A conversation with Björn Otto, founder of Interius Solutions

Here's a hiring rule that almost every water tech company follows without thinking twice: if you want a salesperson, they'd better have an engineering degree. We even gave the role its own title. Sales engineer. The logic is obvious. Nobody is going to hand you six figures for a membrane system if the person across the table can't explain how it works.

Now ask yourself how many water companies apply that same standard to the people running their marketing.

Björn Otto noticed the gap years ago, and it eventually pushed him to start his own firm. Björn is an environmental engineer turned marketer based in Germany, and the founder of Interius Solutions, which exists to help water tech companies, in his words, "become visible, finally." He spent years in sales and marketing for membrane companies, and the thing that drove him crazy was working alongside marketers who, as he put it, "couldn't separate the UF from an RO" while being responsible for marketing a membrane company.

"How can you market something if you never talked to a customer, if you never tried to sell your technology to someone else?" he asked. "If you have never sat across from someone who wants to put 100,000 or millions into your technology, how do you want to write a script? How do you want to build an automation? How do you build a funnel?"

My favorite example from our conversation says it all. An agency once told Björn that Amazon was his company's competitor, because Amazon sells water filters. "The difference," he said, "is my water filters go into a Tesla fab. The Amazon water filters go into your coffee machine." If your agency can't tell those two things apart, they cannot market either one.

Marketing Belongs at the Beginning, Not the End

Most founders treat marketing as the thing you turn on once the product is finished. Build the breakthrough technology, then go find someone to announce it. Björn thinks that's backwards, and he's watched it sink companies.

"I have found companies and technologies that are brilliant, but there is no market for them," he said. "If you haven't talked to operators, if you haven't checked whether there's a niche for your technology, you will fail in the end."

His reframe is simple. First the market, then the technology. Marketing's earliest and most valuable job isn't writing the launch copy. It's pressure testing whether anyone actually needs what you're about to spend three years building. "You need somebody who can say, wait a minute, we are running in the wrong direction, because there's no market for what we're trying to sell."

I've made this point to founders a hundred times and it still surprises them. You have to understand the customer's problem and what's already on the market before you can know whether you're filling a real gap. The engineer's instinct is to assume the product will speak for itself. It won't.

The Expectations Trap

This was the part of the conversation I keep coming back to, because it explains so much of the skepticism I run into.

Plenty of water company engineers don't believe in marketing. Björn's diagnosis is that they don't actually have a marketing problem. They have an expectations problem. "Most CEOs expect that if they have a marketing department, it should bring them 10 or 20 leads a day, fully automated, for their 500,000 Euro membrane solution, and they just convert them and get rich. If that's your expectation, you will fail."

His line for it was perfect: "You've found the short way to hell."

We are not selling books to consumers. This is B2B, a conservative industry with a sales cycle measured in years. Marketing's job in that environment is to build the brand and the visibility that make the eventual sale possible, not to drop pre qualified buyers into a rep's inbox by Tuesday. When a CEO measures a brand building function against a lead vending machine, marketing always looks broken. It isn't. The scorecard is.

So who's to blame when marketing genuinely doesn't perform? I asked Björn directly, marketing or management. He didn't flinch. "First of all, marketing. You are responsible for your department. Full stop." But the fix he described is a management one: stop letting marketing operate as a silo that survives by begging other departments for a photo from the last installation. Build the bridge between sales and marketing so they're working from the same expectations.

Get Your Marketers Out of the Building

If there's one piece of tactical advice from this episode I'd staple to every water company's wall, it's this. Send your marketers into the field before you let them touch a campaign.

"If you hire a new person in marketing, send them out with the salespeople, or put them in the service department," Björn said. "They need to talk to the operators, to the people who are going to buy the technology, before they touch marketing." How long? There's no clean answer. A month, six months, it depends on the person. The principle matters more than the number.

Trade shows are where this really shows up. Most companies, Björn pointed out, treat marketing's role at a show as logistics. "They go on Sunday to take the booth from the booth builder, hand the sales team the keys on Monday morning, and say good luck, I'm leaving." But a trade show is the single best place to actually be part of the industry, to see the technologies, the applications, the competitors, the conversations.

