15 qualified distributor applications in 7 days. One signed distributor. Under R5,000 ad spend.
15 qualified distributor applications in 7 days. One signed distributor. Under R5,000 ad spend.
Social Media Design
Sales Campaign
Sales Copywriting
Pirtek Africa
15 qualified distributor applications in 7 days. One signed distributor. Under R5,000 ad spend.
Pirtek Africa was spending tens of thousands of dollars flying sales teams across the continent to pitch potential distributors in remote mining regions. The conversion rate was uncertain. The cost was not.
Pirtek Africa
Overview
Pirtek Africa operates in one of the most demanding commercial environments on the continent. Their clients are mining operations and heavy equipment businesses across Sub-Saharan Africa — industries characterised by logistical complexity, dollar-denominated costs, and vast geographic spread. Securing franchisees and distributors in these markets had always required a traditional approach: identify a target, research the organisation, send a sales team, fly to the region, pitch in person, and manage a negotiation process whose outcome was never guaranteed. The problem was not the quality of the Pirtek offer. The problem was the cost and inefficiency of the model. Each prospective distributor required significant due diligence — alignment with host country local empowerment policies, assessment of organisational credibility and market presence, evaluation of commercial commitment. That process, conducted through in-person visits across Africa, was consuming resources at a rate that made growth expensive and slow.
Pirtek Africa had a different aspiration for their distributor network. Not volume. Alignment. They were specifically seeking organisations that honoured local government employment policies — businesses with genuine market presence and commitment, not opportunistic experiments. The right distributor for Pirtek is one who simply lacks a world-class brand, product, and supplier relationship to win the deals they are capable of winning. That specificity — the precision of what the right distributor looks like — was both the strategic challenge and the creative opportunity. A precise target means the message can be precise. And a precise message, delivered to a precisely targeted audience, does not need to be loud. It needs to be right. The brief was to test whether LinkedIn advertising could flip the entire distributor recruitment model. Instead of Pirtek’s sales team pitching for distributors, could distributors be made to pitch Pirtek for the opportunity?
Pirtek Africa
The Challenge
The first challenge was audience definition at a level of granularity that most advertising campaigns never reach. Zambia was selected as the test market — a territory with significant mining activity and the right profile for Pirtek’s distributor criteria. But “businesses in Zambia” is not an audience. “The specific type of organisation — credible, commercially committed, locally compliant, with the right customer base and the aspiration for international brand backing — that Pirtek should be talking to” is an audience. Getting to that level of specificity required mapping the ideal distributor profile with commercial precision: their organisational characteristics, their commercial situation, their primary motivations for seeking a supplier partnership, their aspirations for growth, and the specific combination of credibility signals, commercial benefits, and partnership terms that would make a Pirtek franchise opportunity feel urgent rather than optional. This was not a demographics exercise. It was a buyer psychology exercise — understanding what a serious, well-qualified distributor candidate cares about most, fears most, and wants most from a supplier relationship.
The second challenge was format and duration. The brief called for a 30-second multimedia advertisement. Thirty seconds to reach a busy, commercially sophisticated business owner or decision-maker in a remote mining region of Zambia — someone with no prior relationship with Pirtek Africa, no awareness of the opportunity, and every reason to scroll past. Thirty seconds is not long enough for explanation. It is long enough for a signal. The creative challenge was therefore a distillation problem: from everything that makes the Pirtek opportunity compelling — the brand, the product, the market access, the distribution support, the commercial partnership terms — what is the single most resonant thing to say to the specific person we are trying to reach? What does that person care about most? What does the Pirtek opportunity mean for their specific commercial situation? What does the ad need to make them feel in order to make them act? Alongside that, the territory intelligence needed to be accurate. Knowing where to target — which regions, which industries, which organisations — was as important as knowing what to say. A brilliant message deployed to the wrong audience is wasted. The targeting work and the creative work had to be built simultaneously, each informing the other.
