When the growth problem is the offer, not the ad budget.

Four areas and a plan. Segments and ideal customer profile rebuilt from your invoice data; pricing and offer, including what you realise against list and where value pricing is defensible; quoting and pipeline, meaning win and loss by segment, turnaround and follow-up; and route to market across direct, distributor and rep channels. The output is a written revenue growth plan with owners and a quarterly sequence, plus a short scorecard your team maintains afterwards.

An agency is paid to run marketing. This engagement is paid to work out whether marketing is your constraint at all, and in industrial businesses it frequently is not: the constraint is pricing, mix, quote turnaround or channel. Because we take no execution work inside the engagement, the plan is free to say that the fastest gain is fixing follow-up on quotes you already receive. If execution is warranted afterwards, it is scoped separately and you can run it with anyone.

Often more useful, because distribution hides the end customer and the growth question becomes who owns the relationship and where margin actually goes. We look at distributor performance by territory and line, what they can and cannot sell for you, where your direct activity helps them or competes with them, and what evidence the end user needs that only you can produce. The recommendation can be to strengthen the channel rather than bypass it.

Because the diagnosis uses history you already have rather than waiting for new results. Three years of invoices and quotes tell you which segments convert, at what margin and where deals stall, without running a single campaign. The plan then sets expectations honestly against your cycle, and the monthly scorecard tracks leading indicators such as quote volume by segment and turnaround time rather than revenue, which will not move for several quarters.

A fixed fee quoted after a scoping call, with deliverables and dates written down before you commit. It varies with the number of product families, how many plants or business units are in scope and whether distributor data is available, so publishing a rate would mislead most readers. For budget context, The CMO Survey puts marketing spend at an average 9.0% of company revenue, with 33.6% of digital marketing activities run by outside agencies. Book a meeting for a scope and a number.

With your permission, and we recommend it strongly. Three or four customer conversations and one recently lost prospect usually produce the sharpest finding in the whole project, because industrial buyers describe their evaluation plainly when asked by a third party. We agree the list with you, explain the purpose up front, never sell during the call and never quote anyone by name without written consent.

Less than most people expect, but the site is not irrelevant, because the shortlist is now formed before contact. 76% of industrial buyers shortlist at least one supplier before any live interaction, and 29% trust independent third-party validation or certification most at that stage. So the recommendation is usually about evidence rather than design: specifications, certifications, test data and real applications made findable. Where a rebuild is genuinely needed we say so and scope web design separately.

Pricing is in scope as a commercial lever and it is often the highest-return finding: realisation against list by product family, discount authority and how it is used, and where lead time or service can be priced. Firms that beat their business case use pricing optimization at 43% against 24% of peers. We do not build a full cost accounting model or set standard costs, and where that work is needed we say so and recommend you use a specialist.

Not on principle. Shows still work in several industrial categories, and the useful question is what they cost fully loaded, which opportunities actually trace back to them and what happens in the eleven months in between. Usually the recommendation is to keep the two shows that produce and rebuild the follow-up around them, because the leak is almost always after the show rather than at it.

Fewer people than you would expect, but the right ones: whoever owns sales, the estimating or quoting lead, someone from operations who knows capacity, and the owner or general manager who can make the pricing and segment decisions. Expect a kickoff, a data pull, a handful of interviews, one decision workshop and a final review. We work around production schedules and take read-only access to systems through your accounts.

Then the plan says that, and it changes what growth means: better mix at the same volume, price increases where the queue justifies them, and disqualifying work that consumes engineering time for little margin. We have no incentive to recommend demand generation you cannot fulfil, and filling a full plant with low-margin work is the most common self-inflicted growth problem in the sector.

It moves more of the evaluation into a phase you cannot see. Among industrial buyers who use AI tools, 56% say AI-generated summaries often influence which suppliers make the initial shortlist, 86% say evaluation is faster than a year ago, and 52% would let an AI agent build an initial shortlist without live supplier interaction. Practically, that raises the value of structured, public, verifiable technical information. The plan covers what to publish; making it citable is GEO and AEO work.

No, though it fits companies with enough history to analyse. A single plant with a few million in revenue, three years of quotes and a clear owner is a good candidate, and so is a multi-plant group where the question is which unit to invest behind. Very early or pre-production businesses get less from it, because the invoice and quote history that carries the diagnosis does not exist yet.

Same discipline, industrial specifics. Growth advisory is the parent engagement, and this version adds quote log analysis, distributor and rep channel economics, specification and certification evidence, and capacity as a real constraint on the plan. If your question is narrower, a marketing audit reviews what is currently running, while marketing strategy consulting takes the wider positioning view.

Your team runs it. You own the plan, the analysis and the scorecard, and the owners named in it are yours. Some clients book a review at ninety days to check what moved and re-cut the quote analysis, which takes half a day and is optional. Where you want ongoing commercial leadership rather than a project, a fractional CMO is the engagement to consider, quoted separately.