IndustrialSage

All right, so let’s jump into today’s episode. I have a very special guest here, I have Catherine Bruce here who is the VP of Product Marketing for Acuity Brands. Catherine, thank you so much.

Thanks for having me, thank you.

Oh yeah, pleasure. Super excited. So, all right, for those who aren’t familiar with Acuity, there’s probably two people out there who don’t know. Everyone else should.

You’re very kind.

Tell me, tell us, what do you guys do?

So, Acuity Brands is a technology company. I know a lot of our employees and a lot of people that are familiar with Acuity, may naturally call us a lighting company. In fact, I have to blame myself for saying that a lot when I explain what I do to my family. A lot of the base of our foundation and where we came from was a lot of lighting brands, but over the last decade, maybe 15 years, we’ve really turned ourselves into a technology company, combining lighting controls, electrical drivers, emergency drivers, and then building management controls, and IoT. Bringing the IoT into everything. And, how we can really create this holistic solution for the different needs of different building occupants, building owners?

Yeah. So, I think it’s a great thing because I think a lot of people, traditionally… “Yeah, well, we’re a lighting company, that’s what we do,” but a technology company, I totally get that. That’s awesome. And it makes a lot of sense, especially when we get into a little bit more of the meat of what I want to talk about today. But, before that, real quick, I just want to get a sense, we talked about a little bit before, like your background. Like how did you get into marketing? What’s that story look like?

Right, so I actually started as a reporter and a television, local news producer. Actually, almost a little bit more than half my career now is with Acuity, which was a different realization for me. Yeah. But, for a long time, most of my career was into local television news as a producer and a reporter. And once I moved to Atlanta, I decided I really kind of wanted a break, I wanted a career change. I really enjoy storytelling. That’s part of the reason I got into journalism and broadcasting. I just, I love writing, I love telling stories, I love telling people’s stories. So I didn’t… I wanted to do something that I could continue that aspect of my career. But I really wanted to have a weekend off, or have holidays off. So I decided I wanted to do something in marketing, and I thought product marketing would fit in cause you’re telling the story of why this product is the best new thing. Whatever it is.

Well, and it sounds like it works. So you’ve been there for a minute now.

Eight years, yeah, mm-hmm.

Yeah. And, Acuity who’s got, just a handful of products. Right?

Yes. Just a handful. We have, I think I counted the other day, it’s 38 brands now with a recent acquisition of The Luminaires Group. So that’s five new lighting brands.

That’s what I like sku-wise..how many? Any idea?

I believe we have about 7 million skus.

Seven million skus?

I think so.

Okay. That’s…a few.

Right, yeah. So we have several brands spanning lots of different product categories, whether it’s industrial lighting, outdoor lighting, indoor lighting, residential lighting, controls, building management controls, our brands span the entire country. We have some software and build Operating Systems technologies. Our Atrius brand is our IoT brand out in California. We have, our building management brand has offices in Lyon, France and Montreal, Canada. And we have offices in Des Plaines Illinois, and Granville Ohio and Atlanta, Georgia, we’re all over the place. So yeah.

So, yeah, sounds like it.

Lots of products.

That’s a little bit to manage. So that you talked about earlier how Acuity is a technology company, not a lighting company. And a little bit about that transformation you’ve had there. One of the things that I think a lot of companies, your traditional product, or that… I’ve got a B2B product and they’re manufacturing them, You mentioned earlier, you have this whole IoT platform, this whole like technology piece. Now, you guys are a technology company, making that shift and that transition from saying, “We manufacture and sell this widget, this X piece is one thing, but then now it’s connected.” And whatever that means, that means that can mean a million different things…

To a million different people.

Yes. Exactly. How have you guys managed to kind of make that transition? You’re kind of like shifting that a little bit. Because obviously, there’s a lot of challenges with that, that we’ll unpack here in a little bit. But what does that look like for Acuity?

You know, there isn’t a secret sauce to it all. Because we have so many people that have different ideas of just thinking of the word “connected, embedded, integrated.” Within our own company, we were all defining things differently. So it’s not a speedy process. We have to evaluate, what do these terms mean internally? What do they mean to our different customers? Because we’re selling these different integrated or embedded solutions, for different reasons, to different people, and everybody has a different value proposition as to why they might want some of these controls or these more sophisticated technologies embedded within their lighting fixture, whether it’s lowering the total cost of ownership, or enabling an easier design process or installation.

We do these things to try and bring some value to each of our customers. Because our customers are the contractors, they are the distributors, they are the architects and lighting designers. They’re also our lighting agencies. They’re our partners, but they’re our customers, too. So we’re trying to figure out how to create the solution be created in a way, and tell the story in a way that it doesn’t seem complicated. Because the whole point we’re doing it is because it’s not complicated. Let us do the complicated stuff and you reap the benefits of the simplicity.

Right? Well that goes back to a little bit of that, you know, product development piece and understanding that but I think one of the principal challenges that I see is that traditionally, where you would go through your distributor, you would go through the architects and the GCs or the lighting designers. And instead of saying, “Hey, here’s the lighting and it’s… this is going to fit the room and the style and the feel, and here’s the use case for it, this is going to help drive employee engagement or whatever that is, whatever that buying decision.”

Now, all of a sudden, these things are connected. And there’s some amazing things that you guys are doing with them. But, somebody was sharing like a use case, like retail, for example, and collecting a lot of data, rolling out Wi-Fi throughout using your existing lighting infrastructure. And then but there’s a massive amount of data you’re able to go to take and fuel that back into the organization.So it’s whole, like, different business objective at that point. So how, what? Yeah, what do you…how do you guys do it? How does that influence in your marketing or your go to market strategy with that relative to? Okay, where it’s not just lighting anymore now it’s like this whole connected platform that has this whole realm of ramifications that are really awesome. But what’s this? How do you package that story?

Right. Very delicately… So a couple things to unpack there. Like you said earlier, there’s probably only two people that don’t know who Acuity is. We keep our main customers, contractors and distributors, even our agents. Like they know the brands,

Right, yeah.

The brands that are part of Acuity, right. But when you start putting a connected solution together, it’s the brands that are connecting to each other and then it becomes this Acuity Brands solution. So there’s been almost a pendulum of, “Let’s Focus on the brands!” “No, let’s focus on Acuity!” “Let’s focus on the brands!” “But what about all of this connected stuff?”

Okay, so there’s this happy medium of where we want our influencers and our end customers to know the Acuity Brands name of the solution that’s connected, but that’s a subset of customers. You can say, that many contractors are still walking into their distributors and they say, I want that Lithonia troffer, that BLT here, or that IBG or that downlight, I want that Juno downlight. So we can’t forget about that. We have to do marketing for both the other pieces. When I started at Acuity, a lot of what product marketing was – the marketing manager role – was sales enablement. It wasn’t demand-gen necessary, demand generation. It was flyers and web copy and spec sheets, and merchandising…..

Very transactional.

Very transactional and we were creating tools and packages and marketing messaging so that our internal sales team can teach and sell to the lighting agencies. And then the lighting agencies can then teach and sell to the distributors and the contractors and the design community. But now that we have this bigger solution, we have to tell that story, we have to teach them that piece of the story, which has created a lot of changes in how we do training and education and the different events that we go to, and how we go to those events as Acuity not necessarily only the different brands, but we still go to some events as the individual brands.

Because we have so many channels to market now. We’re either selling directly with our corporate accounts teams, where we have some old products that we sell OEM to other lighting manufacturers. And then of course, the big pieces our consumer and industrial or commercial and industrial channel, where we’re selling through the electrical distributor network. So we have partners that are just buying, I just need to stock up on this product. But then they’re even also dabbling in the, I want to create this renovation solution of products.

Yeah.

So we’re trying to help teach them how these lighting fixtures embedded with our nLight controls are the best way to renovate XYZ spaces, or here’s a good, better best for these different renovation situations. Everybody’s trying to dabble in different pieces of the channel, so it makes marketing a little bit more interesting now, cause we’re not just doing sales enablement anymore, we’re doing more training and education and especially on the IoT and the corporate account side of things, we’re doing more account based marketing.

Okay. Yeah.

Targeting certain customers that we know we want to be partners with or we know we want to surround.

Yeah.

And make sure they know who Acuity is and what all of our brands stand for, and the value proposition of a connected solution.

Yeah, now that makes a lot of sense. I mean, because at that point, it’s really going to be a little bit more like solution selling ,really at that point. So, backing that up from a marketing standpoint, to your point, if you guys are employing an ABM strategy to be able to say, “Hey, look,” it’s almost like, here… I’m inferring… is it more like, “Hey, this, here’s the capabilities, here’s what we can do, here’s use cases,” kind of thing? Because it’s just, it is, I mean, honestly, the use cases can be almost endless I imagine.

Mm-hmm. Yes. I mean, in some cases, we’re trying to stay focused on certain vertical applications. Because we want to make sure that we’re scalable there.

Sure. Yeah.

Make sure we’re hitting it hard and we’re scaling. We’re all about efficiency. So the account based marketing is a lot in the national accounts in our Atrius selling, and bigger solution selling, pulling the package together. But what my team has started… what my team has started dabbling in account based marketing, maybe around with our co branding with our lighting agencies. So one of the biggest struggles I faced earlier on when I was at Acuity was, I couldn’t do anything other than sales enablement, because I could never say, “Hey, look at this great product, it solves this problem for you, contractor. Go buy it,” because I couldn’t tell him where to buy it! But if we co-market with our lighting agencies who might not have the marketing power that Acuity has, we can grow our brand together, you can go the brand of Lithuania, or Juneau or Mark Lighting together with the agency and grow the agency’s brand, help them grow. And then point the sales qualified leads to them.

Yeah, no, that’s great. And it’s really… I think a lot of manufacturers struggle with that a little bit, that whether it is, “We’re a technology company, and we’re selling, connected products or what have you that have bigger business case objectives,” but really making it easy, and helping them. Looking at it from a sense of, we have two different customers, you’ve got your end user, but you also have, you’re talking about the lighting agencies and helping them to be better and sell better. And then that way likely, and I don’t know how you guys are structured there, but I would imagine that they’ve got other products that they may be wrapping, and they might say, “Oh, well, what’s the difference being this one or this one? While these guys are here, Acuity is helping us, they’re driving leads, they’re helping my team to be able to sell into this a little better.” So that’s awesome.

Yep. That’s the power of Acuity.

That’s awesome. That’s very good. So I actually see you bring up ABM and that is a pretty, it’s been pretty hot for the last several years. How did you guys…pivoting a little bit… How did you like, roll out with it because it does sound like a great way of being able to kind of sell in even with these… this connected piece, like, “Let’s target these groups of people,” which, I’m going to back up for our audience who aren’t- most of them are familiar, but some aren’t: account based marketing, instead of saying, “Hey, let’s just put our messaging out to just kind of everybody who might fit in here,” it’s like, “Let’s focus on a group of maybe 100 companies or 500,” whatever that is, “And they’ve got a defined challenge, And we have a solution or something around there. And we’ve got sales people, some of our distributors are trying to get in there. So it’s like a multi pronged approach, where we’re going to be focusing on that.”

Right, you surround the account, and always so….

“You guys just pop up everywhere!”

Yes.

That’s amazing.

Right, right. To every person that’s associated with that company, maybe?

Yeah, exactly.

They’re going to get sick of seeing our ads. But yeah, so it was hyper focused on our IoT brand and the different value that that brand, that solution could bring. I guess an example would be, maybe a retailer is trying to increase the shopping cart size of their customers, right? Now with lighting fixtures, we can help create indoor positioning within their stores, that they can then have their, vendors their suppliers, of goods and merchandising, send advertisements and coupons to their shoppers, they can have help their shoppers navigate the store. They can offer customized or personalized coupons or journeys for the customers using their apps and all with the hope of maybe increasing the shopping cart size, right?

Yeah.

