Finding Tekmos

Tekmos provides replacements for obsolete ASICs and microcontrollers.  Our customers are those who manufacture systems that have a long lifetime, and are frequently under regulatory control or have technical reasons for not replacing their design.  As a result, they really need our product.  The job of our sales team is to find them. 

But finding them is tough.  Most sales forces call on the design teams, since that is where components are designed in.  However, since obsolescence tends to hit the manufacturing side, opportunities are frequently missed by the normal sales channels.  If we can’t find them, then we have to make it easier for the customer to find us, and that means advertising.

Twenty years ago, advertising was much simpler.  There were a number of free trade magazines that were delivered to key individuals.  All you had to do was to create a clever ad, and wait for the customer to call you.  That was then, and now the internet has killed the magazines.  Perhaps a fifth of our incoming calls are from the magazines themselves, begging us to accept a free subscription.

Nowadays, advertising is being listed by a search engine.  I just did a search for obsolete ASIC, and out of 8.2M hits, we were number 32.  Not bad, considering a number of hits were for ASIC tennis shoes.

Search engine advertising is a two prong effort.  The main activity is through web content, the more, the better.  And that is the main reason we have our newsletter and this blog.  The second prong involves the purchase of ads that are linked to key words. 

Generally, key words are not expensive, and we can usually get top ad placement.  But there are two downsides.  First, there are many surplus dealers out of China that heavily advertise certain part numbers, and that can make it difficult to get your ad seen.  The second downside is triggering many hits by what we think are students trying to get homework assistance on specific microprocessors.  It is better to advertise an 80C51FA than to advertise an 8051.

 Does this work?  It does for us.

A month ago, a major manufacturer had run out of a specific microcontroller.  Their product was controlled by the FDA, and they faced a serious shortfall in sales if they were unable to locate additional microcontrollers.  They had tried the surplus market, but had only found counterfeits, and they could not take that risk.

Then they found us using the internet.  Their first level of checking was to examine our web site, and we passed.  Their second step was to make a day trip to Texas from Europe (!) to see if we were real, and we passed that test too.  We negotiated a contract, and we are now designing a new variant of one of our micros that will be out this fall.

 It makes writing this blog totally worthwhile.