What does a procurement engineer in Stuttgart or a buyer in Houston do before adding a new name to the supplier list? They look at your website. They want the datasheet, proof of certification and a CAD file they can drop into their own drawing. If they can't find those, they don't email you; they move on to the next supplier, and you never learn that you missed a quote.
This article is for companies that make and sell machinery, spare parts, chemicals, packaging, building materials, textiles and similar products, at home and abroad. It covers the website as part of your sales team, languages, RFQs and dealer portals, LinkedIn and Google Ads, trade show follow-up, CRM, and measurement over a sales cycle that runs for months. The last section looks at B2B marketplaces and export support.
Your website should work like a sales engineer
B2B buyers don't visit your site for inspiration. They visit to rule suppliers out. Does the product meet the specification, is the paperwork in order, is there enough capacity? They should be able to answer those questions without speaking to sales. A good B2B website is a sales engineer that answers questions at midnight.
The product catalogue
The catalogue shouldn't be a PDF brochure pasted onto a page. Every product family needs its own page, and every product should be searchable and filterable by dimensions, material, tolerances, standards and applications. If a buyer can filter for "DN50, stainless, PN16" and reach the right product in two clicks, the catalogue is doing its job.
Include production capacity, minimum order quantities, typical lead time ranges and the Incoterms you work with. "Price on request" is normal in B2B; hiding everything a buyer needs to request a quote is not.
Datasheets, CAD files and certificates
Offer datasheets as PDFs, but put the content on the page as text too, so search engines can read it and an engineer on a phone doesn't have to download anything. Provide CAD and drawing files in common formats such as STEP, IGES, DWG or DXF. With a large range, parts catalogue platforms such as CADENAS PARTcommunity or TraceParts can deliver files in formats that engineers' design software accepts.
You will have to decide whether to put files behind a form. Our view: leave datasheets open, because a buyer who is still shortlisting won't fill in a form; they will leave. A short registration for CAD files (name, company, email, country) is reasonable. By that stage the engineer is already designing you in, and knowing who they are is a valuable signal for your sales team.
Publish certificates (ISO 9001, CE or UKCA declarations of conformity, UL listings for North America, sector approvals, test reports) as downloads with their validity dates, and replace expired ones. If you sell steel, aluminium, cement or fertilisers into the EU, prepare for one more question: the EU's Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM) entered its definitive period on 1 January 2026, and your EU importer may ask you for embedded emissions data.
Languages: your buyer's terminology, not a translation
Multilingual B2B is more than moving words into another language. A German engineer writes "Edelstahl", a US buyer expects inches and psi while a European one expects millimetres and bar, and standards change by market: DIN and EN, ASTM, GOST and their equivalents. Technical copy should be written, or at least checked, by a native speaker who knows the industry.
Choose your languages from your export data and don't launch them all at once; a half-finished language version is worse than none. Technically, each language needs its own URLs linked with hreflang, and contact details should suit the market: a local or international number that works from that country, a person who speaks the language, opening hours and time zone.
The RFQ form and the dealer portal
The request for quotation form
The RFQ form is the till of a B2B website. A good one collects what the buyer already has in one go: product or product family, quantity and order frequency, delivery location and preferred Incoterm, required date, country, and an upload field for drawings or specifications. Keep mandatory fields to a minimum; sales can ask the rest in the first reply.
What happens after the form matters as much as the form itself. The enquiry should go automatically to the right country or product rep, the sender should get a confirmation saying when they will hear back, and the enquiry should land in your CRM with its source. Use invisible spam protection; making a buyer pick traffic lights five times isn't a good first impression.
Dealer and distributor portals
If you sell through dealers, orders by phone and email don't scale. A dealer portal typically offers:
- Dealer-specific price lists, discount rules and account balance
- Stock levels and estimated delivery dates
- Quick ordering, bulk ordering and order history
- Current technical documents, product images and marketing material
- Training content and new product announcements
Feeding the portal from your ERP (SAP, Microsoft Dynamics, NetSuite or Sage, for example) avoids double data entry and the classic "different price in the portal than in the system" problem. Start small: for most manufacturers, order history and a document centre turn out to be the two most used features.
LinkedIn: organic content and advertising
B2B decision makers are on LinkedIn. A company page on its own reaches few people, though; real reach comes from the personal accounts of your sales engineers, production manager and founder. A short video from the factory floor, an application example, the story behind a test result, an invitation to meet at a trade show: authentic beats polished.
LinkedIn's advertising strength is targeting: industry, company size, job title, seniority and, above all, specific companies via an uploaded company list (Matched Audiences). The LinkedIn Insight Tag on your site lets you reach visitors again. Lead Gen Forms let users request a quote or catalogue without leaving LinkedIn; Document Ads put a technical guide straight into the feed, and Thought Leader Ads turn an employee's post into an ad.
Clicks on LinkedIn tend to be expensive, so advertise to narrow, well-defined lists rather than broad audiences, and connect lead forms to your CRM. LinkedIn's Conversions API is the way to feed qualified leads and quote stages from your CRM back into campaigns.
Google Ads for niche B2B terms
Very few people search for "hydraulic cylinder seal kit" or "food-grade industrial conveyor" each month. But the people who do usually have a need and a budget. Niche B2B search works differently from consumer advertising: precision over volume.
- Start with exact and phrase match; broad match can spread a small budget across irrelevant searches very quickly on low-volume terms.
