Manufacturing Thrives on Relationships and In-Person

Here's What I Built When That Was Missing

Manufacturing sales runs on presence more than almost any other industry: the trade show, the plant visit, the handshake. It's close to gospel. Most revenue problems in this space trace back to somebody not showing up.

Neither company below fixed that by hiring more salespeople. Both grow revenue without adding headcount, because in each case, headcount wasn't actually the problem yet. I've worked with two manufacturing-adjacent companies where "just show up more" wasn't available to them as a default, for very different reasons. Different fixes. Same root diagnosis.

The Customer Success Motion Build for a Company Without One Home Base

A $100M supplier inside the manufacturing chain, selling exclusively to other manufacturers, operating out of several plants nationwide, one headquarters location, and with clients in all states including Alaska and Hawaii. No single territory, no single floor to walk. And the sales model still depended on the thing that only works at a smaller footprint: being physically there.

Spread that wide, "be everywhere in person" stops being a plan and starts being a wish. This company didn't need more salespeople covering more territory. It needed a way to stay high-touch with buyers who were themselves manufacturers, deciding whether to trust this company as part of their own supply chain.

Summer designed a customer success motion built specifically to substitute for the physical presence the model usually runs on:

Built a custom sales strategy aimed straight at the real problem: sales kept winning the first contract, but orders weren't repeating
Handed the relationship to a new customer success function the moment the first sale closed, with one job: deepen it and earn the repeat order
Built a custom sales success, upsell, and referral playbook around how this company's buyers actually re-order
Installed clear handoffs between sales, success, and service/delivery, so no account fell into the gap between "sold" and "supported"
Set a standing cadence between success and service leadership specifically to catch early signs of account distress before they became losses, looping sales back in when the relationship needed it

The shift was undeniable. The sales leader stopped watching his team get pulled into service firefighting and could point them back at new deals. Sales and service, who'd been pointing fingers at each other, started working together. And the CEO walked into his next board meeting with something to point to: real action taken on revenue growth that had slowed.

The lesson: manufacturing sales runs on presence. When geography won't allow you to use that superpower, presence has to be engineered with intentionality instead of assumed by default.

The Playbook the Old Team Wouldn't Run

A regional professional services firm with a dialed-in ICP; they served manufacturers exclusively. COVID disrupted this team like most others and had pushed the sales team fully into email. And digital sales worked, until they didn't. Email response rates decreased and pipeline and closed deals followed. Client no-starts and churn increased too. The board advised the CEO he needed to invest in sales coaching to increase new revenue, but it turned out the entire sales engine needed an overhaul.

All of the challenges pointed to one main root cause - in a high-trust business that thrives on relationships, they weren't being built.

Summer wrote a sales and marketing strategy as part of a broader digital transformation: deciding what needed to stay in person and where digital could genuinely help, instead of letting digital become a stand-in for everything. Alongside it:

Built a real feedback loop between sales and marketing, plus sales enablement content, so the two stopped operating like separate departments
Wrote a full custom sales playbook and a sales success plan
Installed handoffs between sales and service to catch two specific problems: no-start clients (signed, never actually onboarded) and avoidable churn, with each team knowing exactly when to tag the other in

The strategy was right. The team in place just wouldn't run it. The CEO made the call and let them go. It took him almost two years, but he built a new sales team, hiring them into the sales system that already existed, and got back to trade shows, doing exactly what the strategy said needed to happen.

The lesson: the strategy can tell a CEO exactly what needs to change. Whether the people currently in the room can make that change is a separate question, and only the CEO can answer it. This one did, it just took longer than either of us expected.

Neither company started out needing more salespeople. Both needed their sales motion rebuilt around the one thing manufacturing buyers actually respond to: someone showing up.

One couldn't show up because of geography, and needed a system built to do the showing up for it. The other got handed the right system and still needed a different team to run it. The diagnosis started in the same place both times. What each CEO had to do with that diagnosis was different.