Business development for plastic extrusion manufacturers can be a challenge. Custom Profile turned to Athena SWC for its inbound and outbound front-end sales infrastructure. A critical move that brought in the right types of leads.
Custom Profile, located in Grand Rapids, Michigan; Camden, South Carolina; and Juárez, Chihuahua, Mexico specializes in a variety of profile extrusion services, including coextrusion, dual durometer co-extrusion, tri-extrusion, and crosshead extrusion, as well as tubing extrusion.
Custom Profile, a plastic extrusion manufacturer, needed to accelerate top-line growth and strengthen its business development for plastic extrusion but faced limitations with its internal sales force. The company was heavily reliant on independent sales reps and found it increasingly difficult to reach the right types of companies. Time and resources were often wasted chasing leads that didn’t align with their capabilities.
When Keith Zeiler transitioned to CEO at Custom Profile, he recognized an opportunity to streamline and scale the company’s sales development efforts. The plastics industry is one where most players know each other, and Keith had heard of Athena several years before when he was at another company. He became aware of the success experienced by a plastics injection molding competitor who had worked with Athena. He had a strong respect for the company’s leader, who had adopted Athena’s process, so he decided to engage Athena SWC for an outsourced infrastructure and front-end sales processes.
This decision marked a turning point for Custom Profile, setting the stage for growth and improved market reach.
Go Deeper: Learn about Athena’s experience in the Plastics Industry
Custom Profile engaged with Athena to implement an integrated outbound and inbound marketing program to support business development for plastic extrusion efforts. At the start of the program, Athena developed targeted contact lists of decision makers, created marketing materials and call scripts, set up Vbout (marketing automation platform) and Pipedrive (CRM) automation system, and launched initial website enhancements. The upfront effort set the foundation for the program.
“The start-up was a relatively seamless process because of the work that Athens’s team put in initially,” said Kieth. “The level of upfront work that was done was key to the success.”
Aside from the overall infrastructure and process, two of the areas that Keith really appreciated were Inbound Marketing and Sales Coordination, which are elements of the Outbound Marketing process.
The outbound efforts were critical early on—not only for direct outreach, but for uncovering information about specific industries.
“We were kind of shotgunning early on, trying to see where we could provide a fit,” Keith said. “We supplied six target markets, and about half have been viable targets. We learned that just because it is a target market for us doesn’t mean the customers in it behave the same way. A lot of it is understanding customer behavior.”
Through outbound calling, Athena’s team identified patterns in some of the industries, like companies that handled extrusion inhouse or used injection molding instead. That intelligence helped Custom Profile avoid wasting time on prospects that didn’t align with their capabilities.
While Custom Profile’s website had been built a year prior, there was no SEO focus, which means it wasn’t always showing up on a search engine results page (SERP) when someone was searching for plastic extrusions. The site SEO work included fixing the website’s SEO fundamentals (e.g., applying appropriate keywords to page titles, meta descriptions, H1 (page or blog headings)), building a blog, and creating additional pages for various services. Monthly, additional keyword-focused blogs and pages are built out.
Through the Sales Coordination efforts, Athena’s team will follow up with stalled quotes or companies that have not responded after a meeting to prevent the opportunity from aging and being lost. The team will also reach out to existing or dormant customers to determine if there are additional opportunities. Custom Profile found this aspect to be beneficial.
“What we found out through the process was that the Athena team is good at finding decision-makers, explained Keith. “They brought me additional value specifically because we have been unsuccessful in tracking down the decision makers for some existing legacy customers.”
In the two years the two companies have worked together, Athena’s team has set up 28 meetings with qualified prospects, which had a combined potential spend of $16.7 million on plastic extrusion. Custom Profile has received two purchase orders, which combined are worth $2.5 million.
Since the website work began, the organic search traffic (those searching for custom plastic extrusions, profiles, etc.) increased by more than 122%, the number of times Custom Profile’s pages appear in the top 10 results (typically first page) on a SERP increased more than 280%, and the top five results increased more than 260%. The increase in website visitor tracking resulted in 14 of the 28 meetings mentioned above.
