What a Waterworks Buyer Needs to See Before They'll Spec You

Here's the situation almost every waterworks manufacturer is in. Your products are specification-driven. The buyer is an engineer or a municipal purchasing agent, and they won't spec something they don't understand. The sales cycle runs months, sometimes longer. And your main point of contact with that buyer is a noisy trade show floor where you have, generously, three minutes.

You hand them a brochure. They nod. They move to the next booth.

The brochure's failing because the product's complicated. A resilient seated gate valve and a double-disc gate valve solve different problems in different pressure environments. A slide gate for a wastewater treatment plant is a different decision entirely from a butterfly valve for a distribution main.

Explaining that distinction in a printed format, to a buyer who has already seen sixty booths that day, is a medium problem. The information doesn't fit the channel.

I keep seeing this in waterworks and municipal water products specifically, because the catalog is almost always deeper than what any single sales interaction can surface. The buyer knows they need a gate valve. They don't know which one, and the spec sheet doesn't give them a path to figure it out.

The catalog problem at scale

McWane Plant & Industrial sells valves, water control gates, ductile iron pipe, fittings, and hydrants. The kind of products that live inside every municipal water system, treatment plant, and distribution network in North America.

Within valves alone, the range covers gate valves, butterfly valves, check valves, eccentric plug valves, and more, each with its own configurations and AWWA standards. A single product family like the SS250 stainless steel slide gates spans multiple mounting configurations, opening directions, and sizing options.

At that depth, it's an engineering library.

You can't represent an engineering library with a hero shot and four bullet points. What you can do is build an environment where the buyer navigates it themselves.

That's what MPI built with us: an interactive clickable map of a water treatment plant, internally called "Flow City," with 46 unique MPI products positioned inside it. A buyer clicks a section of the plant, drills into the product, gets specs and a description, and moves forward to the product page or a contact form. It runs in a browser, offline, and on a 23-inch touchscreen that a sales manager can set up at a regional water show in an afternoon.

The ACE show, Design Build in Grapevine, Texas Water in San Antonio: there are regional water shows running almost every week through the summer. Steven Hocurscak, who leads MPI's marketing and trade show efforts, told us he was being asked at least a few times a week when the interactive would be ready. His team understood before we did how much ground they were losing by waiting.

What WEFTEC forces you to think about

The big target is WEFTEC, which draws somewhere between 70,000 and 100,000 attendees. Everything on MPI's production calendar is shaped around that deadline.

The build plan for WEFTEC goes further than a single interactive map. The vision is a product carousel with 12 to 15 core products, each linking into its own AR hotspot experience. Four or five tablets at the booth, plus a pair of 36-inch touchscreens.

A buyer picks up a tablet, selects the eccentric plug valve, rotates the 3D model, clicks into the callouts that matter to them (seat configuration, actuator options, applicable standards), and walks to the product page from there.

The AR models add something no printed piece can match. MPI's application engineer Pranay Badade put an earlier version of the plug valve AR on his desk and saw the model at real scale. Hocurscak showed a version to someone at a Walmart and, by his telling, the reaction was immediate.

There's also a cutaway version in progress. MPI's engineering team flagged that showing the internal mechanism of a valve, how the disc seals, where failures occur, what the gearbox looks like under load, is where technical training gets serious. A cutaway AR model a trainer can rotate in front of a room beats any cross-section drawing in a manual, including the ones that are actually accurate.

Who controls the content matters as much as what the content shows

One of the more clarifying moments in the MPI engagement happened on a call when we demoed our self-serve platform: once an asset is built, MPI's own team can edit callout text, update a link, duplicate an experience for a specific rep's customer visit, change the starting view angle, or add a photo to a hotspot. Without filing a ticket. Without routing changes back through us.

Hocurscak's reaction is worth quoting directly. "Now that you all have shown us this, you cannot take this away. This is going to be integral to what we're doing on a day to day basis. This is going to have to be the new standard."

That quote is doing more work than it sounds like. Hocurscak travels 2 to 3 weeks a month. His technical sales managers are at different shows in different states, often on a weekly rotation through the summer.

The ability for a field rep to log in the morning before a customer visit, duplicate an experience, and add callouts specific to that customer's application, without anyone at headquarters being involved, changes who the content actually serves.

He laid it out plainly: "If you're going to go to a customer visit, you want to show something specific for their use case, you can pop right in there right before. Make whatever you want. And here's your specific situation. That's pretty powerful."

The analytics layer compounds the value. Every hotspot experience tracks which callouts buyers actually click.

After WEFTEC, MPI will know which features drew the most attention across tens of thousands of visitors, and which products drew zero engagement. That feedback doesn't exist when you hand someone a spec sheet and they walk away.

The trade show content and the training content are the same content

The MPI build opened with a scope around sales tools. Then the training team got involved.

MPI is building "MPI University," a three-part training program for distributor reps: online coursework, a presentation component, and a hands-on practical track in a converted facility with real product workstations. Distributor reps who understand the product are the ones who spec it. The logic runs straight through.

The 3D and AR assets built for the trade show floor turn out to be exactly what the training program needs. A cutaway view of a plug valve showing what happens when cavities clog with media. A video of the SS250 slide gate operating with water flowing through it. An AR model a trainer can rotate on a tablet in front of a room of reps.

Badade scoped the SS250 slide gate video series to cover four representative configurations rather than nine individual products. Each video teaches a principle rather than repeating a product demo. Make fewer, better assets and use them across more situations.

The long-term direction is a full 3D walkable environment of a water treatment plant where a user navigates the facility and clicks any MPI product to get specs, video, and a contact path. Flow City was the proof of concept. The vision is the plant.

The pattern under the example

Generalize MPI's situation and you get most of what I see in waterworks, municipal water, and industrial fluid handling. Deep catalog. Specification-driven buyers who won't purchase what they can't picture operating correctly in their system. Field sales teams traveling most weeks of the year.

A trade show calendar that starts in winter and runs straight through fall. And collateral designed for a world where buyers had time and print worked.

Interactive 3D is becoming operationally viable, and the difference from a few years ago is who controls it. A living asset the sales team can customize the morning before they walk into a meeting is a different tool from a one-time agency deliverable that lives on a hard drive.

When a rep can pull up a full-scale AR model of a gate valve on a tablet and show a municipal engineer what it looks like on their pump station floor, the conversation changes. The engineer can point at the model.

They can ask questions about what's inside. They can visualize the installation before the spec is written.

The medium fits the information now. That's what changes the outcome.