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A Case Study: Compounded Success

How Individual Campaigns Within the Framework of a Single Strategy Lead to Market Leadership

Challenge:

What began as assisting an entrepreneurial start-up gain name recognition, has evolved into a partnership that includes researching customer needs and developing products that meet them.

Solution:

Focus on discovery and adaptation of customer-centric solutions, as well as a company culture that emphasizes constant innovation and passionate support of self, community, customers, and country.

Result:

?? in new sales, ?? increase in customer retention, ?? increase in revenue, ?? increase in profitability, ??? ROI in FitzMartin Services

SPOC Automation

SPOC designs and manufactures automation technology for both the upstream and midstream segments of the oil & gas industry. Since 2001, SPOC’s products have helped customers automate processes in artificial lift and water handling, as well as vapor recovery and gas compression.

In 2021, the Trussville, Alabama-based company diversified and began manufacturing grid inverters for use in hybridized and remote energy systems. These innovative grid inverters are designed to lower emissions, reduce fuel consumption, and create efficiencies across the board in a variety of applications.

FitzMartin

We’re a specialized marketing and sales communications firm that helps clients solve complex sales and marketing problems. We’ve been in this business for more than 20 years, working with hundreds of clients. We’re based in Birmingham, Alabama, with partnered affiliates located throughout the country.

We’ve won awards for our work, and while notice from one’s peers is terrific, we believe the greatest proof of success is that of our clients’, as we help them build businesses that last. When our work is effective and our clients are successful, that does more than build wealth for the owners. It creates opportunities within their organizations and within the community for people to pursue their own dreams. That’s the point—when we succeed, we all succeed.

Learn more about our work—and its successful outcomes—in the case study that follows.

Customer-Centric, Sales-First

What they did have, however, was an exceptionally talented team that was not only eager to sell its high-quality, innovative products, but also willing to lay the groundwork necessary to create lasting relationships with its customers. They needed guidance in the sales and marketing space to create and execute a strategy to overcome those hurdles and bring it all home.

Speaking of strategy, we should note that the guiding principle for all of FitzMartin’s work, most certainly including its work with SPOC, is that of Cognitive Marketing. Known as the Science of Behavioral Change, CogMar is a particularly instructive approach when you face a long, complex sales process with multiple decision-makers.

What we at FitzMartin implemented was a customer-centric, sales-first approach to building market share. Yes, there were plenty of victories early on. The pay-offs, though, kept coming over the years, as we worked together to not only sell existing products, but also to innovate and create technologies that pushed the envelope, and more importantly, make SPOC’s customers more successful.

Revenue is up, profits have increased, but the biggest win of all are the long-term relationships built between SPOC and its customers.

What Is Success? Multi-Million Dollar Clients and Trust

Bobby Mason is SPOC’s president and CEO, as well as one of the company’s founders. He sums up the results of SPOC’s 18-year relationship with FitzMartin this way: “They have helped us develop and literally transform—transform—the company from a small mom and pop all the way to a leader in our space.”

That little company from Birmingham that has played amongst industry giants has, indeed, become a leader, and we at FitzMartin remain proud to have played a role in that success. As Bobby says, “I can tell you that I have multimillion dollar customers that I wouldn't have [without FitzMartin].”

Yet, he adds, there is more to the relationship between our two firms, something that’s perhaps less tangible than dollars at the bottom line, but every bit as valuable.

“I would say one thing about Fitz Martin is that they're honest, they're sincere, and I trust them, which is vitally important, not only from a financial standpoint, but from a, well, just a friendship standpoint.”

And he concludes, “They truly care about their customers.”

Understanding What Motivates the Buyer

We invite you to take a deeper dive into CogMar—you, and we, will be so happy you did. Suffice it to say, for the moment, that its sales-first approach helps buyers and their teams move through specific barriers in the decision process.

There are nine stages central to CogMar, from which decision makers are moved from one stage to another. First, is when they’re unaware of a product and company, leading to when they’re contemplating a purchase and are actually preparing to buy, to even when they’re actively advocating for you.

The key, however, is not just awareness of where among these stages the buyer is, but how we help them make informed decisions. The secret is not so much the tools used at each stage, as it is an understanding of what motivates that buyer. Not that those tools, such as video and voice of customer initiatives, aren’t themselves critical. But, it’s the specific purpose for which they’re developed and when they’re implemented that really drives results.

A Strategy Built for Complex Sales Processes

But before we discuss the individual campaigns, we should note that the guiding principle for all of FitzMartin’s work, most certainly including its work with SPOC, is that of Cognitive Marketing. Known as the Science of Behavioral Change, CogMar is a particularly instructive approach when you face a long, complex sales process with multiple decision makers.

Consider the “multi-million-dollar customers” Bobby mentioned. Those clients rarely come along overnight. They take months, sometimes years, to make a decision on where to put their money and trust. CogMar provides a framework that tightly aligns your sales and marketing functions with the needs of your buyer.

As we mentioned in the intro, this case study is different from most in that it doesn’t focus on a single campaign, but a 20-year-long partnership between an agency and its client. In addition to exploring the individual campaigns, which are listed below, we also encourage you to read the narrative summary of our relationship with SPOC. It details a few of the twists and turns we all encountered along the way, and offers context to not just the initiatives and tactics described here, but the long-term strategy employed.

Throughput for the Complex Sales Processes
Speaking of strategy, we should note that the guiding principle for all of FitzMartin’s work, most certainly including its work with SPOC, is that of Cognitive Marketing. Known as the Science of Behavioral Change, CogMar is a particularly instructive approach when you face a long, complex sales process with multiple decision makers.

If you’ve had a chance to read the narrative summary, you may remember that SPOC CEO Bobby Mason kindly gave FitzMartin credit for helping land a few big clients. “I can tell you that I have multimillion dollar customers that I wouldn't have as a result of them,” he said.