And all of that infrastructure to provide them that data comes from the lighting fixtures and the controls and sensors and building management controls, it’s all an interconnected web of data, that is talking to each other right? So when we did account based marketing, retail is a big vertical that we’re going after. So, we may go after retail customers from an account perspective, we want to talk to the marketing team so they know how they can market, we want to talk to the IoT team so they understand the securities implications, and the infrastructure that needs to be put in place. We want to talk to the finance side of it because they can help see the ROI on a renovation. But you want to talk to facilities too, because facilities have to implement the the lighting design and the installation and the renovation, So you have to surround that account, with the different value proposition for each account. You can’t take the same message to all of them. And that’s what we’ve been doing with our account based marketing. That’s just a little piece of all of our markets.

That one of the 7 million products.

Yes. That one of the 7 million products.

I think that sounds, that’s awesome. And that makes all the sense in the world. I mean, because again from a sales standpoint, I think you hit the nail on the head in terms of messaging. The messaging is different and understanding the decision makers or the influencer certainly on that. It’s a lot more of a sophisticated sell. So it’s not just, “Okay, a few people, Here are the pain points,” like, now there’s a million pain points you’ve got to address. “Well, how easy is it to roll out with? What does it look like? We were just wanting to, we just wanted to get lights for a darn thing, Now it’s like this whole thing!” It’s opening up this whole foray in a retail environment like, “Oh, well, we didn’t know that. We didn’t think this was possible! How would that look like?” and I would imagine that there’s a lot of challenges that come with that. But there’s also a lot of great, great opportunities.

Right.

Well, it definitely sounds like there’s… it’s one of those things that iterates… you mentioned, somebody told us earlier on, it was a great phrase: “You try something out. You nail it, and then you scale it .” It kind of sounds like that’s what you…

That’s exactly what Acuity has instilled in me and all of the employees, is: you fail fast, if you do. Fail fast, but try new things. And then when you nail it, scale it. That’s it. That’s a great phrase.

I can’t trademark that, it’s got to come from somebody that we had on a previous episode, but I love it. I use it all the time.

Right? Yeah,

It makes sense for real. Well, listen, Catherine, I really appreciate the time and just sort of sharing what you guys are doing, areas that you found success, and obviously as we move into this, I mean, it’s there’s no right answer. There’s probably no one wrong answer. And I think what you just said there with just sort of the the Acuity way of just experimenting, and trying to figure that out, I think that’s…kudos to you guys for doing that. And not being afraid to fail, and trying new things. And it’s really truly a pillar of innovation.

I can’t take all the credit. Not at all. There are a lot of really really smart people at Acuity, that mad scientists, people crunching the numbers that are all part of like helping us make the decision to shift gears in different ways. And I think we’ve pivoted a lot at Acuity over the years that I’ve been there. I mean, I think I mentioned earlier, I look back on the eight years; it seems so slow in the…when you’re in it. But when I look back, we have changed so much. Even our website, when I got to Acuity, we had a corporate site. And we had 20 plus individual brand sites and dozens of little product micro sites. And that was eight years ago.

None of them were mobile friendly, even eight years ago, and now almost all of our brands are on the same platform. We have this wonderful search tool that’s part of our sites that is now extremely powerful using all of the best practices. We’re able to scale as we acquire new teams, new brands, we can bring them into that platform. And it just makes sense now from a digital marketing perspective. So that I mean, like, that’s a huge thing. The fact that we’re doing account based marketing, we’re actually doing demand-gen versus just sales enablement. Like that it’s been great to be a part of that transition.

That’s awesome. Well, it sounds like you guys are doing some great stuff there. Tackling that challenge head on. I love the whole ABM piece, as far as it sounds like it sounds like a really great strategy on how to tackle that, that I imagine you guys just kind of take that and go one space to another and keep dominating, so…

I hope.

That’s awesome. Well, Catherine, thank you again, so much for coming. If somebody wants to learn more about Acuity brands…

AcuityBrands.com.

Perfect Yeah, thank you. Thanks for coming on.

Thank you for having me.

All right. Okay, so wow, my head is about to explode. A lot, Lot of really cool things that we just talked about there, if you are a marketer, or you’re in sales, and you’re kind of facing the same thing where, there’s a lot of innovation going on in the industry, relative to products where they were, they were a traditional widget, if you will, and now it’s a connected widget, and it’s like, “Oh, my gosh, there’s all these amazing, amazing things you can do with it!” That obviously, is a unique challenge.

Think about some of the things that Catherine was talking about just a sense of leveraging ABM, I think a big thing actually we talked about was- and this is my fault- I love… I can get super excited, “Oh, it’s connected! And here’s the solution and this solution, we can do all of it!” Well, that kind of is a little bit of a challenge, focus on that, figure out that solution. And making sure that now the big thing is that the people who are going to be making the decision on that new connected product, a lot of different messages around the different people and they’re going to have different value prop. And so we need to be able to twist that using account based marketing. ABM is a really great way of being able to do that. So there’s a million other takeaways from that, take one or two and implement them, think about it, especially as we roll into 2020.

So that’s all I’ve got for today. If you have any questions I’d love for you to send them to us while I answer them for you on show industrialsage.com/questions. So thanks for listening and watching and I’ll be back next week with another episode of IndustrialSage and I’m done rambling. Have a great day.

Thanks for reading. Don’t forget to subscribe to our weekly newsletter to get every new episode, blog article, and content offer sent directly to your inbox. You can also subscribe wherever you download podcasts so you can listen on the go!

Hey, so let’s jump in today’s episode. I’ve got a very special guest today. I have Chris Lavigne who’s the Head of Production for Wistia. Chris, thank you so much for joining me today on IndustrialSage.

Hey, thanks for having me. I’m excited to chat all things Wistia, video, brand, and beyond.

I’m super excited. So anyone who listens to IndustrialSage knows that I’m a total video dork but for those who aren’t familiar with Wistia please let them know who you guys are, what you guys do.

Yes, so Wistia is a software company up in Cambridge, Massachusetts. We make software that helps folks build their audience through brand affinity. Primarily our big thing is video hosting. We have a suite of tools like channels that let you host your videos, almost like a YouTube but for businesses. So you put it right on your website. You don’t have to worry about any of YouTube’s ulterior motives, their ads, their related videos that are actually to your competition, all that stuff.

Awesome, all right. So interesting word you threw out, brand affinity, through brand affinity. So I want to jump into that in just a minute. Before I do that though I want to just get to know about you a little bit. So, all right, so you’re Head of Production. Tell me a little bit about, how did you start in video?

Wow, well you’ve got to go way back–

Take me back!

I’m not going to bore you, I’ll spare you the details but I always had a camcorder when I was growing up and I actually got into video because it was an easy way to get an A in school. If you made any type of a video when I was in elementary school and middle school it was an easy A because you were editing tape to tape. I had my camcorder and then a VCR and I was editing linearly like that. But then I found out that I actually kind of had a knack for it and I loved it so I studied video in college.

I hustled my way doing wedding videos and building up my gear throughout high school and college and doing some product videos actually for some folks that are- my family’s in manufacturing, so some product videos for some manufacturing companies locally. And then I ended up freelancing doing more of those product videos, testimonial videos. And that’s actually when I found Wistia through one of my friends. He was very early at the company and he was saying, “Hey, I’m working for Wistia. It’s this video software and they don’t even have the video on their website. You should come up here and meet the company.”

So I traveled up from Rhode Island with all of my gear to Cambridge in February of 2011 and I walked into this company and it was my first experience with a startup. It was so interesting and casual and I’d never seen startup culture. I’ve always been around manufacturing. I thought that if you wanted to have a job in video you’d have to be at a TV company or out in Hollywood. So needless to say I made a quick video on spec for Wistia, kind of just like a tour of the team. I called it the “Meet the Team” video and they loved it. They put it on their website and what’s crazy is they noticed more deals coming through almost immediately. People wanted to see who they were about to do business with. And things snowballed from there and I ended up joining the team full time.

I fell in love with the work I was doing at Wistia, fell in love with the company, and I’ve been here ever since.

That’s awesome, so all right. So funny thing, when you were doing what we now know as linear editing: did you know that that’s what that was at that time?

Oh, absolutely not. I thought that that was just the way that you edited video, tape to tape, that was it. And then I happened to go to Sears with my mom. She dragged me to Sears and I was killing time by playing with the first iMac DV which had a very early version of iMovie and that was my first experience with non-linear editing. I was like, POOF! blown away! “Oh my god–”

“What is going on!?” yeah.

“I’ve been doing it wrong this whole time!”

That’s hilarious, so no. Yes, because I remember kind of a similar story and I remember doing that, doing the whole tape to tape thing. And then years later even after getting into non-linear editing and all that stuff I remember hearing the term, “Oh, non-linear.” I’m like, “Non-linear editing, what is that?” And then they go, “Oh well, it’s when you…” I’m like, “You mean the thing I was doing when I was a kid?” That’s hilarious, okay, that’s super funny.

Oh yeah. I think just the way that computer technology, what it did for video production as a whole, introducing non-linear editing, we’re seeing that now happen on the camera side too. Because even when we were getting into doing non-linear editing the cameras looked like garbage that we were working on. They were eight millimeter cameras, maybe miniDV, but they were SD. They were still clunky. They had big batteries. You could never get a wide enough shot. Forget about any kind of depth of field.

And then camera technology caught up to it when you had the Canon 5D and even the iPhone. These things look incredible. So what’s crazy right now is technology has enabled such incredible creativity because everyone has the power to make a really incredible-looking video and edit a really good video with nothing but their phone right now and that didn’t exist even 10 years ago.

Exactly, 100%, which I think is a good foray into what I wanted to talk to you a little bit about because there’s a great connection there. And that is you guys have launched your, I guess we’ll call it the episodic content, “Brandwagon,” and I think you guys started that a couple months ago from what I understand. And I think that the piece of what you were just talking about with the technology shift and the ability for everybody- they’ve got a phone in their pocket, they can create content, is that it’s like opening up this whole new foray and a whole new way of thinking about, A: producing content. Like you can, and the average Joe can, and the average Joe probably should now. So not just can but should.

And then it’s opening up this whole new thing like, “Well what should we be doing? What should that look like?” And I think that what you guys are doing with “Brandwagon” is really kind of where things are going. But for those who aren’t familiar with what… can you maybe tell what you guys are doing with that?

Sure, well first off, yes thanks, thanks a lot for the kind words there. “Brandwagon” is almost like a talk show or a “Tonight Show” but specifically for the marketing and creative audience. So the show is essentially our CEO Chris Savage sits down with some business leaders and marketing leaders. We have the CEO of a marketing software company, HubSpot. We have the CEO co-founder of Harpoon Beer, a myriad of other guests. And he basically picks their brain about what they had to do to build up a really awesome brand, brands that companies all over the world look up to.

And so it’s this talk show format but we also couple in some of the kind of the gag and the shtick from “Tonight Show.” So we have a through line where because the show’s called “Brandwagon” we actually were able to convince our company to let us buy an old station wagon, a ’91 Volvo in just pristine condition, and the show kind of follows us kind of turning that wagon into almost like a “Pimp My Ride” version of a company car where we just mod this thing out with a bunch of video accoutrements and it’s great. It was a lot of fun. The whole show was a lot of work but boy, it was a lot of fun and it’s been getting received really well.

That’s awesome- So a station wagon, that’s pretty darn cool. That’s actually, that’s a pretty neat part of your culture. I guess I have a really from the outside perspective looking in you guys look like you have a really fun and cool culture that you’re able to kind of transmit through that.

Yes, thanks, and that’s not an act, that’s not. That is we try to have our outsides match our insides. And we found that for our brand it’s important for us to be ourselves in everything that we do. Video obviously has an outsized impact on how people can perceive your brand. And actually speaking of brand too one of the things that “Brandwagon” kind of brought up for me and one of the key takeaways that I was able to get from this was actually from Mailchimp, their Chief Creative Officer, Mark DiCristina. And he said something along the lines of that… Your brand is not something that’s owned by you, that your brand is actually what people perceive of you. So you’re in control of your brand but it’s not owned by you. Your brand is actually just your audience’s perception of you which I thought was really interesting.

Yes exactly, and we have the ability as marketers to be able to shift that perception. We can press these buttons, whatever to do to help to kind of shift that but yes, that’s 100%. That makes a lot of sense.

