At Gantrade, we don’t simply fill orders when prospective customers come our way. Often, they need a customized solution that involves one or more Gantrade products. These opportunities, when viable, fuel innovation at Gantrade, enabling us to sell stronger offerings with each successive customer.
To make this dynamic of customer-initiated innovation work, Gantrade utilizes a formal business management process which allows us to track and effectively facilitate new opportunities as they move through our sales and development process.
With our new opportunities pipeline process, we are trying to provide a visual tool and common platform for everyone engaged in prospect development. Providing a clear roadmap for all stakeholders allows our team and our customers to understand the key information and decision process used in advancing projects through to a commercial success. The Gantrade process outlines the workflow, in a logical order, that needs to be accomplished within each stage so that prospects transition smoothly to the next stage.
The process connects with other work processes in our Gantrade Management System (Responsible Care and ISO 9001:2015 combined procedures). This management tool includes our New Business-New Product procedures and our EH&S and regulatory procedures.
The pipeline provides a visual snapshot of the status of prospects and allows us to track progress and recognize the next key actions needed. The overall benefit, for Gantrade and its customers, is to optimize our focus, shorten the cycle time for prospects, facilitate follow-up, and optimize business growth.
How Gantrade’s Customers Benefit from Our Pipeline Process
Gantrade is pleased to share our pipeline process with our customers and prospects to promote an exchange of ideas and to facilitate the identification of top-of-the-funnel opportunities. We hope that sharing our best practices will attract interested parties who may collaborate with Gantrade in achieving their business goals.
Our pipeline approach handles opportunities of various sizes, sales cycle timelines, and probabilities of success. By establishing goals, criteria, and accountability within the pipeline framework, we believe Gantrade can be more responsive and increase our joint success rate in meeting our customers’ product requirements. By promoting a focus on the key actions and by tracking progress, we have found this process helps to move viable projects along the opportunity funnel. Yet, this process does not create bureaucratic complications or generate unproductive time-consuming activities.
Elements of the Gantrade Pipeline Process
There are five stages in our pipeline process, as follows:
Stage 1
Leads Generation – Sources of leads include the many interfaces we have with the marketplace. These interfaces include current customers, enquiries to our website, market research, conferences and tradeshows, networking, online research and referrals, etc.Stage 2
Needs Analysis - Fitting customer requirements to commercial solutions and validation of the value-proposition. Communicating how Gantrade’s products, expertise and service can meet the needs articulated.Stage 3
Transition to Sales – Transition to sales-driven activities and completion of customer qualifications as appropriate.Stage 4
Sales Prospectus & Close – Development of a purchasing proposal and initial sale.Stage 5
Ongoing Customer Support: Meeting customer requirements and ensuring customer satisfaction.
The leads generation stage is where our pipeline process starts. The highest percentage of lead sources come from interactions with current customers, enquiries from our website, and tradeshows. A pivotal part of the process effectively communicating how prospects can achieve their desired results based on our proposed solution and our product portfolios, expertise, and services.
Gantrade would like to connect with organizations having an interest in our product lines and overall value proposition. To understand how Gantrade’s core product portfolios may be suited to your company’s unique needs, we invite you to partner with us.
Our team, armed with a wealth of technical knowledge and expertise, can guide you to the best solution for your applications. Contact Gantrade today to get started. Gantrade offers a wide portfolio of products for the CASE (Coatings, Adhesives, Sealants and Elastomers) sector, as well as polyurethane & polyurea platforms, barrier packaging, polymers & resins, and the oil & gas industries. Please visit our website www.gantrade.com to review our library of blog content developed around our business and technical expertise.
