IndustrialSage

Hello, and welcome to today’s IndustrialSage Executive Series. I am joined by Mr. Ron Rock who is the CEO of Microshare. He’s coming in all the way from Philadelphia today. Ron, thank you so much for joining me today on the Executive Series.

Thank you. It’s a real pleasure to be here.

I’m excited to jump into this. We had some great conversations before we actually started rolling. But for those who don’t know Microshare, give us a little synopsis on who you are, what you guys do.

Sure, so Microshare is in the IoT, internet of things, business. And specifically what we do is what we call digitally twinning the world, creating a virtual replica of our physical worlds by putting sensors on virtually everything. Why do we do that? We do that to improve the quality of life, to improve the sustainability in ESG initiatives, make it a better planet, create new efficiencies. And in this whole IoT world also surrounded with data is allowing new business opportunities. So companies like Microshare exist to be doing these types of projects. We specifically work in commercial real estate. We put sensors for occupancy, predictive cleaning, environmental monitoring, indoor asset tracking, COVID contact tracing. So think about anything that an industrial space will need. We also think about industrial space as hospitals without touching the patient, airports without touching the airplane, so that unregulated band where we all live and breathe every day outside of our home is where Microshare is building these digital twins and creating lots of safe value for employees and your ecosystem’s customers.

Great. No, I’m excited to jump into that a little bit more. Obviously, it’s incredibly relevant and increasingly critical, really. So before we get into that a little bit more, during this part of the episode, I want to get to know you a little bit more. I want to get to know your story. So Ron, take me back to, how did you get into the IoT space, the technology space? High school, college, did you just say, “Hey, I love technology.” What did that look like?

I wish it was that well-planned. I started out as a cook at Denny’s. I was cooking eggs from 11 at night to 7 in the morning, the graveyard shift. I put myself through college, La Salle College here in Philadelphia. My degree is in accounting.

Oh, mine too. That’s a good one.

You know, I didn’t know what to do. I was good at math, and our guidance counselor in high school said, “You know what? Be an accountant.” I realized by my junior year in college, I didn’t want to be an accountant. But it’s a great foundation to be able to get into any business. In the mid-80s, as I was graduating, IBM personal computers were just coming out. And I took a job at ComputerLand in Philadelphia selling IBM PCs when nobody knew what they were. And a few years later, I was one of the top reps in the country selling those computers. I discovered, though, that there were lots of opportunities to do things, and there were no companies to support them. When I was growing up, my house was the one that all my friends came to. When their 10-speed bike broke, I fixed it. Then, when we all got driver’s licenses, I was always tinkering with engines. I restore old cars. I restore old furniture. I restore old houses, like the one you see me in right now. And my father was a great guy. He said very simply, “Ron, you can have anything you want. You’ve just got to pay for it.” And so there was this value in my mind that I could do anything. Nothing was intimidating. So in the late 80s I started my first company, Brook Rock Corporation. We were the first company to be remanufacturing toner cartridges in 1988.

Wow.

Now that is a global industry. And today if you Google Brook Rock, you can still find some Brook Rock branded things on the internet. We sold that company before I was 30. I got involved in several other start-ups, so I’ve been an entrepreneur most of my life. I’ve also worked in two Fortune companies and ran a publicly-traded company in technology space. So I spent a lot of time in financial services. I spent a lot of time in insurance. I’ve been on public boards of insurance companies. And so my whole career has been, though, the same theme of, how hard can it be? I can figure that out. Let’s go do it. So I started Microshare.

Now this is my sixth start-up. I’ve had a couple big wins. I’ve had a couple catastrophic losses. And not surprisingly that, if there’s any entrepreneurs out there today listening to this or watching this, your failures will stick with you for life. You tend to down-play your successes, and boy, the losses are painful. And you learn so much in those losses. So that’s me. I’m basically an entrepreneur because I think I’m unemployable. I just go and create companies so that I can have job where I want to be. And so I met my two partners, Charles Paumelle and Tim Panagos, who are co-founders of Microshare with me. I met them in 1999. I started a company in 2003 called Knowledge Rules. I grew that company globally and sold it to Accenture in 2010. And our customers were some of the biggest companies in the world: Citi Bank, JP Morgan Chase, American Express, AIG, Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs which is the IRS of the UK. And the common theme on all of them was big, scalable, resilient, secure, regulated data.