Oh totally, I mean it would have been easier for us to do a talk show format with “Brandwagon” and just have it be Chris Savage, CEO of Wistia sits down with another person. Get a multi-camera shoot, wham bam bam bam bam, thanks, see you later, and that’s it. But instead we built this crazy set behind us. We have a live studio audience. We brought in an animal handler that had exotic animals. We had a chinchilla and a porcupine walking around on that desk. A giant cobra snake out there. We bought this ’91 Volvo and spent all this time and money transforming it into the Brandwagon. That attention to detail and that… personal touch we hope adds a lot to the effectiveness of the show.

Yes, so on that note I mean there’s a couple things I want to ask you on that. You guys have been doing it for a minute now and I think a lot of organizations, I think that they naturally kind of resist and they struggle with saying, “Hey, we want to make this investment and we want to do this because there’s this three-letter acronym called ROI that is very near and dear, and it can be very difficult to track success.” I mean what have you guys done in order to do that or what does that look like for you guys?

I mean, for us, I think a lot of it comes down to trust and that trust works two ways. It works from the company trusting the creative team and the creative team also trusting the company. I think that trust is earned over a period of time. We didn’t make “Brandwagon” as our very first video. We didn’t commit to 25 30-minute episodes, 10 episodes coming out weekly. That was a serious investment in time and resources. We didn’t commit to that overnight. That was after literally almost a decade of using video and seeing its effect both qualitatively in the comments and the responses we’d get but also quantitatively in the data, specifically in the viewing data.

And Wistia, we obviously are using Wistia to host all of our videos and deliver and distribute all of our video content and we’re able to track engagement. We’re able to track fall off. We’re able to track play rate and trends over time. And so that ROI is actually tied to that quantitative data as well as the qualitative. The qualitative is usually if people aren’t talking about it on social or if people aren’t responding positively to a video we feel like maybe something’s wrong and oftentimes it’s because it’s lacking any type of personality.

Yes, that makes a lot of sense. I think what you said, something there is really insightful. I think a lot of, and you said it I guess maybe two times in a couple different ways but one was talking about, hey, you could do just your average interview, whatever camera, multi-cam boom boom boom edit, be done, but you interjected this element that is a lot more engaging.

And I think where I’m kind of driving at is just getting a sense of that ROI relative to engagement because video is a very broad term now, even video in your marketing. “Hey, we want to do a video.” “Okay, well, I mean… there’s a million different things that you can do here.” And I think that there’s a big challenge of saying, “Hey, let’s just do something that’s really conservative and we’re not going to go over here and where we’re worried, where we’re afraid.” And I think trust was a really, was a big word that I heard there that they trust you guys to be able to do that.

Well I mean yes, I mean it’s just not enough to just ship a video. You need to be able to stand out because everyone’s doing it and it’s not enough to just get views on a video, right. You need real engagement. And one of the key pieces of data that we look at specifically with things like “Brandwagon” or our mini-series called “One, Ten, One Hundred” is hours watched, hours spent with the brand. And we were absolutely astonished with the amount of time people have spent with the Wistia brand through watching “Brandwagon” and through watching our other series, “One, Ten, One Hundred.”

And it’s not enough to just grab people’s attention. You need to hold their attention. And that’s why we think episodic content and longer form content and stuff that maybe even makes your viewers wonder “I can’t believe somebody’s actually making this for me! Who would make a talk show just for marketers? Who would make a mini-series about spending $1000, $10,000, $100,000 on the same video for video people?” That seems crazy in today’s “Game of Thrones” world where it’s like you’re just trying to get as big of an audience as possible. No, sometimes it’s all about engaging those niche audiences.

Yes, exactly, 100%. Know your audience and go deep. And I think that one thing that you mentioned there as well is the whole long-form content which I think is a little bit, I think a lot of people have been predisposed to it needs to be shorter, like short, short, short, short. So this whole notion of going more long-form what have you guys discovered with that? Because that is kind of going against what you might think from today’s social marketing or social media standpoint and core content, better engagement. What have you guys found?

I mean it’s all about the platform in which you’re making videos for and what your end goal is with these videos. If you’re putting a video on your front page and you’re just trying to give potential customers or prospects a view of what it is your company does and what you stand for I don’t think you should put a 40-minute video up there. It needs to be short. It needs to be punchy.

Similarly, if you’re putting a video up on let’s say Facebook or Twitter or Instagram, the things that are historically you’re competing with all kinds of other attention grabs, maybe you shouldn’t be throwing something super long and that doesn’t actually have a hook on there. But if you are making something for a niche audience that they’re going to look at this and be like, “I can’t believe this content exists,” you have a little bit more of a license to go deeper on that because you’ve already captured their attention. It’s not about trying to capture attention and hold it. You already kind of have an attentive audience there.

And then it comes down to, how long can you retain them there? How many hours can you get with these people to interact with your brand? Because if somebody’s interacting with your brand for hours on end they’re probably going to have crazy strong affinity for your brand. They’re going to turn into a superfan. They’re going to recommend you to other people.

I actually think there’s a shift that’s happening where it’s almost going back to the word of mouth thing. You don’t know what to trust because you see all the same polished-looking video. Everyone has the same product video online. You don’t know what to trust so of course you’re going to go back to this word of mouth. I’ll trust the thing that my friend or my colleague or a family member tells me is awesome. I think that’s happening with content. I’ll watch the piece of content that a friend or a family member or a colleague told me is really awesome.

So would you be suggesting then with that that maybe the ability that long-form content has that you’re able to form better, maybe deeper relationships from a digital standpoint over the long term? Is that kind of what you’re driving at there?

I think so. If you’re making the right type of content it doesn’t need to be super flashy as long as it is hitting the right target of your audience. Yes, I think ultimately if you can win an hour spent with your brand I mean I think that’s an incredible indicator for success.

Yes, no, I mean I agree 100%. So there’s a term that I’ve noticed that you guys have been kind of putting out in your marketing and on your webpages and whatnot. It’s this idea of brand affinity marketing. What is that?

Yes, brand affinity marketing is basically the belief that your marketing materials should be doing as good of a job as possible to build affinity with your audience. And what I mean by that is that they are going to, even if they’ll never be a customer or they’ll never be one of your clients that they still recognize you as the leader in your industry. And because you’re going to, in this day and age you’re looking for these referrals.

Everyone’s looking for what they should be doing. They’re actually going back to these word-of-mouth referrals. So if you can create an audience of true fans that have crazy affinity for your brand we think that that is going to be the best way that you can market your product or service, your company most effectively in 2019, 2020, and then beyond.

That makes a lot of sense. I wish I’d asked you that question earlier on! Because everything kind of builds on top of that. No, but that’s great. I mean so I guess one other thing I want to add relative to that, maybe talk to me a little bit about the whole, and this is a couple, like maybe what, a year or two old but the whole “One, Ten, Hundred” video series you guys did with Sandwich. What was the idea behind that? And walk me through the backstory on that.

Yes, so “One, Ten, One Hundred,” probably the most important project I’ve ever worked on in my career I think to this day, it spawned from us just wanting to work with Sandwich Video. Sandwich Video of course is like the de facto software product video company out in Los Angeles and we had wanted to work with them for a long time. And we pitched Adam Lisagor, the owner of Sandwich Video, on this idea because both of our companies kind of share the same admiration for creativity and constraints and strong brands. So we pitched him on this idea that, “What if we give your team $1000 to make a video, $10,000 to make a video, and $100,000 to make that same video? What kind of stuff would we learn about the creative process and how budget impacts the final output and where that point is of diminishing returns?”

And they were so excited about the project. And so we kind of started on this journey of not just getting them to make us three videos for our software but we also wanted to go behind the scenes and see how this whole story unfolded. So while Sandwich Video was making those three videos we were actually out there in L.A. capturing documentary-style footage behind the scenes. And then we came back to Cambridge and kind of wrote and shot the rest of this mini-series called “One, Ten, One Hundred” that kind of shines the light on creativity and creative constraints and how budget affects your video quality.

That’s awesome. What were the results? What did you guys discover in that?

So we discovered that kind of unsurprisingly it all comes down to the creative and the creative people that you have attached to your project. And it was actually extremely inspiring to see what this Hollywood director was able to do with $1000 using nothing but an iPhone to create a video. He leaned into the constraints and created an engaging video for $1000. Similarly for $10,000 it was really interesting to see that giant uptake in production quality as you start adding people to your project and different specialists. And then with the $100,000 video you see that Hollywood gloss, that big budget, big national TV commercial look.

And selfishly it was really awesome for us to see what that looked like at Wistia, to see Wistia video would look like for $100,000 but the thing that remained the same across all the videos, it’s you can’t just throw money at a problem, especially a creative problem and expect that to fix it. It all comes down to the creative people that you have on your team.

That’s awesome. There’s a great quote. I get all the ads on Facebook for MasterClass and all this and I think there was one with Hans Zimmer. So he’s the big Hollywood composer. He’s done all the big Nolan films and all the–

Oh I know, I’ve seen him live, incredible.

We actually went live as well I think a year ago or two. He was doing that tour so maybe, I don’t know. Maybe I don’t know if that was the same one or not.

So awesome, yes, yes, yes.

It was amazing but I digress. So he’s got on that MasterClass ad I think it was him and he talks about, he said, “Creativity is not restricted or constrained by budget. The creative process happens up here in the head.” And I think that really shines light on it. You’re talking about having constraints and so, “Okay, we are going to shoot a video on an iPhone or we’re going to shoot it on, you know. We’re going to have a huge crew and we’re going to have all kinds of compositing and all kinds of work and whatever.” And that, I love how you said it’s really that creativity and the people there, that that’s really where that’s what really matters at that point.

And I think to that point I think what you guys maybe were trying to, you guys have communicated, especially what I’m seeing with “Brandwagon,” and whatnot, it’s like that you, that creativity and the ability of creating all this content relevant to the technology that we have and the access that we have is that everybody has that ability to be able to create. And we should be creating especially for if we kind of go into this whole brand affinity marketing piece, that’s the ability. It’s a unique opportunity for brands to be able to leverage the technology and the access and to do it creatively.

And so there shouldn’t be an excuse, I guess should I say, like, “Oh, we only have an iPhone,” or, “We only have a whatever.” No, you can work around those constraints. And actually I would argue and I think from our standpoint and from our experience has been, we’ve actually had, some of our most creative stuff has come out of lower budgets because it’s almost like here’s the box. How can we really stretch that? And there’s solutions that popped up that we otherwise wouldn’t have thought about because oh, well that’s not a problem, it’s whatever. But now it becomes– a challenge becomes a great opportunity.

Totally, yes, I mean a lot of creativity is problem solving and when you insert some of these constraints your problems get different and you can use access different parts of your brain. But one thing I will say to that and to people thinking about making more content, grabbing their phone, opening up their laptop, using their webcam to make content is kind of know where your brand kind of what your brand demands there. Somebody like Nike or Apple, their brand doesn’t really allow for that type of production quality. Even though it looks pretty good it needs to be intentional. I mean you see Apple using their own phones for that. There was a holiday “Snowball” ad. There are definitely exceptions to that but there needs to be kind of a minimum point of entry on the production quality for what’s good enough to put out there.

Sure, totally, yes.

Just because you can doesn’t mean that you absolutely should. But I do think the principles that we try to communicate with “One, Ten, One Hundred” that creativity always wins I still do believe that to my core.

That’s awesome. So all right, my last question. What’s next? What is next for “Brandwagon” or what’s the next big thing that you can share with us that’s not?

Yes, well at Wistia we are really excited to keep moving forward into original content. We have some shows that we’re working on that are in development right now that we’re really excited about. We’re going to take a lot of the stuff that we learned about building this studio and all the stuff that we learned about creating episodic content and we’re hopefully going to share that with the world and influence the next 2020 slate of shows that are coming out of Wistia. But we’re really excited about what we’re cooking up over here.

Awesome, well listen, I’m really excited that you were able to join me today on this episode. Thank you so much for your time. If anyone would like, you know, the best way to learn about you guys, obviously go to Wistia.com and I’m assuming we can find “Brandwagon.” Does it have its own URL or it’s up on your website somewhere?

Yes, if you go to Wistia.com, if you go to Wistia.com/series you’ll see “One, Ten, One Hundred” and “Brandwagon.” You can find me on Twitter. My handle is @crlvideo. But yes, thank you so much for having me. This is fun.

Awesome, thanks so much, Chris.

