TBM Consulting

Key Takeaway

In our 7+ year relationship with TBM Consulting, we have helped the firm improve the quality of its leads, grow opportunities in the pipeline, and grow top-line revenue.

TBM is the operations and supply chain consultancy responsible for first introducing American manufacturers to the Japanese concepts of lean and six sigma. After enjoying a long period of rapid growth in the 1990s, the company saw sales drop significantly following the Great Recession. TBM hired Rattleback to help reposition the firm for renewed success in an evolving business climate.

Our marketing consulting, thought leadership development, and lead generation work has helped TBM:

The Obstacle

A Brand that Had Become Everything to Everyone

Over the years as TBM grew, the firm began adding many niche services to cater to many different industries. This broadening of capabilities and markets percolated down into every tactical execution. The result was a hodgepodge of resources with nothing to tie everything together. At the same time, TBM’s core area of expertise was less and less differentiated. The initial strategy—grounded heavily in lean—no longer resonated the way it once had. TBM had hit its 2nd growth plateau. It found itself operating without a clear sense of who it was and the value it could offer its clients.

The Solution

Reinvigorating Marketing to Succeed in a New Reality

The Rattleback and TBM teams aligned around the immediate need to rethink the corporate marketing strategy in order to drive the next wave of growth. We saw a need to simplify the positioning and concentrate on a core set of solutions for a core set of clients. By taking a purposeful approach, TBM clarified its ideal client, consolidated its service mix, redesigned its digital experience, and re-imagined its approach to thought leadership. The process included:

Marketing consulting to establish a new positioning and POV

As a first step, Rattleback and the TBM teams came together for some overdue marketing strategy and messaging work. The primary objective was to streamline the firm’s industry focus and service offerings—they had more than a dozen of each. The next step was to align everything around a strategic point of view that could help the firm better articulate its value to its ideal clients.

Collectively, we discovered that the firm’s ability to work at the point of impact to quickly generate results for global manufacturers was its key differentiator. “Speed wins every time” became the cornerstone of the marketing strategy and a North Star around which to focus.

Rattleback crafted new messaging to better articulate the positioning and solidify the importance of speed and rapid results in each of TBM’s core areas of expertise. This work surfaced opportunities to establish and grow several practice areas including talent and leadership, supply chain consulting, and private equity to support firms looking to invest in the manufacturing industry. Collectively, these strategies opened up critical new revenue channels for TBM.

Building a thought leadership engine to shape how clients think about operational issues

To support the new marketing strategy and stand up the new practice areas, Rattleback began working closely with subject matter experts from each of the six major practices to hone in on the key challenges clients face in their operations and supply chains. We helped TBM develop major cornerstone content assets and distill them down into more digestible formats including blog posts, articles, and infographics.

Collectively, the firm’s thought leadership has established TBM’s authority in the industry and helped it attract the kinds of clients it wants to serve. It’s also kept the firm at the forefront of what’s happening in manufacturing. When COVID-19 hit, TBM was well positioned to kick its thought leadership marketing into high gear. Rattleback helped TBM clarify its POV about managing supply chain risk nine months ahead of the global supply chain disruptions that impacted every organization to one degree or another.

Through years of concerted effort and close partnership with marketers and subject matters experts in the U.S., Rattleback helped build the organization’s internal thought leadership muscle. With the U.S. team’s thought leadership capabilities well developed, in 2022, Rattleback turned its attention to working with the TBM Europe team to expand the thought leadership model globally.

Lead generation to look beyond the known audience

Over the course of our working relationship, Rattleback has helped TBM refine and advance its lead generation efforts. We helped the marketing team select and implement the right marketing automation software – Pardot – and bring the capability to leverage it in-house. We then worked with TBM to optimize and expand on its organic content delivery model, which includes the use of email marketing, social media, a comprehensive SEO strategy, and lead nurtures.

We also helped the firm develop and implement a comprehensive paid media strategy. This initiative has combined paid search and paid social advertising to help drive potential clients to the website and grow the quality of leads in the funnel. Ultimately, Rattleback facilitated a lead generation beta program and process that TBM has since expanded internally with enhanced results.

The Result

More Qualified Leads and Renewed Growth

Since beginning our journey together, Rattleback has helped TBM: