Manufacturing industrial tube fabrication equipment may not feel like the best place to apply inbound principles. However, Mike Thomas and the team at Tube Form Solutions (TFS) in Elkhart, Indiana, had other ideas.

Founded in 1989, two companies merged in 2010 to create Tube Form Solutions (TFS) to compete in a crowded marketplace. TFS designs, manufactures, and distributes tube fabrication equipment. Customers include manufacturers of automotive exhausts, heavy truck fuel systems, hydraulic lines for ships and planes, and seat frames for furniture manufacturers. They also design and manufacture tooling for tube bender and tube end forming machines. They support customers through the entire tube fabrication lifecycle from installation to refurbishments.

Unfortunately, in 2014 sales were flat. The marketing and sales playbooks that had been so successful for so long weren't working as they did before.

The main problem for Tube Form Solutions was a lack of sales qualified leads. Industry trade shows generated some leads, but not enough to grow the business. TFS was relying on their outside sales team to generate and develop their leads for new business. This resulted in missed market opportunities and missed sales targets because the sales team spent a lot of time on prospecting. The company website was not generating any leads at all.

Sales results were inconsistent among their 10 sales reps. Some were successful cold-calling for new business, some were not successful, and some flat out refused to do it. Sales reps that were new to their territories and did not have a bank of contacts to fall back on tended to get off to a slow start. Reps were vying for the “good territories,” and there was a lot of heated discussion on fairness and territory realignment.

TFS thought they were staying top of mind with customers. But, after completing a review of competitive sales pursuits and analyzing the results, they realized that they were losing more often than they were winning. The company did very little ongoing engagement to market to their existing customer base. Like many companies in the industrial world, TFS focused on the people that called them requesting service and support. These people represented the proverbial “squeaky wheel.” TFS also did not take much time to educate customers after the initial sale.

Mike Thomas, president of TFS, followed the HubSpot marketing blog. After reading stories of manufacturing companies succeeding with inbound marketing, he decided that TFS needed to change the way they approached marketing and sales.

TFS shifted from a total reliance on a traditional outbound approach and invested in inbound sales and marketing. They adopted the HubSpot marketing platform, CRM, and sales pro product; moved resources to inside sales; and educated everyone in the sales organization about the target persona and their buyer journey.

Thomas says:

We reallocated resources to inbound marketing, CRM, and more inside salespeople and technical support became our focus. We did this because our buyers told us this is how they wanted us to support them. Industrial buyers don't want salespeople cold-calling them and sitting in the lobby waiting to see them. Our research and experience told us that our industrial persona wants immediate and expert support when questions arise both before they make a sale and especially after the sale. These people run optimized production operations and cannot have machines down. Our expertise was being wasted with sales calls that did not add a lot of value to the buyer or TFS. What our persona asked for was a deeper connection to our technical expertise. By moving more resources to engineering and technical support we were able to help our buyers the way they want to be helped.^*

TFS identified the key attributes of their target persona by conducting customer and prospect interviews. Their target persona was an engineer or business leader (often with a technical background) who had either high-value or high-volume tube fabrication requirements. The persona could vary from Fortune 100 manufacturers to a local custom motorcycle shop. A fascinating aspect of this buyer persona research was that TFS did really well at both ends of this production spectrum but less well in the middle. TFS's expertise, equipment, and business approach applied well to either persona type.

TFS developed a detailed map of the buyer journey for this ideal buyer persona. Buying capital equipment is a complex, multistep, considered sale and the buyer journey lasts from 6 to 12 months and includes many steps.

In general, the TFS buyer journey follows these key milestones:

• Buyer identifies a need for automation including decision criteria.
• Buyer identifies potential solutions and gathers information on options.
• Buyer develops preliminary outline of specifications, budget, and a timeline for installation.
• Buyer validates suppliers, connecting the engineering requirements and design outline to the specifications.
• Buyer runs a supplier selection process to narrow down the list of possible vendors.
• Selected vendors perform functional tests, create prototypes, and complete technical specifications.
• Buyer develops final request for proposal and submits to a small group of vendors.
• Buyer reviews proposals of the “short list” of vendors to determine the best option.
• Buyer selects vendor, including contractual agreement and start date.
• Supplier delivers, installs, trains, and measures output.
• Supplier begins to support and service of the product to ensure success.
• Supplier conducts a periodic check to ensure proper maintenance and customer satisfaction.

TFS identified another key insight about the persona and the buyer journey; buyers asked different questions if they were a first-time buyer or buying a second or third piece of equipment. They had completely different priorities and reasons to purchase. Also, buyers fell into one of two orientations. Either they were ROI focused and looking for the best price-performance ratio or they were detail/specification focused and needed a very specific feature to make the investment work.

Detail-oriented personas knew their production lines inside and out. They wanted to know the specific details of all the equipment they might add to their very controlled environment. They were very picky because they took pride in their work and felt personal ownership of the production line.

Results-oriented personas knew their business and production processes well enough, but they cared less about the actual production line and more about results. They wanted to know how tube fabrication equipment impacts and improves the production process, or increases speed, or reduces waste, or improves the bottom line.

Buyers tended to stay in the same lane, although some would go from results to detail oriented for subsequent purchases because of experience, change of ownership, or different market conditions. TFS was able to determine this buyer perspective via their marketing data and could address either option. If TFS delivers the appropriate return, then future purchases become more specification oriented, often with TFS being the only vendor considered.

Once over the specification and engineering detail hurdles, detail-oriented buyers often want to see how a new machine increases their return when they add it to their existing operation. The insight that personas may change their focus depending on the long-term stage of their journey is an important one for TFS. It helps them stay alert to the types of questions they are being asked, so they respond with the right information.