See you.

Awesome, all right. So a lot of things that, a lot of takeaways that I have for sure and I think one of the big ones is we were talking about this element of creativity and that it really doesn’t have restrictions per se but it’s really making sure that we have the right creative people for creating some of these things. I think long-form content was another big thing that I pulled away as you look to do brand affinity marketing.

So I think Chris has got really onto something when he’s talking about how he’s seeing that a lot of, you know, we’re seeing this word-of-mouth effect happening a little bit more. You’re inundated with messaging and ads and video content and all the like. And so the opportunity is to be able to align your messaging, align your content maybe in a long-form standpoint where you’re able to develop more ongoing relationships so that maybe your customer isn’t necessarily ready to buy today but six months from now or 12 months from now or three years from now, whenever that is. But they say, “You know what? This company is awesome. They’ve shared all of its value with me. I’m learning a lot from them, and they are the experts and we are totally going with them,” or “I’m going to recommend them.”

So I think that’s a really great opportunity that we need to be thinking about as we move into 2020, as we look at 2021, as ways to be able to really differentiate yourself and to do things, something that’s different and something that your competitors quite honestly in the manufacturing industrial space most people are not doing it so it’s a land grab. That’s your opportunity.

So if you liked this, listen, we’d love a like, share, comment on social media. If you have any questions we can answer them for you on IndustrialSage.com/questions. That’s all I’ve got for you today so thanks for watching or listening if you’re on any of the iTunes or podcasting stations. I’m done rambling for today. I’ll catch you next week with another episode of IndustrialSage. Thanks for watching.

Thanks for reading. Don’t forget to subscribe to our weekly newsletter to get every new episode, blog article, and content offer sent directly to your inbox. You can also subscribe wherever you download podcasts so you can listen on the go!

Okay, let’s jump in today’s episode. I have the Founder and President of The Upstart Group [now renamed UpstartWorks] based in Chicago, this is Rohan Thambrahalli. Thank you so much for joining me today, Rohan.

Hey, thanks for having me, I appreciate it.

This is great, so for those who aren’t familiar with The Upstart Group. And I want to be very specific, there’s a few Upstart Groups, you guys are based in Chicago.

That’s right.

Tell me, tell our audience who you guys are and what you guys do.

We’re a technology company, focused on working specifically with commercial industrial brands. Helping them, really harness the power of E-commerce. And many different E-commerce marketplaces and E-commerce platforms.

Great. So E-commerce is a little topic. It’s a little hot right now. But before we kind of jump into all that stuff, tell me a little bit about your background, how did you get started into this space? What’s your background?

Look my background is traditional industrial sales. I grew up in the B2B industrial sales distribution space. Focused on selling industrial commercial products to large enterprise customers. Really five, seven years ago as I was in front of customers talking about a product I continuously found that the customers were listening to me, talking about whether it’s a commercial lighting product or whether it’s power tools, pneumatic tools, they really wanted social proof, right? They really wanted to see what other people were saying about this product. And they turn to the web and specifically, they turn to Amazon to see what people are saying about this product and how they were using it, different application.

And that really was kind of the genesis of the business. For me, it was kind of a light bulb went off and said, “Wow, this customer who was buying product for a large enterprise is still turning to a platform that historically was really just meant for individual consumers to buy a cell phone case or an iPhone charger.” And that really was the genesis of the company.

That’s awesome. So that’s an interesting thing that you were talking about. You said you found your customers, they wanted that social proof, they want to get reviews. We want to be able to see how this product performs and whatnot and I think, and correct me if I’m wrong, but I feel that because of, we’ll call it the Amazon effect or what have you. Because we have been predisposed as consumers to buy a certain way. The way that you and I buy now, likely, right? When we’re looking for a product, we’re looking for a new iPhone case, okay? We’re going to go look online, nine times out of 10, we’re probably going to land on Amazon somewhere. And then we’re going to start diving into the reviews and we’re going to start looking at features or maybe look at some videos, we’re going to do all that stuff, right?

So I think there’s a gap between buying that product from a consumer standpoint and then when we get to B2B products, that it’s like, wait a minute, that doesn’t exist. Or what may have started to now, but there’s an expectation to say, well I bought my iPhone case like this, but I want to buy my stainless tanks or I want to buy my safety product or I want to buy whatever inside the, do you guys feel that what your customers were saying?

Yeah, absolutely. Look the demographic of the industrial buyer has changed significantly, right? If you look at Amazon, almost 70% of all product search begins on Amazon. I think there was an interview of Google’s CEO and they asked him, who’s your biggest competitor in search. And they said Amazon. They didn’t say Bing, they didn’t say Yahoo. He said Amazon’s our biggest competitor because Amazon is the largest product search engine. So now what’s happening is that B2B customer, when she’s at home shopping for her supplies on Amazon, she’s expecting the same level of customer experience when she’s buying for a large plant or a large facility or a hospital. So to your point; however, there’s a big gap between the data and the customer experience industrial brands currently have versus how their customers are shopping for their products.

Yeah, 100%. So what are, obviously you guys help companies be able to mitigate that gap and be able to close that. What are some of the signs or some of those pain points where some of these manufacturers are saying, “Okay yeah, we need to start looking.” What are those triggers, if you will, where they start saying, okay we knew it was a problem before but now this happened, or these series of events are happening and now we want to start making action. What does that look like?

I think generally speaking when we look at it, in going into 2020 there’s a lot of research done that says as high as 75% of B2B buyers are wanting to transact online, okay? However, a very small portion of them are doing it because first, product availability. There’s a lot of industrial product that’s just not available online. So the customer is forced to go buy through traditional distribution channel.

Secondly, and this is a big one: if the product is available online, the product details is not sufficient, there isn’t good content. The reviews are not necessarily well managed. The customer Q&As are not necessarily well responded to. So it doesn’t give the customer confidence that okay, if I’m going to go buy a $1600 circuit tracer online, do I have the confidence that this is truly being sold by the brand owner, the manufacturer, right? Because there’s so many third party sellers out there that are selling products. Oftentimes you have customers buying the product from some third party sellers and then when it’s not working or it’s not what they expected, sending the product back to the manufacturer saying, “Hey this is your branded product. It’s not what I ordered, it’s not working.” So that’s one thing that’s happening, one of, but it’s a big challenges.

Secondly, I think mobile is also being a big driver in terms of, I’m going to use the word forcing some traditional commercial industrial brands to look at E-commerce because 40% of E-commerce transactions are on mobile now. And on mobile, it’s so much more easier to get the social proof even when compared to just desktop because you can just switch over to YouTube and look at a YouTube video on how to use a specific product that might be traditionally complicated. So access of information that’s being created put out there from other users who are using this product, is a big big driver of why a lot of the traditional brands are really looking to sort of get footprints on E-commerce and mobile. And if they are not, they should start like really quickly.

Yeah, I agree with you 100%. So maybe for those companies that are saying, they’re realizing that and they say, “Hey, we need to start really quickly.” What are some things maybe you ought to prepare for that, what of they need to have or not have? How do you make that transition? I just asked you a lot of questions so, how do you that, what are those first steps saying, “Okay gosh, I think we need to figure this out”?

And you know what, that’s a great question. I think, our recommendation always is don’t try to boil the whole ocean, right? Start small, right? Start small. Because it is a lot of work. Content is a big driver. So not just your very traditional product related, technical product related data, but also having the intelligence around, okay well how are people searching for our products? Searches are different on desktop versus mobile. So making sure that we’re incorporating all of that search intelligence into product bullet points, descriptions. Having multiple product images. One or two product images just don’t cut it now. Having at least five product images, application images if possible. Videos, even better.

So content is a big piece of it. And then I think really figuring out what is the right platform, right? I think that also drives a lot of, that there’s a lot of discoverability. So a great example of this, you know we launched a brand that is based in the safety PPE space. They make work boots. So if you’re working in a large manufacturing facility or you’re working at a food processing facility, you wear these boots. For the longest time, these products were traditionally just procured from MRO distributors. But we launched this brand about 90 days ago on Amazon and they’ve seen significant sales increase 30 days after we’d launched them. So that again tells us that these very traditional B2B buyers are relatively, quickly migrating to E-commerce platforms. And having the products where your customers are shopping for your products is critically important.

Yeah that makes a lot of sense. One of the challenges that I’ve heard and I’m just curious about, if you’ve got manufacturers traditionally going through 100% distribution or some dealer, but yet now we’re going through Amazon. From I guess maybe a fulfillment standpoint, how have manufacturers been able to sort adjust to that? If particularly, if there 100% going through distribution and it’s just like, we’re just sending truck loads of stuff to our distributors versus now, we’re sending one thing or two things. Much smaller shipments, does that make sense?

Yeah and again that is a good point. These manufacturers traditionally make the product, put them on pallets, and just ship them out and let somebody else worry about the broad based distribution. With E-commerce there’s obviously two ways to do this. You can have a relationship with the Home Depot or Walmart or Amazon where you ship product directly to their fulfillment centers and then they do the broad based distribution on their own. Or you can always choose to do drop ship where you’re shipping product directly to end users. But in our experience, there’s several mainly non CPG brands out there they just don’t have drop ship capabilities. So that does become a battle for several brands.

So if I understand correctly, so most manufacturers who are doing this, are they going through like an Amazon type fulfillment? Or are they fulfilling on their own? I wasn’t sure I understood that.

Most of them are leveraging the distributors, in this case the E-commerce platform built-in lens capabilities.

Okay, yeah I was very curious about that. Because I know that’s definitely, again it’s not a one size fit all. Everyone has their own, their different challenges and what might work for one company as another might not work for another one. I know that’s something that comes up quite a bit. One question, and you mentioned about, we were talking about a little bit earlier, is maybe from an E-com standpoint, maybe they aren’t necessarily have the capability to be able to buy through the website. But even just changing that customer experience of saying, he we’ve got a printed magazine or catalog that we send out, but now it’s we’re going to make sure that is all online. And you mentioned about having, making sure that you have a lot of great content. What specifically do you recommend that for each product category or each product, what’s best practice from a content perspective for them to have?

We spend a lot of time and again, really understanding on how customers are searching for products. We’re geekish when it comes to customer search, we’re passionate about it. We spend a lot of time in sort of product titles and descriptions. When it comes to product search, that is the highest index, right? So we want to make sure that product titles and descriptions incorporate again without changing the integrity of the product, incorporates all the different ways customers are searching for your product. Then we get down to bullet points.

Again bullet points, we don’t necessarily recommend them to be very technical. We recommend them to be more solution-oriented. So instead of saying “Our degreaser has this chemical.” We would say, “Degreaser for a bearing or a compressor” or what have you. It’s really more solution driven. On the imaging standpoint, obviously we always recommend high resolution here image that’s kind of the primary product image. Followed by angled shots. Again depends on what the product is. You might have two angles or four angles. Special callout features so if there’s a specific feature on your product, you want to call that out.

360 imaging. Again, very important if a product is a very technical tool. Like a precision measuring tool, right? The customer might want to zoom in, rotate it so 360 imaging is very impactful. And then of course a short video describing the product– better if it’s application driven as well. And then in most platforms as you scroll down to the bottom of the page, there’s real estate that you can really get deeper into product features and benefits and even applications. So these are just the basic components that we always recommend to our clients.

Great. That’s good to know. Especially, I think you mentioned specific on the imagery and making sure that there are five images and the whole 360 piece. Video obviously is a big game changer. And then specifically with the application specific content I think makes a lot of sense. Obviously relevant to the product depending on what that is. But yeah, that makes a lot of sense.

And what’s interesting to me is that because I do come from that the belly to belly, industrial sales piece. One thing that’s remained constant from that time to today is customer relevancy. And it’s taken different forms, different forms of delivery. But at the end of the day, anything we put out there, whether we’re doing an in-person sales pitch or it’s an E-commerce platform or mobile, the more relevant we can be to the customer, they’re more likely, you are able to deliver really great customer experience.

Yeah exactly.

I think the big piece really is customer confidence, right? So it’s a bit counterintuitive because you’ve got several brands that say, “Hey, you know what? We don’t want to deal with E-commerce.” But I tell them that, “Your products are already out there,” you know? It’s just that some random person is selling those products. And if I were the brand owner, I would want to control my product integrity, my price, my product content, and my brand! Those are the big things that I would want to control. So for me to be able to do that effectively, I have to directly engage with these platforms and not let some random person dictate those four big things that really matter.

