Napoleon Engineering Services
Strategic marketing drives new business growth
Chris Napoleon, PresidentDespite our small organizational structure, we have been able to achieve smart growth without significantly increasing our Sales & Marketing function.
The Company
Napoleon Engineering Services (NES) is a custom manufacturer of high-performance specialty bearings and the largest bearing test and inspection facility in North America. Their products and services support aerospace, agriculture, heavy-duty truck and medical applications nationally and internationally. Customers include high-profile, recognizable companies, such as SKF, John Deere, Boeing and Moog.
The Challenge
A significant investment in plant and equipment was made based on the belief that the company could double sales over a four-year period. It was less clear which products, markets or customers offered the best opportunities to achieve that growth. Due to the complexity of that task, Insyte Consulting was engaged to develop a clear direction, priorities, and specific action plans to achieve the growth.
Our Solution
The company tracked sales to its 300 customers as one consolidated list, allocating attention to customers in proportion to their annual purchases. Insyte showed via detailed analysis that NES really had three distinctly different product businesses with different potentials for growth and profitability. The largest product businesses also contained several distinct customer categories with different potentials for growth.
The company’s first action was to reconfigure its accounting system to separately track each of the three businesses. This permitted better tracking of relevant costs for more accurate price quotations. Customers within each business were grouped into application categories and prioritized by sales potential. The result was a prioritized 80-20 list for the 300 customers. NES could now focus its attention on an easily-managed short list of applications, customers and products offering the highest potential for growth and profitability. To facilitate that highly-focused sales effort, Insyte developed the sales messaging and website content that would appeal to targeted customers and applications. Finally a prioritized list of sales activity action plans was developed to focus the sales efforts where they would have the greatest long-term impact.
