Strategy & PositioningComms & CampaignsCollateral & ToolkitsSpecialist Print ServicesBids & TendersMarketing OperationsSystemsSoftware & AIM&A buy-sideM&A sell-sidePlug-in Marketing Director

Case Study:

Building RailSense from the ground up

RailSense Solutions had a strong technical vision, a capable founding team, and a product that genuinely solved a real problem for rail infrastructure engineers. What it didn’t have was a brand, a commercial identity, a route to market, or a marketing function of any kind.

RESOLVE has been embedded as RailSense’s plug-in Marketing Director since the company was founded – building everything from scratch and evolving alongside the business as it has grown from a single-product startup into an established supplier to rail infrastructure operators and maintenance teams across the UK, US, and internationally, with eight product lines, a dedicated monitoring platform, a global distributor network, and a significant acquisition completed in 2024.

The environment RailSense operates in

Railway infrastructure monitoring is not a forgiving market to enter. The audience – Track Maintenance Engineers, Asset Managers, and infrastructure engineering teams – are technical specialists who know their discipline inside out. They don’t need explaining to. They need a supplier that speaks their language, understands their operational constraints, and makes claims it can stand behind.

That means marketing that doesn’t oversell, doesn’t oversimplify, and doesn’t treat the buyer as someone to be impressed rather than informed. Get that wrong and the doors close quickly. Get it right and the relationships run deep.

RailSense’s product portfolio reflects the breadth of what that audience needs: BuckleSense for rail buckling risk, VoidSense for track void and temperature monitoring, TempSense Enduro for Mod 14-compliant Critical Rail Temperature monitoring, ShockSense for vibration and shock, TrackWater for trackside drainage and flood monitoring, MultiSense as a multi-sensor hub, and SmartWater for road gully management. All of it feeding into the RailSense platform – the cloud-based intelligence layer that turns sensor data into real-time alerts, analytics, and remote asset visibility.

Getting all of that to market, clearly and credibly, from a standing start, is what the engagement has been about.

What we built

The brand

We built the RailSense brand from nothing – visual identity, tone of voice, positioning, messaging architecture, and the strategic foundations to carry the company as it grew. The central decision was how to position a technology business in a sector that is instinctively sceptical of technology vendors.

The answer wasn’t to lead with the hardware. It was to position RailSense as a trusted partner in infrastructure condition management – a company that understands the operational world its customers live in, and builds products that fit that world rather than asking customers to adapt to them. That positioning has held through four years of product launches, a major acquisition, and a significant commercial evolution. It was right from the start because it was grounded in genuine understanding of the audience.

The website and digital presence

We developed and have maintained railsense.co.uk from launch – architecture, product pages, content, and ongoing evolution as the portfolio has expanded. Every new product launch has been supported with technically credible online collateral that reflects how infrastructure engineers actually evaluate products, not how technology companies typically like to present them.

Social media

We manage RailSense’s social media presence end-to-end – from strategy through to day-to-day execution. That means writing and publishing content consistently across channels, developing engagement strategies that build RailSense’s profile within the railway industry community, and monitoring competitor activity to ensure the business is always aware of how the market is moving around it.

Regular reporting keeps the leadership team across what’s working, what isn’t, and where the opportunities are – so social media functions as a genuine commercial channel rather than a box-ticking exercise.

In a specialist sector like railway infrastructure, social media done well is less about volume and more about consistency and credibility. Showing up regularly, with content that reflects genuine sector knowledge, is how a relatively young business builds the kind of market presence that takes competitors decades to establish.

Print, exhibition, and events

RailSense exhibits at key industry events, and RESOLVE has provided end-to-end support throughout – creative concept, print production, pre-event promotion, and post-event content. We’ve written and produced the full suite of print materials: product data sheets, technical brochures, exhibition stands, and event collateral – all calibrated to the same technical standard as the products themselves.

Sales toolkits and commercial enablement

We built the sales materials RailSense’s team uses in every customer-facing conversation – individual product collateral, cross-portfolio content, and materials for specific commercial situations. Precision matters here. TempSense Enduro, for example, operates as a monitoring support system for Mod 14 compliance – it supplements rather than replaces human watchperson deployment. That distinction is important to infrastructure engineers and important for RailSense’s credibility. Every sales material we produce reflects it accurately.

CRM and internal systems

We supported the development of CRM and SharePoint-based systems infrastructure to help RailSense’s growing team manage customer relationships and marketing assets as the business scaled. We introduced them to an IT managed services partner company that supports their IT infrastructure on a daily basis. The commercial capability had to grow alongside the product capability.

Industry engagement

We’ve supported RailSense’s engagement beyond individual events such as Rail Live and Innotrans – Rail Industry Association membership activity, Network Rail innovation programmes, sector conferences. The aim has been to position RailSense not just as a supplier but as a contributor to how the industry thinks about predictive maintenance and infrastructure intelligence. That positioning takes time to build and is difficult to replicate quickly.

