Mackintosh Tool Co. is having a good 2007, “hitting our projections,” says Brian Beachy, vice president of sales and marketing. He has a few measuring tools he and the company can use to back up the claim.

While the Centerville, Ohio, cutting tools distributor was having a slight summer slowdown in business, Beachy was cheered by “our daily rate”—a statistic that gives him an idea of the amount of sales they achieve each day. Another metric is the “sales-per-person” ratios, a way to determine what each of his salespeople is producing.

“We look at that sales-per-person ratio and it's been pretty high,” Beachy says.

Mackintosh upgraded its company Web site this year. It now contains an array of customer options and various technical tips.

“We want to teach our end users how to properly use the tools and how to trouble-shoot on their own to make them better,” Beachy says.

The Web upgrade isn't completed yet, but will eventually add a number of different topics in its training section, Beachy says.

Another option on the Web site is information on Mackintosh's tooling management offering, in which customers have tooling inventory on their job site but don't actually buy the tools until they use them. That inventory is kept at the customer's site on a consignment basis, Beachy explains.

“Basically, we own the inventory that's on their site,” he says. “When they use them, it officially becomes their inventory.”

Beyond the immediate availability of the tools, this also represents a savings advantage to customers in inventory costs, taxes and shipping fees.

Customers can also use vending machines to dispense the tools, Beachy says, something that has become popular and profitable both for Mackintosh and its customers.

“Vending machines are growing quite a bit in popularity. We've implemented quite a few of them,” he explains.

A locked down vending machine will require a code or an ID number to get into the machine, Beachy explains. Customers can then track the cutting tools by their job site number. Mackintosh bills these customers once a month.

“That gives them better reporting accuracy on where their tools are being used,” he says. “Companies are interested in consolidating their vendor base and the vending machine is a very good tool for doing that.”

Many of Mackintosh's products are very technical, high-precision cutting tools. Aerospace, medical and automotive are its dominant industries, with aerospace accounting for nearly half, Beachy says.

As technically sophisticated as some of those cuttings tools are—and as state-of-the-art as its Web site is becoming—Beachy and his staff don't kid themselves about why they are there.

“The Web site is there to give people the knowledge of who we are and what we do,” he says. “But it will never [actually] replace what we do. It's that simple. You have to have the skilled salespeople.”

Mackintosh's size (15 employees) makes it vital that it take advantage of every chance to emphasize its value added-offerings—salespeople being number one on that list, Beachy says.

“You have to put the best people out there,” he says. “You can have a catalog with every gee whiz idea in the world, but it's not going to replace the human interface that is needed.”