How to Sell to Top Executives in the Manufacturing Industry

Would life be better if you could just do the same thing day in, day out at work? 

Maybe. It might be easier, but it might also be…a little bit boring? 

The same thing applies to the sales strategies and processes you use. Apply the same one to each industry, and both you – and your prospects – are going to get bored pretty quickly. 

Each industry needs a strategy as unique as it is. And if you’re selling to the manufacturing industry and wondering how you can turn yours into a wonderful snowflake, you’re in the right place. 

In this blog post, we’re going to cover: 

• Deploying Multi-Touch, Multi-Channel Sales Strategies
• Leveraging Buyer Intent Data
• Essential Tools for Selling to Manufacturing Executives
• Crafting the Right Message for Manufacturing Executives

Hey, kind of looks like it’s going to snow! Without further ado:

Deploying a Multi-Touch, Multi-Channel Sales Strategies

Use a multi-touch, multi-channel sales strategy and you’re basically reaching out to your prospects multiple times, over multiple channels. This isn’t random, though – instead, the timing, the channels and the relationship between the two are highly thought-out. 

For example, you might start with a connection request and a phone call, follow up with another call and an email on the second day, before sending another email and a LinkedIn DM on the third day. If you don’t get a response after a set amount of time, the lead should move to a nurture sequence. 

These strategies are effective because they make you stand out: 48% of salespeople never make a single follow-up attempt. And how many of your messages or calls result in a meeting on the first go? Exactly. 

Let’s take a closer look at the channels you might utilize. 

Social Selling on LinkedIn 

As you might have guessed, sending a single salesy DM isn’t going to get you anywhere. Instead, focus on providing value and building genuine relationships over LinkedIn. Then, when the time does come to pitch, it’s going to feel a lot more natural to the recipient. 

For example, you might start off by following your prospect, maybe liking their content. You might then send them a connection request and have a few conversations in industry groups you’re both a member of. Only then, when you’re certain that 1) they recognize you and 2) they’ll want to hear from you do you reach out with a DM. 

To appeal to top executives in manufacturing, we’d recommend: 

• Focussing on brevity: these people are extremely busy. They don’t have time for your life story – now’s time to cut to the chase when you message. 

• Show benefits they’ll be interested in: quantifiable benefits like increased productivity, reduced downtime and, of course, ROI will float their boat. 

Cold Emailing 

We’re sure you’re familiar with the humble cold email now. As a refresh of best practices: 

Subject lines: keep these short, and make sure you show what’s in your email. Nobody likes being tricked into opening something! Minimize your use of punctuation and don’t include numbers. Salesy or pressuring language is a no-no here, too. If you’re lucky enough to have a referral, make sure you pop it in here. Salesloft has a great report if you want more. 

Personalization: at a basic level, this means referring to a prospect’s name and their business. At a better level, this means referring to pain points that you know they’ll struggle with. You can also use historical data to shape your messaging here – what’s worked before for similar profiles? 

Value-driven content: give your prospect something of value, and you’ll make them feel more inclined to give you something of value back (we do love psychology). Helpful content like a webinar recording, a whitepaper or a case study can do the trick here. 

Follow-up sequences and timing: make sure your follow-ups are timely, but not annoying in frequency. Never send a ‘Just following up message’. Think value-first. Timing-wise, don’t overthink it – but use historical data to get a sense of when your prospect will be most open to opening your email. 

Cold Calling 

Cold calling is an excellent way of getting feedback on the spot – and what’s more, you’ll find that a lot of top executives actually prefer it to an email. Make sure that you: 

Do your research: you need to be well-prepared and able to think on your feet. At the very least, peruse LinkedIn, the company website, and company news before you speak. 

Personalize your conversation: show that you understand them from the get-go with an opening line that speaks to their problem. For the manufacturing industry, you might want to touch on: 

• Operational efficiency
• Supply chain optimization
• Cost reduction
• Data-driven decision making
• Compliance and risk management

Cold calling does require a bit of thinking on your feet – but try to keep it to this structure, and you can’t go too far wrong: 

• Opening lines: make sure you name your business and talk about the problem you solve 
• Value proposition: explain how your product solves it – succinctly! 
• Clarifying question: find out if you should carry on the conversation
• Close: ask for a call to discuss further 

At some point in your cold calling career, you’re going to get objections. Don’t worry when you do – they’re a chance to learn about your prospects’ anxieties. Make sure you’re listening actively, and answer with empathy to change their no into a yes. 

Integrating Channels for Maximum Impact 

Time to combine all three channels. How you do this is going to depend on your business – use a combination of historical data and an experiment mindset when you approach this task. 

Top tips from Salesloft include: 

• Getting in touch twice on day one to get your prospect familiar with your name 
• Not overdoing it – you don’t want your prospect to feel harassed 

Leveraging Buyer Intent Data

Buyer intent data is super powerful: it shows you that a prospect is thinking about buying your product. It comes from their online behavior – they might visit your website a lot or download a case study from your blog. 

Buyer intent data falls into two categories: 

First-party data: this comes from direct interactions with your prospects. It could be something so obvious as them emailing you and saying they want to buy, or something more subtle like their behavior on their website. 

Incorporating Buyer Intent Data into Your Sales Strategy

If you see a top executive in the manufacturing industry doing any of these, they could be ready to buy from you: 

Engaging with industry-specific content: if you – or another body – post content around manufacturing challenges, for example, and your prospect starts interacting with it, that’s a sign that they’re looking for a solution (which could be your product!). 

