Expand Your Outreach Tactics
Embrace LinkedIn and Social Selling
Hit the Phones
Outreach to Multiple Contacts
Make It Personal and Relevant Master Multi-Channel Sequencing
How to Approach Dead Leads
The Manufacturing Sales Engine
The manufacturing sector is no stranger to long, complex sales cycles. Deals can take months to pull off, with buying committees that include everyone from engineers to procurement, executives, and beyond.
That’s why success in manufacturing often hinges on finding the right kinds of leads, at the right time.
If you approach a perfect-fit prospect too early, they’ll forget about you when they’re finally ready to buy. And if you reach out too late, they’ll be locked in with a competitor, and you may wait years for the next opportunity.
But what if there was a way to find leads faster, and make sure you stay top-of-mind if you’re early with the outreach?
This guide outlines four key ways to build your own sales engine, so you can unearth new leads in under 30 days.
From expanding your outreach to building systems that ensure a prospect is never forgotten and uncovering invisible leads on your website, there’s a lot of potential in the data and website you already have. This eBook will help you tap into that.
The Manufacturing Sales Engine: How to Find More Leads in 30 Days
Expand Your Outreach Tactics
Your Tactics
Sticking to the same old playbook of calls and emails won’t cut it if prospects are unresponsive. To get on the radar of potential buyers, you need to expand your touchpoints and meet them where they are.
Embrace LinkedIn and Social Selling
In manufacturing, LinkedIn can be a goldmine because it’s where technical buyers and executives network and research. In fact, LinkedIn accounts for 80% of B2B social media leads, according to data from the platform. That makes it the most effective social platform for lead generation.
You can use LinkedIn to connect with prospects, share industry-relevant content, and even engage with their posts.
And because social selling builds familiarity and trust over time, it means that when you do reach out with a pitch, you’re not a stranger.
For example, you can send a brief direct message to a prospect that references their recent post or some industry news, which can warm them up more than a cold email alone.
The average rep needs 8 contact attempts to reach a prospect successfully. And once you’ve established contact, the majority of sales (80%) require at least five follow-ups to close.
The RAIN Group
Hit the Phones
While digital channels are important, don’t underestimate the power of a well-timed phone call.
When other sales reps shy away from making calls, having the confidence to cold call can be an increasingly effective differentiator.
This tactic is welcomed by prospective buyers, too. Research found that 69% of B2B buyers are open to accepting cold calls from new providers and 82% of buyers say yes to meetings from a strategic cold call, the RAIN Group reports.
But the caveat is your calls must be relevant and researched.
A “spray and pray” script won’t work. But if you call referencing an email you sent or a challenge you know the prospect’s company is facing, you’re far more likely to get a positive response.
The Manufacturing Sales Engine: How to Find More Leads in 30 Days
Outreach to Multiple Contacts
Another tactic to expand your outreach is to make sure you approach multiple people within the organization. It’s called multi-threading, and it can be the thing that stops your outreach from being ignored.
It’s particularly powerful in manufacturing sales, where buying decisions are rarely made by just one person. If you're only speaking to one contact, you’re missing a lot of influence. And if that person goes quiet or moves to a different project or business, your deal may disappear.
To counter this, it’s recommended you identify and engage several relevant stakeholders within the organization. For example, you could:
• Reach out to both the Maintenance Manager and the Plant Manager if your solution impacts uptime.
• Include the Procurement Lead in your email thread once pricing or vendor approval comes into play.
• Connect with the company’s Head of Engineering to address technical due diligence early.
Multi-threading helps you build internal consensus and momentum throughout the buying journey. It also shows the prospect’s team that you understand their complexity and are serious about earning their business.
Just make sure each touchpoint adds value, not noise.
Make It Personal and Relevant
No matter which channels you use, make sure you personalize the message.
Generic copy-and-paste messages are easy to ignore. But when you reference specifics, such as mentioning the prospect’s company by name, citing a common industry challenge, or congratulating them on a recent business milestone, they’re more likely to listen
These small details can dramatically improve response rates.
