CASE STUDY

While D&E has been successful at cultivating and strengthening its partner-relationship with existing customers, they wanted to improve activities and processes for acquiring new business opportunities to build and diversify its current customer base. The company has an aggressive business growth goal that includes increasing sales by 10 percent annually. To achieve this, they need to identify key market segments, attract “good fit” prospects, and convert them into new customers in as short a sales cycle as possible. To help them in this effort, they wanted to improve their existing sales and marketing tools and processes, which would include a more targeted lead generation and business development approach. With a solid sales and marketing infrastructure in place, D&E would not only be able to focus valuable time on customer RFQ’s and/or projects that match their manufacturing capabilities – but attract new business opportunities that would help them expand their current market base and add new markets for continued growth in the future.

Following a review of D&E’s current sales and marketing system, the sales and marketing performance team at the NWIRC developed a Sales Process Map to identify required steps for their specific buying process to develop prospects into recurring customers. Concurrently, market research was conducted to provide a vetted list of leads within D&E’s target industries.

NWIRC Sales Process Map for D&E would serve as a sales activity guide to align with their customers’ buying processes and provide supporting sales tools to further increase effectiveness of communication and improve the probability of achieving targeted sales performance indicators and growth goals. Additionally, NWIRC provided contact information for 70 prospective customers in aerospace, defense, and other targeted markets.