People often say B2B marketing is boring (usually people who aren’t actually doing it). Some of the best marketers are building great brands in categories nobody talks about: fintech, healthtech, industrial and manufacturing, insurance, facilities management, professional services, and so many more. We recently interviewed a VP on the pod who runs marketing for a company that sells software to auto repair shops, a buyer who’s about as far from a typical B2B audience as it gets. Here’s her playbook.

Lessons From Marketing to an Industry That’s Never on LinkedIn

We recently had Clare Corriveau on the pod. Clare is VP of Marketing at Tekmetric, the largest cloud-based software platform for auto repair shops. There are 250,000 auto repair shops in the U.S. Tekmetric still only has 5% market share and is growing 50% year over year.

Clare’s background is in demand generation and growth, built in fintech and then cybersecurity, before she made the jump to Tekmetric, which is about as different a sale as you can get. “In horizontal SaaS, you’re one of 50 marketing leaders fighting for the same audience. Here we’re building something – the category is ours to define,” she said.

Her buyer doesn’t behave like a typical B2B buyer either (and based on the responses we get to our newsletter, we know a lot of you are in the same position; the whole “just be on LinkedIn for B2B” advice doesn’t always apply). Shop owners aren’t at a desk. They’re not on LinkedIn and they don’t open emails or attend webinars. Here’s what she’s learned marketing to them.

A call transcript can’t tell you what you need to know – go experience your customer’s world.

New marketing hires at Tekmetric don’t start with a deck – they start in a shop. Onboarding week in Houston includes real shop visits before anyone touches a campaign, and every employee gets a monthly stipend through “Tech Treks” to visit a customer’s shop, bring swag and food, and just ask how it’s going.

This matters more now than ever. Marketing has gone remote, most of the workday happens behind a laptop, and increasingly that laptop is talking back – we’re all leaning on AI for everything. It’s easy to feel like you understand a customer without ever leaving your desk. Getting out from behind the screen can be a differentiator.

Clare understands this gap firsthand. You can listen to a call recording and think you understand a shop owner. Walking into the shop and taking in what you see, what you smell, what it actually feels like to step into their shoes and run that business is a different thing entirely.

She felt this shift coming from cybersecurity, where she said she never met a CISO outside of a trade show, and they didn’t want to talk to her anyway (their job was to keep people out, she explained). Now she can look up every Tekmetric customer within 30 miles of her house and just show up.

Tekmetric’s ideal customers are people that are proud of their craft and what they’ve built. That pride shows up in many ways. At Clare’s first trade show, a customer introduced himself by his shop ID number before he gave her his name. That’s how much shop owners identify with the business they’ve built and Tekmetric’s role in it.

You can’t manufacture deep industry experience. Lean on the people in the company who actually have it.

Tekmetric’s founder, Sunil Patel, ran an auto repair shop for over a decade before he got frustrated enough with the available software to build his own. Sunil is still the first person Clare pressure tests ideas with. He stays close to the product and the customer – and that’s more effective than any messaging workshop Clare could run with her team.

You can’t fake subject matter expertise. Being good at marketing comes down to having a real point of view and understanding of the customer, and that’s a lot easier to build when the ingredients already exist inside your company. In the case of Tekmetric, it’s about using what’s available: a founder who’s actually lived the problem, and a customer base that’s bought in on the product. “That’s the story,” Clare said. “My job is to put them together and amplify them.”

If you’re trying to manufacture lived experience with clever copy, stop. Go find whoever at your company has actually lived the problem, and start there with your messaging.

Meet your buyer where they actually are, not where the playbook says they should be

It’s not just about the message, it’s where you deliver it. Tekmetric’s buyer isn’t on LinkedIn and isn’t downloading anything (ever) so the team built go-to-market around where shop owners actually spend their time.

Events, at real scale. Tekmetric already runs over 100 events a year. This year they went further and hosted their first industry conference, a moonshot idea that drew almost 1,000 people. 

Boots on the ground. Parts providers already have a foot in the door at every shop, they’re  constantly making deliveries. Tekmetric pairs its partner managers with partner managers from those parts providers, and they walk into shops together to get owners signed up for demos on the spot. 

Peer groups that shop owners already trust. Auto repair has a built-in coaching culture, informal groups of 15 to 20 non-competing shop owners who learn the business from people who’ve done it. Get endorsed inside one of those groups and it spreads like wildfire, because the most trusted recommendation you can get is from a peer running a business like yours.

Even Bing turned out to be worth real paid search budget. The team was skeptical, but generally, shop owners seem to use the browser that comes standard on their computer (anyone else’s parents like this?). The key takeaway here – don’t assume your audience behaves like a default tech-savvy B2B buyer.

Don’t fix what’s already working

Tekmetric’s customer community isn’t a polished branded platform. It’s a Facebook group, and Clare’s team deliberately doesn’t over-manage it. It stays light on structure on purpose, because they don’t want to disturb the organic nature of the group.

Tekmetric has 16,000 customers, with about 6,000 active in the group. They swap tips, complain, and make requests. The CEO and CTO are active there too, watching and participating – but never policing.

The payoff: customers defend the brand unprompted. When someone complains, others jump in to push back, exactly the kind of unpaid, unprompted defense any brand could only hope for.

Clare’s filter for whether to move the group to a ‘better’ platform: is this a company problem or a customer problem? If customers are getting value, moving it would just make us annoying marketers trying to make something work better for us instead of recognizing what already works for our customers.

Most of us are in industries where the buyer is harder to reach than the playbooks let on. It’s a really exciting challenge for marketers, and not uncommon. At Exit Five, we understand you, B2B marketer (yes YOU!). Many of us are working in industries where the customer is harder to reach. I hope you liked this example. Let me know if this resonated.