Robotics companies build remarkable machines. The pipeline rarely matches.
Fifteen years making technical, long-cycle products generate demand, a large part of it inside industrial robotics. This is the market I know best, and the commercial problem I keep getting called in to fix.
I led the web and digital experience for two global robotics brands on a single platform, across markets, languages and a long, technical sales cycle. That means I have lived the real constraints of this market: a buyer who needs an engineer and a CFO to agree, a product that has to be proven on a customer floor before anyone signs, and a demand programme that has to work in several languages at once.
Teradyne Robotics · Universal Robots · Mobile Industrial Robots
- 01
A category with no search demand
Buyers google the problem in the words they already have, not the capability you just invented. Keyword-led programmes capture the few already educated, usually by a competitor.
- 02
A buying group that doubled
Operations, IT and OT security, safety, finance, and often the integrator. Any of them can stop the deal, and each needs different evidence. One champion with one deck is not enough.
- 03
Pilots with no finish line
No written success metric, no exit criteria, no contractual path to expansion. That is how a company ends up with several pilots, no revenue, and engineers permanently on site.
- 04
Pipeline that lives on three trade shows
Events work. Treating the event as the pipeline does not. Badges get scanned, the list waits, and the interest decays for three weeks before anyone calls.
Demand created in the buyer language
Programmes that teach the market the problem before your category has a name, then capture that demand cleanly when it surfaces.
Buying-group enablement
The safety file, the OT security and integration documentation, the ROI model. The material that lets your champion sell internally when you are not in the room.
The pilot as a product
Fixed scope, written success metric, exit criteria and a contractual path to expansion, wired into the CRM as its own funnel stage.
Events turned into tracked pipeline
Qualify before the show, book the meetings ahead of it, agree with sales what counts as an opportunity, and instrument the path from badge to tracked deal.
The long version
I wrote this argument out in full: what physical AI changed in the robotics market, why the classic go-to-market breaks against it, and the demand system that fixes it.
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