Pirtek Africa
The Solution
The process began with the distributor — not the product. Before any creative was conceived, we mapped the ideal Pirtek Africa distributor with the same rigour applied to any high-stakes buyer: what are their primary commercial motivations? What keeps them from growing as fast as they could? What does a world-class international brand relationship make possible for them that they cannot access independently? What would make them stop scrolling and pay attention? The answers shaped the creative strategy completely. The ideal Pirtek distributor is not looking for just any supplier. They are looking for the credibility infrastructure that allows them to win deals their capability deserves but their brand cannot currently secure. They have the market presence, the relationships, and the commitment. What they lack is the international brand, the product range, and the supplier backing that puts them in the room for the contracts that matter. The Pirtek opportunity is not a product sale. It is a commercial elevation. That insight drove the creative direction. The 30-second multimedia advertisement was built around aspiration and recognition — speaking directly to the experience of being a capable, committed business that cannot access the opportunities it deserves without the right partner behind it. Emotional targeting that resonated before the logic even landed.
Adobe After Effects Adobe Photoshop Adobe Illustrator Sales Copywriting LinkedIN Advertising
Territory mapping ran in parallel. Using a combination of market intelligence and LinkedIn’s geographic and professional targeting capabilities, we identified the specific regions within Zambia with the highest concentration of mining and heavy equipment activity — and therefore the highest density of organisations matching the ideal distributor profile. The targeting architecture meant that the 30-second asset was not distributed broadly. It was delivered precisely. The right message, to the right organisational profile, in the right geographic concentration. LinkedIn’s targeting depth in professional and industry contexts made this possible at a level of precision that broad-reach advertising cannot achieve. The result was an advertising campaign that functioned less like an advertisement and more like a highly targeted sales signal. The ad was not designed to generate awareness. It was designed to generate applications — to make the right person recognise themselves in the message and take a step toward Pirtek Africa, rather than waiting for Pirtek Africa to find them. The role reversal was structural, not incidental. By positioning the Pirtek opportunity as something to be qualified for rather than sold into, the campaign changed the power dynamic of the entire distributor recruitment process — before a single conversation had taken place.
Pirtek Africa
Performance Results
Within 24 hours of the campaign going live, three solid applications had been received. Not enquiries. Not expressions of vague interest. Qualified applications from organisations that had seen the ad, recognised the opportunity, and taken the step of initiating contact with Pirtek Africa. By the end of the first week, that number had reached fifteen. Fifteen organisations — each pre-qualified by the targeting architecture, each having self-selected into the process, each having demonstrated the commercial initiative to pursue the opportunity rather than wait to be found — had applied to become a Pirtek Africa distributor in Zambia. For a business that had previously invested significant time, travel, and dollar-denominated cost in the pursuit of individual distributor relationships — with uncertain outcomes at the end of every engagement — fifteen qualified applications in seven days represented a fundamental transformation in commercial model efficiency.
Pirtek Africa
Final thoughts
Pirtek Africa’s sales team was not the problem. They were skilled, experienced, and motivated. The problem was the model they were operating in — one that required them to spend significant time, money, and energy pursuing people who had not yet decided they were interested. Cold pursuit is an expensive way to build a distribution network. It puts the seller in the weakest possible commercial position from the first conversation. The prospect knows they haven’t asked for the meeting. The seller knows they’re working against that. And every negotiation that follows carries the invisible weight of that dynamic — the seller needing to close, the prospect knowing it. The Pirtek campaign did not change the quality of the distributor relationships. It changed the power structure underneath them. When a prospect has self-selected — when they have seen the opportunity, recognised themselves in it, and taken the initiative to apply — the entire commercial conversation is different. They arrive motivated. They arrive pre-qualified. And the organisation they are approaching is, from the first contact, in the position of evaluator rather than petitioner. This is what a precisely built sales asset can do when it is deployed with the right targeting and the right commercial argument. It does not simply generate leads. It restructures the relationship between the organisation and its market — making the right people come to you, pre-sorted, pre-motivated, and ready to be evaluated rather than persuaded. If your pipeline depends on your team finding the right people and convincing them to engage — the question worth asking is: what would it look like if the right people found you instead?
Pirtek Africa
Credits
Previous Project
Next Project
15 qualified distributor applications in 7 days. One signed distributor. Under R5,000 ad spend.
15 qualified distributor applications in 7 days. One signed distributor. Under R5,000 ad spend.
Social Media Design
Sales Campaign
Sales Copywriting
Pirtek Africa
15 qualified distributor applications in 7 days. One signed distributor. Under R5,000 ad spend.
