Slippery Rock Gazette

Justin Shaw

Stone Fabricator Elite

If you’re experiencing a decrease in walk-ins and fewer potential customers showing interest, or if your retail sales have already declined, there are a few ways to address this situation and maintain profitability.

The initial and commonly attempted solution is to become more aggressive in your marketing efforts. This means increasing advertising spend on channels like Google Ads, Facebook, and Instagram to generate leads. I’m not saying this isn’t a good strategy, but you should be aware that increasing your ad spend will only do so much when the market softens, and there is less demand. Both you and your competition will be vying for a bigger piece of what is a smaller pie. Cost per customer acquisition will be higher, so although you’ve upped your advertising budget—the volume of leads you receive won’t reflect your increased investment.

So what is the alternative? Increase the work you do directly with design-build pros (B2B or business-to-business revenue). Two good reasons for this are: your revenue streams are diversified; and the consistency of work helps to smooth out the fluctuations in your retail sales (which outweighs the lower margin, in my opinion).

What’s the plan?

If your sales have dropped, then your competition is most likely feeling the squeeze, as well. You can capitalize on the fact that some of your competitors are likely to be experiencing slippage in their customer experience, communication, and quality. This opens the door for you and allows you to capture a piece of the market.

1. Target the opportunity

We recommend targeting design-build pros in your market with the goal of acquiring a portion of the market that is unsatisfied or soon to be underwhelmed by their current fabricator. To do this effectively, you must offer a compelling advantage against the shop they’re doing business with currently. BTW– we’re not referring to price. That’s not the arena to compete in, someone likely already owns that category. You should be solving real problems for them and creating a hassle-free, exceptional countertop experience.

2. Create massive upside for your prospects

For a trade pro to make the move and work with a new fabricator, the biggest obstacle for them to overcome is risk. Working with a new fabricator presents a risk, and a builder is prone to stay with their current fabricator even if there are headaches and balls are being dropped, simply because it’s what they know. They are familiar with what to expect and can navigate it. The unknown represents a risk to their revenue and, more importantly, their reputation.  

To overcome this, you must have a significant upside (aside from price) to justify why they would explore working with you. Remember, this is typically found in solving challenges, streamlining processes, and impacting their bottom line (think efficiencies over the lowest price). Without giving away a shop’s unique advantage, here is a high-level example of how to think about your unique value proposition:

Imagine there is a commercial developer who is frustrated by the logistical headaches and issues that countertops pose within their projects (a common complaint). A fabricator would look at what they can do to proactively eliminate these problems and inefficiencies. Perhaps you provide containers that are delivered in phases versus all at once to align with the project timelines, labels with QR codes for tracking and detailed information, resealable containers, etc. The key here is to identify the solutions you offer (or can offer), the benefits, and package the various pieces into a concise message and positioning.

3. Use direct response marketing to acquire new B2B customers

If you’re not familiar with the concept, direct response marketing is a marketing strategy that aims to elicit an immediate response or action from the target audience. In this case, it would be getting in touch, communicating the advantages of working with you over anyone else and asking for the opportunity to show them the difference.

Remember, the key to successfully landing new customers is who you are targeting. You want to speak to the percentage of the market who will appreciate the value you bring to the table, has the types of jobs that are right for your shop, and is currently not satisfied with their current fabricator relationship. 

What’s our favorite way to reach prospects?

To reach prospective customers, your options are making cold calls, in-person visits (knocking on doors), advertising, through associations, networking, and our personal favorite, and what we offer through our done-for-you new business development program — email.

In our experience, email trumps the other options unless you have a dedicated, highly skilled person to consistently go out and get business. With email you can clearly communicate your value, without interruption, day-in, day-out. That said, there is an art and science to direct response email, and that will be the topic for a separate article.

Our recommendations come from a multi-year proven track record; we’ve helped stone companies across the country to diversify and grow their revenue streams so their businesses can be more resilient, sustainable, and profitable.

For example, we had a client ask us to help them expand their network of design-build customers; at the time, they were doing a handful of projects a quarter, and B2B accounted for about 20% of their total revenue. We helped them identify their unique competitive advantage and within ninety days generated thirty qualified opportunities. Of those opportunities, six have become customers who consistently send projects each month. One of the developers represents approximately $5M in project revenue in their sales pipeline.

If you enjoyed this article and would like to know more about the tactics we use or how we generated over $50M in 2022 in B2B project opportunities for our stone fabricator clients, you can email the author justin@stonefabricatorelite.com directly. 

The author Justin Shaw is the founder of Stone Fabricator Elite. Stone Fabricator Elite provides managed new business development to help stone shops land more jobs with design-build pros, contractors, developers, and millwork companies.
Visit their website www.stonefabricatorelite.com