Have you found that sometimes there’s a little bit of a fear from a dealer to distributor standpoint? Again, depending on the company they approach, that there is irrelevancy for a distributor. If you’re rolling out an E-commerce model. I guess what I’m asking is, what are ways that you guys have seen that this has really added a huge benefit? Versus, you’re adding another channel, yes they could go directly to the consumer or to the end user rather. Versus maybe the prior model.

The number one pushback we get is, “We have big business in the traditional channels.”. And what we tell them always is that don’t be channel obsessed, be customer obsessed. Because your customer obsession should make you want to provide your products on E-commerce platforms. Not saying the traditional channels are not important, they are. But we want you guys, we want them to be where the customers are and the customer will at the end of the day, decide to buy the product from where they get the most value.

Exactly. No, I love it. That’s a huge initiative and a big piece. It’s more than the customer experience piece. It’s that I love the customer being customer obsessed. That’s the game changer. That’s where you’ve got to go.

Yeah and the way we really look at that is it comes in many different forms, so I have that customer obsession. And there’s so many different ways we can do that on an E-commerce or mobile platform is because we want to be able to tell the brand’s story directly to the person that’s turning that wrench all day long, right? And I think in some cases, the ability to tell that story in the traditional channel, it’s somewhat reserved for just a tier one brand. Well we’re the underdogs, we want to tell the tier two brand, tier three brand’s story to again to the actual users that are using the product, making a living using the product everyday.

Yeah, absolutely. That makes a lot of sense to me. So as we’re kind of wrapping up, what else, what recommendations do you give to companies as we kind of move in to 2020. Think about that company that’s kind of on the edge thinking okay yeah we might need to move, we’re kind of on the fence going into this direction, what would you tell them?

Well I would tell them that, think about your customer. Stay customer obsessed, your customers are searching for your products on E-commerce platforms. Secondly, your products are already out there, right? Some random third party seller is selling your product. They’re controlling your brand, your product integrity, your pricing strategy, and more importantly customer experience on your behalf. So as a brand, we strongly feel that the brand should be controlling that not somebody else. And lastly, I would say that, allow your customer the experience that they deserve. When they’re at home buying something for themselves, the experience shouldn’t be any different when they’re at work buying one of your products.

Bingo, that’s it. That’s awesome. Rohan, I really appreciate the time. I know your time is very limited, thank you for spending it with us on IndustrialSage. If anyone would love to learn more about you, what’s the best way to learn more about you?

Thanks for having me on, I really appreciate the opportunity. We’re definitely passionate about this space. To learn more about us, you can go to www.upstartusa.com. Our headquarters is in Chicago, Illinois. I would love to have a chat with anybody.

Awesome. Well Rohan I really appreciate it and stay warm, stay warm up there in Chicago.

Yeah thanks a lot, I appreciate it.

All right, thanks. Okay so another really great episode here. So a couple of key takeaways that I had. And I’ve been hearing this term, well we’ve all been hearing it for a little bit. And obviously it’s more than, it’s elevating the next game of that customer experience, it’s being customer obsessed. And it’s really understanding what those challenges are and what their customers are going through. How can we facilitate an easier sale? How can we make things better and easier and faster for our customers? And E-com is a really great way of being able to do that. Why?

Rohan talked about, I think he said that, he’s talked about how Google was saying that Amazon is actually their biggest competitor. It’s not Bing, it’s not Yahoo, Amazon. And people are going, doing their product research there. And that is happening whether it’s B2C or B2B. So there’s a lot to learn here. There’s a lot to, if you’re not going down this road, start thinking about it. Say hey, look at our customers and if this is how they want to buy, then there’s a way that we can do this, start thinking about that.

And I also love how Rohan was talking about some best practices around how to really communicate the value prop for your products and making sure that you have all the right images and the search titles and the descriptions. Maybe adding some video, 360 content. And being really application specific. Versus just kind of general. So some really great insights here, hopefully you have one or two takeaways. And I have a laundry list of things that I took away from this.

Listen, if you have any question you’d like us to answer from the show, we’d be happy to do that. You can reach out to us at IndustrialSage.com/questions. We’d love to answer them for you. Listen I really appreciate you listening or watching. Maybe you’re on iTunes or you’re on Spotify. Or maybe you’re watching on the website. Thank you for doing that. We love a review or social comment. And that’s it, that’s all I’ve got for you today. Thanks so much for watching. I’ll be back next week with another episode of IndustrialSage.

Thanks for reading. Don’t forget to subscribe to our weekly newsletter to get every new episode, blog article, and content offer sent directly to your inbox. You can also subscribe wherever you download podcasts so you can listen on the go!

All right, so let’s jump in today’s episode, I have Mr. Scott Luton, Mr. Supply Chain, right, from Supply Chain Now Radio. Scott, thank you so much for coming onto IndustrialSage.

You bet, excited to do it, we’ve been talking for awhile, and it is incredible what you all have been doing, and all the stories you all been featuring, so glad to be here.

DANNY:

Well, we feel the same exact way about you. So for those who aren’t familiar, big podcast, Supply Chain Now Radio, tell me for those who aren’t familiar, the two who aren’t familiar, tell them about who you guys are, what you guys do, a little bit of background there.

Sure, so we’ve been doing digital media, mainly webinars, going back five, six, seven years. Really enjoyed it, really enjoyed the remote, the convenience, the ability to kind of pick and choose what stories needed a big spotlight, right? Whether it’s people or companies or best practices. So enjoyed that for awhile and then in May 2017, the world as it turns out, changed a lot for us. We kicked off our first podcast with some partners here in Atlanta, and really, we went from once a month to now we’re seven, eight shows a week.

That’s a lot.

Because we enjoy it, right? We’re very passionate about it, we love–

That’s important.

Telling the story, right? However, what we have come to find out, the industry, the supply chain industry on a whole has a big perception problem. And number two, a lot of the things that make it happen a lot of the things that make packages delivered on your door two days later, or be able to send back packages that may be wrong sizes, wrong colors, what have you.

And really everything that happens in between, that doesn’t get any spotlight, no visibility. Whether it’s the people that make it happen, or the emerging technologies, or for that matter, the problems that have to be solved to make global business and global supply chain happen, all of that needs more visibility and that’s the basis of our business model.

That’s awesome, so I’m excited to jump into that and unpack a little bit more. But before we do that, tell me a little about your background, like how did you… Are we doing the whole podcast thing you said, but 2017, so what had happened, what was pre-2017, what’s your background?

So in a nutshell, I’m born and raised in Aiken, South Carolina, moved to Atlanta in 2005 I believe. Met my wife Amanda, father of three kids, and two dogs, Dexter and Ruby. My wife and kids would make sure they get mentioned. From a professional standpoint, we’ve been serving the really the end-to-end supply chain community for 15 years. A lot of that time has been spent in the manufacturing industry or serving the manufacturing industry.

At the end of the day, one of the things I really enjoyed the most is facilitating forums or dinner meetings or workshops where folks are interacting and they’re exchanging ideas. I think, and whether it’s supply chain or in the business world in general, that so many folks and leaders and practitioners are searching for answers and market intel and what have you. And it’s been very rewarding whether it’s through industry associations or some of the digital media we’ve produced or some of the other initiatives to help facilitate that. So that in a nutshell is my background. And in 2013 we were pushed out of the tree, so to speak, we became an entrepreneur, had a little bit of a plan. But I think, as you can probably relate, many folks can probably relate, that plan changes dramatically when you’ve got to put, when the rubber meets road, right?

What are you talking about?

I’m sure your perfectly-laid plans were exactly what you ended up executing and all, but kidding aside, it changed for everybody, right? We launched our first business in 2013 which focused on training and consulting, a lot around Lean Six Sigma. And two and a half years later sold that to jump into, with some longtime friends and partners back on the workforce side of things, still supporting supply chain, manufacturing, engineering.

Fought the good fight there for about four years and when we did that, we were intending to, because we enjoyed it as much as we have, continued to churn out content and interview folks and share case studies and you name it, and we just had an epiphany. Hey, this could well be, especially bouncing the idea off my wife, what we’re here for, to really focus and double down on this.

So this being what?

Supply Chain Now Radio.

Supply Chain Now Radio.

So that was always, those efforts and the resources and the content, that was always in the backseat, and in the last couple years that’s changed dramatically to the point where in spring of 2019 we decided to make a big, bold bet and do this full time. Go to bed thinking about it, head up out of bed in the mornings thinking about it, and since that time we have grown dramatically. We’ve built a lot of momentum, we’ve got some new partnerships that we’ve already launched and more that we’ll be launching in weeks and months ahead. And we’re all doing what we absolutely love to do.

That’s key, that passion piece. So you mentioned that you kind of were doing this for a little bit before, what did that look like initially? This is back, prior 2017.

So great question–

Is it webinars and stuff?

Yeah, webinars primarily. And you know, webinars and podcasts are terms that are thrown around a lot and people have all kinds of different notions of what they are. However, what I have found, especially in supply chain, especially where there are so many challenges and things are changing so rapidly, and to get things made, procured, made, delivered, and then even returned, folks are constantly looking for new ideas, and often times they can’t step out of their offices to go to this lunch meeting or go to this dinner meeting what have you.

So, the genesis of our work, really was with industry associations, namely ASCM, the Association for Supply Chain Management, especially their APICS Channel. We volunteered locally in Atlanta, on the board and served as president of the local chapter. And then also regionally, with their, at the time their southeast district was served about 33 chapters across US southeast region. And one of the first things we uncovered is that hey, a lot of these folks in some of these smaller markets don’t have a chance or the resources or the time to put together monthly dinner meetings.

So first thing out of the box, it’s not the most creative thing, but let’s do a monthly webinar series. I enjoy doing it, we knew how to do it, and we felt there was a need. And that really began to resonate, we got a lot of great feedback, we continued to see numbers and more interest in that program. That’s what started us down the path to really say, hey, you know, there could be something here, that is a business model.

And so locally that was my personal experience, and then if you look at the industry, the global industry, there is a lot more dollars coming into organizations that are looking for ways, we’ve talked about this I think, when you were on our show, that more and more effort and deliberate effort and bandwidth is going into how can we tout our capabilities, our capacity, our expertise, in a way that’s not just a 30 second commercial. But is in a way that’s based on stories and anecdotes and problems, and kind of on the human aspect of it all.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely. I think we’re on the very beginning of that wave, to be honest, I really think that the opportunity and the need… I think a lot of companies, particularly in the spaces that we’re working, they recognize it, but they haven’t fully implemented it. They’re like, okay, let’s dip our toe and let’s start doing that a little bit, so…

Danny, I can tell you from all of our interactions through several years now, and especially when you were our guest a few weeks back, you get it and you’re doing it, and to your point, I think, a lot more folks will be following your lead, frankly. What I really have enjoyed about our conversations is you get that it can’t be, I mean yeah, there’s some great commercials right now, the Apple commercials around the holidays, those are the first ones that come to mind. Publix are known for their commercials, but if you look at a lot of those, none of those are product first, it is the story, right, that pulls you in. And seeing all your work throughout the years, you get it and I think a lot of the other sectors and a lot of the traditional industry, I’ll call it, they’re coming around. They realize that okay, this needs to be a big shift.

Well, yeah, I agree 100%. I mean story telling, I think a big piece, I think this is what you guys are doing really well, is that it’s not about selling. You know, when you think of marketing or advertising, okay, we’ve got to hit him, we’ve got to sell, we’ve got to sell, super transactional. What you’re doing is you’re offering that platform for people to be able to, talking about you share ideas.

I love how you were talking about how these are busy people, executives, everyone’s busy and so the ability to go to one of these dinners or something like that, it’s really hard. But there’s so much value and there’s so much expertise that people have to share, that creating these different types of forums, these different opportunities, are really where it’s at. And I think that’s what you guys have really done a tremendously great job of doing through the podcast. So, tell me, you made that transition, what are some of the biggest things that you’ve learned by doing this, maybe from some guests or different things? What are those takeaways?