Pirtek Africa was spending tens of thousands of dollars flying sales teams across the continent to pitch potential distributors in remote mining regions. The conversion rate was uncertain. The cost was not.
Pirtek Africa
Overview
Pirtek Africa operates in one of the most demanding commercial environments on the continent. Their clients are mining operations and heavy equipment businesses across Sub-Saharan Africa — industries characterised by logistical complexity, dollar-denominated costs, and vast geographic spread. Securing franchisees and distributors in these markets had always required a traditional approach: identify a target, research the organisation, send a sales team, fly to the region, pitch in person, and manage a negotiation process whose outcome was never guaranteed. The problem was not the quality of the Pirtek offer. The problem was the cost and inefficiency of the model. Each prospective distributor required significant due diligence — alignment with host country local empowerment policies, assessment of organisational credibility and market presence, evaluation of commercial commitment. That process, conducted through in-person visits across Africa, was consuming resources at a rate that made growth expensive and slow.
Pirtek Africa had a different aspiration for their distributor network. Not volume. Alignment. They were specifically seeking organisations that honoured local government employment policies — businesses with genuine market presence and commitment, not opportunistic experiments. The right distributor for Pirtek is one who simply lacks a world-class brand, product, and supplier relationship to win the deals they are capable of winning. That specificity — the precision of what the right distributor looks like — was both the strategic challenge and the creative opportunity. A precise target means the message can be precise. And a precise message, delivered to a precisely targeted audience, does not need to be loud. It needs to be right. The brief was to test whether LinkedIn advertising could flip the entire distributor recruitment model. Instead of Pirtek’s sales team pitching for distributors, could distributors be made to pitch Pirtek for the opportunity?
Pirtek Africa
The Challenge
The first challenge was audience definition at a level of granularity that most advertising campaigns never reach. Zambia was selected as the test market — a territory with significant mining activity and the right profile for Pirtek’s distributor criteria. But “businesses in Zambia” is not an audience. “The specific type of organisation — credible, commercially committed, locally compliant, with the right customer base and the aspiration for international brand backing — that Pirtek should be talking to” is an audience. Getting to that level of specificity required mapping the ideal distributor profile with commercial precision: their organisational characteristics, their commercial situation, their primary motivations for seeking a supplier partnership, their aspirations for growth, and the specific combination of credibility signals, commercial benefits, and partnership terms that would make a Pirtek franchise opportunity feel urgent rather than optional. This was not a demographics exercise. It was a buyer psychology exercise — understanding what a serious, well-qualified distributor candidate cares about most, fears most, and wants most from a supplier relationship.
The second challenge was format and duration. The brief called for a 30-second multimedia advertisement. Thirty seconds to reach a busy, commercially sophisticated business owner or decision-maker in a remote mining region of Zambia — someone with no prior relationship with Pirtek Africa, no awareness of the opportunity, and every reason to scroll past. Thirty seconds is not long enough for explanation. It is long enough for a signal. The creative challenge was therefore a distillation problem: from everything that makes the Pirtek opportunity compelling — the brand, the product, the market access, the distribution support, the commercial partnership terms — what is the single most resonant thing to say to the specific person we are trying to reach? What does that person care about most? What does the Pirtek opportunity mean for their specific commercial situation? What does the ad need to make them feel in order to make them act? Alongside that, the territory intelligence needed to be accurate. Knowing where to target — which regions, which industries, which organisations — was as important as knowing what to say. A brilliant message deployed to the wrong audience is wasted. The targeting work and the creative work had to be built simultaneously, each informing the other.
Pirtek Africa
The Solution
The process began with the distributor — not the product. Before any creative was conceived, we mapped the ideal Pirtek Africa distributor with the same rigour applied to any high-stakes buyer: what are their primary commercial motivations? What keeps them from growing as fast as they could? What does a world-class international brand relationship make possible for them that they cannot access independently? What would make them stop scrolling and pay attention? The answers shaped the creative strategy completely. The ideal Pirtek distributor is not looking for just any supplier. They are looking for the credibility infrastructure that allows them to win deals their capability deserves but their brand cannot currently secure. They have the market presence, the relationships, and the commitment. What they lack is the international brand, the product range, and the supplier backing that puts them in the room for the contracts that matter. The Pirtek opportunity is not a product sale. It is a commercial elevation. That insight drove the creative direction. The 30-second multimedia advertisement was built around aspiration and recognition — speaking directly to the experience of being a capable, committed business that cannot access the opportunities it deserves without the right partner behind it. Emotional targeting that resonated before the logic even landed.
