How Manufacturing Quality Certifications Help Win Business

For manufacturing companies, attaining and maintaining quality certifications can take a lot of time and effort, but it's important to have these qualifications for a number of reasons—including winning new business.

Whether it's a well-known standard like ISO or ANSI or a more niche accreditation like QS 9000 or IRIS, quality certifications let buyers know that you can meet their specific standards.

This can be a powerful sales and marketing tool because most buyers specifically search out suppliers with these acronyms attached to their names, and if you have them, it's an immediate sign of trust over one of your competitors without them.

Quality certifications ranked in the top six of all factors that B2B buyers use to evaluate suppliers, according to our recent survey, so you don't want to be a supplier who overlooks the importance of their quality certifications.

Don't make it unnecessarily difficult for buyers to find and verify this critical piece of information — it’s a seemingly minor error that can add up to a huge loss of potential revenue.

Buyers are already 70% of the way through the industrial buying process before they reach out and contact a supplier. They do their initial research and discovery online, anonymously. That means your important information — like your quality certifications — need to be online, lest you get eliminated early in the process.

Just listing a bunch of ISO numbers isn’t sufficient — buyers want to see your certification, which means having high-quality images, with up-to-date information at all times from any of these organizations:

• ACC (The American Chemistry Council)
• AISC (The American Institute Of Steel Construction)
• CEN (European Committee for Standardization)
• CSA (Canadian Standards Association)
• EASA (European Aviation Safety Agency)
• Quest Forum (Quality Excellence for Suppliers of Telecommunications Forum)
• The Foundation for Food Safety Certification
• (ITAR) The International Traffic in Arms Regulation

See More: The Complete List Of Diversity & Quality Certifications For Manufacturers

If you have quality certifications, you need to make sure your potential customers know about them. It could mean the difference between winning new business and being left off the shortlist. (To explore the other factors that buyers evaluate you on right now, download our free eBook, How To Make The Industrial Buyer's Shortlist.)

As an example, Renown Electric, a manufacturer of electric motors and repair company has a certification page on its website so that buyers can see that Renown is a quality business to work with. The motor company lists out all the certifications they have obtained throughout the years within their website's side rail section.

What's unique about this page is that Renown put together a free downloadable offer for their ISO 9001:2015 certificate. Providing a gated downloadable certification goes beyond showing buyers that you're a quality supplier, but it also helps improve lead generation efforts. 

Similarly, in the screenshot below, you can see Outlook Group has an "Our Credentials" section on their website that lists the numerous certifications they have to serve different markets like food and beverage and medical and personal care.

Tex Tech Industries is a textile manufacturer that takes full advantage of the certifications they have across multiple content types.

An ISO 9001:2015 certification is positioned in both the header and footer of the company website. The footer also showcases its Thomasnet.com badging with a "Verified Supplier Badge" and a "COVID-19 Response Supplier Badge," which is also highlighted on the Tex Tech Industries Thomas company profile. (More on that later in this post!)

Tex Tech takes its certifications a step further by including it as a main point in a company video.

It is stated within the first five seconds of the video that the manufacturer is ISO 9001:2015 certified to reinforce further that they are a "proven leader in the high-performance materials market."

Beyond your website, you need to put your quality certifications front and center when buyers are looking for the products and services you offer. This means listing your business and maintaining your profile on Thomasnet.com — every second, a buyer visits the platform to source products and services and find a new supplier.

AMECO USA is a CNC machining business that provides vertical turning and milling services. This manufacturer exemplifies the use of certifications on its Thomasnet.com company profile. Under the "Certifications" tab of the supplier's listing, buyers can see that AMECO is AISC and Nadcap certified.

A key element within the AMECO supplier profile is its ownership and diversity status. This manufacturer is a "Veteran-Owned," "Small Business Enterprise (SBE)." Displaying your diversity certifications on your business listing alongside quality certifications can be a huge value proposition when prospects are looking to shortlist your company. Some businesses won't partner with others unless they are certified.

Obtaining quality certifications has many benefits to suppliers, but they mean nothing unless your prospects know about them.

Thousands of manufacturers across North America advertise their business on Thomasnet.com to get seen by more than 1.2 million B2B buyers, engineers, and procurement managers sourcing for suppliers — it's free to create a company profile.