Challenge:
CH Hanson was having trouble with brand recognition—potential clients either weren’t aware of them or only associated them with one product. How could they increase awareness across their offerings?
Outcome:
CH Hanson launched a university with BlueVolt, and by consistently releasing content and creating internal buy-in, they increased engagement with their courses, leading to increased brand awareness, product familiarity, and distributor member adoption.
The Story:
CH Hanson, a family-owned manufacturer since 1866, is a respected brand that serves the construction, metalworking, and plumbing tool markets, with SKUs including Palmgren Machinery and SuperiorTool. Steven Yonkers, Product Manager at CH Hanson, has been with the company since 2017. According to Yonkers, CH Hanson has thousands of individual products.
“The last number I got was over 6500 individual unique SKUs combined across all three brands. I always go back to the old saying: knowledge is power. For us, having that many SKUs, our biggest task was educating our customer on not only what our SKUs or products do, but what we have.”
Despite CH Hanson’s size and brand offerings, Yonkers found that most potential clients only associated them with one product – steel stamps.
“There's a funny saying that my sales manager and I have: go and talk to an industrial distributor, and they’ll go ‘I know CH Hanson. They do steel stamps.’ We joked about making our marketing slogan ‘CH Hanson: more than just steel stamps.’”
This was an issue: when they attended events for buying groups they belonged to, distributor members either didn’t know who they were or only knew about one of their products. But in 2021, CH Hanson discovered BlueVolt.
“We realized the value of being able to give our customers knowledge. Again, knowledge is power, right? This gave us a great outlet to be able to get to distributors digitally—it's very difficult in the industrial distribution market to get a salesperson's time. And if you get their time, that time is golden.”
Because they have so many products, CH Hanson decided to first release courses to their buying group partners, like NetPlus Alliance, that gave a wider overview of the company. Over time, they created a rhythm and best practices for releasing new content.
“We started working on a cadence of one or max two courses released at a time [every] couple weeks... I have seen a lot of success in getting distribution to go in and take all the courses that we have,” Yonkers said.
“We started to really push BlueVolt. NetPlus is fantastic—Cynthia at NetPlus does a great job every single time. There's a new course, I send it to her, she puts it up on their platform and they push it to all their members.”
In addition to slowly releasing content and marketing it through NetPlus, Yonkers worked to get internal buy-in on the training program across the company.
“This year, it became a main focus, not only for myself on the product management marketing side, but from top down, even our President and management and leadership group. They wanted to see monthly updates on where enrollments were, how course engagements were,” Yonkers said.
By releasing content at a consistent rate, increasing internal buy-in, and pushing new courses to their buying groups, CH Hanson saw engagement in their courses more than double from 2022 to 2023. According to Yonkers, the change has been massive.
“At NetPlus especially... we have seen massive returns of that knowledge,” Yonkers said. “Now, they come to us knowing who we are and what we do, and we can talk... I don't see it as a dollar-for-dollar ROI. But to me, that is an ROI of having those members know we're more than just steel stamps.”
In the future, Yonkers hopes to expand CH Hanson’s reach in the channel with BlueVolt, as well as to make more use of the platform internally. But with only a few years with BlueVolt under his belt, he’s been pleased to see CH Hanson’s presence grow.
Conclusion:
CH Hanson utilized their university to reach the BlueVolt network of buying groups, putting themselves in control of their presence in the market. By using course release best practices and making training a cornerstone of their marketing plan, they increased engagement with their content and solidified their brand’s presence with buying groups.
"BlueVolt has built a great relationship with the buying groups that only helps us,” Yonkers said. “Knowledge is power—as a supplier, a manufacturer, the more knowledge that we can give to our customer, that gives us power and that also empowers them as well, and that’s what BlueVolt helps us do."