Adobe After Effects Adobe Photoshop Adobe Illustrator Sales Copywriting LinkedIN Advertising
Territory mapping ran in parallel. Using a combination of market intelligence and LinkedIn’s geographic and professional targeting capabilities, we identified the specific regions within Zambia with the highest concentration of mining and heavy equipment activity — and therefore the highest density of organisations matching the ideal distributor profile. The targeting architecture meant that the 30-second asset was not distributed broadly. It was delivered precisely. The right message, to the right organisational profile, in the right geographic concentration. LinkedIn’s targeting depth in professional and industry contexts made this possible at a level of precision that broad-reach advertising cannot achieve. The result was an advertising campaign that functioned less like an advertisement and more like a highly targeted sales signal. The ad was not designed to generate awareness. It was designed to generate applications — to make the right person recognise themselves in the message and take a step toward Pirtek Africa, rather than waiting for Pirtek Africa to find them. The role reversal was structural, not incidental. By positioning the Pirtek opportunity as something to be qualified for rather than sold into, the campaign changed the power dynamic of the entire distributor recruitment process — before a single conversation had taken place.
Pirtek Africa
Performance Results
Within 24 hours of the campaign going live, three solid applications had been received. Not enquiries. Not expressions of vague interest. Qualified applications from organisations that had seen the ad, recognised the opportunity, and taken the step of initiating contact with Pirtek Africa. By the end of the first week, that number had reached fifteen. Fifteen organisations — each pre-qualified by the targeting architecture, each having self-selected into the process, each having demonstrated the commercial initiative to pursue the opportunity rather than wait to be found — had applied to become a Pirtek Africa distributor in Zambia. For a business that had previously invested significant time, travel, and dollar-denominated cost in the pursuit of individual distributor relationships — with uncertain outcomes at the end of every engagement — fifteen qualified applications in seven days represented a fundamental transformation in commercial model efficiency.
Pirtek Africa
Final thoughts
Pirtek Africa’s sales team was not the problem. They were skilled, experienced, and motivated. The problem was the model they were operating in — one that required them to spend significant time, money, and energy pursuing people who had not yet decided they were interested. Cold pursuit is an expensive way to build a distribution network. It puts the seller in the weakest possible commercial position from the first conversation. The prospect knows they haven’t asked for the meeting. The seller knows they’re working against that. And every negotiation that follows carries the invisible weight of that dynamic — the seller needing to close, the prospect knowing it. The Pirtek campaign did not change the quality of the distributor relationships. It changed the power structure underneath them. When a prospect has self-selected — when they have seen the opportunity, recognised themselves in it, and taken the initiative to apply — the entire commercial conversation is different. They arrive motivated. They arrive pre-qualified. And the organisation they are approaching is, from the first contact, in the position of evaluator rather than petitioner. This is what a precisely built sales asset can do when it is deployed with the right targeting and the right commercial argument. It does not simply generate leads. It restructures the relationship between the organisation and its market — making the right people come to you, pre-sorted, pre-motivated, and ready to be evaluated rather than persuaded. If your pipeline depends on your team finding the right people and convincing them to engage — the question worth asking is: what would it look like if the right people found you instead?
Pirtek Africa
Previous Project
Next Project
15 qualified distributor applications in 7 days. One signed distributor. Under R5,000 ad spend.
15 qualified distributor applications in 7 days. One signed distributor. Under R5,000 ad spend.
Social Media Design
Sales Campaign
Sales Copywriting
Pirtek Africa
15 qualified distributor applications in 7 days. One signed distributor. Under R5,000 ad spend.
Pirtek Africa was spending tens of thousands of dollars flying sales teams across the continent to pitch potential distributors in remote mining regions. The conversion rate was uncertain. The cost was not.
