Most top-line revenue growth for EMS manufacturers comes from existing customers handing the EMS provider additional business – with little contributing sales effort. As a result, EMS sales people are not developing, professionally, instead relying on lower common denominator tactics like being a friend to OEM customers rather than learning how to understand and solve problems and challenges facing OEM decision makers.
This is causing EMS manufacturing service quality to suffer while diluting EMS management business practices along with a declining EMS industry corporate culture. Its becoming increasingly more difficult for EMS providers to differentiate their services sans end-market and factory location or geography.
GOOD: EMS sales people are (unwillingly) being forced to learn to improve their communications skills as travel and face-to-face meeting frequency drops due to travel restrictions, tighter financial control and pandemic supply chain management.
Today, it is easier than ever for EMS manufacturing management to identify and isolate poor sales performers from those EMS sales people able to meet EMS corporate management objectives. This is good news for electronics OEM equipment manufacturers who typically have 80% of the knowledge they need before even speaking with an EMS sales or marketing person.
BAD: Finding ‘new’ OEM customers is extremely difficult for EMS providers.
UGLY: EMS sales and marketers do not have adequate prospecting networks or tools for identifying suitable prospects and converting these to qualified leads for channeling into a robust marketing funnel.
In your search results, you can further target other provider End Markets and Services plus, you can add more Geographies.
Instead, EMS providers continue to nurture poorly constructed marketing funnels using CRM systems that simply track prospects. After all, sales people have to put ‘something’ into the funnel each month. But attempting to nurture these contacts into a qualified lead amid lengthy (18+ months, on average) sales-to-close cycles with customer acquisition costs often exceeding hundreds of thousands (even millions) of dollars is proving difficult.
In the past, poor sales performers could remain hidden in large (and small) EMS firms. Today, this is no longer possible. Poor communicators – combined with a glib understanding of the complexities of EMS business model management – is causing many EMS sales and marketers to be unemployed at worst, self-employed at best as EMS sales people are being fired or placed on commission only (manufacturing rep status).
SEE ALSO
EMS sales and marketers struggle
How OEMs can reduce EMS costs and fees
There is also a glut in EMS industry of EMS sales people seeking new positions. This impacts EMS recruiters serving EMS sector – who tend to focus on sales and business development positions – while recruiter incomes drop.
As these low-performing EMS sales and marketer leave large EMS firms and hire on with smaller EMS manufacturers, they bring average and sub-average behavior. This is playing out across all industry players, from global EMS firms like Foxconn and Jabil, Flex…to EMS providers earning $10 million in annual sales.
In addition to our massive, detailed database of EMS providers and factories worldwide, we hear first-hand from electronics OEM decision makers about their experiences working with, and leaving, EMS manufacturers of all sizes.
EMS provider factory quality and execution varies from factory to factory, even within the same EMS organization.
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