DHL NORTH AMERICA SUPPLY CHAIN

The bigger the company, the more places go-to-market breaks. Different teams, different sectors, different buyers, different language — and no shared definition of what "good" even looks like. Marketing makes assets. Sales runs its plays. When the two don't connect, everybody feels it.

That was DHL's North America supply chain marketing team. Nine verticals, each with its own audience and buying criteria, all needing to speak fluently to sophisticated B2B buyers — and no shared GTM framework tying them together.

The Challenge

DHL North America Supply Chain isn't one business. It's nine verticals, each serving a different industry and a different buyer. That range is the whole point — technology, retail, consumer, industrial, and more, each with real depth.

But at that scale, every vertical had drifted into its own thing: its own content, its own messaging, its own relationship with the sales team it supported. Marketing had the data. The business had the expertise. None of it was organized into something teams could reuse, adapt across sectors, or scale without starting over every campaign.

Underneath was an alignment problem. With no shared content framework, marketing couldn't reliably build assets that backed the sales conversation — and sales couldn't count on marketing to speak the language they were already using with buyers. Nine verticals, nine mini GTM motions, no single story about what DHL does and why it matters.

And a translation problem on top of it. DHL had proprietary data buyers actually wanted, but data doesn't sell itself. Turning supply chain numbers into something that lands with a logistics director or a VP of procurement takes a framework — and that framework didn't exist yet.

What we were working with:

• Nine verticals, each with separate content approaches and no shared GTM framework
• Marketing and sales in silos, with no common content language
• Strong sector expertise and proprietary data that wasn't becoming buyer-facing content
• No consistent way to break content down across formats and channels
• Email that wasn't converting at the rate the funnel needed
• No read on where DHL's content stood against direct competitors

The Shift

What needed to change wasn't one vertical's content, or one campaign, or one channel. It was the foundation underneath all of them — the shared GTM framework every vertical was working without.

That meant starting at the bottom. Figure out where DHL stood against its competitors. Define what a shared content framework needed to look like across sectors. Then build the playbooks that let marketing and sales work from the same starting point, without reinventing the wheel for every vertical or every deal.

It was never about producing more content. It was about giving every piece a shared foundation, and every team a starting point they could actually run with.

The Work

Competitive Maturity Map + Foundational Recommendations

We started by pinning down where DHL actually stood. A competitive maturity map benchmarked DHL against five direct competitors on content mix, channel presence, messaging, and how well each one turned sector expertise into buyer-facing content. That gave us the baseline — and the gaps that mattered most: where DHL was leaving positioning on the table, what was working and worth scaling, and where the GTM foundation was simply missing.

• Competitive maturity map across five direct competitors — content mix, channels, messaging, sector execution
• Gap analysis on where competitors were claiming positioning DHL's content wasn't challenging
• Foundational recommendations defining what the GTM content program needed to look like across all nine verticals

Data Storytelling Playbook

DHL had the data. It just wasn't turning into content buyers engaged with — stories, not spreadsheets. The data storytelling playbook gave the marketing team a repeatable way to spot the data worth building a story around, frame it for different buyers and buying stages, and turn supply chain numbers into narratives that land with procurement and operations leaders.

• How to spot which data points carry the most story potential for B2B supply chain buyers
• How to frame that data differently for a logistics director, a procurement VP, or the C-suite
• Format and channel guidance for data-forward content — long-form, short-form, social
• Templates and examples the team could use immediately across all nine sectors

Content Hub Audits (Nine Verticals)

Before building forward, we needed an honest picture of what already existed. We audited the content hubs across all nine verticals; what was live, what was performing, where the gaps were, and where priority buyer topics had thin or no coverage. Not a surface inventory, each audit went deep enough to name specific opportunities by sector, flag messaging that didn't match across verticals, and surface the strong assets worth building on.

• Content inventory and performance review across all nine verticals
• Gap mapping by sector — where buyer questions and priority topics had no coverage
• Messaging review — where language and positioning varied in ways that confused rather than differentiated
• The highest-potential existing assets in each vertical, flagged for reuse

Atomization Playbooks and Workshop (Nine Verticals)

With the audits done, we built an atomization playbook for each of the nine verticals — how to take one cornerstone asset and turn it into ten across formats and channels, without losing the message or running a full production cycle every time. Then a hands-on workshop put the team through it with their own content, so they could run it solo after.

• An atomization playbook per vertical, tuned to that sector's formats and buyer channels
• How to identify cornerstone content and map it to short-form social, email, sales enablement, video, and one-pagers
• Workshop exercises built on real DHL content
• Channel priorities by vertical — where each sector's buyers actually spend time

Email Conversion Workshop

Email was its own gap. In a long B2B sale, it's often what carries a prospect from marketing content to the sales conversation — and it was converting below what the funnel needed. The email conversion workshop gave the team a framework for email that moves buyers through the funnel instead of just filling inboxes.

• Message hierarchy — what goes first, what earns the next click, what closes the loop
• Subject line and preview text strategy for high-consideration B2B buyers
• CTA structure by funnel stage, from early awareness to late-stage sales support
• Sequencing built around the supply chain buyer's months-long decision

The Outcome 

By the end, DHL's North America supply chain marketing team had the thing it started without: a shared go-to-market foundation.

Nine verticals that had been running independently now shared frameworks, language, and playbooks. Marketing and sales were working from the same story. The team could produce content across sectors without starting from scratch, and sales had assets that backed the buyer conversation instead of running alongside it. And DHL had a clear read on where it stood against competitors, plus a plan for closing the gaps that mattered.

The best part is that it compounds. Atomization built on the audits. The data storytelling playbook fed atomization. The email work plugged into all of it. The more the team uses any one piece, the more useful the rest get.

• Competitive baseline set across five direct competitors, with gaps mapped by sector
• Data storytelling playbook the whole team can run to turn proprietary data into buyer-facing content
• Content hub audits across all nine verticals, each with its own gap and opportunity map
• Atomization playbooks for all nine verticals — one cornerstone asset into many formats
• Email conversion framework with exercises the team could apply the same week
• A connected GTM content system: frameworks that build on each other, so marketing and sales can execute consistently at scale

The Takeaway