Algeria AgencyIndustries
Manufacturing: your site is read by a buyer, not by a customer
Three different people search for you, assess you and pay you. None reads the same page, and none wants the same thing.
In every other sector in this series, one person searches, decides and pays. In manufacturing those three roles are held by three different people: a technician with a need, a buyer who compares, a director who signs.
The technician looks for a specification and a compatibility. The buyer looks for a price, a lead time and administrative guarantees. The director wants to know whether your firm will still exist in two years. None of the three is satisfied by the page the other two wanted.
That is what makes industrial communication so often useless: it is written for an imaginary reader, generally an enthusiastic one, while its real readers are three busy professionals each looking for a precise piece of information and giving up when they cannot find it.
So this article treats your site as a file rather than a shop window. It starts with the datasheet, the most-read and most-neglected page in the sector, and it ends with what we refuse to write on your behalf.
The person who finds you is not the person who decides
The first practical consequence of that division of roles is that your first reader has no purchasing authority. The technician who finds you cannot choose you: they can only pass you on, or not.
What they pass on is not your page, it is what they retained from it. The quality of your documentation therefore determines the quality of an internal recommendation you will never see and can never correct.
The second reader, the buyer, is not judging your product. They are comparing files: price, lead time, payment terms, whether the administrative documents exist. An incomplete file is set aside without discussion, even when the product is the best one.
The third reader, the one who signs, wants one thing and will never say it out loud: certainty that you will still be there for after-sales. That is why references, longevity and an address weigh as much as a technical specification.
The practical conclusion is not to build three sites. It is to understand that one page has to answer three readings, and that the only way to manage it is structure: specifications that can be located, terms that can be read, and proof of existence visible without effort.
The datasheet is your most-read page
On an industrial site the most consulted page is never the home page or the "about" page. It is a product datasheet, and it is nearly always written like a sales brochure while being read as a working document.
A useful datasheet carries a reference, dimensions, a material, a tolerance, an operating range, a compatibility and a standard where one applies. It also carries a weight and a packing unit, because the buyer has to calculate a shipment the technician has not thought about.
What makes it useless is nearly always the same thing: the specifications live inside an image. A value written into a catalogue photograph is neither searchable, nor copyable, nor legible on a small screen — so it is invisible to all three readers at once.
The second defect is the absence of what does not suit. A datasheet stating limits of use — above what temperature, outside what application, with what incompatibilities — saves everybody time and prevents a return that will cost far more than a lost sale.
And date it. A datasheet with no revision index and no date is a document nobody can tell still describes the product being shipped, which forces the buyer to ring you to check — which they will not do if they have another option.
Customer references: what you are entitled to say
The list of your customers is your most effective argument and your worst-used one. It proves existence, capability and duration in one stroke, which no wording achieves.
It does raise a question the sector handles badly: you are not entitled to name an industrial customer without their agreement, and many tacit agreements age poorly. A logo displayed for six years without anybody re-asking is a commercial risk, not a guarantee.
The solution is administrative and simple: ask for permission in writing, at a moment when the relationship is good, and accept a refusal. A customer who declines to be named is not declining to work with you, and taking it badly costs more than the mention.
Where the mention is refused, an honest and effective wording remains: describe the sector, the nature of the supply and the length of the relationship without naming. "Supplier to a food producer since 2019" says nearly everything a logo would have.
What is not done: displaying a logo obtained from a single order eight years ago, or claiming membership of a group that never existed. In a world where everybody knows everybody, an exaggerated reference is verified with one phone call and never recovered from.
How long you take to answer a request for a price
The thing that decides the most business in this sector is neither price nor quality: it is how long you take to answer a request for a price.
The reason is mechanical. The buyer consults several suppliers on the same day and has an internal deadline. Whoever replies first sets the reference the others are compared against, and whoever replies after the decision did not take part.
So treat that delay as a production commitment, with a written value: within forty-eight hours, within five working days, according to complexity. A stated delay that is kept to is an argument your competitors cannot copy without reorganising.
Where a complete answer takes time, the holding answer is almost as effective: acknowledge receipt, name the person handling it, state the date of the proposal. It costs two minutes and moves your file from the "no news" pile to the "in progress" pile.