I told him about walking a big booth at WEFTEC this year, asking what the company did, and having someone tell me, "I'm just in marketing, let me go get one of the salespeople." Björn's response: "That hurts. That really hurts." It does. And it's exactly the symptom he's describing.

The deeper version of this problem is what he calls the monitoring gap. Most water marketers monitor their own company and nothing else. "We are not living on an island," he said. If you can't name your five closest competitors and the alternative technologies that could replace yours, you can't advise your CEO on strategy, and you're stuck living in your own bubble.

Visibility Is the Whole Game

When I asked Björn what's actually effective in water marketing versus what's a waste, he wouldn't give me a single tactic. He gave me a principle. Build visibility, especially early. Not just to customers, but to stakeholders, future hires, investors, and suppliers.

The how matters less than the commitment. "Decide on your channels, and then go all in. Not for three months. For a longer period." Pick the channels you can consistently create for, own them, and stay the course.

Are trade shows still worth the money? Björn pointed at HUBER, the German water tech company, which books roughly half of an entire hall at IFAT in Munich every other year. "I don't want to know the number, but they spend so much. It must be worth it, otherwise they wouldn't do it, and they are very smart people." His caveat: it's about visibility and starting conversations that pay off in three or four years, not closing a deal on the show floor. Pick the right shows, and staff the booth with people who can actually talk.

And then there's LinkedIn, which so many water executives write off as a waste of time. Björn's reaction made me laugh, because it's the most honest competitive take I've heard. "If they're convinced it's a waste of time, perfect. There's a rule, one percent of people create content, nine percent interact, ninety percent just consume. I'm part of the one percent, and the one percent doesn't get bigger. Happy for me." He's not going to spend energy convincing skeptics, including his own clients' CEOs. "Asking whether social media works is like asking whether the earth is flat or round. I'll just do my thing."

Do the Homework Before You Chase the Shiny Thing

I had to ask about 2026 and the next big shift. Everyone says AI. Björn's answer was refreshingly unglamorous: do the basics first.

"Ninety percent of the water tech companies I know are not ready for the shift," he said. "They have a website, but no clue what SEO means. If you don't rank on Google, how do you expect to rank on ChatGPT or Gemini?" The homework comes first. A website that actually works front and back, that converts. Automation. Email marketing. Social. Build that, build a brand, and then look beyond.

I loved that he led with technical SEO, because most people think SEO is just stuffing the right words on a page. They never look behind the curtain at whether the page loads fast or throws errors. If it's broken, Google won't rank you no matter how many keywords you use.

One genuinely surprising prediction: press releases are having a renaissance. Not PR exactly, but the press release itself. "They were more or less dead," Björn said, "but the new language models treat them as an authoritative source. If you have enough press releases out there, it helps you get found." An old tactic, useful again for a brand new reason.

As for where AI is actually earning its keep in water marketing today, his honest answer was translation and research, not content. Running a German firm that publishes in English and other languages, the translation tools have become genuinely good. And deep research is underrated: "Spend the 200 bucks on ChatGPT and go into deep research. You'll find a lot of information about your market and your competitors." Content creation? "It's mid core. Not good enough." Hard to argue.

The One Thing

I closed by asking what Björn would tell every water company CEO if he had one sentence. He didn't reach for a tactic. He went straight back to the theme that ran through the whole conversation.

"Think about your expectations. You are not in B2C. This is a long sales cycle, conservative, B2B industry. Don't expect that you hire someone on day one and have 20 leads in your inbox by day two. Manage your expectations, Mr. CEO."

That's the whole episode in a sentence. The marketing usually isn't broken. The expectations are. Fix those, hire people who understand both the technology and the customer, get them out of the building and into the industry, and give it the years it actually takes. That's not a marketing hack. It's just the work.

Björn Otto is the founder of Interius Solutions, helping water tech companies become visible. The easiest place to reach him is LinkedIn, or grab him for a coffee at one of the big shows.

This post is based on my conversation with Björn on Below the Surface with Paul Balsom, a podcast for water industry operators, founders, and marketers. Listen wherever you get your podcasts.

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