Why this text
We work for companies from the production world: machine and plant builders, tool makers, suppliers that produce components or workpieces for OEMs. Most of them already have customers in Germany, Austria or Switzerland, won through referrals, trade fairs or their own network. Now they want more of them, won the same way as the first ones: in personal conversations. Our contacts are usually technical founders and managing directors. People who know their product inside out, whose existing customers 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 yet a plan for winning more customers
Many excellent companies are hard to find. 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 they only reach the companies your network already touches.
The industry's reflex answer is: tools. A stack of sales software, AI agents, automation that fires when someone visits your website, "new customers on auto-pilot". Our answer is less comfortable: a manufacturer becomes a customer after a conversation between people. Tools can help prepare that conversation, they cannot have it for you. And before the first conversation is worth having, eight questions need answers.
The eight questions
1. Why should my target companies care more than anyone else?
"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 yet know which companies fit. 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 real example from the shop floor. It shows how fast the investment pays back, it can be checked, and it speaks the language of production. Sentences like this are not written in marketing. They come from open conversations with your existing customers.
3. Who are the five people who decide, 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 investment 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: the German-speaking economies are barely growing, and the usual reaction is to freeze investments. Only what pays back fast gets through such a freeze. The faster the payback, 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 customer who will answer questions. German-speaking buyers check more carefully than most.
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. A visit to a reference customer 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 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, a 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, based on experience, ours and our customers'. 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 emails, 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 short, often only a few hundred. Every company put off by a careless mass email stays put off. So we do not send mass emails. Every first contact is a personal message to one person, written for their company and their problem, with one goal: a conversation. We call this TrueReach™: sales from person to person.
The order matters: first the answers, then a careful first campaign, then website, profiles and content, then more. What works in these conversations is what we scale. Not before.
What 15 years of B2B sales taught us
Since 2010 we have been winning new customers for manufacturers in Germany, Austria and Switzerland. Much of it our customers do not need to know themselves, because it is our craft:
- How to write to a German-speaking buyer.
- How to call one.
- What better to avoid.
- What groundwork it takes.
- Which evidence convinces.
- When to reach whom.
- How to follow up without being a nuisance.
- 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 management, sales and engineering of our customer. There we look at what worked with your existing customers, work out the eight answers and the examples that make them tangible and verifiable, and agree on the order in which we reach the companies your network does not reach. A new target segment or a new offering needs the eight answers again, even in a market where you already sell.
We do this with every customer. Before the first email leaves the building.