Evolving to meet 21st-century demands

The pandemic has forced us to explore new approaches for how we do business in the cutting tool industry. Personal relationships with customers and partners always will be most important. But by embracing modern digital technology, we’ve been put into a position to be cost- and time-efficient in how we maintain those relationships, and we’ve begun to close the gap with other industries in our processes and approach. We learn how to build and maintain customer relationships with and through our technical resources instead of looking at them as a temporary substitute for regular face-to-face meetings.

In a contracting market like this one, it’s never easy to operate. But my perspective is: Let’s take this opportunity to reinvent ourselves and drive the evolution necessary to become a 21^st-century business.

My company is developing programs to drive sales growth and strengthen our relationships with customers and key partners while limiting the size of our sales force and restricting the related costs we incur, especially for travel. By training our sales team on the latest digital tools, we prepare it for the future selling environment and help it become more efficient and productive. We’ll never get away entirely from in-person sales, but we have learned that we can develop and maintain important relationships without every meeting being face to face. And we’re finding that customers are open to that and appreciate it because there are also greater demands on their time, and they use more technology every day to manage those demands.

Furthermore, we’re making certain that our selling partners are efficient and productive. We’re training our distributors to be authorities about our products and our customers’ businesses. Through that insight and understanding, we strengthen our customer relationships with each transaction.

Similarly, we’ll never get away completely from printed materials, which are still necessary but not as much as they used to be, especially if relationships are managed digitally. Customers are becoming more accustomed to finding what they need online and are open to digital contacts and interactions.

This crisis has opened a door to be creative, and a lot of customers and partners out there have increased their creativity to meet the demand. So it’s opened our company to much creative thinking about how we do business moving forward.

We’re finding openness now in our industry to research what is needed digitally. People have raised their awareness and are using technology. This is partially a reaction to pandemic restrictions, but it’s also driven by fundamental changes in how manufacturing does business today. So in that regard, we’re already there. We have that option with our Centralized Distribution Center. We have invested in building an industry-leading comprehensive catalog, and now its products are available quickly and conveniently — and digitally — through our CDC. It’s a single-point-of-contact ordering approach that saves valuable time for our customers.