The Bance acquisition

In 2024, RailSense acquired Bance – a British railway maintenance tools and equipment business founded in 1923, with over a century of heritage in trolleys, trailers, carts, and track maintenance tooling trusted by rail professionals worldwide.

The acquisition was strategically significant. Bance brought additional Network Rail approvals, an established reputation among track maintenance teams, and a product range that extended RailSense’s relevance well beyond condition monitoring into the physical maintenance of infrastructure. Bance continues to operate as a distinct brand within the RailSense group – its heritage intact, its product lines now sitting alongside RailSense’s sensor and monitoring technologies.

Together, the two businesses cover a broader slice of the infrastructure management lifecycle than either could alone: from intelligent remote condition monitoring through to the physical tools and equipment that maintenance teams depend on trackside. Communicating that combined capability coherently – without diluting either brand – is the kind of challenge this engagement has always involved.

How the relationship has evolved

Four years in, the work has moved well beyond marketing execution. We work closely with RailSense’s leadership on commercial model development, product portfolio positioning, and strategic direction – including the significant evolution currently underway.

RailSense launched as a product business. It is becoming a platform business. The shift – from a collection of sensor products to a coherent intelligent infrastructure condition monitoring platform, with the RailSense platform at its centre and a modular ecosystem of sensing products around it – is a meaningful repositioning that changes how the business is valued and how it sells. That work is being led by RESOLVE.

Where RailSense is now

Network Rail approvals for VoidSense, TempSense, and TrackWater. Mod 14 compliance for TempSense Enduro. Deployments across rail infrastructure throughout the UK and the US. A growing global distributor network spanning Europe and North America, including Dahl Rail in Norway and Sweden. Eight product lines and a dedicated monitoring platform, built from a single product concept in four years.

RESOLVE has also developed RailSense’s entries for the RIA RISE Awards 2026 across three categories – Innovation, Application of Digital Technology, and Safety. Those entries reflect the cumulative weight of four years of product development, commercial relationships, and real-world deployments.

Why it has worked

The plug-in Marketing Director model works when it’s treated as a system rather than a service. Brand, digital, content, PR, events, sales collateral, CRM, and strategic input aren’t separate workstreams – they’re part of a single coherent effort to build and sustain a credible market presence.

What that requires, in a sector like railway infrastructure, is genuine understanding of the audience. Not a willingness to learn the jargon, but real comprehension of the operational world the customer inhabits – the pressures, the approval processes, the consequences of getting things wrong, and the criteria by which a supplier earns trust.

That understanding has to be there from the start. With RailSense, it was. And it’s what has made four years of consistent, coherent marketing output possible – through product launches, an acquisition, international expansion, and a fundamental repositioning of what the business is.

RESOLVE have been with us since day one. When we founded RailSense, we were a startup with a strong product and a clear technical vision, but no marketing infrastructure, no brand, and no route to market. Philip came in as our plug-in Marketing Director from the outset, and the RESOLVE team became our entire marketing function.

What followed was genuinely end-to-end. They built our brand from scratch – identity, positioning, messaging, and the strategic foundation that would carry us from early-stage startup to an established player in railway infrastructure monitoring. From there, they developed every channel: digital presence and social media, print and exhibition materials, media and PR, sales toolkits, CRM and SharePoint systems, and event support. It is truly integrated marketing – RESOLVE treats it as a system, not a series of tasks.

As RailSense has grown and our ambitions have expanded, RESOLVE have adapted with us – the relationship has evolved from building the foundations to shaping where we go next. The strategic conversations we’re having now about how we take the business forward are a far cry from those early brand-building days – and Philip has been a consistent and credible voice in shaping that thinking at every stage.

What makes the relationship work is that the team operate as colleagues, not contractors. They’ve engaged deeply with our products, our market, and our customers, and that investment in genuinely understanding the business shows in everything they produce and the problems they solve.

We’re a very different business today to the startup that first engaged RESOLVE. The brand, the commercial model, the sales capability, and the market profile we now have are inseparable from the work Philip and the team have put in over the years.

If you’re a technically complex B2B business looking for a marketing partner who will genuinely become part of your organisation and grow with you, I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend them.

Tristan Lloyd-Baker

CEO,
RailSense

RailSense is the kind of engagement we find most interesting - a business with real technical substance, a demanding audience, and genuine ambition.

If you're building something similar and need the marketing capability to match, we'd be glad to talk.

Tell us about your project

Six integrated marketing communications services that work as a system – from strategy to execution.

Commercial transformation partner for complex, technical B2B businesses and M&A.

On-demand expertise – strategic leadership, custom development, and specialist print production.

RESOLVE'd Thinking

Case Study:

Building RailSense from the ground up

RailSense Solutions had a strong technical vision, a capable founding team, and a product that genuinely solved a real problem for rail infrastructure engineers. What it didn’t have was a brand, a commercial identity, a route to market, or a marketing function of any kind.

The environment RailSense operates in