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About Handtmann
Handtmann is a family-owned German engineering company that manufactures filling, portioning, and forming equipment for food producers worldwide – from vacuum fillers used in sausage and meat production to solutions for bakery, dairy, and pet food manufacturing.
Food manufacturing is a relationship-driven, long-cycle industry, and much of the buying process happens quietly – a production or engineering manager researching equipment online long before a sales conversation ever starts. That’s the gap Handtmann’s business development team set out to close.
The Challenge
Tom Bowman, Business Development Lead for Handtmann’s UK and Ireland business, supports a team of six area sales managers spread across the north, south, southeast, southwest, Ireland, and Scotland, feeding them leads and market intelligence from a centralized hub.
Before Lead Forensics, Handtmann’s new business efforts leaned almost entirely on a market the team already knew inside out: sausage and meat production. As Tom put it, the team “knew nearly everyone within that industry like the back of our hand” – which was a strength, but also a ceiling.
Handtmann wanted to expand into adjacent markets like bakery and pet food, but had no reliable way to see which companies outside its existing network were actually researching filling and portioning equipment.
Anonymous website traffic meant that food producers who didn’t fit the obvious mould – or who Handtmann had never actively targeted – were browsing the site, downloading brochures, and leaving without a trace.
The Solution
uses Lead Forensics to turn that anonymous traffic into a structured, daily source of pipeline. Every visit is identified and automatically sorted into categories – new leads, existing customers, lapsed opportunities, and irrelevant traffic (recruitment firms, finance companies, and other businesses trying to sell to Handtmann rather than buy from it).
Central pre-qualification and dual-track follow-up:
Tom reviews and qualifies new leads each day, then routes them down two parallel paths – a phone/email outreach cadence from the central team, and a heads-up to the relevant area sales manager so they can plan an in-person “door knock” alongside their usual cold outreach.
Market expansion via visitor behavior, not guesswork:
Rather than relying only on companies already on Handtmann’s radar, the team uses Lead Forensics to spot food producers outside their existing network who are actively researching the site – surfacing categories of business Handtmann previously ruled out on sight.
Different journeys for different visitor types:
Existing customers browsing service or spare parts pages get routed to a customer care team for a relationship check-in rather than a sales pitch; lapsed customers are fast-tracked straight to sales for reactivation outreach; and live opportunities are flagged immediately to the salesperson already working that deal, especially when a prospect returns to the site after an in-person meeting or site visit.
Contact identification for hard-to-reach buyers:
For its core ICP – production managers, engineering managers, and maintenance managers at larger accounts, or owners directly at smaller businesses – Tom combines Lead Forensics’ contact search function with LinkedIn to identify the right person, then works a structured nine-touchpoint cadence (a mix of calls, emails, and LinkedIn outreach) rather than giving up after one attempt.
Marketing attribution:
Campaign links (from print ads, digital banners, and email sends) point to specific landing pages, so when a company shows up in Lead Forensics against one of those pages, the team can tie pipeline back to the marketing spend that drove it.
The Results
The clearest impact has been Handtmann’s ability to find and win business it would previously have written off entirely. Two examples stand out:
A company downloaded Handtmann’s pet food brochure – which was built around historic successes in dog and cat food – but turned out to manufacture horse treats, a use case the brochure never mentioned. A follow-up call led to a test kitchen and a deal now maturing at around £250,000
A company that appeared in Lead Forensics turned out to be manufacturing Bombay mix using a modified competitor forming machine – a business Handtmann had previously seen on supermarket shelves and dismissed as a fit. That deal is on track to be worth around £80,000
Beyond individual deals, the team has used visitor data to accelerate opportunities already in flight – including flagging a live opportunity the moment a prospect returned to the site at 3 a.m. after visiting Handtmann’s German showroom, prompting a faster follow-up – and to expand order values by prepping sales reps with the specific pages (like depositing solution pages) a prospect viewed ahead of a meeting.
Centralizing the process has also sped up response times generally, since leads no longer sit unactioned in an individual rep’s inbox. The workload has stayed manageable throughout, with the qualification process taking roughly an hour a day.
