How do manufacturers get new customers?

When the backlog fills, the sales calls are the first thing to go. Three or four months later a customer moves a program or a rep takes on a competing line, and the owner starts calling again from a cold list. One lost program leaves a hole that takes months to fill.

One senior person at More & Faster owns the work for your company, from picking the target companies through the first meeting. Your company approves the target list, the examples of your work we can mention, and every message before the first one goes out. Messages go out from your own domain and mailbox, under your name, to one buyer or engineer, by name, at a company with a checked reason to hear from you. Nothing is sent to a list. When someone replies, the same person handles the reply, books the meeting and passes along anything technical the same day.

The targeting rule is written in your terms before outreach starts: the parts or processes you want more of, the industries and company sizes that fit your capacity and certifications, and the titles that issue the RFQs. A buyer who does not fit the rule is not contacted.

The target list is drawn around your rep agreements before anything goes out. Territories, accounts and industries a rep holds stay with the rep, and the outreach works the companies and regions no rep covers. If a rep has an exclusive territory, that territory is off the list. Where a rep has the territory but has not touched an account in a year, you decide whether it stays with the rep or joins the outreach list. Every decision goes into the agreement before outreach starts, so a rep never learns about it from a customer.

A manufacturers rep brings relationships you do not have and gives your line the share of attention it earns against the other lines he carries. A salesperson works for you alone, carries a quota and takes the meetings, and in a small shop drifts toward the existing accounts. Managed business development produces the first meeting and stops there. It fits a shop where the owner or a lead still takes the meeting and closes. On Practical Machinist and the machinist forums on Reddit, the owners who have tried commission reps split: one pays 10% and calls it the best decision he made, another quoted twenty jobs for his rep and won none.

More & Faster's service is called The Build: a monthly fee for one senior person who owns the work from target selection through the first meeting. It starts as a test of one industry and one offer, with a review at the end of each month. The fee depends on the industries in that test, the number of companies on the list and the channels that fit. More & Faster quotes it after a conversation about your shop and does not publish a rate card. The agreement covers the work and the monthly reviews and does not promise a number of meetings.