One consequence to accept: it means being able to decline quickly. A supplier who replies in two days with "that is outside our capability, and here is why" gets asked again next time; a supplier who does not reply is filed as unreachable, which is permanent.
The tender: what gets prepared beforehand
A tender is not won at the moment it is published. It is won beforehand, by having the administrative documents current, and it is lost for reasons that have nothing to do with your trade.
The administrative file is an object in its own right: it ages, it expires, and it requires the same documents from the same bodies every time. Keeping it current continuously rather than in a rush is the first decision, and it is purely organisational.
The second point is reading the specification. A bid set aside on a formal criterion is the commonest waste in the sector, and it nearly always comes from a quick read done the evening before submission.
The third is choosing not to bid. Not all tenders are equal and a half-prepared bid costs a lot for nothing. Deciding early not to compete is a management decision, not a surrender.
And there is something your site can do here, contrary to what people think: make your capabilities, your equipment and your references verifiable without a phone call. A committee that has to ring you to understand what you make has already read two clearer files.
What can be measured in a long cycle
An industrial sales cycle is counted in months, which makes most of the usual indicators unusable: when a number takes six months to move, nothing can be steered with it.
Three measures work anyway. The first is the time taken to answer a request for a price, measured in hours. It is the only indicator on this list that moves immediately and the only one you control entirely.
The second is the conversion rate from requests to orders, calculated by product family rather than overall. An overall rate mixes markets with nothing in common and says nothing actionable.
The third is the reason for losing, asked for and recorded. Price, lead time, capability, missing documents, no reply at all. Twenty lines are enough for the dominant cause to appear, and in many firms it is the last one.
What we will not give you: industrial output, capacity or average lead-time figures "observed in Algeria". We know of no dated, checkable series we could honestly cite, and an invented number in a technical file is the worst possible fault in this sector.
Where people look for you, and on which screen
This is the only sector in the series where the principal reader is not on a phone. A buyer works at a desk, with several tabs open, comparing documents side by side.
The internet market observatory published by ARPCE counts, for the second quarter of 2025, some 59.10 million internet subscriptions in Algeria, of which 88.71% are mobile and 11.29% fixed.
The right reading of that figure for you is the opposite of every other sector’s: your professional reader belongs to the fixed minority, but only for part of the day. The technician who finds you on a site or in a workshop is on a phone like everybody else.
The consequence is that a datasheet has to work at both sizes. A specification table overflowing horizontally is unreadable on a phone, and a page that has given up on tables is unusable for the buyer doing a comparison.
The answer is dull and well known: specifications as text rather than images; units written out; tables that scroll inside their own frame rather than pushing the page; and a downloadable document as a complement to the page, never in place of it.
- Mobile subscriptions88.71%
- Fixed subscriptions11.29%
ARPCE, internet market observatory, second quarter of 2025
Capacity, certification, and what cannot be promised
Announcing a production capacity is a contractual commitment in disguise. A buyer reading a monthly volume on your site will carry it into their tender, and you will have to meet it or explain why you do not.
The careful wording is not vague, it is conditioned: stating a capacity per line, per period and under named conditions beats an impressive global figure that will be quoted back at you.
Certifications raise the opposite problem: they can be checked. Displaying a standard without being able to produce the certificate, its issuing body and its validity date is the kind of error that removes a supplier from a list for several years.
You also have to distinguish three things the sector happily conflates: being certified, being compliant with a standard, and manufacturing to a standard. Those are three claims of very different strength, and the buyer knows the difference even when the writer does not.
The rule we apply is simple: nothing on your site that cannot be produced on request the same day. If the document does not exist, the sentence does not exist.
The language of your documentation decides your customers
An Algerian industrial firm has three linguistic readers, and the choice of language is not a communication decision: it is a market decision.
French remains the dominant working language of industry and design offices. Arabic is the language of administrative documents and of some public counterparties. English is the language of foreign buyers and international datasheets, and its absence excludes you from an entire market.
The usual reflex — translate everything — is expensive and rarely right. The useful decision is finer: which pages serve which reader. A datasheet in three languages makes sense; a company presentation in three languages almost never does.