Remember: multi-channel outreach doesn’t mean much if every message is a bland template. It’s the tailoring of your message to the platform and the person that drives results.
One cold email benchmark analysis by Martal Group found that advanced personalization beyond basic fields (such as first name or company) achieved reply rates of up to -18%, compared with roughly 5% for generic templates - representing nearly a 3.6× increase in replies.
Make sure you do a bit of homework on LinkedIn or industry news sites so that your intel can fuel more meaningful conversations.
Master Multi-Channel Sequencing
When you coordinate your varied touchpoints into a sequence, the whole becomes greater than the sum of its parts.
For example, a prospect might ignore your first two emails but then see your LinkedIn connection request and accept it. Next, they notice the helpful article you shared on LinkedIn. And by the time you place a call, they recognize your name and associate you with value, not spam.
Research has found that sales teams who use a mix of email, calling, and LinkedIn outreach can see a 28% increase in conversions, according to Sales So.
They also found that cold call success rates were boosted by 40% when an email was sent before the call.
Consider that each touchpoint reinforces the others, increasing the chances that a lead will engage with one of them.
Automate Your Management
Your expanded outreach should help you find new leads and new inquiries. But as you know, getting that lead is just the first step and what happens after they show interest is just as important.
Your Lead Management
A Smarter Approach to Manufacturing Lead Generation
When you’re working with a small volume of leads, you might have the capacity to move them through your pipeline manually. But as the volume grows, you’ll need a more sustainable way to manage leads.
That’s where automation comes in.
From immediately sending a follow up when a prospect completes a contact form to building an automatic email sequence that nurtures the leads you’ve outreached to early or keeping them warm and engaged through different content, there’s a lot that automation can help manufacturing sales teams with.
Respond to New Leads Immediately
When a prospect raises their hand, whether by filling out a form, emailing you back, or asking for a quote, you need to get back to them instantly.
That’s because the faster you engage, the better your chances of success.
A well-known study found that reaching out to a lead within 5 minutes makes you 100 times more likely to actually speak with them compared to waiting even an hour or more.
Not only does a fast response demonstrate your attentiveness and catch the prospect while your company is still fresh in their mind, but it can also beat your competitors to the punch.
For every inbound lead or positive reply, make sure you reply within 5 minutes. This might mean setting up real-time alerts or using automation to instantly notify your sales team when a new lead comes in.
When you’re working on these speedy responses, remember that automation doesn’t mean impersonal.
Your first direct reply to a new lead needs to have a bespoke message. You should reference what you know about their inquiry, such as the specific product or solution they showed interest in, or the problem they mentioned. It’s important that this initial outreach feels highly tailored.
It’s worth the effort: leads that receive personalized follow-up tend to make significantly larger purchases.
Those orders are 47% bigger on average, according to
InvespCRO, than leads that aren’t nurtured with personal attention.
Build an Automated Nurture Sequence
Despite your best efforts, not every lead will respond to your initial outreach. Maybe they were just researching or aren’t ready to engage in a sales conversation yet.
In fact, Martal Group reports that only about 27% of B2B leads are “sales-ready” from the start. That means nearly three-quarters of new leads will require nurturing over time –and you can do this with automation.
Rather than manually chasing every unresponsive lead, which is impossible and inefficient, you can set up an automated nurture funnel to keep lightly engaging those leads who go quiet.
For example, if a lead hasn’t replied within 10 days of your personal outreach, you can add them to an automated email sequence that sends a series of helpful emails over a few weeks or months.
While these emails should still feel relevant to the lead, they don’t require manual sending every time. That’s because you can build the automated flow once, and then your marketing automation or CRM system handles it once you’ve defined the workflow.
Make sure your nurture sequence considers these factors:
• Timing. Decide how long to wait after no response to start the automation. Ten days is a common timeframe, as it gives your direct efforts a chance but it’s not so long that the lead forgets about you.