So our DNA is lots of data. It’s the kind of data that can’t go down. You just expect, when you swipe your credit card, it works. You just expect, when you go to the ATM, the account balance is right. There’s a whole world of new technology out there that can be very forgivable. But there’s core infrastructure data that just has to work all the time. And so when we sold Knowledge Rules, we had begun building these massive platforms for companies like GE to bring all these disparate, regulated data sets together. And we learned a lot about how data locked behind the firewall and data out in the cloud were beginning to co-exist. And we were all showing up at work with our mobile phones and saying, “Hey, now I want to be able to get my email on this thing, not my desktop that’s locked in the office, can’t be taken away.” And so we learned a lot about all of that. Also new things like Salesforce.com and DocuSign were coming up. So suddenly companies couldn’t save all their stuff in one place. That was the genesis of Microshare.

And what we realized was IoT takes this problem and puts it on steroids. Let’s just imagine that maybe banks had 40,000 data sets between—and then if they bought another bank, they went from 40,000 to 80,000. But now with IoT, there’s going to be a trillion devices out there. And every one of those devices has a communication protocol, has a data format, has security, has encryption, has to be managed. And every single piece of data is just as important as your bank account. It is a vulnerable spot that hackers take advantage of. Data can be stolen. Data can be manipulated. So we decided to bring our data-centric view into IoT. I’ll stop there. We could go lots of different directions from it, but life-long entrepreneur is the short answer.

No, it’s great. I love it. I love the story. I’m a huge data dork. I guess that’s maybe where the accounting thing came from. There’s stories in the numbers, right? There’s stories in the data, and it’s a matter of finding that and saying, what is this, and learning and making really informed decisions based off of it. And I think it’s super fascinating. Especially now, we talk about IoT and how it’s been taken off. We’re hitting a nexus of technology and speed with ISP where you can actually do this. You were talking about how you’re deploying sensors all over the place. I was reading somewhere that the manufacturing space, particularly, is the most data-prolific industry in the world. I can’t remember how many petabytes of data that is being generated when you think of all the different processes, even from a commercial real estate space, in terms of the actual facilities. All of the things that are going on there, I think it’s fascinating. And there’s so many, we’ll call them stories or insights or information that are locked that, having this technology now, you’re able to unlock it, and you’re able to see what that is. One thing that I want to circle back on, I was just curious. Where did you get this entrepreneurial spirit from? Was your father an entrepreneur? Your family? Do you have a predisposition to that growing up? Where did that come from?

I appreciate the question. My dad was a hairdresser, and he had his beauty shop attached to our house. So my dad slept every day until 9:15, rolled out of bed, went down, and had his first appointment at 9:30. And in the summer times, we were building a cabin in upstate Pennsylvania, all out of recycled scrap material. Frankly, we’re still building it, 50 years later. In the summertime, my dad would take four days a week off and just work three days a week. And he was always able to accommodate the demands of the family and what we wanted to do with his ability to provide an income. And so it was a very unconventional household to grow up in. And I think I just took that for granted, so even when I went to college, it was nothing to work 11 at night to 7 in the morning. It didn’t occur to me that, no, that’s unconventional. I had classes; I needed money. I worked, and I slept when I slept. And there was no sense of, there’s a proper way to do it. You just make things work.

And so at Knowledge Rules, our global corporate headquarters was my home in Philadelphia. We had a whole wing with apartments on it that we–the only reason that we bought a home that big was, we could accommodate my offices. And I woke up one day, and I thought, gee, I’m doing the exact same thing my dad did. I’d wake up. I’d walk down the hallway. I’d be at work. And there was just a, again, being the CEO, I was always able to accommodate where the kids were in life, what we needed to do. And so I think I was early in this idea that work life and personal life are really very intricately interwound. They’re not disparate. And by the way, that has some disadvantages as well.

Sure, yeah.

But very much, that’s why I was able to do this.

