Introduction to PDH Marketing

Holiday Inn, South County Center, St Louis, MO – October, 2017

I thanked the speaker and dismissed the audience of professional engineers for a 10-minute break. John had just finished a presentation on shell and tube heat exchangers. As I walked to the back of the room to get a cup of coffee, I overheard a discussion between John and one of the Dupont engineers in attendance.

“Great presentation, John. Listen, we have an application right now for a shell and tube heat exchanger at our plant.” As I walked past the two, the details of the conversation faded away and were drowned out by other back-of-the-room discussions between seminar attendees. After quickly gulping down a cup of coffee, I introduced the next speaker. I waited around a few minutes to ensure that all was good with the speaker’s mic and the projector, then I stepped out of the meeting room.

John walked towards me, briefcase in hand. “It was good seeing you again, Eddie. Thanks for the opportunity to speak. I’ve got a plane to catch in a couple of hours, so I need to head out to the airport. But, I got a great lead from one of the engineers in the audience. He has a need in his plant, and I think our heat exchanger is a good possible solution.”

I wrapped up the two-day St Louis seminar the next morning and moved on to the following city. A few weeks later I ran into John again in Nashville, where he was scheduled to do another presentation. Up until then, I hadn’t given his new lead another thought. “Hey Eddie,” he said. “You remember that engineer from Dupont that I was talking to in St Louis? Well, Dupont just sent us a $250,000 purchase order for two heat exchangers.”

Prior to that day in St Louis, that Dupont engineer had never met John. And he had never done business with the heat exchanger manufacturer that employed John. A mere six weeks later, John had a $250,000 purchase order on his desk from Dupont. That’s a testament to how effective PDH Marketing can be.

Don’t get me wrong. Not every engineer who attends a presentation will buy something from you. There were 40 other engineers at the St Louis seminar, and the Dupont engineer was the only one who bought a heat exchanger (that I know of). And it doesn’t mean that leads from your PDH event that do buy from you are going to give you a purchase order within a few weeks. That’s not the norm for big-ticket industrial products, which typically have long sales cycles.

A PDH marketing event, such as a seminar, webinar, or a lunch & learn, serves as a vehicle for you to meet and build relationships with engineers who may be good prospects. It allows you to introduce yourself to an audience of engineers and educate them on a topic that is related to products that you sell.

The key here is to educate. Don’t try to sell your product.

John didn’t walk up to the podium and talk about why his heat exchanger is the best thing since sliced bread. Instead, he educated the audience on shell and tube heat exchangers in general. He talked about design criteria, size ranges, operating principles, parallel-flow vs. counter-flow configurations, pressure ratings, materials of construction, typical applications, and pros and cons of shell and tube vs. plate-and- frame heat exchangers. He provided useful, educational information to a group of engineers who were interested in learning more about the topic. By focusing on teaching—as opposed to selling—John succeeded in demonstrating himself as a Subject Matter Expert on the topic. The more John spoke and educated the engineers in the room, the more credibility he gained in their eyes.

If you want to sell something to an engineer, you can’t use traditional marketing tactics. Engineers tune out and disengage as soon as you launch into a sales pitch. You need to be subtle. You need to offer something of value to them in exchange for their time. You need to demonstrate to them that you are a credible source of useful information. You need to establish yourself as an expert they can rely on when they have questions or need help with a problem. PDH events accomplish all of these things and more.

So, what is a PDH, anyway? PDH is an acronym for “professional development hour.” Like many other professions, licensed engineers in most states are required to complete continuing education. The term PDH is used in the engineering profession to denote continuing education credits. One PDH is equal to between 50 to 60 minutes of contact time, depending on the state. Engineers can earn PDH through a variety of methods, including attending seminars, webinars and lunch & learns, completing online courses, serving as an officer in a professional society, and obtaining a patent.

On this website, you are going to learn how to harness the power of PDH marketing, the term that I have coined for marketing to engineers using free PDH activities. One of the best features of PDH marketing is that it is a win-win for you and for the engineers. The engineers come away from a PDH activity with free PDH they need for license renewal, and you get an hour of the engineers’ time.

I have seen firsthand how effective PDH marketing can be. One of my continuing education companies, Professional Development Seminars, hosts seminars for engineers throughout the country. I’ve watched and observed the interaction between the engineers in the audience and the speakers representing industrial manufacturers. I’ve seen countless new business relationships born in the back of the room during the coffee break between sessions.

I’ve also experienced PDH marketing from the engineer’s perspective. I am a licensed professional engineer who worked on multibillion-dollar oil and gas projects in the 1990s and early 2000s and I’ve attended countless lunch & learn presentations to earn PDH for my license renewal. My motivation was to expand my knowledge, get a free sandwich, and earn a free PDH, although not necessarily in that order.

I learned a lot in those one-hour sessions and I usually came away impressed with how knowledgeable the presenter was. In some cases, I was already familiar with the company doing the presentation. So, I can’t directly attribute any subsequent sales to the lunch & learns in those cases. I’d say that the lunch & learn just reinforced my trust in the manufacturer and the sessions helped to keep the company “top of mind.”

In other cases, lunch & learns introduced me to companies that were previously unknown to me. One that comes to mind is a company that manufactures pressure-vacuum relief valves, which are used on very low-pressure oil storage tanks. After attending the lunch & learn, I gathered the presenter’s brochure and business card and headed back to my office. Sometime later, I needed to do some preliminary sizing of a pressure-vacuum valve to determine the nozzle size on a tank where it would be installed. I also needed to know the valve’s inlet/outlet sizes so that I could put the connecting pipe sizes on the preliminary version of the Process and Instrumentation Drawings (P& IDs).

The knowledge I gained from the lunch & learn was very helpful, but I wanted more information since I had never dealt with such a valve before. So, I dug up the presenter’s business card, and I called to ask him some questions. That query eventually resulted in a purchase order on that project. Once that manufacturer was “on my radar,” I continued to include the company in bid lists on future projects. Although it took several months to start bearing fruit for that PV valve manufacturer, his lunch & learn resulted in many purchase orders over the years.

If you are browsing through this website, I probably don’t have to tell you that engineers are major influencers when it comes to purchasing decisions involving industrial equipment. They are your prospects who are out looking for products and services to solve their problems. You need to find them and get in front of them. But, in a subtle, non-pushy way. On this website, you’ll learn how to do that by offering them free webinars, online courses, and lunchtime presentations for PDH credit.