• Content. Offer value in each touch, whether that’s providing insights about manufacturing trends, ROI calculators, maintenance checklist, or anything that speaks to your product’s value in solving their potential problems. Avoid sending “Are you ready to talk yet?” emails; instead, share something useful that keeps your company relevant to them.
• Frequency. Don’t bombard their inbox daily. Early on, once every 5-7 days is fine, then maybe taper your contact to biweekly or monthly. Remember, the goal is to stay on their radar, not annoy them.
• Triggers for Sales Reach-Out. Use engagement signals to your advantage. For example, if a lead clicks a link or downloads another resource, that’s a hint of interest, so you can alert your sales rep to follow up personally at that point. Automation and human touch should work hand-in-hand.
By automating this process, you effectively multiply your touchpoints without multiplying workload.
After all, companies that excel at lead nurturing, often by using automated workflows, generate 451% more qualified leads as a result, The Annuitas Group found.
Keep Leads Warm Until They’re Ready
The beauty of using automation to nurture your leads is that it keeps you in the game for the long haul.
For instance, maybe a prospect isn’t ready to buy your industrial equipment this quarter, but 6 months from now their old system fails, and guess who’s been periodically sending them helpful info all along? You.
It’s perhaps the most valuable thing you can set up right now. Because nurtured leads produce on average a 20% increase in sales opportunities compared to non-nurtured leads and have significantly higher lifetime value. And as noted earlier, they tend to buy more when they do purchase, because your nurturing has educated them on the full value of your solution.
How to Weave Automation into Your Follow-up Cadence
This illustrative example assumes you spend 10 days trying to convert a lead and they’ll be considered cold after that point:
Day 0: Lead comes in via a form fill or inquiry.
Automation: Get instant alerts when this happens. Automatically create a lead record in your CRM and assign to a rep.
Manual action: Send personalized welcome email within 1 hour and leave a voicemail if a number is provided, with a quick, courteous introduction.
Day 1: Connect on LinkedIn with a short thank-you note for their inquiry.
Automation: Log the LinkedIn touchpoint in your CRM and set a follow-up reminder for Day 4 if there’s no response.
Manual action: Send a connection request with a short message e.g., “Thanks for your interest in [Product] — happy to connect here too.”
Day 3: Send a second email sharing a relevant case study or testimonial that addresses a pain point they likely have.
Automation: Use a templated email that pulls in dynamic tokens like their first name and industry, and schedule it in your email cadence tool. Track opens and clicks to adjust lead scoring.
Manual action: Review their company/industry to select the most relevant case study, personalize a sentence or two in the email, and send.
Day 5: Place a follow-up call referencing the case study.
Automation: Pre-schedule a call task in your CRM. If voicemail is logged, automatically send a follow-up email e.g., “Sorry I missed you — here’s what I mentioned.”
Manual action: Call the lead to rference the case study and leave a voicemail if there’s no answer.
Day 10: Still radio silence? Enroll lead into the nurture workflow.
Automation: Once they’re in your automated nurture campaign, they’ll start receiving your pre-planned drip emails over the coming weeks. You can “pause” direct one-on-one outreach and let the automation gently take over.
Manual action: None
At any point, if the lead engages by replying, downloading content, clicking on links, etc, you should jump back in with personal follow-up. That kind of engagement is your cue that they’re warming up again.
Automation isn’t about ignoring the signs of a hot lead, it’s about giving yourself a safety net that carries the relationship forward until the lead is truly sales-ready.
Dive into Dead Leads
Dead
New leads are exciting, but don’t forget about the ghosts of leads past.
Buried in your CRM or sales records is likely a treasure trove of dead leads and lost opportunities from the last few years that you just couldn’t close. But you might be able to now…
There are so many reasons why deals don’t come off, and often it can be as simple as the budget being paused or the timing not being right. Even if they went with a different provider, they might now be open to another solution.
It’s worth revisiting those leads because they’re more efficient and effective to convert. They know your name and what you offer, so it takes far less effort to rekindle the relationship than to start from scratch with someone new.
