Natural Selection

The communications and marketing capabilities of your Web site can go a long way in educating your unseen or "stealth" prospects. Stealth prospects are technology-minded purchasers or influential team members who scour the Web looking for suppliers, buyers and other technical solutions for their own businesses. Unlike traditional prospects, members of this new breed of prospects don't identify themselves or contact you because they don't have to—the info they're looking for is available online—on your site or someone else's. As stealth prospects find greater volumes and more quality information, Web sites play a greater role in influencing the research and buying habits of the discrete parts and machining services markets.

To best serve these prospects, what should you do after you've done everything with the formatting of text and graphics on your site?

For inspiration, why not look to selectors to improve the research experience your Web site provides?

Selectors are ideal because they allow online visitors to create tailored lists built on their exclusive criteria. Quite simply, selectors let prospects or researchers see what they want to see, when they want to see it.

A great example of selectors—how they work, what they can do and why they're effective—can be found at www.selectsmart.com, a site created and maintained by a fellow named Curt Anderson.

Now, before we go any further, you need to know a few things. SelectSmart.com has a lot of selectors that don't apply to machining. And Curt isn't just a "Webhead." He's with Darex, a manufacturing company in Oregon, and he's a manufacturing professional himself. He's even applied the selector model to Darex's site (www.darex.com).

The point of all this is for you to look for the potential in selectors and similar Web-based utilities and use what is right for those stealth prospects on your own site.