Why this text
We work for companies from the production world that want to sell into the DACH market: machine and plant builders, tool makers, suppliers that produce components or workpieces for OEMs. Our contacts are usually technical founders and managing directors. People who know their product inside out, whose existing clients recommend them, and who deeply distrust the marketing language they see on LinkedIn every day.
They are right to distrust it. That is why this text is written differently: no superlatives, no promises nobody can keep, and in some places against our own sales interest.
A great product is not a go-to-market strategy
Many excellent companies are invisible. The references are strong, the offer is professional, and still a buyer in Stuttgart finds nothing: no German website worth the name, no way to book a meeting, a contact form with a mandatory phone number field, a LinkedIn presence made of anonymous profiles. New business comes from referrals. Referrals are valuable but not plannable.
The industry's reflex answer is: tools. A GTM stack, AI agents, signal driven automation, "pipeline on auto-pilot". Our answer is less comfortable: you can only automate what already works manually. And before anything works, eight questions need answers.
The eight questions
1. Why should my ICP care more than anyone outside it?
"Basically anyone can use our product" sounds like a big market and means in practice: nobody has to. A useful answer names the operating condition that makes the pain acute: three-shift operation, an upcoming retrofit decision, scrap rates that eat the margin. Without that condition you do not have an ICP yet. You only have the hope that the buyer connects your product to their pain on their own.
2. How does a buyer describe the value of my product, not my own marketing deck?
The deck says: "highest precision in its class." The buyer says: "Changeover time went from 45 to 8 minutes. Now small batches pay off too." The second sentence is a use case. It carries the ROI, it can be checked, and it comes from the language of the shop floor. Sentences like this are not written in marketing. They come from open conversations with your existing clients.
3. Who are the five people in the buying group, and which of them owns the problem?
An investment in production is never decided by one person alone. Managing director, head of production, maintenance, purchasing, sometimes quality or process planning: each role has its own questions and its own risk. But there is a harder question first: what is "the problem" at all? Can we describe it in one sentence, the way the plant experiences it: as downtime, as scrap, as a bottleneck, as an audit risk? Only when the problem is named can you say who owns it. The first message goes to the person who owns the problem. Everyone else needs their own answer to "why does this concern me", at the latest in the second step.
4. Why should they act now, and not at the end of the next CAPEX cycle?
"Now" needs a trigger: a line at the end of its life, a new norm, a new EU regulation, an expansion, an energy price that breaks the old calculation. Because whoever could live with a problem for seven years can live with it for another seven. Without a trigger there is no urgency, and without urgency no reply. If you do not know the trigger, you have no argument.
5. What do they lose by running the old line another five years?
The biggest competitor is doing nothing. This option must be priced: energy, scrap, unplanned downtime, operators who retire and take their knowledge with them. Only when doing nothing has a price does the investment become comparable. And right now this counts double: DACH is not in economic growth, and the usual reaction is a strategic investment freeze. Only what pays back fast gets through such a freeze. The shorter the ROI, the better.
6. What sets me apart from the other three exhibitors claiming the same at the next trade fair?
"Quality and service" is what the other three say too. A difference only counts when a buyer can check it: a property that can be measured, a process that can be visited, a client who will answer questions. And in DACH this counts double.
7. What evidence lets a buyer check my claim?
Skeptical engineers do not believe. They verify. That is what the reference installation is for, the one a buyer can visit, and the number a buyer can recalculate. In DACH a reference visit is worth more than any case study PDF.
8. What new risks do they see with me as a foreign supplier, and what removes them?
A foreign supplier that nobody knows in the buyer's field means extra risk, even if it is long established elsewhere: what happens in a service case, how fast do spare parts arrive, who speaks German, how stable is the company, what about five years from now? These questions do not disappear because you avoid them. Name them before the buyer does, and deliver the answer with them: service contract, spare parts stock, German-speaking engineer. That turns the biggest objection into proof of trust.
The answers are theses
With us, these answers are built in an intensive two day workshop. And still, they are not "correct" afterwards. They are assumptions and theses, based on experience, ours and our clients'. The market corrects them: through replies, through objections, through conversations, through silence where we expected a reaction. That is not a weakness of the method. That is the method. Whoever claims to know the right answers in advance is selling an oracle.
The answers feed everything
With the eight answers you own the raw material for every message on every channel: the website and its German version, the blog, the LinkedIn posts, the ads, the email sequences, the phone calls, the trade fair conversations, the sales meetings. Everything tells the same story, in the form of each channel. That is the difference between a positioning and a slogan.
No experiments on a living market
If you sell into production, your market is small. The list of companies that could become your customer is finite, often only three digits. Every account burned with a bad mass email stays burned. So we do not build wild experiments. We build a deliberate pipeline machine out of content and techniques: first the answers, then one careful first campaign, then website, profiles, content, then more. We automate what has proven itself manually. In that order.
What 15 years of B2B sales in DACH taught us
Since 2010 we have been doing market entry and pipeline building in DACH. Much of it our clients do not need to know themselves, because it is our craft:
- How to write in DACH.
- How to call in DACH.
- What better to avoid.
- What infrastructure it takes.
- How proof works in DACH.
- When to reach whom.
- How to follow up.
- And the formalities that signal seriousness.
The workshop
All of this is why every cooperation with us starts the same way: with a moderated two day workshop, together with the client's management, sales and engineering. There we work out the eight answers and the use cases that give them life and ROI, and we set the order in which the market entry is built. Market entry does not only mean new geography: a new target segment and a new offering are a market entry too, and each of them needs the eight answers again.
We have been doing this since 2010, with every client. Before the first email leaves the building.