How Veco Precision is building a future-proof commercial strategy

Established in 1934, Veco Precision makes precision metal components for the aerospace, automotive and semiconductor industries, among others. Innovation has always played an important role within the company. From the very beginning, for instance, the founders used electroforming, a technology in which metal is knocked down onto a die until the desired product with the desired thickness is created. Certainly at the time, a rather unconventional and unknown technology. But even in 2021, electroforming is still a specialised, relatively unknown technology, but one that offers many opportunities for the production of high-precision metal components.

For a long time, a significant part of Veco's customer base consisted of companies that mainly purchased off-the-shelf products: metal components requiring little or no R&D. More interesting are the customers who develop their metal components together with Veco, says Filipe Oliveira da Silva (Managing Director). "The life cycle of these products is considerably longer, and often such a co-development process results in a valuable long-term collaboration. However, engineers are often unaware of the existence of some technologies, such as electroforming. Let alone that they know that Veco Precision can co-develop a product with them, saving them time, money and energy."

So the problem was mainly the relative unfamiliarity of the technology and of Veco's expertise in this field, Oliveira da Silva outlines. "Our sales department consisted mainly of account managers who both served existing customers and were 'hunting' for new ones. The latter they tried to achieve with cold calling." While engineers mainly search for solutions online, Veco had no presence there. "If we did not change our commercial strategy, we would continue to attract the same customers: customers who did not grow with us."

Veco decided to change course. Streamlining its sales and marketing processes was given top priority. The focus should be on generating leads online and forecasting future sales through prospecting. "We needed to find a way for sales and marketing to work together structurally in generating, nurturing and tracking leads. And in doing so, not putting the product, but the customer at the centre." Working with an external partner (HubSpot consultancy Webs), Veco rolled out an inbound marketing strategy. In which high-quality content, relevant to the target group, should ensure online inflow of the right visitors. Which could then be converted into customers. "Starting from the turnover problem and based on concrete objectives, we first set up the right commercial processes. After which we hooked up people with the right skills. Then we started working on the tooling: first with a marketing automation tool to attract leads. Then with setting up a good system for Customer Relationship Management (CRM)."

Moreover, to get a better picture of its main target group internally, a persona was developed: 'Engineer Jim'. A major eye-opener, Oliveira da Silva says. "The introduction of this persona brought our marketing and sales activities to life. As a result, everyone in the organisation better understood the goals and challenges of the average engineer. Based on this persona, physical campaigns were then set up to generate leads, measure results and improve. Soon we saw a substantial growth in online visits and leads."

The new strategy has done Veco no favours. Traffic on the website already grew from 3,000 to 30,000 monthly visitors in a short time in 2018. The number of qualified leads went from 0 to 40 per month. And below the line, Veco welcomed 21 new customers in the first year. With 30 per cent of new business arguably coming from 'online'.

All in all, Veco has made great strides in business development, Oliveira da Silva stresses. "Our main priority now is to further improve the quality of leads. In this way, we are getting ever closer to our goal: to become the number one co-development partner in high precision metal components."