Growing what you already have before chasing what you dont
Edition 051 · 1 October 2026
In putting together the programme for Meet Magento UK each year, it’s often my role to pull together the themes our retailer panels tell us they’re interested in, and match up different ways of looking at the same point from different angles. This year, two sessions did that for me on the question of growth: one from an industrial tools company, one from an engagement psychologist, both asking if the customers you already have are still getting value from what they bought.
Evgenii Garde, who heads up Tool Services marketing at Hilti, grows revenue by getting more use out of the tools a customer already owns, rather than selling new customers more of them. Scott Gould, of Ampersand Group, came at engagement from the other end: his five engines apply from the first click to the lifelong customer, and some of his examples are about what happens after someone has already bought.
Garde’s numbers make the case for me. Hilti’s tools aren’t cheap, with a breaker costing around two thousand pounds by his estimate, and the growth he described doesn’t come from selling more of them. It comes from getting more out of the ones a customer already owns. Tools carry a Bluetooth tag that gateways in vans and warehouses read, and 1.3 million connected devices feed one platform. That answers a question a purchasing manager used to have to guess at: before I buy another breaker, is there a tool available somewhere in the business that I could relocate instead?
Garde reduced the pitch to one line:
“Pretty much the concept of buy less, but everything from us. And that’s how we get the market share and the share of wallet from customers.”
Separately, he said the software side of the business is growing in a 30-ish per cent ballpark year to year. His team also runs a quarterly health check with each customer to check they’re using the system, drawing on the usage data they already collect, and follows up when something looks off. Watch Garde’s talk in full.
What I like is how Hilti sells it. Garde put the problem plainly:
“Rather often the question is not what solution to get, but how to make that solution work.”
So the team maps the customer’s process first and starts with something low commitment, sometimes with nothing asked for up front and the charge coming afterwards. They then hand-hold the customer through each step. He described three teams, solution consultants who build the business case at C-suite level, implementation specialists who do the work on site, and ongoing support.
Gould’s frame is that people engage with a website as they would a person rather than a page, and judge it on warmth and competence, the two things we use to size up anyone we meet. He runs each of his engines through three lenses: acquisition, conversion and retention. That framing explains why speed matters to him: we expect computers to respond at the speed of conversation, and a slow website reads as rude and, worse, as less competent.
His five engines of engagement – sharedness, prompt, unexpected, role, story – read like an acquisition toolkit until you get to the retention examples. People forget, so remind them. On sequels, he said:
“Offer the customer legitimate sequels instead of money squeezing sequels.”
Then ask. On that, he was clear that a lot of us forget customers are still waiting to be asked:
“People are waiting to be asked, people will act when asked.”
He also pointed at customer’s role, which means letting people customise or personalise, as GSF Car Parts does when you put in your registration. On community he was direct that it’s a moat if you have one, and that if you don’t have an online community you shouldn’t try to build one. Watch Gould’s talk in full.
Side by side, Garde has the instrumentation, tags on tools and usage data flowing into a platform, and uses it to see who is and isn’t using what they’ve bought. My version needs no hardware: notice the signals already sitting there, the customer who hasn’t opened an email in a month, the account that’s stopped touching half of what they’re paying for, and treat that as a reason to get in touch.
I’d bet most businesses have a version of Hilti’s data sitting in a CRM or an order history that hasn’t been opened in months. Winning a new customer this quarter is the easy question to ask. Checking that the ones you’ve already got are still using everything they bought is the harder question, so I’d ask it first.
Every other talk from Meet Magento UK 2026 is on our YouTube channel, all in one playlist. Both sessions are also part of The Official Meet Magento UK 2026 eBook, our written-up collection of this year’s sessions, produced by JH and Corefinity. Sign up to get it the moment it’s live.
This article first appeared on CEO and Founder, Jamie Huskisson’s LinkedIn newsletter, Breakthrough Commerce.
