Client Profile
Since 1942, , RB Royal, a Wisconsin-based manufacturer, has been providing design, prototyping, and manufacturing services (custom tube bending, hose assembly, brazing, welding, and kitting) for custom fluid transfer systems, including oil lines, fuel lines, and engine dipstick tubes.
Business Situation
RB Royal lacked an inside sales process, relying instead on national sales reps. It faced the same issue many companies face: the sales reps resisted hunting for new business, preferring to focus on easier repeat sales. Over its 84-year history, RB Royal tried several strategies, including hiring business development representatives, but each new approach ultimately failed to deliver lasting results.
When Ryan Blaine, president and CEO, took the reins nearly two years ago, there was no unified inside sales process, limited use of CRM tools, and little visibility into performance across the team. As a result, the company was not growing with intent and lacked a repeatable framework for entering new markets.
“There was no strategy behind how we were growing,” Ryan said. “Historically, much of our growth had been opportunistic rather than the result of a repeatable commercial strategy. We were winning business, but we weren’t consistently targeting specific industries, accounts, or market segments in a structured way. Throughout our 84 years, we had landed several excellent customers, including large OEMs, but when I stepped into the role, I recognized that many of those wins were inbound or relationship-driven rather than the result of a formalized business development process. My focus shifted to building a scalable growth engine, implementing a CRM discipline, improving pipeline visibility, strengthening our digital presence, and creating a more proactive market diversification strategy.
Building a More Structured Growth Strategy
Before joining RB Royal, Ryan was president and CEO of Aztalan and had great success outsourcing the front-end new business development activities and sales coordination to Athena SWC.
Ryan enlisted Athena’s help once again. His primary objective was to diversify RB Royal’s customer base — 60% of its business was in the same industry. He also wanted to improve the company’s online presence by implementing search engine optimization (SEO) best practices to drive the right traffic to the site.
Athena was brought in to provide a structured front-end sales and marketing model (outbound, inbound/SEO, and sales pipeline management) to generate qualified opportunities.
How a Manufacturing SEO Agency Helped Attract Better-Fit Leads
RB Royal’s visually appealing website lacked basic SEO fundamentals, resulting in poor search engine performance. The manufacturing SEO agency performed technical SEO and implemented a keyword strategy to bring the right opportunities to the site.
“Our traffic has skyrocketed from where it was just a little over a year ago. So, from nothing to huge gains, even now, starting into our second year, as we refine our keywords, we’re still seeing steady increases in activity,” said Ryan. “Our digital presence was attracting lower-volume transactional work, whereas our strategic goal was to position RB Royal as a high-value engineering and manufacturing partner for OEM and industrial applications. Athena has helped us transition to a business-to-business model. The first year is more of the road map and building, so we are anticipating that year two is going to be a breakthrough for us.”
Using Pipedrive CRM to Improve Sales Visibility
Before working with Athena, RB Royal relied on spreadsheets and a legacy CRM that were inconsistently used across the team, making it difficult to understand pipeline status or measure progress across sales efforts.
With Athena’s support, RB Royal implemented Pipedrive as a centralized CRM and moved the entire team onto a single platform. This shift created a consistent process for managing leads, tracking outreach, and reporting on performance.
“Everybody’s on the same page,” Ryan said. “It’s simple, it’s quick, it’s easy. It’s really allowed us to organize our information. The reporting process for my team has been streamlined because we no longer pull information from multiple spreadsheets. I have real-time information to know where we are at.”
How Athena’s Process Led to Measurable Value
Ryan finds value in Athena’s process, which maintains a specific cadence for tasks and outreach, and in how the team works seamlessly as an extension of his team.
“You know they’re in the background working for you. You can see the activity. You can see the dials. You can see the follow-ups and monthly touchpoints,” he said. “The e-mail correspondence back and forth with prospects feels like they’re really, truly an extension of your internal team, even though they’re Athena employees. The Athena team has RB Royal emails, so when they reach out, it’s showing us as a unified front. It makes our small operation feel much, much larger.”
As a result of Athena SWC’s work, it generated 17 qualified appointments. Of those, 11 were the result of cold calls, and the remaining came through the website. Many of these opportunities are from targeted sectors, including heavy truck, marine, and power generation, demonstrating Athena’s success in achieving its diversification objective. Of the 17 leads, 9 companies have submitted 51 quotes with an initial value of $4.6 million; the highest quotes are over $500K. The potential annual value could be significantly higher.
Manufacturing SEO Agency Helps to Drive Results
Because of the SEO manufacturing Agency’s work, the website has seen a significant increase in traffic, and impressions are up 211%. Top 5 SERPs (search engine results position) — the number of times RB Royal appeared in the top five of a Google search — increased from 29 to 357, and Top 10 SERPs increased from 56 to 441.