Once TFS understood and documented the persona and buyer journey information, they completed a content audit matching existing content assets to the persona and buyer journey stages.

This audit included:

• Specific checklists and guides for purchasing tooling and machines
• “Tool School” training documents designed to educate readers and help them successfully operate the equipment
• Introductory content about their equipment to help “explain to the boss” how this machine would fit into the production line and provide an effective ROI
• E-books and video presentations with technical details about the equipment, usage, and applications suitable for engineers
• ROI calculators that helped buyers know when automation paid off in fabricated part volume and value and how long it would take to get a reasonable ROI

TFS took these content assets and started running marketing campaigns. They built landing pages for each of the content assets like e-books and slide decks. TFS also built thank you pages that provided the content offer. These pages encouraged further engagement with the sales team to answer questions or get more detailed information. They created lead nurturing email campaigns encouraging prospects to request quotes or contact the sales team to discuss their project at any stage of the buying process. TFS figured out what parts of the website were driving the most traffic and used calls to action to point traffic from those pages to the landing pages and offers of machines that would upgrade that experience.

“Most of our content is very engineering-heavy, technical stuff that proves popular with our target audience,”^* says Thomas.

Content is a big focus. Most of the content that previously existed talked about what TFS machines did and the applications they addressed. TFS organized the existing application content into a library so that they could show the full range of solutions and the benefit they created. The goal was to create strategic content to build a bigger audience. They wanted the website to be a resource destination for engineers dealing with tube fabrication issues that covers the entire lifecycle of a tube from the tube mill to the finished component.

TFS developed detailed segmentation of their contact database by persona, then created additional marketing automation workflows that nurture these segments. The goal is to deliver personal, focused messages to the right persona. These messages include case studies from existing customers, as many companies are dealing with similar issues.

TFS also implemented HubSpot CRM and trained their sales teams on how to nurture and engage with inbound leads over the phone.

What was the reaction from the sales team?

Thomas explains:

The sales team got busy fast! These changes caused some confusion within the team. Salespeople didn't know how to connect with leads who weren't yet ready to buy. New lead qualification outlines helped the sales team respond to each e-book download lead or request for quote lead. We trained them on nurturing leads who are starting their buying process. We stopped going for the sale close right off the bat when a prospect downloaded a top-of-the-funnel offer. We started to ask more questions, which helped our people understand what problem they were trying to solve, what application they needed to implement, and what results they were looking for.^*

By implementing HubSpot CRM, the sales team now tracked and shared their activity with leads and deals, giving TFS better insight into their pipeline. TFS's salespeople did not use a CRM before this, even though they had one installed.

TFS leveraged HubSpot's sales technology to help them get more out of their traditional marketing and sales approaches. Trade shows are still critical in the capital equipment world, and TFS uses landing pages and offers to get booth visitors to convert back on the website once they return from the event. The sales team then engages those contacts with more personalized content to improve the relationship and boost the ROI that TFS sees from their trade show investments.

Thomas says, “Engineers use the Internet to do their research, and wait until later in their buying process to contact companies like ours. TFS did not serve early-stage prospects with our website until we adopted inbound. We feel we are getting ahead of it now. Persona-based content has made our events better and improved the types of conversations we have with the people we meet. Networking on LinkedIn is more effective using this content, which gets us in front of even more qualified buyers. People come to our booth and let us know they read an article or learned a lot from an e-book. Our sales team started to hear from the prospects that they appreciated and consumed our content, and saw the benefits of what we were doing. Our salespeople were skeptics, but they see now why an inbound strategy works.”^*

TFS committed to using more of the HubSpot CRM features and to taking advantage of the marketing and sales integration they provides. The HubSpot CRM collects a leads website and email history (because it shares a common database with the marketing platform), which allows the salespeople to manage the sales process. As a result, the time frame for closing deals has drastically shortened. TFS also created new dashboards and reports in the HubSpot CRM, which allowed them to track key account activity. This tracking makes it possible for them to react with the appropriate context and personal messaging when a contact needs help.

TFS started to use Google Adwords to present their content offers to more searchers on more keywords. They test and evaluate where their buyers look for information and what they are looking for. TFS moved from advertising the products to promoting their offers using Google Adwords and targeted trade media. This change to an inbound philosophy for outbound advertising increased lead generation by 200% from the same trade journal e-newsletters. This change in approach invested in these outbound types of ads ROI positive.

“Now, our challenge is to up our game and the value that our sales team brings. Over time, we will continue to transition more sales assets to the inside and technical sales roles. Our customers expect technical expertise from our sales team and applications experience from our service people so they can get the right solution recommendation. TFS has a very technical and experienced sales team, and we will continue the process of learning how to convert that knowledge to content that buyers want to consume,” states Thomas.

What happened as a result of these changes?

“The number and quality of our leads increased immediately. We landed many sales and found new customers that would have never considered us if it had not been for inbound. We increased our sales over $1,000,000 in year one after adopting an inbound mindset. The results spoke for themselves and made it easy for us to continue to invest more time and resources to inbound ideas, technology, and services,” says Thomas.

He continues, “We plan to create more content around tube bending tooling and consumables. We will engage more with existing customers to provide increasing value in the relationship. We will create specific content that relates to the engineering issues our customers see every day. Another area of focus is marketing our expertise to our existing customers. We will drive our inbound marketing efforts farther into the lifecycle journey and add more resources to stay engaged after the sale. We know that shipping a machine and starting it up is not enough. Our customers need to be successful with our equipment for as long as they use it, which is almost always many years and in some cases decades.”

Thomas concludes by saying, “We will continue to apply the principles of inbound to everything we do. We will bring more people throughout the company into the process of being as helpful to our prospects and customers as possible. Especially after the sale when the relationship with our team and us matters the most to the buyer.”^*

TFS has become an inbound organization.