In today's fast-paced sales environment, efficiency is vital. When one of our clients approached us with the challenge of managing over 500 monthly form submissions and assigning them to the correct sales territories and representatives, we knew we had to leverage the power of marketing automation. Here's how we used HubSpot to streamline their process and save countless hours of manual work.

In B2B sales, a "no" doesn't always mean "never." At WebStrategies, we recently helped a client turn a lost deal into a significant win, resulting in a $107,000 equipment sale. Here's how we did it and how you can apply these strategies to your sales process.

The Challenge: Outgrowing Act-On

Our manufacturing client has been using Act-On for their email marketing campaigns for several years, and it is integrated with their on-premise Microsoft Dynamics CRM via nightly batch updates. However, they faced growing frustrations:

• Difficulty setting up workflows
• Inconsistent workflow performance
• Limited platform usage (primarily quarterly emails)
• Underutilized landing pages for regional sales managers

Salesforce is a powerful CRM platform, but its value is only as good as the data that lives within it. For industrial manufacturers, poor data quality in Salesforce can lead to missed opportunities, wasted time, and frustration for sales and marketing teams alike.

Integrating Salesforce with HubSpot can help enhance your Salesforce data quality and usability, leveraging HubSpot's intelligence to fill in gaps, correct inaccuracies, and surface valuable insights.

In today's competitive landscape, alignment between sales and marketing is more critical than ever. However, many industrial manufacturers struggle with disconnected systems and processes that create blind spots and missed opportunities.

Integrating Salesforce and HubSpot can help close the loop between sales and marketing, providing full visibility into a lead's journey and enabling seamless handoffs between teams.

Equipment manufacturing companies have lagged in the use of digital marketing to generate sales leads, instead leaning heavily on trade shows and sales teams to build relationships with potential buyers. These are effective but without an effort to capture online leads, equipment manufacturers are losing countless revenue-generating opportunities. After many years as a senior strategy director of digital marketing for manufacturers, I wanted to share the most effective tactics we have found to enable manufacturers to leverage their websites to generate more business.

HubSpot is a CRM with powerful marketing automation features that can be used with its own Sales Hub or integrated with another CRM. Salesforce is a popular CRM with manufacturers but when it comes to marketing automation to nurture the leads, HubSpot is the leading platform for usability and functionality - in any industry. It integrates easily with Salesforce and Microsoft Dynamics and keeps data in a centralized location rather than maintaining data in two separate systems. HubSpot also integrates with ERP systems such as Odoo and Commercient giving one source of truth for data records.

We regularly update this article with the latest information pertaining to marketing budgets for manufacturers.

Last update: November 2022

Based on industry-provided research and our own experience, we’ve identified a realistic marketing budget calculation for manufacturing companies who are ready to more fully leverage the internet to generate business.

We experienced quite a show in Atlanta on January 25 and 26 at the International Production and Processing Expo! If you missed it, here are some highlights of the event: 

Does Digital Marketing Really Work for Manufacturers?

In the last few years, we have partnered with a wide variety of manufacturing companies in the USA to help them generate online leads and sales. The fact that we've been able to drive results through online channels may come as a surprise to many in the manufacturing industry.

For the most part, the majority of manufacturing sales have been almost entirely relationship-driven. For that reason, there is often skepticism that a marketing agency could produce quality lead generation results using online marketing techniques.

The truth is that we've been able to deliver amazing digital marketing results with a B2B manufacturing marketing strategy leading to millions of dollars worth of closed business for our clients. This article provides a little insight into how we do it.