And according to industry research, reactivating an existing contact can cost up to 80% less than attracting a completely new prospect. That’s a huge boost to ROI if you can convert even a handful of dormant contacts into warm leads again.
How to Approach Dead Leads
Start by pulling a list of leads and opportunities that went cold or closed-lost in the past 2-3 years. For each prospect, include deals where you sent quotes that weren’t won, and leads who showed interest but never progressed.
Try to prioritize those that were a good fit for your product, which are typically the leads that chose a competitor or deferred the project. These are the quickest to win back, because they already understood their problem and saw value in a solution like yours. And they might be in that same position again, you just need to reconnect with them.
When reaching out to these contacts, acknowledge the past and offer something new as a reason for your outreach. For example:
• Start by referencing your last interaction: e.g., “Hi Jane, we talked last year about improving your assembly line throughput. At the time, budget constraints put the project on hold.”
• Update them on anything that’s changed on your side: “Since we last spoke, we’ve introduced a new [feature/solution] that many manufacturing clients found helpful in cutting downtime by 20%.”
• Reiterate the value: “I remember you were aiming to increase throughput without adding headcount; that’s exactly what this update was designed for.”
• Then pose a re-opening question or offer: “Would it make sense to reconnect and see if conditions have changed on your end? Even if now isn’t the right time, I’d love to share this insight with you for future reference.”
This approach is empathetic and value-driven, not pushy. You’re effectively saying, “I know it wasn’t a fit then, but maybe the context is different now, and I have something that might help you.”
Plus, by referencing the prior conversation, you show you listened and remember their situation, which builds trust.
Find out When They’ll Be In-Market
When reconnecting with dead leads, it’s highly likely you could be ignored or told that now’s not a good time. If they’re busy at the moment, try to find out when would be a good time to have a proper conversation.
If you’re the only company still connecting with them, and they say to call at the start of Q2 because they’ve got a project coming up, you might be the first to discuss it with them.
Make sure you set a reminder to get back in touch around that time and try to pick the conversation back up.
Connect on LinkedIn
We’ve already discussed the power of social selling and how valuable LinkedIn can be. But there’s another reason to make sure you’re connected to all your previous contacts, and that’s because they might move company – and their new employer may also need your services.
If your contact remains exclusively through their business email or phone, that stops if they move on. But if you’re connected via LinkedIn, your relationship can follow them to their new role.
You’ll also be able to see what they’re posting, which can be another useful source for sensing when they might be getting ready for a big project.
Be Prepared to Handle Objections Gracefully
Some old leads might indeed remain uninterested, and that’s okay.
The goal is to revive the fraction that can be brought back, not to win over every single one.
So, if someone responds to confirm they’re not looking to make a change, you must respect that.
But before you move on, ask if you can keep them updated of any changes that might interest them or share other helpful information. Most will agree, which means you can then put them into your automated nurture track.
Even if they move from dead to nurture status, that’s a win in itself, because your automated emails will ensure your company stays on their radar and you become an option if they’re ready to make a change.
Find Every Your Website
Lead on Website
Your company website is more than just a digital brochure; it’s a lead generation machine waiting to be unleashed.
Every day, there are countless visitors on your website researching your company, and your solutions, long before they ever speak to your sales team.
For example, a plant manager or engineer might quietly browse your site’s product specs or case studies to evaluate if you could help them, but they aren’t ready to buy so they don’t complete your ‘contact us’ form.
Its common in B2B: buyers are so independent that 75% prefer not to engage a sales team until they absolutely have to, relying on online research to guide their decisions.
This means by the time a prospect contacts you, they might already be 60%+ through their buying process and weighing you up against your competitors.
The question is: how many prospects are checking out your website and leaving without a trace? The answer is most of them, because on average, only 2% of visitors convert on your website.
If you let those visitors vanish, you lose a huge number of opportunities.
But the good news is there are tools and strategies to capture those invisible leads, giving your sales team a chance to strike while the iron is hot.