Yeah, that’s such a great question and right when you asked, I think about the 230+ podcast episodes and each of those stories and individuals. But if I had to pick just a couple of things, I think one of the biggest learnings for me has been the exceptional paramount need for more diversity and more folks who are willing to help provide opportunities for all.

Through the course of, on the very first episode, and who still retains the championship belt for most appearances is Elba Pareja-Gallagher who founded Show Me 50 here in Atlanta. And I have learned so much from Elba and thought leaders like Elba can not only state the case from a data standpoint of why we need, and it’s not just a male and female, it is diversity in all walks of life. But not only can thought leaders like Elba share why the bottom line benefits from diversity, but from a personal experience, we’ve really learned how the brightest and some of the most capable leaders almost often times can be overlooked and not given opportunities to make a huge impact.

And it takes everyone to get working together to really work, and it’s not easy, but work to figure out a way to make sure opportunities are enjoyed by all. Very transparently, we’re not where we want to be from a, how can we really showcase a very well thought out, wide, I want to say diversitude, but I don’t think that’s a word, Danny.

Well, it is is now, you can just make it, it’s all good.

But you know, we want to continue to diversify the content we produce. I don’t think of ourselves and our firm as a marketing firm, we pride ourselves on the ability to go out and find the stories, find the content, find the people, the technologies, the companies, that need the spotlight. And the stories that should be told, and then work very hard and diligently to produce that content. And then by and large we have built an engine and continue to add to the engine that helps maximize the ears and the eyes that those stories, that pick up those stories.

But, so the need, the very real need for great diversity across, especially supply chain. And then, probably the second big lesson learned for me, if I had to pick just a couple, is lip service leadership vs really action-based leadership. Until you go through all these conversations and you’re getting recorded, right, so you’re really thinking hard about every word and phrase and story you’re sharing. I think this notion of lip service vs action based is something that’s really been core to me for quite some time, but as you sit down and meet with a wide variety of leaders that have a wide variety of different approaches, it really dawned on me those that, I mean there’s so many lip service leaders that can talk the best game, but fail miserably in execution.

And not only do the leaders fail, but their teams, the organizations, the shareholders, it impacts so many of the people vs the folks that not only talk a good game, but more importantly they make it happen, they do it. The servant leaders, the folks that work hard, not just for the bottom line, but to help everyone win. I mean that, episode in and episode out, we see leadership observations and insights that, maybe someday we can write a book, there’s so many of them.

DANNY:

I’m sure there’s a lot that you’ve discovered with that for sure. It’s certainly been my experience, on this set, you said, 230 episodes?

Just over 230.

That’s awesome, we’re not there yet. So you guys are a good 100 above us in our front.

That’s the beauty, what you’re sharing there, is the beauty, I think, of not just podcasting, but digital media. There are millions of different approaches, whether it’s how you put content together or whether the cadence that we’re talking about, or whether it’s the style or the positioning. Or for that matter, just all the subject matter. I’ll be the first to tell you that in the world of podcasting, I bet supply chain, which I’ve had people say, “You do a podcast on supply chain and you have listeners?” And that’s okay, one of the beauties of this digital space is there’s so many different ways to get there and to tell the stories and it’s so rewarding all along the way.

Yeah, no, absolutely. Again, same shared experience, you’re like, “What, you, huh, this? Okay, I don’t know, I don’t know about this.” But it’s true, you keyed on something important, giving the spotlight and having that ability for those companies, those organizations that need it. Or they’ve got amazing innovations and different things that are going on. So, I’m curious, and this was something, podcasting in general, I think, is one of the fastest growing trends right now, and I think it’s going to continue to grow. I can’t remember, there’s a stat about it’s growing by 30% or 40% in terms of viewership from this year to last year, it’s a huge number of new listeners that are coming in and they’re adopting that. Why do you think that is the case?

You know what I love about it, and what I believe is a tailwind for the podcasting industry, is number one, it’s the democratization of content. Whether you have ten dollars to spend or $100 to spend we’ll call it, vs a million, you can jump in and you can build content and have your voice heard. Or seek out the voices you want to have heard and publish. There’s a very low barrier to entry which we love about it, and I love about the industry, because there are so many folks that don’t have the resources that have stories and perspectives that need to be told. So I think that’s one of the big tailwinds.

I think, again, I’ll defer to the marketing geniuses in the room, but I think that the spoken word and also the video word continues to, it’s not like it’s been this week, but for years it’s continued to garner more and more influence. And if you look at how consumers want to consume the content, the spoken word, via whether it’s audio or video that continues to dominate, especially as we see some of the generational transfer influences take root, which we talked about in the last conversation. One last thing, when I think about podcasting in particular, if you live in Atlanta, you know traffic well, right? Really well, some days more than others, right? And I think, I won’t attribute this to generational transfer, but I think in general, many folks, especially professionals, are looking to maximize their time, right?

Oh beyond a doubt, yeah.

So while they’re making an hour and a half commute for some, or 30 minute commute, or they’re spending that time in the gym or maybe they’re in the dentist’s office waiting that proverbial hour before you’re being seen, which Amazon effect is changing by the way, on demand is where we’re going right for everything. Folks are using that time differently, and one of the ways that they’re using that time is by the consumption of podcasts. I agree with you, I think while podcasting has been around for a long time, I think we’re still kind of in its infancy in terms of just how many players will be there.

We’ve seen some big gets here recently, between Spotify and many others that are doubling down on the investment in the space, and I think some industries, including the end to end supply chain industry, are still really in their infancy when it comes to how they’re leveraging. It doesn’t mean that it’s invisible, there’s plenty of outstanding companies involved in supply chain that have great digital products, however, many of them are product or service first, and they’re not agnostic. And if not agnostic, I mean who wants to listen to an infomercial for an hour into their commute? I love Ron Popeil, I still love some of his infomercials, “You’re going to set it and forget it”, but that’s tough to listen to day in and day out.

Oh yeah, exactly. Yeah, I think there’s an element of value and I think, as you mentioned on there, it’s really just the way that we kind of buy now, and pairing in that that shift, it’s like everything you mentioned, the Amazon effect, right, on demand, we want that, and I think that as that experience we have is, whether you’re buying a consumer product or even a B2B product, that’s changing, and that expectation to have… The net net is that we are self educating, and so if this is a way that we’re now buying, and I don’t want to hear the infomercial, we’ve got to learn how to provide value and share that expertise. I think it’s just a fantastic way of being able to… I love podcasts, but I don’t listen to them as much as I should. Half the time I’m on the phone in the car, hands-free, hands-free by the way.

You know there’s that saying that the shoe peddler that wears holes in his shoes–

Yeah, that kid that has no, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Whatever that saying is, I usually butcher all the cliches, but there’s so much truth there. We are, I believe we’re kindred spirits here, we’re so busy spotlighting and creating content, all these stories and these great people, and these great companies, that rarely do we, at least I try to. And when we’re not doing that, we’re doing quality checks on what we have to do to try and get better.

I think you get a pass for that, like you know, I think that’s, you’re creating a lot…

But you know, one other component I think that’s really important and driving digital media including podcasting is the global consumption, right? If you look at, I want to say we just, well we publish in the 230’s when this interview airs maybe, so if you look back at episode one and maybe the first hundred that we did, we were very internally focused, especially in Atlanta, especially what’s right here and based on feedback we got, and other opportunities. We said, “We’ve really got to cover the global end to end supply chain industry, and let’s not have every story, as much as we love Atlanta, supply chain city, how can we really broadcast from here vs broadcast on here all the time?”

So with that shift, and with some of our content shifts and some of our other partners, both internally and externally as our team grew, we’ve continued to really diversify that thought leadership to where, you want things as entrepreneurs, we measure ourselves in a variety of different ways. We just hit our 41st country and when we look at all the charts, all the leadership charts that Apple and Spotify offer, you can get a sense of how your content’s landing. With Thailand this past week, we just hit our 41st country in terms of charts globally for business podcasts.

And that, we want to be at 400 next year, but that, from where we started, we’re very proud of that journey and proud of how we’ve tried to get out of our comfort zones to cover more content and stories that, we’re not even remote experts in. We still have a long way to go when it comes to the journey, whether it’s global content or diversity of thought leadership, or featuring more non-mainstream stories, we’ve come a long way and we look forward to making 2020 even a bigger year making sure we’re covering that global end to end supply chain.

That’s awesome, well congratulations on that, that’s fantastic.

Great team.

You have to have a great team for that–

Have to, have to, Amanda and Greg, and Chris, and Jessica, Clay, Michelle, Kelly and several others. These folks have really come together. In start up mode, you’re constantly experimenting, and if you’re not, then you’re going to be in trouble, right? But to work with all of these incredibly bright people that get, they get the feedback cycles, they get experimentation and get, they’re willing to try new ideas and bring new ideas and lead new things. It has been an absolute, the best learning experience of my entire life, which again, going back to where we started, this is where–

That’s awesome.

I think we were born to be, and while we’re really excited to where we’ve gotten today, the sky’s the limit and we’re looking forward to doubling down on all of these, these wins we’ve had and seeing where it takes us next year.

That’s super, that’s awesome, that’s super, and you know I think it’s awesome that you’ve found your passion with that. Sometimes it’s like you kind of come at it from a totally different way, I don’t know how this happened but it somehow happened.

Serendipity sometimes, right?

Yeah, exactly, but I think the key thing is, you said, experimenting. I think that maybe, this is maybe shifting the topic a little bit, but on that entrepreneurial spirit, and I think that there’s always, in your DNA, that I’m guessing that even before you said you got pushed out of the tree, or whatever, I can’t remember what you said there, that there is that, I’m guessing, that that sense of experimenting and just like always looking for something a little bit different. And how can I even, maybe I’ve got a traditional nine to five, but ooh, how can I do this still different over here or that, is that something that you identify with?

So I think there’s two things, I think as I listen to kind of how you’re posing that question. I think number one, I think I saw a Harvard Business Review article, that based on research, showed that entrepreneurs have more faith than many other aspects. I didn’t really think about that until I sat back and said, you know, based on all the conversations and collaborations, that probably is something there.

And I know for us and our family that you do have to be willing to not only take on the risk, which is only one step, but believe in it. And faith is a big part of that. But secondly, you let go whether you’re pushed out of the tree, or whether you make that leap. And sometimes you’re not going to make the leap unless you’re pushed out of the tree. You’ve got to be willing to embrace the notion of a cape, there’s no safety net, or maybe there’s a safety net for six months. Or maybe for six weeks, and it creates this environment, that most entrepreneurs can probably speak to, you can probably in part resonates with you, that you can’t let that get in the way of executing and operating and investing, whether it’s time, blood, sweat, tears or money and performing.

And that is what I have found, while every day is not equal, there are some days that are much more challenging than others because maybe you get more bad news, or some days are much easier and you get good news. You’ve got to compartmentalize and at the end of the day you’ve got to make it happen and everyone approaches that differently, that’s why some folks never venture into the world of being an entrepreneur and small business and all that stuff, and that’s fine. We need everyone, however, for us that’s the journey we’re on and being able to compartmentalize is such a critical component that’s required to make the journey.

Yeah, it totally makes sense, and I think it’s, I would actually would liken that spirit as well to an organizations need to be thinking themselves relative to, you mentioned earlier on, as far as getting their message out there and doing that, I think that it’s taking that risk, having that faith. I think that’s a very difficult thing, especially when you go into digital media.

This is new, this is different, we don’t know if this is going to work, we think it’s going to work, it probably should work, I don’t know. It seems from an outside perspective, hearing and looking at your content that you’ve been able to transmit that spirit and really kind of communicate that and have it reciprocated by virtue of having all these guests, these great companies coming in and sharing that because that is, if you think about it, a little bit of a nervous, kind of scary thing. Then the effect of inspiring other companies, even us as well saying hey, wow, what they’re doing over there is really good, that’s awesome. We need to continue doing this over here and other companies I know for a fact, looking at that and saying, you know what, maybe we need to take that jump to. Maybe we need to do that for our own marketing efforts, or content, digital media, you know.