That makes a lot of sense. That answered very clearly. I always love asking people that question that have started businesses and sold them because I feel like 9 times out of 10, there’s something, for the most part. It’s built in, or it’s learned, or both, or whatever. But I think the key is that—I remember—this has been a little bit of a phrase. There’s always another way. The status quo or whatever is not—so I think, obviously from a very young age, you saw that and experienced it. And what may be normal to you is very unconventional to everybody else. I think that’s fantastic. What an interesting foundation. Obviously, you have a very, very vast career. Is there somebody or something that stands out in terms of, it could be a mentor. It could be an event. I could be a family member. It could be something that happened in high school or middle school, or at Denny’s. Something that’s had a measurable impact in your career and on your life. Does something jump to your mind?

There’s so many things. My team, and a lot of my team has followed me from company to company. I have a million Denny’s stories. You learn so much at Denny’s. Talk about instant gratification: you’re either successful, or you’re not. People either like their breakfast and pay for it, or they leave because it didn’t come out fast enough. There’s so many Denny’s stories that are part of my—other people have Harvard Business Review. I break in Denny’s.

That sounds like a book. “Everything I Needed to Learn About Business, I Learned at Denny’s.”

Yep. But no, I think if I had to pick one that was most defining, it would be my failure during the dot com. I got involved with a company. I was employee number one. We were well-funded, theoretically. We had venture capital that had committed $80 million to us. We ramped up. We hired almost 70 people. I had people leave really good-paying jobs to come join me. We had a couple million dollars of initial funding, and it was in March of 2000. That was the beginning of the end of the dot com meltdown. And so what happened from March to September is, I was flying around the country meeting VCs who had already committed, and they were saying, “Hey Ron, just one more question.” And you’d go back, and you’d crunch a bunch of numbers, and you’d get it back to them. And in fairness and in hindsight, they didn’t know that they weren’t going to fund me in April, May, June, and July. They were getting nervous. They were doing their job. Same thing; I thought they were going to fund, and so at the end of the day the meltdown happened. All the VCs backed out. I had a huge payroll. I had people who had shifted their lives to join me. And it taught me a lot of humility. It taught me a lot of–if it can go wrong, it really can go wrong.

And there’s a level of sensitivity—sensitivity might not be the right word. But there’s a level of awareness now that, even as I’m growing Microshare, we’re 44 people. We’re currently raising $20 million on top of 20 we’ve already raised. I have a pretty extensive recruiting pipeline, and I’m very cautious, very aware that I don’t pull the trigger. When I ask you to join my company, I am now responsible for you. And I’m responsible for you even if the people behind me let me down. That doesn’t give me license to let you down. And so there’s a level of connectivity there and awareness that I think has had a profound impact on my career because—and if any of my employees are watching this, they might be busting my chops later—but at the end of the day, anybody that’s worked for me in the last 40 years will work for me again. And that’s a reputation I’m proud of. That’s a relationship that I take very seriously.

That’s fantastic. Obviously a very difficult experience. A lot to learn from, a lot to unpack, and I’m sure there are still things that you’re unpacking and learning and looking at. What did that do to you, from a risk standpoint? Obviously entrepreneurs know the uncanny ability to be able to take on more risk than most. What did that do for you immediately thereafter? You mentioned it a little bit, how you’re very cautious about when you might bring somebody on. The ability to take on more risk and see that opportunity and say–I don’t know. Does it make you, initially, a little bit more gun-shy?

Actually, no. Here’s the scary part of it. I’m much more conservative about the risk that I’ll put my employees under. Me, I’ll triple down. I’m okay losing my money. I’m okay failing. I’m not okay with my team failing. I’m not okay with my team not getting paid. So yeah, the risk is a great—I lecture sometimes at schools where I’m the least educated guy in the room. I’m lecturing at masters and MBA programs, and I have a slide with a big guy sitting on a thing of dynamite, and the sparks are getting ready. And I say, “Look, you can go to school to be an entrepreneur. You can learn lots of things that may or may not be important. But let me tell you. Entrepreneurism comes down to one thing and one thing only: How much risk can you personally endure? If you can’t endure risk, you’re in the wrong job.” After a lecture on time, a guy came up to me, and he said, “Mr. Rock, that was awesome.” He goes, “Can you help me out?” I said, “Oh, what is it?” He goes, “I have a great idea, but how do I get my wife to go along with it because she won’t let me borrow the money.” And I was like, “Dude, psychology department’s, I think, the next hall down. I can’t help you with that.” But the mere fact that he was asking and that he was deflecting his inability to take the risk onto his wife as opposed to looking in the mirror and saying, “Look, are you going to take the risk, or are you not?”

