The vendor
Critical Manufacturing (CM) is one of Europe's leading Manufacturing Execution Systems vendors, with deep expertise in regulated manufacturing environments. Their platform supports discrete and process manufacturers navigating strict quality, compliance and traceability requirements, with a customer footprint that spans semiconductors, medical devices, electronics and precision equipment. CM's standard sales motion prioritises enterprise accounts actively migrating from legacy MES platforms.
The challenge Baseway solved
CM's inbound pipeline concentrates around one very specific ICP profile: enterprise manufacturers already scoping a migration from a named legacy MES. This filter serves their inbound funnel well, but leaves considerable white space in adjacent segments: mid-market manufacturers running SAP Business One and BEAS, high-complexity assembly operations, and precision equipment makers building new production lines that need MES for the first time.
Reaching those buyers requires phone-first outbound with genuine manufacturing fluency, the kind of conversation an SDR script cannot fake. CM's internal sales team had capacity but not the specialised outbound bandwidth to develop these adjacent segments in-language across multiple European geographies.
What Baseway did
1. Adjacent-ICP mapping
We layered additional qualification signals on top of CM's standard ICP: shop-floor complexity, quality-gate density, integration burden with existing systems (SAP B1, BEAS, legacy Apriso, Werum), and regulatory pressure (ISO 13485, IATF 16949, GMP). This surfaced accounts that CM's inbound filter would have systematically missed but that were, in fact, in active MES scoping.
2. Phone-first qualification, in-language
We ran multi-channel outbound (LinkedIn, email and phone) across DACH, Iberia, Italy, France, Benelux and the UK, targeting Heads of Manufacturing IT, Operations Managers, COOs, Plant Directors and Business Analysts owning the MES scoping process. Every qualified conversation happened by phone or video, never by asynchronous email exchange.
3. Full written briefings on every handover
Each qualified prospect passed to CM's sales team came with a written briefing: named buyer with confirmed role and tenure, confirmed pain points, current tech stack, timeline, stakeholder map, and expected next step. Isabel Lopes (BD Manager) and the CM discovery team walked into first meetings with full context, with no cold reintroduction and no wasted time.
The outcome
One of the accounts Baseway sourced is a global manufacturer of specialised industrial equipment, headquartered in Europe with multiple manufacturing sites worldwide. Following Baseway's phone-first qualification and written briefing, CM's discovery team ran a 60-minute technical scoping session that surfaced a complete, funded and COO-mandated MES opportunity.
What the discovery call revealed
- Business priority: must have. A new product launch, a 5 to 6 stage assembly line with smart tooling and vision-inspection quality gates, is driving the MES search.
- Top-down mandate. The COO has tasked the operations team with "doing things differently", with an explicit goal of reducing indirect tasks and cost by approximately 50%.
- Budget allocated. Management buy-in is confirmed. The commercial shape (capex vs. subscription) will be defined against vendor proposals.
- Core pain points aligned to CM's platform: no real-time shop-floor visibility, quality handled by end-of-line inspection rather than built-in assurance, disconnected issue handling, weak KPI reporting, and no proper warehouse management.
- Deliberately cautious buying motion. The prospect is speaking to multiple vendors and taking "small steps" to avoid the wrong choice, placing functionality and long-term scalability ahead of headline price.
- Multi-site rollout potential. The initial deployment is positioned as a platform for future products and potential rollout to existing production lines and other global sites.
Deal characteristics at handover
| Business priority | Must have |
| Executive sponsor | COO, mandate confirmed |
| Budget status | Allocated and approved by management |
| Timeline | System live by Q4 2026 to Q1 2027 (product ships March 2027) |
| Stakeholder map | Operations Manager, Business Analyst, Systems/ERP Lead, and external Integration Partner |
| Baseway status | Handed to CM Business Development team. Discovery call held. Follow-up in around two weeks with a pre-sales engineer for a live demo. |
Why this deal moved
Baseway's phone-first, in-language qualification methodology reached the buyer at the exact moment the internal MES scoping was crystallising, not months later when they had already shortlisted competitors. The written briefing gave CM's discovery team the ability to walk into the first meeting with full context, matching the buyer's own language back to them. Because the buyer had been qualified before the meeting, the discovery time was spent on solution mapping rather than fact-finding.
The takeaway for MES vendors
The narrower a vendor's stated ICP filter, the more adjacent-fit revenue is left uncovered. Boutique outbound with deep manufacturing domain expertise, in-language coverage and disciplined phone-first qualification can systematically develop those adjacent segments, without diluting the vendor's core ICP focus or overloading the internal sales team.
For MES vendors, and adjacent categories including QMS, EAM, PLM and Industrial IoT, Baseway operates at the intersection of domain fluency, buyer network depth and disciplined qualification.