STOBA has been on the US market since 2010 through its sales partnership with a successful German mechanical engineering company. In principle, this partnership made a lot of sense, as the customer target groups of the two companies largely overlapped.
However, Stoba’s products have not received the attention they deserved according to their market potential. The sellers in the USA branch of the friendly German mechanical engineer were not sufficiently trained on the products, there was no jointly adopted marketing and sales plan and no regular exchange of information with the Stoba Management in Memmingen.
Therefore, the sales managers responsible for the USA, together with Inmotion, decided to research suitable target companies from the automotive industry and to address them with a tailor-made communication package.
The goal: Spot new potential customers on the US market, approach the leads in a cost-effective manner and convert them to customers
In its first years, Stoba was only able to attract customers on the US market on a project-by-project basis. There was no information about the overall potential for the Stoba products and how Stoba compares to their competitors. For this reason, the company wanted to gain transparency on this issue and improve the sales performance on the market in the long term.
The winning set: Market Research, a go-to-market plan and cost-effective lead generation activities
In an extensive, multi-year project, as we have carried out with the company Stoba, it is absolutely crucial to do some basic market research and to get the building blocks of a go-to-market plan right in the first place. These underlying concepts are fundamental for all downstream lead generation activities such as LinkedIn Campaigns, Telesales, and Email Marketing.
The result: The biggest single order in company's history
We have identified 3,000 potential automotive customers in the U.S. for Stoba through a comprehensive market study. We researched contact persons and qualified the companies for possible applications for their offering. “We presented ourselves for the first time in 2016 at the IMTS trade fair in Chicago. Inmotion prepared us optimally for this event. The result was 80 highly qualified leads and the first contact with the company, which a year later was to give us the largest single order in the company’s history,” said Hans, former Sales Director at Stoba Memmingen.
Sample Work
Heatmap designed for Stoba showing the number of automotive supplier plants per carmaker in the US, as of 2015. Click icon to enlarge.