And that’s a hard thing because people want to be entrepreneurs. They aspire to be an entrepreneur. They go to school to be an entrepreneur. I didn’t go to school to be an entrepreneur. There’s all of that, but at the end of the day, you’re not going to get an A+ in entrepreneurism and have a guarantee that you’re in a great career like you go into many other, financial services or consulting or manufacturing. There’s a lot of career paths out there where an A+ matters. An A+ in entrepreneurism doesn’t matter at all. It’s, can you apply it, and can you take risk? And I think the risk comes back to some of your early questions. I was never afraid to tear open that 10-speed gear box on the back of my bike when 10-speeds first came out. Everybody else was scared to death of them. I’m rebuilding a Rolex watch that got caught in a fire. I used to rebuild cars; now I’m working on a scale of—and I looked at this watch, and I thought, “I can do that.” And I’m 50 hours into it, and oh, my God. But you know what? If you and I are talking six months from now, I’ll have a Rolex on. I’ll say, “See this? Built it from scratch.”

We’ll do a follow-up. That’s awesome. I don’t know. I just love asking these questions and getting everyone’s different—specifically entrepreneurs, their perspective on all of this. And we could probably go on for another three hours on this, but I’m going to transition to pivot a little bit now back to Microshare and talking specifically about, there’s a lot of challenges that have gone on, obviously, over the last 12, 13, 14 months, if I can do math. What are some of the big challenges that you’re seeing right now and going forward as we start to emerge a little bit?

Sure. Initially, for me and for Microshare, Covid became real the week of March 16th of 2020. I was in London, and all of a sudden, all the restaurants were doing take-out only. Business meetings were getting cancelled. We really didn’t know what was happening. And by the end of March, I had come back to the states because the State Department said, “If you’re an American, get home now, or risk being stuck where you are indefinitely.” That was a little scary, and I had to fly home through Dallas. And you were treated–it was the first time, as an American, that I felt like my rights were totally stripped away. You weren’t allowed to talk to anybody. You were herded like cattle through these chutes. Your temperature was taken. You weren’t allowed to sit, once you got off the plane. And it was really scary, coming back.

And it was scary for us as a company. We had just closed a couple really big, global deals where we were doing occupancy and predictive cleaning. Occupancy in a lot of your temporary office spaces, so think companies like we work where you go into a conference room, and they want to know people are in that conference room because they bill you extra to use those conference rooms. So it was a revenue shrinkage solution. It was a massive, massive deal, globally. And by the end of March, they cancelled that order. We also did a huge deal from one of the global accounting firms. They were going to put our occupancy—and we can do room occupancy. We can do desktop occupancy. And as we move to a lot of hotel space offices, you want to know. If you’re thinking of going into the office in Atlanta today, you want to know how many people are there, how many desks. Oh, by the way, you’d like to reserve a desk on the third floor, if you can. And so we were building those kinds of solutions. All those got cancelled by the end of March.

And GlaxoSmithKline went to Microsoft, our biggest partner, and said, “We noticed that Microshare has an indoor asset tracking solution.” We put very inexpensive tags on hospital beds, wheelchairs, infusion machines, ventilators, and track where they are. So doctors and nurses look at the app on their phone; they know exactly where these things are. And GlaxoSmithKline said, “Do you think we could use that, modify it, for contact tracing?” In March of last year, nobody knew what contact tracing was. We never heard of it. Nobody. Well, the CDC came out and said, “Well, contact tracing is people closer than six feet, two meters, for more than 15 minutes—” and there’s been a lot of variability since—”that’s important. That’s going to be how we track the spread of the virus.” And so we were able to easily modify our software with off-the-shelf hardware to create a contact tracing solution. And with that, we made the front page of the Financial Times, globally, the third week of April last year. That led to the front page of The New York Times twice about Microshare. And then Fast Company, and then The Washington Post, and then the BBC did a piece on us. And we took contact tracing, and the idea was that it was for essential workers. Folks like you and me can work out of home indefinitely. But people in nuclear power plants, mining facilities, hospitals, distribution warehouses, essential workers have to show up.

