Page 29 - MetalForming January 2011

and assembling, a complex electrical assembly that DeLay expects will lead to success with similar new accounts.
Attracting the “Right Prospects”
There are plenty of other informa- tion-packed tabs on the website, including several minutes of narrated video sequences providing up-close looks at the technology being used throughout the facility. What caught our eye was how short (and sweet) the Request for Quote (RFQ) section is— “designed that way on purpose,” notes DeLay. He notes that the goal was to provoke website visitors to “give us a call and ask to schedule an onsite visit, rather than spend a lot of time prepar- ing an online RFQ.” Also missing from the RFQ area (by design) is the ability to upload a drawing with an RFQ.
“We have found that when compa- nies attach part drawings, we often have several questions and may wind up going in a wrong direction,” says DeLay. “So we designed the RFQ area to
encourage companies to reach out to us so that we can discuss project details in a more direct way.
“And,” he adds, “we also want to avoid those prospects looking to treat suppliers as commodity stampers— OEMs that tend to blast their projects and part drawings to every stamper with an online RFQ form.”
Last but Not Least—Selecting the Right Technology Partner
Just how did DeLay and his team go about selecting a technology partner with whom it could work to develop a website different than that from most other metalformers? For starters, since search-engine optimization and search score were so critical, DeLay only con- sidered website-development compa- nies whose own websites scored high on search engines. The thought was that if a company couldn’t drive its own search score high, it likely would struggle to deliver the results Diemasters expected.
The team also sought a “good-old-
fashioned advertising company” that had expanded into website design and web-based marketing, rather than hir- ing a relatively new company special- izing only in website design that oth- erwise lacked a solid background in business-to-business marketing.
A third qualifier, explains DeLay: “I did not want to hire a website devel- oper that already had created a site for a metalforming company, because I did not want just another run-of-the- mill contract-manufacturing website. I wanted a fresh perspective.” Those three qualifiers flushed out the poten- tial list of partner candidates to just three local companies, including Killian Branding.
Now that the site has become so successful, is DeLay worried that his competitors will imitate what he’s done—with his website and with his company?
“As long as we don’t stop innovating, we’ll stay ahead...by several steps,” he boasts. MF
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