Leverage Website Visitor Identification Tools
Solutions like Lead Forensics allow you to identify which companies are visiting your website, even if the visitor never submits their information.
These tools work by tracking the visiting company’s IP address and matching it against a vast database to reveal the business name and other firmographic details.
For example, Lead Forensics could tell you that someone from ABC Manufacturing Co. from Ohio visited your site yesterday and spent 5 minutes on the Automation Solutions page.
That is actionable intel: you now know who the interested company is and what they looked at.
From there, your sales team can find relevant contacts at ABC Manufacturing and reach out proactively.
This kind of outreach can impress prospects because you caught them while they were interested, so it’s timely and relevant.
But it’s important to approach this carefully . For instance, you wouldn’t say “we saw you on our website” in a creepy way; you’d frame your contact as market outreach around the topic they were researching.
Filter and Prioritize Leads by ICP
One powerful feature of tools like Lead Forensics is the ability to filter the visitor data by criteria that matter to you.
After all, not every site visitor is a good lead. Some could be students, or companies outside your target industry, people looking for a job, and more.
To find the most valuable leads, you can configure your website visitor identification tool to highlight visitors that match your Ideal Customer Profile based on firmographic details.
That could look like manufacturing companies with 100+ employees, or visitors from specific industries or regions.
By filtering this way, your sales team can focus only on the promising leads. For example, if 50 companies visited this week but only 10 fit your ICP, start with those 10. This saves time and ensures your outreach is directed at the most relevant prospects.
Act Fast and Contextually
When you see a hot website lead, treat it with urgency akin to an inbound phone call.
The prospect’s interest is highest when they’re literally on your site or freshly off it, which is why some tools will even send you an alert the moment a target company lands on your page.
Even though a web visitor hasn’t inquired yet, the principle still applies; if you reach them proactively while they’re in research mode, you set the bar for responsiveness.
It’s also important to note that if they’re on your website, they’re also likely checking other sites. If you contact them first, you get a chance to shape their perspective before competitors do.
When you reach out, the key is to be relevant. Reference the solution area they seemed interested in without blatantly saying you tracked their web visit. For instance, if they spent time on your “CNC Robotics” page, your outreach can mention CNC robotics benefits or a case study in that area. This way, the prospect feels like the conversation is timely and on-topic, not out of the blue.
Speed is critical because 35–50% of sales go to the vendor that responds first to a potential buyer’s inquiry.
Integrate with Your CRM and Marketing Automation
Most visitor identification tools can integrate with your CRM or email automation platform. This means the moment a lead is identified, you can automatically:
• Create a new lead record in CRM (tagged as “website visitor – unconverted” or similar).
• Assign it to a salesperson or queue.
• Trigger a specific nurture workflow if direct outreach doesn’t happen or the lead isn’t sales-ready yet.
Capitalize on FirstTime vs. Returning Visitors
Some tools will tell you if a company has visited your site multiple times. This is particularly helpful, because a return visit is an even stronger buying signal, so those leads should go to the top of your outreach list.
Getting more detail about which pages they visit is also helpful.
For example, if a company has checked your Pricing page and Case Studies page, and did so twice this week, that’s a scorching hot lead. You might even pick up the phone directly for that one.
On the flip side, if a company only looked at your Careers page or spent 10 seconds on the site, that’s likely not a sales lead and you can ignore it.
Stop Losing Leads from Your Website
Lead Forensics is the world’s #1 B2B website visitor identification software.
Our software identifies your anonymous B2B website visitors and tells you which companies are interested in your business, so you can capture those leads that would otherwise bounce off your site.
You’ll learn which pages they viewed, when they visited your site and how they found it, so you can prioritize the leads showing the warmest intent.
And we’ll include firmographic details like industry, size and location, so you can filter out the visits that don’t fit your ICP.
Plus, we’ll give you the contact details of key decision-makers, so you can turn their interest in your website into real sales opportunities.