I think some folks out there in the marketplace are constantly looking for kindred spirits to collaborate with, ’cause in this day and age, whether it’s digital media or else where there’s always a way to collaborate with folks that are kindred spirits and want to collaborate. And that’s one of my big lessons learned since day one of being an entrepreneur. I think… I think secondly it is such a new space, right, digital media, especially for industry, and you’re going to have these early adopters that get it and not only are they kindred spirits, but they love what you’re doing, they want to be a part. But then you still have, every study I see, I see this word ‘laggards’ and I don’t love that word–

Laggards, great word.

Especially for technology, in this day and age of digitization. You look at Gartner’s and these others that publish this research, a lot of times they refer to folks that are slow to embrace new technologies. So, there are lots of folks that are slow to embrace digital media, and I guess the way, whether it’s with what we’ve seen or how we’re geared, I believe that social media and your digital footprint that exists, that you’ve got to cultivate, and very intentionally and deliberately. I see that as the website 20 years ago where it becomes table stakes–

100%, no I agree 100% with what you’re saying, that’s the opportunity. It’s a land grab, the table stakes right there. It’s wide and it’s open for right now, and it’s not going to be ’cause there’s a limited window and opportunity.

That’s right, yeah. So either you get it and you’re with it, even if it’s not how you’re geared. Even if you, we pick on the ’80s all the time because we probably both grew up in the ’80s, even if you’re geared like it’s 1985 and you’re enjoying your Christmas vacation and you want to stay right there, the world is changing at a pace that arguably has never been seen before. And the same thing applies with getting your message out there. Whether you’re a service company or a manufacturer, or 3PL or a logistics firm or you name it. Many professionals and leaders are quick to wrap their head around that and embrace it and figure out what needs to change. And others, it’s still going to be 1986 in a few weeks, and hey, that’s okay, we’ve got to work with folks that can’t work with everybody.

Totally makes sense, so I’ve got just like, one or two other little questions that are… This great backstory, just getting to understand, I love all this stuff, in the supply chain space, obviously you’ve talked to a lot of leaders, a lot of executives, a lot of companies, what are you seeing going into 2020, 2021? Some of those big shifts from a technology standpoint, obviously that’s a pretty big topic, what are those trends that you’re seeing moving into 2020?

Such a great question, and you know, that’s one of the questions I usually wrap up with in a lot of our episodes, and now I feel how the tables are turned.

I totally turned the tables there.

So here’s some general observations, and this comes from lots of conversations, lots of different initiatives. We were on a supply chain talent webcast a few weeks ago with some folks I deeply respect, and here’s some general observations. I think number one, the war for talent, which some folks have told me doesn’t exist, which I love that counter prevailing–

The war for talent?

Yeah, the war for talent.

The war for talent, okay, yes, gotcha.

The war for talent, a lot of folks will say that’s alive and well and we’re going to continue to see whether it’s the well known brands, or some of the newer companies, change their approach to not just attracting talent but realizing how ever more important it is to develop that talent if you want to retain the talent. I saw in the last few weeks that Ford Motor Company, which is going through an $11 billion transformation of the company, is now allowing 1,300 folks to bring their dogs to work, at Ford.

Really?

Yes, and they’re also reinventing their campus in Dearborn, Michigan, to be better suited for some of the collaboration that some of these newer generations really crave, and that’s Ford. So I think you’re going to continue to see a lot of organizations reinvent how they attract and retain talent, which is great. Hopefully in that same vein, and maybe inarguably, because millennials are now the plurality of the workforce, and Gen Z’s right behind them. I heard a great supply chain leader that owned this webcast say that millennials are constantly dumped on. And you know, that was well put because they are. You go to an industry event and if you’re there all day you’re going to have at least three or four conversations where folks are taking potshots–

Millennials! Blah blah blah!

And you know, we’ve got to change that as an industry, from a supply chain standpoint, we’ve got to change it, we’ve got to embrace it, we’ve got to figure out what we need to do to better embrace and engage all the new generations that are coming to work for us. So I think that will continue to be a trend.

And then from a technology standpoint, I’m no technologist, but as you might imagine, supply chain is technology these days, it drives a lot of our conversations. AI is what I’ve learned, is for months we heard of it as still future state, what’s around the corner. AI is powering so much today, not just because it’s innovative, but really out of necessity. We’re seeing how computer manufacturers are changing up how they build their devices to take better advantage of some of these forces that give the products more power, or give the processes more power. AI is, it’s incredible to see how active it is and how supply chains are getting time back, and resources back, by very practically deploying that.

Blockchain, you know I think it’s, as we may have joked about when we were together last, I think it’s federal law to drop the words ‘supply chain’ or ‘blockchain’ in any and every supply chain conversation these days. But you know, it is, I believe as we have spoken with more people and done more researching and seen more and more practical use cases. You know Walmart in Canada is doing something where they’re really saving time, money and resources and providing more transparency for everybody using blockchain.

And we’re seeing more and more of these practical use cases come out around blockchain, I think 2020 and beyond we’re going to see a lot less folks and professionals that view it as the flavor of the month. And better yet, look to embrace it and figure out how they can plug in this very powerful, transformational technology and segment, really, of supply chain technology and figure out how to use it in a very meaningful, practical way with bottom line results.

And one last notion, I think something we’ve been, is inarguable, the globalization of supply chain, the globalization of business for that matter. Between that trends and the Amazon Effect, holy cow, it’s changing life minute by minute, right? So I think what we’re seeing is many companies that may have not had as much of a, a global culture, a global welcoming culture, a global talent acquisition strategy, a global effort at really making business happen today with taking the blinders off if you’re based here in the States and many companies have those American blinders on. That’s changing dramatically from what we’re seeing, we’re seeing more and more global strategies, whether it’s technology related, talent related, or go to market messaging related, and that’s going to continue to impact so many components of making supply chain happen today and in the future. So those are some things that are top of mind for me, and we’ll knock out 100 more episodes and we’ll be back and and share more maybe.

Well, we’ll report on that, see how that, that all sounds good to me. Definitely hearing the same things, seeing very, very similar things, especially on that war for talent piece. And obviously of course across all the technology there’s a lot of amazing things coming down the tracks, a lot of challenges.

I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention one more thing.

Okay, all right, go for it.

We’ve got a lot of wheels turning, but sustainability, green supply chain. This is something that, well, I’ll blame, I poo-pooed maybe the notion years ago, right?

I think a lot of people did.

Yeah, but now that we’ve looked, heck, as consumers are more and more willing, and really demanding companies to see their sustainability initiatives and to know where certain ingredients came from, know what they’re doing with the waste that’s a byproduct of so many things. I think sustainability is going to continue to be a huge issue that more and more companies, not just want to grapple, but they have to, because the markets are demanding it. So I probably would be remiss if we didn’t mention that in terms of some of the biggest priorities in supply chain.

A lot of big challenges coming up, that’s for sure, but a lot of great solutions and innovations. Well Scott, I think we could probably go on for another hour or two, I think we’ve gone on for an hour, but there’s a ton. But I really appreciate you coming on on IndustrialSage, so if anyone would like to, and I highly recommend that the audience they check you guys out, supplychainnowradio.com and I’m sure you can find it on a near podcasting station whether it’s iTunes, you mentioned Spotify, and all the like. Android devices, I think they’ve got their thing out there, I dunno, I’m an iPhone user. If there’s any other place that’d be best to find you?

All that works and also I’d invite each of your listeners to 2020 Atlanta Supply Chain Awards.

Oh yes.

We are driving, really enjoy the partnership there we’ve got there with a variety of folks, but to include the Metro Atlanta Chamber, CSCMP Atlanta Roundtable and Apex Atlanta. Second year awards, atlantasupplychainawards.com Nominations are open, registrations are open, sponsorships are open, we’re being hosted by MODEX, which I know you and I both–

Yes, that’ll be in March, right?

Yes, March 10, 2020, and we’d love and welcome any professional or especially organization that has a presence in the Metro Atlanta area, to plug in with us.

Excellent, no that is great, so I highly encourage anyone you’ve got nominations, or you want to sponsor, go check that out. Fantastic, what year is this?

Year two.

Year two, okay.

Year one was creating it from scratch, with some help from resources and we’ve benchmarked some of the different programs that are out there, but we failed to see one that really represented the true end to end supply chain across metro Atlanta.

Awesome.

And folks would be surprised just how much takes place in the 29 county metro Atlanta area, so I look forward to collaborating with you. By the way Dan, this is, I admire what you do. We have been benchmarking and observing from afar, I’m glad now we’ve just, in the last few weeks, been able to really sit down and catch up meaningfully.

Absolutely.

If you’re listening to this and you’re still figuring out a way to plot your path forward from a go to market messaging, from storytelling, from how can you put what you do in front of more people effectively and successfully, Danny is an incredible resource. And I mean that very genuinely and I look forward to our continued collaboration.

Well, I really appreciate, thank you very much. You know, the feeling is very mutual, so I feel the same way about you guys. Thank you so much for coming on.

All right, thank you Danny.

All right, so another great episode. Listen, we’re making some changes here at IndustrialSage. We’re going to learn a little bit more storytelling and hearing people’s stories, and I just really, really loved hearing Scott’s story as he literally has created this thing and it’s driven through his passion. And a lot of companies, they’re wildly successful, if you haven’t checked them out you need to supplychainnowradio.com you can go find them on all the podcasting stations. They do a phenomenal job and they’re really keeping a pulse on the industry and what is going on. So I just loved hearing the story, I loved hearing about the trends, and the different things that are coming down the pipe that they’ve been hearing and seeing from all the leaders in the space. Anyways, check them out.

So thanks so much for watching or listening to today’s episode. If you have any questions you’d like us to answer on the show, you can reach out to us at IndustrialSage.com/questions be happy to answer them for you. And that’s all I’ve got all for you today, thank you so much. We’ll be back next week with another episode of IndustrialSage and I’m signing off, goodnight, good day, good morning, whatever time you’re watching this. All right, I’ll see you later.

(Each episode’s blog article will now be published on Thursdays. Check back soon for this one!)

Thanks for reading. Don’t forget to subscribe to our weekly newsletter to get every new episode, blog article, and content offer sent directly to your inbox. You can also subscribe wherever you download podcasts so you can listen on the go!

All right so let’s jump into today’ episode. I have a very special guest today.

Hey.

I have Cassie Nettles from Ad Victoriam Solutions. Thank you so much for coming on.

Hi, of course.

How are you doing today?

Happy to be here. I’m great, doing great.

It’s going to be an awesome episode, are you ready?

I’m very excited.

Okay. So all right, so for those that aren’t familiar with Ad Victoriam, what do you guys do?

So we are a platinum partner with www.salesforce.com. If you’re not familiar with SalesForce, SalesForce is a CRM, customer relationship management software. It’s known for giving businesses a 360 view of their client, everything from service, support, opportunity, pipeline growth, things like that. So we are a development firm or partner. You purchase the license from SalesForce, and then we go in and implement it.

That sounds super cool, right. So all right this is the big topic right, around digital transformation.

Yep.

And typically, you kind of hear it around the actual manufacturing plant, and so obviously people have had the ERP for years, but IOT platforms, and industrial automation, and all these great things. But then something funny kind of happens, like when you get into like the whole sales and marketing piece, it’s just kind of like that gets left off the bandwagon. Is that something that you have experienced and heard?

Yeah. So one of the things that I think is really important out of this, we engrain ourselves in the manufacturing industry, because we do specialize in manufacturing. We put a lot of focus on what’s happening in the industry, and from that we’re able to look at all the pain points of what’s going on with the manufacturer. And sometime it is the IOT stuff,

Yeah.

A lot of times it’s the sales and marketing stuff. So we take a look at what’s trending out in the market, what manufacturer’s are seeing, what pain points are common across the board, and then we figure out ways to build that into the platform, and help with those pain points, and release some of the pressure. I think in the sales and marketing space, specifically, it’s a lot of lead generation, it’s hard to generate leads as a manufacturer when you’re just working with dealers and distributors.

Yeah.

Versus something that’s more B2B, or I’m sorry B2C, where you’re out there looking at end users, who are clearly looking to purchase something.

Right.

Versus dealers who are looking to go out and sell something.

Yeah, exactly. So you mentioned there’s a lot of common pain points. What would you say are the top, couple pain points that you’ve seen across the board, where they say yeah, we’re struggling with this, that might be a clue into we need to look at some CRM type solutions.

