I showed up to a locomotive factory in a pair of too-big, borrowed steel-toed boots and a shiny new title: Digital Marketing Leader. Nobody knew what to do with me.
I came straight from corporate New York — finance, private equity, the kind of offices where the biggest logistics challenge was getting the Pantone right on a printed brochure. GE Transportation was something else entirely: a $5 billion industrial business making locomotives, mining equipment, and marine engines in Erie, Pennsylvania.
The engineers on the factory floor were gracious, but baffled. One of them summed it up perfectly: "So… are you here to help us sell locomotives on Facebook?"
It was a fair question. But here's the thing: GE Transportation wasn't actually trying to sell more locomotives. Railroads already had locomotives — many of them sitting in rail yards, parked and underutilized. What GE was really selling was software and services to make those parked locomotives worth running again. Fuel optimization that cut operating costs. Predictive maintenance that eliminated unplanned downtime. Fleet management systems that helped operators do more with what they already owned.
That's a completely different sales conversation than "buy this machine." It's "here's what your existing fleet is costing you — and here's what it could be doing instead." That story required data, live calculations, and a way to make a CFO feel the ROI before signing anything. A brochure had no chance.
My job was to figure out what "digital" actually meant in this context — and build something that could tell that story in a conference room in front of a railroad's executive team.
The iPad had just changed what was possible. Almost nobody in B2B industrial had noticed yet.
This was 2012. The iPad was two years old. Consumer apps were exploding, but enterprise B2B sales tools were still firmly in PowerPoint territory.
The insight was simple: a sales tool should feel like a product. It should have a roadmap, feature iterations, and a user experience designed around the person holding it — not the marketing team that built it. Each app would be treated as a digital product in its own right, with its own platform roadmap and feature set.
We didn't build one tool. We built a suite of 15.
Each app simplified one thing the sales team struggled to explain. Then we made that one thing come alive.
Some tools were visual configurators. Some were ROI calculators. Some translated complex engineering specs into language a CFO would care about. All of them did one thing a brochure couldn't: respond to the conversation in the room.
The centerpiece was the Durathon Battery Shape Shifter Calculator — a tool built using 3D modeling software MATLAB integrated with iOS. It was the first mobile app ever to combine MATLAB with the iPhone OS. Customers could model battery configurations in real time, visualize performance tradeoffs, and see ROI projections update live during the sales conversation.
The tools simplified complex product offerings and enabled the sales team to visualize the value of GE's software and solutions in ways that were previously impossible to convey in a meeting room. A rep could walk in, open an iPad, and run a live conversation — steering it based on what the customer actually cared about, in real time.
The engineer who asked about Facebook would have understood this one immediately.
It worked. Then the rest of GE came calling.
The tools transformed how GE Transportation's sales team operated — reps who had spent years managing static collateral now walked into meetings ready to run a live, interactive conversation tailored to each customer's priorities.
The impact didn't stop at GE Transportation. The model was adopted by other GE business units — Wind Turbines, Power Generators — who saw what was happening and wanted in. What started as a single team's problem became a template for the enterprise.
The locomotive was never the problem. It was never being shown right.
This is still the pattern I see everywhere: genuinely great products being sold with tools that don't do them justice. The product team has done their job. The sales team is trying. But the bridge between what the product does and what the customer understands is broken.
The fix is almost never "more content." It's better questions: What is the hardest thing to explain in a sales meeting? What decision does the customer need to make, and what information do they need to make it? What would it look like if the tool served the salesperson instead of the marketing department?
At GE Transportation, the answer was making parked locomotives worth moving again.