Wolfe can scan the resulting list of hits off-line—a list that can easily number around 1,000—and quickly reject irrelevant matches, focusing on only those Web pages whose titles suggest they may offer useful information on the company.

Also, the Web does offer small pockets of organization. For example, a subscription to the online version of the Wall Street Journal (wsj.com), with its searchable archive of articles, has also been valuable to him.

What is he looking for in his research? Essentially, two things. One is evidence that the company has a demand for contract machining work of a kind that Power Manufacturing can do well. The other is evidence that the company has money to spend.

For example, when researching one company that has since become a customer of the shop, Mr. Wolfe discovered that a major industrial conglomerate was considering purchasing it. In other words, the company was revealed to be a rising star—one to which Power Manufacturing might do well to hitch its wagon. The shop contacted this company directly and ultimately did win work. And when the purchase went through, the demand for work increased.

After the shop's own Web site has helped identify a new prospect, the shop uses the Web at large to search for information on that company. The Web lets the shop obtain a large volume of relevant information about a prospect in a short amount of time.

In fact, research on a company often leads Mr. Wolfe to a company different from the one that hit the site. Researching a given company may reveal a demand for machined products in an industry where the shop would never have thought to look. However, the company that visited the shop's site, and thereby led Mr. Wolfe to this insight, may not be the best prospect in that industry. Preferring to court more aggressive and more mobile customers, Mr. Wolfe says, "we generally avoid the leader in a given industry, and go after number two or number three instead."

So in some cases, even though an industry leader has been drawn to the shop's Web site, the shop ends up pitching itself to that company's competitor instead.

What's Next

This is how Power Manufacturing uses the Web to search for business prospects. A Web site that's promoted can identify potential customers—or more accurately, can encourage these prospects to identify themselves. Then, the Web at large can be used to help qualify these prospects. Taken together, these uses of the Web allow an hour or two per day of one manager's time to return more new business leads than the same level of effort ever could before.

All that said, this particular approach leaves one source of new business unaddressed. And for any given shop, this source of business is potentially the most lucrative one of all: the business that is already in the shop. There may be no better way to invest for the future than by building on the customer relationships of today.

Stay tuned, says Mr. Wolfe. Power Manufacturing believes the Web can also be an effective tool for serving its existing customers better.

Sometime next year, he says, the shop will launch a new version of its Web site, updated with this goal in mind. This site will be linked to the shop's MRP system. By logging on, says Mr. Wolfe, customers will be able to check on the status of their jobs in real time.