Pirtek Africa
Overview
Pirtek Africa operates in one of the most demanding commercial environments on the continent. Their clients are mining operations and heavy equipment businesses across Sub-Saharan Africa — industries characterised by logistical complexity, dollar-denominated costs, and vast geographic spread. Securing franchisees and distributors in these markets had always required a traditional approach: identify a target, research the organisation, send a sales team, fly to the region, pitch in person, and manage a negotiation process whose outcome was never guaranteed. The problem was not the quality of the Pirtek offer. The problem was the cost and inefficiency of the model. Each prospective distributor required significant due diligence — alignment with host country local empowerment policies, assessment of organisational credibility and market presence, evaluation of commercial commitment. That process, conducted through in-person visits across Africa, was consuming resources at a rate that made growth expensive and slow.
Pirtek Africa had a different aspiration for their distributor network. Not volume. Alignment. They were specifically seeking organisations that honoured local government employment policies — businesses with genuine market presence and commitment, not opportunistic experiments. The right distributor for Pirtek is one who simply lacks a world-class brand, product, and supplier relationship to win the deals they are capable of winning. That specificity — the precision of what the right distributor looks like — was both the strategic challenge and the creative opportunity. A precise target means the message can be precise. And a precise message, delivered to a precisely targeted audience, does not need to be loud. It needs to be right. The brief was to test whether LinkedIn advertising could flip the entire distributor recruitment model. Instead of Pirtek’s sales team pitching for distributors, could distributors be made to pitch Pirtek for the opportunity?
Pirtek Africa
The Challenge
The first challenge was audience definition at a level of granularity that most advertising campaigns never reach. Zambia was selected as the test market — a territory with significant mining activity and the right profile for Pirtek’s distributor criteria. But “businesses in Zambia” is not an audience. “The specific type of organisation — credible, commercially committed, locally compliant, with the right customer base and the aspiration for international brand backing — that Pirtek should be talking to” is an audience. Getting to that level of specificity required mapping the ideal distributor profile with commercial precision: their organisational characteristics, their commercial situation, their primary motivations for seeking a supplier partnership, their aspirations for growth, and the specific combination of credibility signals, commercial benefits, and partnership terms that would make a Pirtek franchise opportunity feel urgent rather than optional. This was not a demographics exercise. It was a buyer psychology exercise — understanding what a serious, well-qualified distributor candidate cares about most, fears most, and wants most from a supplier relationship.
The second challenge was format and duration. The brief called for a 30-second multimedia advertisement. Thirty seconds to reach a busy, commercially sophisticated business owner or decision-maker in a remote mining region of Zambia — someone with no prior relationship with Pirtek Africa, no awareness of the opportunity, and every reason to scroll past. Thirty seconds is not long enough for explanation. It is long enough for a signal. The creative challenge was therefore a distillation problem: from everything that makes the Pirtek opportunity compelling — the brand, the product, the market access, the distribution support, the commercial partnership terms — what is the single most resonant thing to say to the specific person we are trying to reach? What does that person care about most? What does the Pirtek opportunity mean for their specific commercial situation? What does the ad need to make them feel in order to make them act? Alongside that, the territory intelligence needed to be accurate. Knowing where to target — which regions, which industries, which organisations — was as important as knowing what to say. A brilliant message deployed to the wrong audience is wasted. The targeting work and the creative work had to be built simultaneously, each informing the other.
Pirtek Africa
The Solution
The process began with the distributor — not the product. Before any creative was conceived, we mapped the ideal Pirtek Africa distributor with the same rigour applied to any high-stakes buyer: what are their primary commercial motivations? What keeps them from growing as fast as they could? What does a world-class international brand relationship make possible for them that they cannot access independently? What would make them stop scrolling and pay attention? The answers shaped the creative strategy completely. The ideal Pirtek distributor is not looking for just any supplier. They are looking for the credibility infrastructure that allows them to win deals their capability deserves but their brand cannot currently secure. They have the market presence, the relationships, and the commitment. What they lack is the international brand, the product range, and the supplier backing that puts them in the room for the contracts that matter. The Pirtek opportunity is not a product sale. It is a commercial elevation. That insight drove the creative direction. The 30-second multimedia advertisement was built around aspiration and recognition — speaking directly to the experience of being a capable, committed business that cannot access the opportunities it deserves without the right partner behind it. Emotional targeting that resonated before the logic even landed.
