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Pune · B2B practice

Marketing for a sale that takes eighteen months

Industrial B2B does not respond to campaigns. The decision is made across engineering, quality, purchase and often a promoter, over months, in rooms you are not in. Marketing's job is to be useful in that process rather than loud at the end of it.

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Typical cycle
9 to 24 months
Decision unit
Four to seven people
Biggest gap
Sales material
Second biggest
Pipeline visibility

What usually needs fixing, in order

Each one makes the next cheaper, which is why the order matters more than the list.

  1. Nobody has written down what you are arguing. Three people describe the company three ways. Everything downstream inherits that. Positioning comes first for a reason.
  2. The presentation opens with your factory. Customers rarely reach the applications. Reversing it is a two-week job with an immediate effect. Sales material.
  3. The website cannot answer a technical question. So the buyer leaves and the sales team disqualifies by hand. Website content.
  4. The best content is locked in project folders. Application notes and failure analyses that nobody outside has seen. Technical content.
  5. Sales and marketing count different things. One two-hour session fixes an argument that has run for years. Demand generation.
  6. The pipeline has no sample or design-win stage. Imported CRM models jump from qualified to proposal. Indian industrial selling has stages in between and they carry most of the forecast.

The pipeline discipline problem

Six months into most engagements I ask how much qualified pipeline exists, at what stage, with what weighted value. Very few companies can answer, and it is not because the information is missing.

Enquiries arrive through the distributor, the exhibition, the website and the regional sales manager, and they are tracked in four places or none. Imposing one structure on that is unglamorous and it is usually the highest-return work available in the first six months.

It also changes the internal politics. A promoter who can see weighted pipeline stops treating marketing as a cost line, which is what makes the next year's budget conversation possible. I build this on Vyndeal, which I wrote for the Indian B2B motion specifically.

Before you ask

Our sales is entirely relationship driven. Does marketing apply?

Relationships get you the meeting. They do not get you into an evaluation at a company where nobody has met your team. Marketing here is mostly about being credible and findable at the technical stage, which is precisely where relationships do not reach.

How long before we see anything?

Sales material changes conversations within weeks because it gets used immediately. Pipeline effects show in one to two quarters. In design-in categories, revenue follows the customer's production timeline.

Is LinkedIn worth it for industrial products?

For reaching named accounts as an account programme, yes. For general brand posting in this category, mostly noise, and I would rather you spent it on application content.

Related work

What objection does your team keep hearing?

One sentence is enough. The recurring objection tells me more about where the problem sits than any brief, and it is usually not where people expect.

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Kunal Waghmare · Padmavati Hills, Mokai Vasti, Bavdhan, Pune, Maharashtra 411021
office@quiamo.com · +91 90216 02686