Challenge:

• The Baumer Group is an international family-owned business and one of the world’s leading manufacturers of sensors, encoders, measuring instruments, and components for automated image-processing. Baumer combines innovative technologies and customer-oriented service into intelligent solutions for factory and process automation and offers an unrivalled wide technology and product portfolio.

• Working cohesively with both of its sales and marketing teams, Baumer sought to expand upon its more traditional sales-driven business model by integrating social media channels into its campaigns. “It’s a huge shift from traditional sales to virtual selling,” says Alexander Gerstner, Head of Product Marketing at Baumer Group.

• With employees and partners throughout the world (from the Americas to EMEA to APAC), Baumer needed a way to connect with leads more efficiently. In the manufacturing industry, companies are shifting their focus towards more digitalization to boost visibility, increasing opportunities and brand recognition. At the onset of the pandemic, this would become even more vital than ever.

Solution:

• In 2016, Baumer began experimenting more with social media channels like LinkedIn. By 2019, the company was relying on LinkedIn Sales Navigator to maximize leads, engagements, and total connections. “It’s the right way to make our sales processes more efficient,” says Gerstner.

• Using Sales Navigator, both sales and marketing teams explored the types of corporate communications they wanted to use for their digital messaging and outreach campaigns. “We have a lot of people who are also able to publish content,” Gerstner explains. “It’s new for some of our employees, but it’s also new for corporate communication. It’s quite important. Real cool stories are coming from our field sales across the globe.”

• Baumer created new local campaigns and webinars to drive outreach programs and qualify new leads. “We use LinkedIn very heavily — in terms of the way Baumer spends money for LinkedIn advertisements on one hand and uses LinkedIn to qualify leads to find contacts. I was really happy that the team was also using InMail to get in contact with new leads,” says Saskia Knopf, Project Manager of Digital Marketing at Baumer.

• Training also played a role in their approach. “With regular InMail training sessions, we shared experiences as a team and explored ways we could receive more responses from our target audience,” says Knopf.

Results:

• With thousands of searches, profile views, saved leads, saved accounts, and InMail messages sent, Baumer saw nearly 60,000 total connections via Sales Navigator. “I saw increased performance for the global Baumer team and then a lot more engagement. It’s pretty cool to see this improvement,” says Knopf.

• Due to their success with Sales Navigator Enterprise Edition, Baumer already plans to extend the contract another two years. “We plan to use Sales Navigator in future campaigns at various points in the customer journey,” says Knopf. “On the one hand, it offers us a new opportunity to get to know our target group better and to select them; on the other hand, it offers us the opportunity to qualify the leads we have gained when used as a follow-up to a campaign.”

Relationship-building in the time of COVID:

• During the coronavirus pandemic, with physical face-to-face meetings being cancelled, Baumer was able to easily reach out to leads using Sales Navigator.

• “A lot of people moved into the home office and that was also a good driver for us to use more LinkedIn and Sales Navigator,” says Gerstner.

Cross-team synergy is essential:

• Baumer’s collaboration across sales and marketing teams was instrumental. “We used Sales Navigator to analyze accounts and leads and see who was active on LinkedIn and who was not, and then we tried to open the door in a very sensitive way to get in contact with our targeted audience,” says Knopf.

• To optimize lead conversion, Baumer encouraged potential leads to join informative webinars where the sales team could then connect and engage with them. “It’s an integrated marketing approach and I’m really happy to see that our sales and marketing teams are working together,” says Gerstner.

About Baumer

The Baumer Group is one of the worldwide leading manufacturers of sensors, encoders, measuring instruments and components for automated image-processing. Baumer combines innovative technologies and customer-oriented service into intelligent solutions for factory and process automation and offers an unrivalled wide technology and product portfolio. With around 2,700 employees and 38 subsidiaries in 19 countries, the family-owned group of companies is always close to the customer.