Lobit vs Directive Consulting: Which One Should an Industrial Distributor Pick?

Honest comparison, written by someone who is not neutral

Lobit is our agency. We are obviously going to find ways we look better. So upfront: Directive Consulting is a good firm with real chops in SaaS performance marketing. If you are a Series B SaaS company looking for a paid-and-organic shop that understands LTV-driven funnels, Directive is a defensible choice.

This page exists because we keep losing deals to Directive that we should not be losing, and we keep winning deals from Directive that the client should never have signed in the first place. So here is the honest breakdown for one specific buyer: the mid-market B2B industrial distributor with a 5,000 to 200,000 SKU catalog and a wholesale customer base.

If you are that buyer, this page is for you.

The three minute summary

If you sell ARR-priced SaaS to mid-market companies, Directive is probably the right call.

If you sell industrial parts to procurement officers, the answer is Lobit. Here is why.

Where Directive is genuinely strong

We will say what we will not see in a Directive sales deck: Directive has built a very capable performance marketing operation around SaaS economics. The team understands CAC, payback, LTV and pipeline conversion as well as anyone in the industry. Their content engine for SaaS positioning is good. Their paid teams are competent and integrated.

If you are a fast-growing SaaS company with strong product-market fit and a marketing leader who needs an extension of the team, Directive will not let you down.

For that buyer, do not call us. Call them.

Where Lobit is genuinely stronger for industrial distributors

The gap shows up in five places.

1. Catalog depth and PIM-to-PDP plumbing

Mid-market industrial distributors run on ERP and PIM systems (Epicor, Infor, NetSuite, SAP, custom). The SEO program lives or dies on whether new SKUs from PIM flow into indexable, schema-marked PDP pages without manual intervention.

We have built that plumbing for distributors on Oro Commerce, Spryker, Sana, Adobe Commerce, BigCommerce, Shopify Plus, Optimizely, SuiteCommerce, SAP Commerce Cloud and several custom stacks. It is a productised service: PIM to SEO Pipeline.

Directive does not productise this work because Directive's ICP does not need it. SaaS marketing sites have 50 to 500 pages, not 50,000.

2. Niche vertical playbooks

We have shipped niche cornerstone content for: MRO, lab, safety, electrical wholesale, fluid power, fasteners, JanSan, HVAC, foodservice, automation, fleet, medical, packaging, welding, abrasives, pumps and valves, chemicals, power transmission, building products, ag, test and measurement, electronic components, tool and die, vertical transport, metals, plastics, paint, material handling, rubber, marine, and a few others by the time you read this.

Each playbook understands buyer intent for that vertical. The OEM cross-references. The certifications. The trade publications that earn the links. The intent that AI Overviews are pulling from.

Directive does not have that library because Directive's clients do not need it.

3. The money-back guarantee

We carry a money-back guarantee on industrial distributor engagements: hit the contract traffic and pipeline targets at 12 months, or you do not pay the final installment.

We can carry that guarantee because we know the playbook works for this ICP. It works because we have run it 100+ times.

Directive does not offer this guarantee for the same engagement scope. Performance refunds happen, but the structure is different and less aggressive.

4. AI Overview / Perplexity / ChatGPT citation engineering

AI Overviews and AI chat search now drive 15 to 28 percent of industrial buyer research, depending on category and country. Citations into those answers are the new featured snippet, and they need to be engineered specifically.

We built GEO Citation Engineering as a productised service that runs alongside classic SEO. It is the only productised GEO offering in the B2B industrial space that we know of.

Directive does GEO as part of integrated content. For SaaS that is enough. For industrial it is not, because the answer formats that AI engines pull from on industrial queries are structurally different (spec tables, compliance language, OEM cross references).

5. Price relative to value delivered for this ICP

Directive's pricing is set for the SaaS market: 8K to 35K USD per month typical retainer ranges, sometimes higher with media spend management. That maps to SaaS unit economics where one new logo at 60K ACV pays for the year.

Our pricing for a mid-market industrial distributor is structured to map to your unit economics: blended retainer typically 6K to 18K USD per month for the full distributor program, with the productised PIM-to-PDP pipeline as a one-time integration fee. That maps to industrial distributor margins where one new wholesale account at 250K annual revenue and 22 percent gross margin pays back the year.

For SaaS, Directive's pricing is fair. For distributors, ours is.

When to pick Directive instead of Lobit

Three scenarios where we would tell you to call Directive:

1. You are a B2B SaaS company. Even if you sell to industrial buyers. SaaS funnels and SaaS unit economics are not what we are built for.
2. You need an integrated paid plus organic plus marketing-ops shop. We focus on SEO and GEO. Directive does the broader marketing-tech stack.
3. You have under 500 pages and your growth ceiling is a content-led funnel, not a catalog-led funnel. Catalog SEO is where we earn our keep. If catalog is not the asset, Directive is the better fit.

When to pick Lobit instead of Directive

1. You sell physical industrial products through a B2B distributor model.
2. You have 5,000 or more SKUs in PIM that are not all indexed and ranking.
3. You compete with Grainger, MSC, Motion, Fastenal, Uline or McMaster-Carr in any category.
4. You want a guarantee that maps to your unit economics, not to a SaaS retainer model.
5. You want AI Overview citations engineered, not promised.

The next step

If you are still deciding between us and Directive, book a 30 minute consultation. We will pull your catalog, run it against your top three competitors and your top three pages on Google, AI Overviews and Perplexity, and tell you honestly which firm is going to do more for you.

If the answer is Directive, we will say so on the call.

Book a consultation.

P.S. Directive is a good firm. We just do not sell into the same buyer. For the mid-market industrial distributor, the case for us is not "we are better at everything". It is "we are built for exactly your shape of business, and Directive is built for a different shape".

Alfred wrote this for the procurement marketing lead who wants the honest comparison without the agency-website fog.