7 Go-to-Market Lessons From Scaling a Waste Management Platform

Most B2B marketers chase perfection and the latest trends. Martin Kosak, CMO at Sensonio, learned to do the opposite—and built a brand presence across 80 countries in the process.

In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Martin shared the tactical lessons from scaling Sensonio, a smart waste management platform that’s raised $12.6 million. These aren’t theoretical frameworks. They’re hard-won insights from building brand awareness in an unsexy industry with long sales cycles and complex buying committees.

Lesson 1: Play the Long Game With Brand Awareness

The biggest mistake B2B marketers make? Expecting immediate results from brand-building activities. Martin embraces a counterintuitive truth about B2B buying cycles.

“I also agree with the statement that 95% of our buyers are just not ready now to buy from us, but one day be ready,” he explains. “And when they will enter the market, we just need to be on top of their minds.”

This perspective fundamentally changes how you measure success. “Every small step or every activity that we do in order to increase our brand awareness, we cannot be disappointed when it doesn’t show instant or immediate results because know that everything will pay off in the future.”

The implication: stop optimizing every marketing activity for immediate pipeline impact. Some activities exist purely to ensure prospects remember you when they enter buying mode—even if that’s 18 months away.

Lesson 2: Events Work, But Concentration Beats Presence

While digital marketers debate whether trade shows deliver ROI, Martin doubled down on events with a crucial refinement. After attending three major shows and six or seven smaller events last year, the team hit exhaustion.

This year, they changed strategy. “We decided just to go to this one big event in Germany and really go all in,” Martin says. The concentrated investment paid off—250 leads in five days.

But Martin views event ROI through dual lenses. Beyond immediate leads, he recognizes the compounding brand value. “I’m sure there were many visitors. They saw our presence and how beautiful our stand was. And maybe they even had a conversation with our sales team on the stand. But maybe it was exactly about this brand awareness creation that, okay, they register us, they know we are here. And when they will enter the market, they will come back to us.”

The lesson: better to dominate one major event than spread yourself thin across many. Post-COVID, Martin notes, “people really miss those off site meetings,” making the in-person investment more valuable than ever.

Lesson 3: Email Marketing Lives—If You Lead With Value

Email is perpetually “dead” according to marketing pundits. Martin disagrees. “Some people claim that newsletter or email marketing is dead. And I totally don’t agree because we have some pretty good leads already now from the emailing campaigns.”

The key? Avoiding the smell of sales. “Definitely not working is the emailing campaigns from which you can smell sales already before you open the email. So you really need to choose the subject very carefully. And also the body of the email should not be very salesy as well.”

What breaks through? Martin shares an example that earned his time: “I received a cold mail where the company was suggesting a free audit of our social media ads which they would present during the call. So I jumped on it.”

The formula is simple: offer something genuinely valuable that requires no commitment. Make the reader smarter or give them actionable insights before asking for anything in return.

Lesson 4: Distribution Beats Creation

Here’s where most B2B companies fail, according to Martin. They invest heavily in content creation but underinvest in distribution.

“I think what many, maybe competitors or companies are struggling is that they create really expensive content like, let’s say professional product video, but they don’t perform very well on the distribution part,” he explains. “So it just ends on their YouTube channel or LinkedIn with some hundred views, but that’s it. And they don’t maximize the potential how they could work with such a video after it was already created.”

This might be the most expensive mistake in B2B marketing—spending thousands on content production only to let it die with a single LinkedIn post. The companies that win treat every piece of premium content as the foundation for a multi-channel, multi-month distribution campaign.

Lesson 5: Build Content Clusters That Dominate Topics

Sensonio’s SEO strategy showcases how to own a market category through content. Rather than chasing individual keywords, they built comprehensive coverage around deposit refund systems.

“We basically cover the whole DRS topic. We took it as a cluster and we wrote articles from very explanatory basic articles, but up to very in house research articles where we gathered, for example the numbers of the collection rates in european countries,” Martin explains.

The results? “When you right now searching Google for deposit refund system or you put in deposit refund system in european countries, you will probably find our bulk article.”

They took this further with the Global Waste Index—a comprehensive ranking of OECD countries on waste management created every three years with a professional PR agency. “This is actually the most visited page on our website after the homepage,” Martin notes.

The content attracts visitors who may not need sensors immediately, but it lifts the entire domain’s authority. “It really helps us to reach high positions on Google. So later when people who are looking for sensors can easily find us.”

The lesson: choose a topic adjacent to your product where you can create authoritative, research-backed content. Use it to build domain authority that benefits your entire site.

Lesson 6: Do Less, But Do It Properly

With over 13,000 marketing tools available and new AI capabilities emerging constantly, distraction is the enemy. Martin identifies focus as the critical challenge.

“Nowadays it’s a lot about not losing your focus and getting distracted, not losing the sight of a big picture,” he says. “It’s very easy to get sidetracked.”

His solution runs counter to conventional growth marketing advice: “The challenge right now is to stay consistent and not changing the marketing direction every month or quarter.”

Given B2B marketing’s sprawling scope—digital, outbound, social, events, content—you must make hard choices. “You simply need to realize that you cannot be everywhere and do everything.”

Martin’s philosophy: “I really prefer, and I think it’s important to do, for example less channels but properly also creating value. That’s what I’m always saying. It’s better than just being everywhere, just for being there and not creating any value.”

This means picking three to five channels and executing them exceptionally rather than spreading thin across ten channels with mediocre results.

Lesson 7: Continuous Improvement Beats Delayed Perfection

For startups and scale-ups, perfectionism kills momentum. Martin offers crucial advice for resource-constrained teams.

“If you are a startup, you don’t have to seek for perfection with everything. You may have probably limited capacities in terms of people and budget, but many things you will need to do very fast on your own,” he explains. “So not everything will be perfect, but I think continuous improvement is better than delayed perfection.”

This extends to experimentation, especially with AI. “You should be agile and not be afraid to try things and fail early and often. This can be also considered to the previous question. With AI, the experimentation brings you such a valuable experience and a great insights.”

But there’s a crucial distinction: be agile in tactics while remaining consistent in strategy. Test different email subject lines, experiment with AI tools, iterate on content formats—but don’t pivot your core positioning every quarter.

His final piece of advice captures this mindset perfectly: “Be a doer and not a talker. I know many people who are more theoretic. They say we could do this and we should do that, but there are still less people who really roll up their sleeves and start to do things.”

The Meta-Lesson: Marketing Isn’t Just Marketing’s Job

Perhaps the most important insight Martin shares concerns how marketing itself gets positioned within B2B companies. He references a quote that resonated at a recent marketing festival: “Marketing is too important to be left to the marketing department.”

Martin elaborates on why this matters: “Even my colleagues sometimes don’t get how significant is marketing for our whole company and how the whole brand awareness begins already with other departments like customer support, delivery, product management, or even of course, sales.”

In B2B, especially with complex products and long sales cycles, every customer touchpoint shapes brand perception. Marketing doesn’t stop when the prospect enters a sales conversation—it extends through implementation, support, and renewal.

The companies that scale successfully recognize this truth. They train sales teams to reinforce messaging. They ensure customer support interactions strengthen brand loyalty. They build product experiences that demonstrate the company’s core values.

These seven lessons share a common thread: simplicity in strategy, consistency in execution, and patience in expecting results. In a world obsessed with growth hacks and viral tactics, Martin’s approach offers something more valuable—a playbook for building sustainable B2B brand awareness in competitive markets.