Adobe After Effects Adobe Photoshop Adobe Illustrator Sales Copywriting LinkedIN Advertising
Territory mapping ran in parallel. Using a combination of market intelligence and LinkedIn’s geographic and professional targeting capabilities, we identified the specific regions within Zambia with the highest concentration of mining and heavy equipment activity — and therefore the highest density of organisations matching the ideal distributor profile. The targeting architecture meant that the 30-second asset was not distributed broadly. It was delivered precisely. The right message, to the right organisational profile, in the right geographic concentration. LinkedIn’s targeting depth in professional and industry contexts made this possible at a level of precision that broad-reach advertising cannot achieve. The result was an advertising campaign that functioned less like an advertisement and more like a highly targeted sales signal. The ad was not designed to generate awareness. It was designed to generate applications — to make the right person recognise themselves in the message and take a step toward Pirtek Africa, rather than waiting for Pirtek Africa to find them. The role reversal was structural, not incidental. By positioning the Pirtek opportunity as something to be qualified for rather than sold into, the campaign changed the power dynamic of the entire distributor recruitment process — before a single conversation had taken place.
Pirtek Africa
Performance Results
Within 24 hours of the campaign going live, three solid applications had been received. Not enquiries. Not expressions of vague interest. Qualified applications from organisations that had seen the ad, recognised the opportunity, and taken the step of initiating contact with Pirtek Africa. By the end of the first week, that number had reached fifteen. Fifteen organisations — each pre-qualified by the targeting architecture, each having self-selected into the process, each having demonstrated the commercial initiative to pursue the opportunity rather than wait to be found — had applied to become a Pirtek Africa distributor in Zambia. For a business that had previously invested significant time, travel, and dollar-denominated cost in the pursuit of individual distributor relationships — with uncertain outcomes at the end of every engagement — fifteen qualified applications in seven days represented a fundamental transformation in commercial model efficiency.
Pirtek Africa
Final thoughts
Pirtek Africa’s sales team was not the problem. They were skilled, experienced, and motivated. The problem was the model they were operating in — one that required them to spend significant time, money, and energy pursuing people who had not yet decided they were interested. Cold pursuit is an expensive way to build a distribution network. It puts the seller in the weakest possible commercial position from the first conversation. The prospect knows they haven’t asked for the meeting. The seller knows they’re working against that. And every negotiation that follows carries the invisible weight of that dynamic — the seller needing to close, the prospect knowing it. The Pirtek campaign did not change the quality of the distributor relationships. It changed the power structure underneath them. When a prospect has self-selected — when they have seen the opportunity, recognised themselves in it, and taken the initiative to apply — the entire commercial conversation is different. They arrive motivated. They arrive pre-qualified. And the organisation they are approaching is, from the first contact, in the position of evaluator rather than petitioner. This is what a precisely built sales asset can do when it is deployed with the right targeting and the right commercial argument. It does not simply generate leads. It restructures the relationship between the organisation and its market — making the right people come to you, pre-sorted, pre-motivated, and ready to be evaluated rather than persuaded. If your pipeline depends on your team finding the right people and convincing them to engage — the question worth asking is: what would it look like if the right people found you instead?
Pirtek Africa
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Next Project
One conversation to find
out if we are the right fit
for YOU
Tell us what you're selling. Who needs to say yes. What's at stake if they don't. We'll tell you exactly what we'd build — and whether we're the right studio to build it.
No obligation. No vague creative brief. A direct conversation about the commercial job your presentation or sales assets needs to do.
One conversation to find
out if we are the right fit
for YOU
Tell us what you're selling. Who needs to say yes. What's at stake if they don't. We'll tell you exactly what we'd build — and whether we're the right studio to build it.
No obligation. No vague creative brief. A direct conversation about the commercial job your presentation or sales assets needs to do.
One conversation to find
out if we are the right fit
for YOU
Tell us what you're selling. Who needs to say yes. What's at stake if they don't. We'll tell you exactly what we'd build — and whether we're the right studio to build it.
No obligation. No vague creative brief. A direct conversation about the commercial job your presentation or sales assets needs to do.