And so we started selling to that group. And by the way, all the press we got meant that our website got inundated with traffic. So the challenge was keeping up with the demand, not proactively selling it. And we took contact tracing, and we bundled it with our occupancy, indoor air quality, and we have something called touch-free feedback. If you see something–if you’re in a conference room, if you’re in a cafeteria, if you’re at a college campus–if you see something that worries you, who do you tell? And so we put these QR codes all over that you can scan with your phone, and it’ll say, “In an emergency, hit this. You need the cleaning crew, hit this. If somebody’s sick, hit this.” And it automatically links on the back end who can respond. In the UK they have something great; I love it. On the subway, on the trains, they say, “See it; say it; sorted.” See something, say something, and it’ll get sorted. Well, we’re solving for the say something. Who do you say it to? Who do you call? Putting this touch-free feedback is what we started. And we had push buttons, and we realized, with Covid, you don’t want to touch something else. But we bundled all of those into Clean = Safe.

So we had a Clean = Safe campaign going after essential workers. A lot of traction with pharmaceuticals, so GlaxoSmithKline, Gilead, Novartis all became customers. Power plants in Australia became customers. Hospitals and nursing homes in the UK became customers. And so that was our reactive—and what’s interesting now, just as a side note, we sell it as a subscription. So we have 12-, 24-, 36-, and 60-month subscriptions for everything that we do. And prior to Covid, most of our business was 36 to 60 months. When contact tracing became available, everybody—again, in April, we all thought we’d be done by June. By June, we all thought, “Oh, my gosh, by Thanksgiving.” By Thanksgiving, certainly by New Years. Well, here we are. We’re all still in it. So people signed a lot of 12-month contracts. An interesting side note, two things: our contact tracing solution continues to expand globally. And customers that signed up for one year are now renewing for another. So there’s a false sense of security in the US that we might have the majority of the problem in the rearview mirror. On a global basis, we’re still in the second inning. So that was Clean = Safe.

But we started thinking about analogies of, where’s the world going? Early on, we were one of the first to say, “We’re never going back to January of 2020” across the board. As consumers, as employees, as college students, as doctors and lawyers, we’re never going back to January of 2020. So what is the new normal? What’s it going to look like? And the analogy I came up with was 9/11. 9/11, when it hit, for the next 12 months, it was absolute global chaos. First of all, all of us were getting our sea legs. And if you remember, 9/11, even within a week or two weeks—one time I was watching Peter Jennings on ABC, and the TVs went blank. And immediately you’re like, “Oh, my God, what just happened?” How big is this going to get? How bad is this going to be? Then, there was the smoke coming up from the site, and there was a lot of knee-jerk reactions.

Oh, yeah.

And trying to travel, it was darn near impossible. But now, here we are decades later, we all know the drill. Whether you’re flying out of Dubai, London, or New York, you take your laptop out; you take your shoes off. You go through the metal detector; you stand like this. We’ve figured it out, and there’s a permanent infrastructure that’s never going away in air travel. I believe the same thing’s going to happen with Covid. And so just last week, after a lot of work in Q1, we launched a new branding, go to market, called EverSmart. And EverSmart is that new layer of infrastructure. We’re going to just expect that when we go to offices, we want to see how many people are there. If we’re going to go to the cafeteria, is it red, yellow, or green? Red, there’s too many people right now; you can’t go. Yellow, if you can wait, wait. Green, come on down; grab a cup of coffee. You’re going to want to use the restrooms. You’re going to look at your phone and say, “Which restroom has been used the least all day, and which restroom has the least number of people in it right now?” You’re going to want to look at your app and say, “What is the air quality in this building right now? How frequently is the air being refreshed?”

