The situation
Your buyers are specifiers and procurement teams and they shortlist you before they call.
They arrive from a distributor’s list, a trade search or an RFP longlist, looking for one part number, one tolerance or one lead time. If they cannot find it in two minutes they do not ring to ask. They ring the next supplier, and the quote request you never saw was never made.
Where it fails
The range is the asset, and the site is where it goes to hide.
Four hundred lines, or four thousand, arranged the way the plant thinks about them rather than the way a buyer searches. The part they want is real, in stock, and three levels down behind a category name that exists on your shop floor and nowhere else. They search, find nothing, and go back to the distributor whose search worked.
You know the site is old. It went up when the second generation took over, built by an agency that stopped answering years ago, and the last real change was a phone number. You send it to prospects anyway, usually with a line explaining what it doesn’t show. Not the tooling, not the tolerances, not the fact that someone picks up at seven in the morning.
Forty years have gone into the stock, the plant and the people who can read a drawing and tell you what it actually needs. All of it is represented by the one part of the business nobody has touched since 2014. Specifiers are careful by trade. They shortlist on evidence, and you’re giving them none.
The evidence exists. None of it is where a buyer would look.
How it works
Every stage ends with something in your hands, and a decision that is yours.
Four stages, in that order. You can stop after any one of them and keep what it produced. That includes the range map, which is worth having whether or not I build anything.
- 01
The first conversation
You write, through the contact page or straight to my inbox, and it helps to send the current site and two or three enquiries you wish had come in instead. I read it myself, and nothing drops into an address nobody owns. If what you need is not what I do, I say so and point you somewhere better.
You keepA reply from me, not from an autoresponder.
- 02
What your buyers actually search for
Spending some time on understanding how the work really gets won: whether it is the engineer or procurement who calls, what they ask first, and which question ends it. Then I go through the range the way a buyer would, typing the terms they use rather than the ones on your category signs. I write down where it breaks, and what that costs you.
You keepA written brief, and a map of the range as a buyer searches it.
- 03
Design and build, and the range with it
Strategy, design and build stay in one pair of hands. Your range comes across from wherever it lives now, whether a spreadsheet, a price list or an export nobody has opened since the last system change. It goes up structured, so search, filters and part numbers work the way a specifier expects. You review it with your own stock in it, never sample data.
You keepA staging link carrying your real part numbers, not placeholders.
- 04
Launch, and what you keep
It goes live in your accounts: domain, hosting and words. There is upkeep, though. Prices change, lead times shift, lines get added and discontinued, and an out-of-date range hurts you more with a specifier than one that merely looks old. Keeping it current falls to either your people, once I’ve shown them how, or me on a monthly basis.
You keepEvery account in your name, and your own people able to edit it.
You are never asked to commit to a stage before you have seen the one before it.