Participation in industry events and forums: if your prospect signs up for a webinar or conference based on an industry problem, they are likely engaged and looking for a solution. 

Recent investment in new technologies or equipment: if you spot publicly available information about your prospect purchasing related technology, it can indicate that it’s in a phase of innovation and improvement. Perfect for you! They might also share that they’re upgrading their production facilities or implementing a new supply chain management system.

(You can now also search for companies based on whether or not they use a specific tool with Surfe’s Company Search)

Use these insights to tailor your outreach and messaging. See your prospect’s company has just invested in a piece of tech a lot of your other customers have? That’s a perfect reason to get in touch. 

Sales and marketing should be working on the same buyer intent data, by the way. In practice, this could look like marketing creating content around a problem a lot of prospects show they’re interested in solving, for example. 

Obviously, you want to make sure you’re staying efficient while keeping on top of your buyer intent data. Make sure that your data providers integrate with your CRM, so you’re not having to waste time manually transferring data. You can also set up alerts and notifications so you don’t have to trawl through your website data and news sites day in, day out. 

Adapt your multi-channel strategy to the data you gather, and you’ll find that you’ll get faster replies, have more fruitful conversations, and close more deals. Pretty clever, right?

Essential Tools for Selling to Manufacturing Executives

You’ve got your outreach strategy and your buyer intent data down pat. Next, the tools to help you reach out to top executives in the manufacturing industry. 

CRM 

A good CRM can be an absolute game-changer when it comes to your sales processes. You need it to manage your relationships, track interactions and keep communication nice and tight. 

Industry-specific features include: 

• Advanced customization and industry-specific modules: we’re sure you know that a lot of manufacturing companies have unique sales processes, with complex product catalogs and specialized workflows. Your CRM needs to keep up. 

• Robust analytics and reporting: you need detailed insights into sales performance, market trends and customer behavior to make informed decisions. 

• Lead scoring and buyer intent tracking: you need to make sure you’re putting effort into the right people, at the right time after all. 
• Workflow automation: save yourself from work that can be automated, and redirect your energy into work that can’t. A good CRM will make this super simple for you. 

Outreach Tools 

Two things to look for here: automation and personalization. If your tool can get the balance right, you’re onto a winner. We’d recommend: 

• Outreach.io: this puts all your activities into one advanced workflow, for complete control and oversight 

• Lemlist: this is a great tool for creating personalized emails your prospects will want to receive – without sacrificing scale 
• Salesloft: coordinate email and phone call efforts to make sure you’re masterfully steering through each conversation

These tools all work to make your life easier, meaning that you can spend more time on the efforts that require the personal touch: calls, demos, responding to queries, that type of thing. 

Buyer Intent Tools 

Looking for a tool to gather your third-party buyer intent data? We’d recommend Bombora, or 6sense. 

The most important thing here is that the tool of your choice integrates with your CRM. There’s no point gathering all of this super useful data and then not having it in your CRM – it’ll make getting a complete picture of your prospects’ activity very, very difficult. 

Contact Data Enrichment Tools 

Having contact data that’s accurate and up-to-date is vital. You don’t want to cold call a work phone only to find it now belongs to someone else, or refer to a title that your prospect had six months ago. Top executives won’t have the time for it – it could even kill the sale before you’ve even got started. 

Tools like Clearbit or ZoomInfo can keep your CRM contact data nice and clean. We’d also recommend having Surfe (hey – that’s us!) set up to sync your CRM and LinkedIn. Any changes on the latter will sync right over to the former. Love it. 

LinkedIn Sales Navigator 

LinkedIn Sales Navigator is super useful when it comes to building lead lists full of top manufacturing executives. Use the filtering to define the industry, title and more of your lead list. 

We also love the recommended lead list feature, which builds you a list full of industry-specific people to reach out to based on your previous activity. 

Crafting the Right Message for Manufacturing Executives

Nearly there! Now, we just need to tie it all together to create a killer message they’d be foolish to ignore: 

Understanding Their Pain Points and Priorities

Supply chain resilience and optimization: supply chains are big, complicated, and at risk of disruption. Building a resilient and agile supply chain will be a key priority for top executives in the industry. 

Operational efficiency and cost management: efficiency needs to be always on the up – but costs can’t rise at the same pace. Creating a lean manufacturing practice and investing in advanced technologies is crucial to keeping these businesses competitive. 

Adapting to technological innovation: selecting the right tools, that provide a clear ROI and are going to make genuine improvements, is a key factor in decision-making at this level. Companies need to stay on top of innovation without damaging the bottom line. 

Value-Driven Communication

Make sure that your communication feels like liquid gold. By that, we mean it drips value – you want to provide helpful content and show ROI as much as possible. Make sure you do this early enough, too. Getting straight to the point will be appreciated, and shows that you’re serious about helping them from the get-go. 

Building trust and credibility 

Unfortunately, people rarely buy on the word of sales reps alone. They need proof: that’s where content, testimonials and industry knowledge come in. Use social proof and case studies in your emails and messages, offer to go through them in more detail on the phone, and make sure they’re all over your website like a rash. It’ll make a huge difference when it comes to your buyers’ confidence in you. 

Let’s Wrap It Up!

By now, you should be feeling well-equipped to reach out to top executives in the manufacturing industry. Focus on a well-crafted outreach strategy with the right messaging, and use the tools to help you automate and scale where appropriate, and you can’t go too far wrong. 

Time to go forth and conquer. You can do it!