Case Study: Westquip

Westquip was started June 1st, 1982.  Westquip obtained the Toyota forklift line in 1984 and the rest is 26 years of successful history. The owners of Westquip are Bob and Jay Gilson and Fred and Nancy Stanley.  Bob and Fred have been friends since grade school.  Fred is the president and runs Westquip. Bob is the company's financial backer and consultant when needed.  We sat down with Fred and asked him about his website.

“We received an unsolicited complement on our website from someone who does research on the Internet to sell material handling companies and equipment companies products”, Fred said. “They liked the way we accomplished this with our site saying it was the best organized, easiest to navigate, and provided the most information on the site that they had seen in a long time.”

Fred explained his strategy why a website was important to their business.  “We see our website as a seed ready to sprout business.”  “The first stage of the website was to establish our image as an excellent company to do business with.” “Now, Westquip is planning to put a marketing program in place that focuses on key words within the Internet Search Engines.  “We will get a better organic ranking for our business,” explained Fred.  “Once we execute on that step, leads will be coming in more rapidly.”

“The world has gone to the web instead of traditional direct mail and the old way of selling.”  We use the website to keep information on our company and products current as a tool for our sales team without having to publish it.” “This way, we don’t have to pay for printing and mailing material and our customers can download or print what they want.”  “Whenever we speak with customers, we promote our site so they come an look at it.”

“Our customers can come and look at the site as a real time brochure because it has a lot of information on it.  We wanted to make it look nice and clean so it represents Westquip adequately as clients want to come and study what we have.”  We have grown into some online forms to generate some activity but we are just getting started.”

“We get an enormous amount of hits on our website but we are not tracking web traffic to leads but I’m sure it’s a small number.  What we are sure of is that if a client is really interested in working with us, our site makes it really easy for them to get the information that leads to a close.”

“When we decided to go with the Worx Company, it was because you had the ability to make some really professional features for our website that we could not do ourselves.  We found Drupal through the Worx Company and it has worked out really well because we were able to interface our internal InfoQuip application so searches from the web query our internal database to display real time data.  Our sales reps use this feature and it’s very powerful.”

“As far as WestQuip goes, the money we spent on building a website with the Worx Company on Drupal, is money well spent.  It has enabled us to take the next level in using the Internet to grow our business.  We only have 20 minutes at the max in talking with a prospective client but the website is there for them so they may take as long as they want.  The more they know about us the better off they will be and the better off we are.”