When a machine-tool builder and a SaaS founder talk about “B2B marketing,” they use the same word for two fundamentally different things. The distance between them is not a nuance. It is a chasm.
I have worked on this border for over three decades — with industrial companies that are world leaders in their niche, and with software firms for which growth seems to be a law of nature. What I see is a gulf in thinking that runs deeper than either side suspects. This piece traces it: first unsparingly, then constructively.
The Bottleneck One Side Has — and the Other Doesn’t
It all begins with the logic of production. It determines where a company can even look.
Industry: the Endless Balancing Act of Capacity
An industrial company is permanently preoccupied with its capacity utilisation. It seeks the narrow ridge between too little — when expensive machines and people stand idle — and too much: overload, missed deadlines, constrained deliverability. The bottleneck sits in production. For a company already producing at the capacity limit, additional demand is not a blessing but a problem. This is exactly the psychological core: why create demand you cannot even serve?
SaaS: the Clear View
A SaaS company knows no such bottleneck. It sells licences — with comparatively little use of resources, available almost without limit. The marginal cost of the next unit sold tends toward zero. The effort shifts to the customer side: implementation, integration, maintenance, update management. A production bottleneck does not exist. That is why SaaS naturally has a clear view of the very things that count as luxuries in an industrial context: pipeline filling, lead generation, customer journey. Whoever can deliver without limit inevitably thinks about demand first.
Scalability is not a feature. It is the lens through which a company sees the world.
Why Industry Treats Marketing as Decoration
Industrial companies often own mature technologies the world is searching for. From this strength grows an attitude I have observed for years — one you can only caricature with affection, because there is so much truth in it: marketing is rather frowned upon. The marketing manager orders ballpoint pens and books trade-fair stands in overcrowded halls. The real kings are the sales directors who bring in the orders month after month. The principle: the customer calls and orders — the company delivers promptly. That is how it worked, and in many places still works today.
“We don’t need marketing, we know our customers.” — “We’ve been a tier-1 supplier for twenty years; the customer orders directly online from us.” — “We hand out keyrings and LED torches at the trade-fair stand. That got us through twenty years just fine.”
And honestly: they did get through just fine. As long as demand came by itself, every euro into marketing seemed wasted. Why on earth would you need intelligent, complex marketing here? The question is fair — until the world turns.
The Reality Shock
And now? Great changes are running through society. Flagship industries suddenly drop by double digits, and the music in the tech world abruptly starts playing in another part of the world. What then? The reflex answer of many corporations: first cut a few tens of thousands of jobs — and then see. Digitalisation? Ticked off reluctantly. Differentiation? Neglected. Backed two start-ups — half-heartedly, and even that only because it was chic and en vogue.
This is not doom-mongering, it is in the annual reports. Trumpf, world market leader for machine tools and lasers and a model of the German high-tech Mittelstand, recently recorded a revenue decline of about 16% to roughly €4.3bn — and operating profit (EBIT) fell from around €501m to €59m. A company can be excellent and still be throttled by the business cycle at the capacity screw. That is exactly the vulnerability no one wanted to see in the good decade.
Meanwhile the IT, server, software and data-centre industry seems to know only one direction: up.
Three Examples, One Pattern
Let us place concrete cases side by side — technically driven production, often with only a handful of customers, against scalable software.
You see the pattern at once: by far the largest revenue (Trumpf) sits in the lower left of the chart — big, but capacity-bound and marketing-averse. The smaller SaaS bubbles sit in the upper right — less revenue, but recurring, high-margin and growth-driven. Personio, for instance, grew its ARR by around 80% within a single year. The workbench does not know such numbers — it does not even know them as a category.
The Real Reasons: Mentality, Liquidity, Self-Image
Why is this so? It is not stupidity — on the contrary, highly competent engineering cultures work here. It lies in three deeper layers:
Mentality. Whoever draws their self-worth from the quality of the product distrusts anything that “merely” communicates. Marketing smells of sales cosmetics — and a good component, so the conviction goes, sells itself. In good years that is even true.
Liquidity. Production ties up capital in machines, material, inventory. Marketing is an expense with no guaranteed return — in a capital-intensive business the first candidate for the red pen. SaaS, by contrast, invests venture capital deliberately in growth, because every customer won brings recurring revenue for years. Two completely different calculations.
Self-image. A highly specialised production firm sees itself as a manufacturer. A SaaS company sees itself as a growth machine. One optimises production, the other customer acquisition. Both self-images are coherent in themselves — but they lead to diametrically opposed priorities.
There Is Still Opportunity — and Good Opportunity
Now the friendly part, which I mean seriously. The industrial Mittelstand has something no start-up can buy overnight: substance. Real technology, deep customer relationships, decades of trust, often world market leadership in a niche. That is the most expensive asset of all — and it is already there. It only needs to be made visible, defensible and connectable. Five approaches:
The gulf between workbench and cloud is real — but it is not a law of nature, it is a question of attitude. Industry does not have to become a start-up. It only has to stop leaving its greatest strength — a genuinely needed product — hidden. That is no great art. It is a decision.