So I think a lot, the biggest thing is always data management. Most of our manufacturers are in the dark age, where they’re still doing things on Excel Spreadsheets. Their entire world lives on Excel. It’s hard to drive revenue from that. It’s hard to determine what your APIs are. It’s hard to really just figure out how your business is running. So that’s one of the first things. We’ll have clients come in and they’ll say take these Excel documents and figure out how to automate them so I don’t have to touch it anymore.

Yeah.

We do a lot of that. We also see a lot around self-service. As a manufacturer you go and you work with dealers, distributors, and they want to be able to go onto your website, and pull manuals. Or they want to be able to ask questions, or reach out to support without having to pick up a phone, or write an email. So being able to build community platforms where these people can go in and self-service, and they can, I have a warranty claim issue. I want to register that warranty claim, and never have to speak to a support rep, until it gets to the part where that rep has to respond or take action. That’s huge, that’s huge.

Yeah.

Self-service has changed the industry I think, because now manufacturers aren’t having to invest time and money in supporting these people, and they can do it on their own. And people nowadays on their phone, they want to be able to just click a button to see the results.

Exactly.

That’s huge.

Yeah. We want to do it on our own. We don’t want to have to call and talk to somebody.

Right.

And be like okay. And be put on hold and whatever.

It’s such a millennial thing too right. Like all of the millennials are like I don’t want to answer the phone. I don’t want to talk to anybody. I just want to Google it.

But I think too, yes I think, okay, part of it is, yes, definitely millennial, but I think everybody as a, maybe not everybody, but most going opinion over that Gen X, and I even think going beyond, that there’s definitely, there’s a reasonable expectation.

Yeah.

That I can do it when I want, how I want. It could be at three in the morning, or it could be at, whatever, I just think we’re predisposed to that because, and that trend, whether it’s a B2C product, or I think in particularly B2B, expectation that we have over here has now been moved to over here, and I think that can create a lot of frustration, if you don’t have that in place.

Yeah absolutely. We see, I think to your point with the building of the communities, it’s made a huge difference for our manufacturers, but it’s also given them the data points that they need to go out and figure out what other features they need to be looking at.

Yes.

We had a client recently who had this community, realized that they were getting a lot of rebates or requests or warranties or service tickets for a particular part that they were manufacturing, and then they decided, okay well maybe we should start looking into that, and identifying if there’s a recall that we need to go and look at.

From that, they’re able to go send service tech’s out using what SalesForce calls Field Service Lightning, where the reps can schedule their entire day and follow a map on where they need to go. So it really is just building this 360 view of not just the customer, but of your workspace. As a manufacturer, you’re able to take care of service and support. You’re able to, you know you have your service tech team you have your knowledge base. You have the ability to go out and sell and see what your incoming leads are. You’re generating new content, and then you’re able to go and market to that.

Yeah.

So I think pulling all those data points in, and then being able to see results, and grow your business more based on the results that you’re seeing, is just, you can’t beat that.

No you can’t. I mean, so it just, and I think that, the big thing is, yes, you’ve got spreadsheets, or whatever, the key thing is unlocking all kinds of data, and I think that’s what is making the whole digital transformation piece so exciting. I read a stat somewhere that they said that the manufacturing space is the most data prolific industry, like the most.

Oh yeah.

Or the most, or however you say it, right.

Yes.

And if you think about all the processes, I never know how to pronounce that word. How is it? Processes or Processes?

Processes? Processes.

It’s like niche and niche.

That’s a good question. I feel like I say it a lot, so maybe I should learn the right way to say that. Processes, processes.

Yeah I don’t mean to, that’s like now the new episode, is we’re going to talk about what is the right word.

What is the terminology?

Is it processes or processes niche or niche? Anyways, I digressed.

That’s okay. We have that class, when we bring on new consultants we’re like this is how you consult, these are the things you shouldn’t say. Yes.

Yeah but a little sidebar, with all the process, I’m going to call it processes, because that’s how I don’t know you heard that.

It sounds right.

So all the processes that are happening with inside the organization, primarily in the operations from the manufacturing standpoint, I mean that’s where again, you get all the, but I’m not, all of touch points, and all the different things, you mentioned on something that there’s definitely a parallel with you hear a lot about predictive maintenance, where okay we’re rolling out IOT sensors so we can detect abnormal vibrations in a motor, and okay now we know that we’re going to deploy a ticket because we can go get that motor replaced, so that our downtime is minimized.

Well you mentioned, a really great pain point in a use case where maybe there’s predictive maintenance in the sense of understanding through rebates or like if there’s issues, warranty issues. Hey wait a minute. We’re keying in on something, or from a product development standpoint, hey we need to make a change to this, or there’s a whole new complementary product or service that we can roll out with that we had no idea about, until we had that data.

Yeah, so I love telling this story because I think it shows you what building a CRM or a 360 view is really capable of, but if you think about the manufacturer, and let’s say they manufacture trucks, and they have product X, truck X, and they work with partners or dealers. And so these dealerships they need information on the vehicle. So a client comes in and they say hey I bought truck X, five years ago and now my blinker’s not working. You need to tell me how to fix it.

Yeah.

Well the dealer doesn’t know right off the bat what the problem is, so they go to the community. They look up the knowledge article, or they start to put in a ticket or a case, what we would refer to as a case, to the support team to say hey, there’s an issue with this blinker, and they start typing in and then all of a sudden, knowledge articles pop up, and these articles say oh there’s a recall on blinker ABC for truck X. So then that guy goes oh a recall, well I guess I need to put in a warranty claim for this end user, because, we want to repair their blinker, process the recall.

So then what happens is the dealer, let’s call the dealer Joe, Joe goes in and he puts in the warranty claim, he puts the end user’s name in, their contact information, and all that goes to the support team, and the support team goes and processes it, and does their operational stuff to get the warranty process. Meanwhile, Joe has the knowledge he needs to fix the blinker. He knows he’s going to get refunded for doing the work. And now the manufacturer has the warranty claim, but now they also have the end user’s information.

Which is huge.

Which is huge.

Yes.

So then everything gets taken care of the warranty’s process and marketing grabs a hold of it. And they say oh wow, we’ve seen, there’s 10 rebate requests or warranty requests that came in, let’s take all of those contacts, because we know truck X is at least five years old, they’re coming up on the end of their warranty, let’s go market to them to see if we can sell them a new vehicle.

Right.

And it’s just building this full circle cycle that you can’t do from looking at a bunch of spreadsheets, then going okay where are we gathering this data?

You might be able to, but…

But you’re going to struggle, and it’s going to take you three weeks versus 10 minutes to do it.

Exactly.

And I think that’s the other big piece is how do we build automation processes,

Yeah.

And keep those processes efficient,

Right.

So that, we eliminate wasted time.

Yeah.

Wasted time is, time is valuable. It’s money, right. So how do we put the time and the money back into these manufacturers’ pockets by…maybe there’s an investment up front, to build out the process in the automation, but once it’s built, it’s just dollar value that’s coming back in.

There’s another thing that I think that to add on to that use case and sort of example that you rolled that I think that is really critical as well, and that’s that customer experience.

Yeah.

Because that end user customer because you’re able to increase the efficiency of the communication between the manufacturer, the dealer, and then the end user, you’re getting that end user back on the road, you’re getting that issue solved so much faster, but not only are you creating a better customer experience for the end user, but also, and I think it’s very important for organizations to look at it this way, that dealer as a customer as well.

Yeah.

So you’re creating those two touch points by facilitating a great experience as well, so instead of saying ah, these people, like I’ve got to call, then I’m on hold, then I’ve got to do this, meanwhile,

They’re going to put me on hold, and then I’m going to have to listen to elevator music.

Right.

Absolutely, things to pass time.

I’ve got all my stuff that I need to be getting taken care of, and I’ve got all these other issues and these other customers, so oh man, you’re solving this challenge for me, so that I can better do what I need to get done, and I’m not dinking around with all this stuff over here. So it’s really I think just a monumental win just across the board.

Absolutely. I mean and you could even take it further than that to say well now we’ve noticed that we’ve had 17 warranty claims against the same product, is there a reason for us to go out and build a recall because of those claims, or do we need to start sending service techs out in these areas to teach the dealers, and build certification programs, or help apply that knowledge to our programs, our training programs, based off of what we’re seeing, from the warranty claims that are coming in. So to your point, yeah data, if you’re filling the system with good data, good data in, good data out.

Exactly, yeah. And end of the day, you can’t fix what you can’t measure.

Exactly.

Or duet, so you’ve got to be able to do that. So if I were to wrap everything up, who needs a CRM tool?

I think everyone. But I don’t, I think it depends. Not everyone needs everything. It’s definitely a growth period. You can’t, this is a process. You can’t go into the process assuming that you’re going to have it all in one magical piece.

Yeah.

There’s a lot of thought process that goes into building a good CRM. And you can throw something up, but unless you’re looking at your business, the way that you run these processes, the way that people interact throughout the business, and then having, I’m trying to think of the word, but like having everyone agree upon what it is that you’re trying to accomplish, you’re not going to build something that sufficient or time-saving or money-saving. At the end of the day, you have to have full agreement. You have to have the business buy-in.

Right.

And then from that, going out and implementing something that truly makes sense for your business.

Yeah.

But the way to start is always to slice it up. Slice it up, what are the most important things for you, and your why, what are the most important things for you in your deal. And that way you can really focus in on what’s important, building a roadmap, and then in five years, maybe you do have your perfect world.

Yeah I love that. Building a roadmap, making sure that you, I mean you can’t substitute process for software. That’s not going to happen.

Right.

You’ve got to have that right, and build that into that roadmap, so you can down the road and that.

We see it all the time. And we have clients come in and they’re like, I want the big picture. I want everything to be perfect on day one, and we have to say look you need to slow down, because this is a lot. This is a lot to take on, and you can build it, but are you really going to be happy with what’s built because you made rush decisions, or people didn’t agree, but we said go ahead and do it anyway. It has to be slow. And not walking pace, a nice little gallop, but make sure you have your roadmap there first.

Exactly, not fire, aim, ready, do it the other way around.

Exactly.

Well Cassie, I really appreciate your time.

Yeah, absolutely.

Thank you for coming on IndustrialSage. I love CRM and sales and process, and customer experience and all that stuff, so we could probably go on for four hours, but I think we may wear some people out, but thank you so much for coming on.

Absolutely anytime.

If anybody would love to learn more about your solutions, what you guys do, what’s the best way of learning more?

So you can reach out to us on our website, www.advictoriamsolutions.com, and we’re happy to talk to anyone who wants advice or information or just help building a roadmap, we’re happy to do that.

Excellent. I really appreciate it. Thank you very much.

Absolutely, happy to be here.

All right. Okay so another great episode here with IndustrialSage. A lot of things to unpack. As we move into this whole, this is a theme we talk about all the time, digital transformation, don’t let this escape outside, don’t let it just stay inside your four walls of your manufacturing plant. This transformation is happening as well within your sales and marketing, and when it comes to your Sales Op, when it comes to having touch points with your end user and creating a better experience for them, and a better experience for your dealers, really think about this.

If this isn’t something that you have rolled out with or you’re not using CRM, you’re using a spreadsheet, A, it’s okay, but it’s not okay for the long-term. You’ve got to start making that pivot. You’ve got to make that change.

So think about some of those pain points, those ways that adopting solutions, a software, a platform, relative to your process, which we can’t substitute, with a solution, a CRM tool, is really the way you really need to be thinking, so I challenge you for 2020, if you haven’t done that, to start thinking about how you’re able to do that, and maybe a company like Ad Victoriam Solutions could help you out. Check them out if you have any questions.

And if you have any questions for us, you’d like us to answer on the show, you can do that, IndustrialSage.com/questions, happy to answer them on the show. So thank you so much for listening and/or watching, if you happen to be listening on a podcast. I’m done for the day, thank you so much, and I’ll be back next week with another episode. I’m Danny and I’m signing off, goodbye.

Thanks for reading. Don’t forget to subscribe to our weekly newsletter to get every new episode, blog article, and content offer sent directly to your inbox. You can also subscribe wherever you download podcasts so you can listen on the go!