What changes when the
foundation is right.

When leadership clarified which customers to prioritize — and which to stop chasing — momentum returned within months.

The Situation

A national truck sales company had been acquired out of bankruptcy following financial malfeasance at its parent. A turnaround CEO was installed to stabilize operations. Inventory was aging — more than 5,000 trucks, many carrying bank liens that prevented discounting to market rate. Margins were thin and sales cycles were unpredictable.

The company had been without a marketing leader for months. Activity existed — promotions, email campaigns, advertising spend — but none of it was pointing in the same direction. Sales and marketing weren't aligned. Measurement was nearly nonexistent. And a hard deadline loomed: the new parent company wanted to divest, and the business needed to demonstrate momentum to attract a buyer.

What Rob Found

When Rob stepped in as interim marketing leader, the first thing he looked at wasn't the campaigns. It was the customer data. The company had been targeting single owner-operators — a segment that was price-sensitive, had high default rates, and generated consistent friction in the sales process. Meanwhile, fleet buyers were underrepresented in the pipeline and significantly more valuable over time.

There was also $1 million in annual marketing budget being deployed without a coherent measurement framework. No one could tell which spend was producing results and which wasn't.

The Shift

Rob worked with the CEO, VP of Sales, and leadership team to make one clarifying decision: reposition the company as a fleet partner, not a truck retailer. That single decision changed the brief for everything else. Campaigns were rebuilt around fleet buyers. Messaging shifted from price and inventory to operational partnership — leasing options, geo-tracking technology, insurance, and service bundles that increased margin per customer.

A new website launched with a live inventory of 5,000+ trucks tied to Salesforce for faster proposal generation. The marketing team was hired, trained, and given a content calendar built around the new target segments. Ongoing ROI analysis of paid search identified $100K in underperforming spend that was reallocated to higher-converting channels.

The turning point wasn't a campaign. It was a decision about who the business was really for — and the discipline to align everything else around it.

Clear positioning and disciplined targeting allowed a brand with 2% awareness to become a top-three player in two years.

The Situation

UK-based Elecosoft had built a dominant position in European commercial construction with its Powerproject scheduling software — 100,000 users across multiple markets, strong retention, and a product that outperformed legacy competitors on ease of use. None of that mattered in North America, where brand awareness tested below 2% and the category was owned by entrenched players with deep relationships and switching costs built in.

The company decided to test the U.S. market lean — a small sales team in Denver and a dozen reseller partners across the U.S. and Canada. Budget was modest. The strategy had to be precise.

What Rob Found

Referred by one of Elecosoft's key resellers, Rob assessed the situation and identified the central challenge: nobody had defined what problem Powerproject specifically owned in the U.S. context. The product had a genuine differentiator — it was significantly easier to learn than incumbent software, which meant companies needed less training and could onboard new hires faster. In a construction labor market that was chronically tight, that was a meaningful operational advantage. But that story wasn't being told.

The Shift

Rob defined the positioning around a single, defensible claim: Powerproject reduces the training burden at a time when construction companies can't afford long onboarding curves. The strategy narrowed deliberately — target mid-to-large construction firms where the training advantage was most financially meaningful, build authority through industry media before scaling advertising, and equip resellers with structured co-branded marketing they could actually use.

The growth wasn't driven by louder marketing. It was driven by sharper decisions about who to reach, what problem to own, and what proof would move the right buyers.

In an emerging category with competing technologies and skeptical buyers, focus determined whether momentum built or fragmented.

The Situation

Crosspoint Kinetics was a startup subsidiary of Cummins Crosspoint, created to bring a retrofit electric hybrid system to market for Class 3–7 bus and truck fleets. The technology was real and the commercial case was compelling — federal and state grants covered up to 50% of the cost for early adopters. But the market was not receptive by default.

Alternative fuels technologies were all competing for fleet operator attention simultaneously, with well-funded lobbying behind several of them. Hybrids were perceived by many buyers as yesterday's technology. Crosspoint Kinetics had zero brand recognition, was not yet on approved vendor lists for public transit fleets, and had no dedicated marketing infrastructure.

What Rob Found

When appointed as contract marketing chief, Rob's first decision was strategic rather than tactical: don't try to win the category conversation. Win a specific use case first. The buyers most likely to act weren't skeptics who needed to be convinced that hybrids mattered — they were fleet managers operating vehicles in stop-and-go duty cycles where regenerative braking produced measurable, documentable fuel savings. Those buyers needed an economic case, not a green technology pitch.

The Shift

Rob embedded with the Kinetics team and built the marketing infrastructure from the ground up — positioning, website, lead generation, account-based marketing, PR, trade show strategy, and the sales systems needed to nurture leads through long public procurement cycles. Messaging was rebuilt around ROI, not sustainability. More than 20 key industry events were selected specifically for access to public transit decision-makers. PR was treated as a primary credibility tool, not an afterthought.

The difference wasn't activity level. It was the decision to stop trying to win the whole category and start by owning the buyers for whom the economic case was undeniable.