Your marketing and sales activities should help your customers accomplish their outcomes, but often marketers think it’s easier to sell their products and services than it is to truly understand what customers need and want. That’s why we developed Follow Your Buyer. Simply stated, it’s a methodology to help your customer, not sell your customer. Learning to follow your buyer requires a change in mindset where you’ll get to know your buyers from the inside out and embrace a collaborative role in solving their challenges.

While operating within a paradigm, we can achieve desired outcomes, but at the same time become better informed about our actions in a way that enables continuous improvement. Marketing and sales is overserved with tactics and failproof processes to deliver better results. What we need is a modern paradigm, a different way to think about marketing, sales, and our buyers. The paradigm is called follow, understand, and help.

Content marketing lifted water and wastewater companies out of the dark ages and into marketing enlightenment. Long gone are the days when B2B marketers created only complex spec sheets and product brochures.

If you are a treatment equipment vendor grappling for stronger growth numbers, it is important to diversify how you approach the market, how you reach prospects, and how you build awareness of your products. Although it sounds counter-intuitive, one of the best ways to do this is by providing content directly to the water and wastewater market that educates them generally about their needs, rather than promotes the specifics of your latest pump.

In 2021 the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IJJA - aka, Bipartisan Infrastructure Law - BIL), was passed which provides an unprecedented level of federal investment in American water infrastructure. BIL provides broad eligibilities for drinking water and clean water projects through Clean Water State Revolving Funds (CWSRF).

In its Decision Memorandum, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) says it is honored to play a leadership role in implementing these provisions and is proud of its nearly decade of successful implementation of American Iron and Steel provisions in its SRF programs. Through these efforts, EPA will support efforts to catalyze domestic manufacturing, resilient supply chains, and good jobs – while successfully delivering a wide range of infrastructure projects.

Alongside BIL and CWSRF is the Build America, Buy America Act (BABA) act, which establishes strong and permanent domestic sourcing requirements across all federal financial assistance programs. The basic requirement being that 55% of all iron, steel, manufactured products, and construction materials must be domestically produced for a project to receive and used federal funding.

A key component to growing a business or standing out in a crowded space is delivering on promises about your products and services. If you are able to deliver on promises, then expanding your brand to reach more customers is not as difficult as it could otherwise be. And a great way to do this is by showcasing your wins.

We are in the midst of the 4^th industrial revolution and its combining digital information technology (IT) with industrial manufacturing operations (OT). The water and wastewater industry is beginning to see the benefits of the IT/OT convergence and engineering consultancies are rapidly moving beyond environmental design work into the burgeoning space of IT/OT design and implementation.

Many treatment equipment vendors put great effort into developing quality products, designing informative spec sheets, showcasing new products at trade shows, and incentivizing independent sales reps to introduce their products to utilities. And yet, growth seems to flatline. Win a few bids, lose a few customers, status quo. Well, according to two independent market reports, all that is about to change – for better or for worse – with the projected 4% to 6% expansion of the market.