- Read the search terms report weekly and maintain negative keywords such as "hobby", "used", "how to" and "jobs".
- Run separate campaigns by country and language, with ad copy and landing pages in each market's language.
- Send clicks to the relevant product family page, not the homepage.
- Separate purchase-intent searches from technical research; give the latter its own campaign with lower bids.
Starting with Performance Max or automated bidding is tempting, but if the system only sees form submissions, it hunts for the cheapest forms. Students, competitors and irrelevant enquiries fill in forms too. Trust automation only once you send qualified lead and quote data from your CRM back to Google Ads.
Trade shows and digital follow-up
Trade shows remain the strongest touchpoint in B2B, whether that is Hannover Messe, The Big 5 in Dubai or IMTS in Chicago. The trouble starts afterwards: business cards sit in a box, the follow-up goes out two weeks later, and a competitor has already quoted.
Before the show, announce your stand and new products on LinkedIn and to your email list, and add a show page with a meeting booking link to your website. At the show, use a lead capture app instead of collecting cards, and add a short note to every conversation: what they asked for, which product, when, whether there is budget, who decides. Without those notes your post-show list is just a pile of names.
Within a few days of the show, follow up with an email specific to the conversation: the datasheet for the product you discussed, when the quote will arrive, the next step. A bulk "thanks for visiting our stand" newsletter is no substitute.
Think about consent from the start, because the rules differ by country. In the UK, PECR allows marketing emails to corporate subscribers without prior consent, provided you identify yourself and offer an opt-out, but sole traders and some partnerships are treated as individuals. In Germany, prior express consent is required even for marketing emails to businesses. US rules under CAN-SPAM are opt-out based. The safest habit: ask at the stand whether you may send the catalogue and quote by email, and record the answer in the app.
CRM, lead qualification and measuring a long sales cycle
One CRM, shared definitions
Enquiries from the RFQ form, LinkedIn, trade shows and the phone should end up in a single CRM, whether HubSpot, Salesforce, Pipedrive, Zoho or Microsoft Dynamics. Which one matters less than everyone using the same definitions. Marketing and sales should sit down and answer one question together: when does an enquiry count as qualified?
A simple checklist works for most manufacturers. Is it in a target country and sector, does it fit your range, is the volume meaningful, is the timing clear, can you reach the decision maker? Make the reason for every lost quote a mandatory field (price, lead time, technical fit, no response). A year later that will be your most valuable report.
Teaching ad platforms about a long sales cycle
In B2B, months can pass between an ad click and an order. If Google Ads only ever sees form submissions, it optimises your campaigns for the wrong goal. The fix is to send CRM stages back to the ad platforms: offline conversion import in Google Ads, or enhanced conversions for leads, which Google now recommends, and the Conversions API on LinkedIn.
According to Google Ads Help, conversions imported with a click ID (GCLID) must be uploaded within 90 days of the click. If you wait for the order, that window often closes. So define intermediate stages as conversions too, and give each an approximate value.
| Stage | Where it happens | What you send to the ad platform | Why it matters |
|---|---|---|---|
| Form or catalogue request | Website, LinkedIn form | Enquiry conversion | Volume signal for the campaign |
| Qualified lead | CRM, sales team review | Qualified lead conversion with estimated value | Separates cheap but irrelevant enquiries |
| Quote sent | CRM or ERP | Quote conversion with value based on the quote | Real interest signal before the order and before the window closes |
| Order | ERP | Order conversion with actual value | Shows which channel brings revenue |
| Lost quote | CRM | Not sent, used in reporting | Exposes price, lead time or technical fit problems |
Without cookie consent and Consent Mode v2 set up properly for visitors from the EEA and the UK, a large part of this data goes missing. Be patient with reporting as well: judge a campaign by the quote and order value it generates over several months, not by its first month's form count.
Marketplaces and export support
B2B marketplaces
Global marketplaces such as Alibaba.com and Amazon Business are a quick way to reach new buyers, especially for standard products. In Europe, Europages is one of the directories buyers use to find suppliers, as is wlw ("Wer liefert was") in German-speaking markets. If you sell into North America, look at Thomasnet.
Use marketplaces alongside your own website, not instead of it. Enquiries from them tend to be price-driven and show you next to your competitors. Link your profile to your datasheets and certificates, and log enquiries in the same CRM with their source.
Export support
Many governments support exporters with subsidised national pavilions at international trade shows, market research and help entering new markets. Programmes, eligibility and rules change regularly, and most require approval before you spend. Check with your national export promotion agency or chamber of commerce before you build a marketing plan around a grant.
Where to start
- Work out with your sales team how the customers behind last year's orders first found you.
- Review your website through a buyer's eyes: are datasheets, CAD files and certificates two clicks away?
- Pick one or two priority languages and markets from your export data, and have the technical copy written by native speakers who know the industry.
- Simplify the RFQ form and make sure every enquiry reaches the right rep and lands in the CRM with its source.
- Agree a written definition of a qualified lead between marketing and sales, and set up CRM stages to match.
- Send CRM stages back to Google Ads and LinkedIn, allowing for the 90-day GCLID window.
- Prepare the meeting, note-taking, consent and follow-up process before your next trade show.
At AYTE Digital we work with manufacturers and exporters on multilingual catalogue websites, RFQ and dealer portals, LinkedIn and Google Ads campaigns, and measurement connected to the CRM. We usually start by looking at your website through a buyer's eyes, together.