There is also a consistency constraint few firms manage: a translated specification has to remain the same specification. A figure that differs between two language versions of the same datasheet is an error a buyer will find, and they will draw the appropriate conclusion about everything else.
Our position, which we apply to our own site: the documents that decide — datasheets, specifications, terms — first; the rest afterwards, and only if it serves somebody.
After-sales is a sales argument
In manufacturing nobody buys an object, they buy a continuity. A machine, a part or a supply commits the buyer for years, and the question they are asking silently is: what happens when it fails.
That is why after-sales is a sales argument rather than an ancillary service. Writing down the response time, the availability of spare parts and how long they will remain available is worth more than three pages about the quality of your production.
Parts availability is the most decisive point and the least often written. An experienced buyer knows that equipment whose parts vanish in three years costs more than dearer equipment whose parts exist for ten.
The second point is the person. In this trade a named contact beats a departmental address, because the failure happens on a day when somebody needs to speak to a person who already knows the file.
And the third is operating documentation: a manual, a diagram, a parts list. Providing them online, durably, is a trivial investment that brings customers back ten years later, when their paper copy has disappeared.
What to check before signing with a supplier
The first question sorts everybody: ask how they intend to handle your datasheets. If they talk about imagery, animation or storytelling, they have understood a shop window where you need a documentary catalogue.
The second is about the technical data: will they enter it as structured text, with units, rather than reusing your catalogue images? It is the most thankless work in the sector and the one that decides everything.
The third is about approval: who at your firm re-reads a specification before publication? A wrong technical figure on an industrial site is not a typo, it is a part that will be sent back to you.
The fourth is about languages: which pages in which language, and who guarantees that the figures stay identical between versions. A translation done without that check produces exactly the inconsistency your buyer will find.
The fifth is a test: ask them to write the datasheet for one of your products from your own documentation. One page will show you whether they can tell a specification from an argument, which is the only competence that counts here.
What we do, and what we will refuse to do
What we will refuse: publishing a specification, a capacity or a certification you cannot document the same day. In this sector an unverifiable claim does not cost you a sale, it costs you a place on a supplier list for several years.
We will also refuse to leave your specifications inside images. It is the sector’s most widespread practice and it makes your information invisible to all three readers at once: not searchable, not copyable, not legible small.
A limit of competence, stated plainly: we are neither engineers nor a design office, and we will never validate a technical value. We shape what your teams write and sign, and we will ask for a named review before any publication.
What we do: product datasheets as structured text with units, limits of use, a revision index and a date; a references page built on written agreements; a response time to price requests that is stated and measured; and operating documentation that stays online for years.
And what you should do without us this month: measure the time between a request for a price arriving and your reply going out, across your last twenty. One column, in hours. It is free, and in most industrial firms it is the number that explains the most losses.
Frequently asked questions
Do we need a site if we sell to only a few customers?
Yes, and not to be found: to be verified. The technician recommending you internally and the buyer assembling a file need precise documents, and they will not ring you for them if they have another option.
Can we display our customers’ logos?
With their written agreement, asked for while the relationship is good, and accepting a refusal. Where the mention is declined, describe the sector, the nature of the supply and the length of the relationship without naming — that says nearly everything a logo would.
Should we state our production capacity?
Only conditioned: per line, per period, under named conditions. An impressive global volume will be carried into a tender and you will have to meet it or explain why you do not.
Our datasheets are catalogue images. Does it matter?
It is the sector’s most expensive defect. A value inside an image is not searchable, not copyable and not legible on a small screen: it is invisible to the technician, the buyer and the search engine at once.
Which language should we publish in?
Decide page by page rather than globally. A datasheet in three languages makes sense; a company presentation in three languages almost never does. And check that the figures stay identical between versions.
Where do we start if we do only one thing?
Measure how long you take to answer a request for a price, in hours, across your last twenty. It is the only indicator in this trade that moves immediately, and the one that explains the most losses.
Where we come in
The time between a price request and your reply, across twenty files, compares badly with what you believe. And your specifications are probably inside images.
- We take your specifications out of images and write them as text, with units.
- We add the operating limits, which filter out off-target enquiries.
- We display a certification only where you can produce the document.
Engineering and design are not our trades: no sizing, no tolerance and no recommendation will come from here.
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