So environmental monitoring, occupancy, people counting, something we’re calling a universal crowd safety. And crowd safety is, we’re used to going into an office building, and we get a visitor’s badge. Now that visitor’s badge is going to track where you are in the building. We’re going to be able to look and say, “Hey, we’re getting too many people on the second floor. We’re getting too many people over in the research area. We’re getting too many people in the shipping dock.” So real-time crowd management married with real-time air quality married with real-time, overall building occupancy married with touch-free feedback at any point in your experience from the moment you leave your house in the morning until you come home at night. If you see something, say something; get it sorted. Putting that infrastructure in place, all of these things are what we talk about with EverSmart.

The other thing that we’re talking about and that’s getting a lot of traction, buildings have been moth-balled for a year. Buildings never had an off switch. So now you’re going to start to bring these buildings back to life. But now there’s conversations about hybrid workplace, flexible office time, vaccinated and not vaccinated. So let’s play that out. What does that mean? If everybody has flexible office time, does that mean everybody comes in on Wednesdays, and nobody comes in on Mondays and Fridays because they want four-day weekends? So suddenly I’ve got a crisis on a Wednesday. What if I start saying, “Look, if you’re vaccinated, you can come in on Tuesdays and Thursdays. If you’re not vaccinated, Mondays, Wednesdays, Fridays. Okay, that means my cleaning staff, my cafeteria staff, my security guards, my parking guards, they all have to be fitting into the vaccinated, not vaccinated. How do I think about buying electricity for the next year?

A lot of these companies buy their electricity on auction based on very sophisticated models of demand. All those models are now irrelevant. How do I measure, real-time, how many people are coming into my building by hour, by day, based on weather, based on time of year? How do I align my security staff, my cafeteria, my food purchasing? Because at the same time that we’re coming back to life, we’ve got a global initiative that the US is lagging behind on, but now we’re stepping up with global warming, ESG, and sustainability. You’re being held accountable for your carbon footprint. So how do I know how much energy to burn, how much carbon monoxide to expel? How much waste am I producing from unused food and refrigeration systems running that don’t need to be and HVAC systems running that don’t need to be? So how do I align my actual consumption of space with my consumption? That is EverSmart.

I think it’s super interesting. Again, all the implications on that as we look at, you mentioned energy use, for example, in a building, on how you might buy that, or even the supply chain. All the facilities, maintenance, everything that goes into it from CPG to what have you. There’s a whole life cycle, whole ecosystem. And right now, you’re right. It’s this, “I don’t know. What’s it going to be like?” It sounds like it’s a really great solution from a standpoint, not even just Covid, from a safety standpoint and having that flexibility to be able to respond. Who knows what’s going to happen tomorrow? If things flare up again later, who knows? Going back to the essential workers piece, being able to have proactive plans and the data and the ability to be able to actually respond to it and understand what the needs are, I think is invaluable. But there’s certainly a lot of other insights that you can glean from that, which I think was part of the initial thesis of Microshare to begin with.

Absolutely. One of our biggest clients, they love our solution. And they said, “You know, we started out being reactive, doing contact tracing. What we’ve been able to now learn is, be proactive. There are lots of behaviors in our factory we never knew about.” And by making a few minor changes, they had some obvious super spreaders. The people delivering the mail were super spreaders. They never realized. So if this one person got sick, you could potentially knock out 70% of your employees. They made a few minor changes. They also were able to start identifying hot spots. Every space in an office building or a factory is not equal. Some places are used 140%. Other spots are used 10%. Knowing that really matters when you start thinking about driving a safer, more efficient facility. The other thing I’ll say is that, and you touched on this a little bit in one of our earlier conversations, the reason we’re able to do this is that the sensor technology has plummeted in cost. You talked about how there was a lot of data in manufacturing, and you’re absolutely right. But the data was there because the ROIs supported custom sensors, getting them powered. But a lot of the sensors I work with are under $20.

Is it more like BLE technology?

It’s BLE; it’s something called LoRa. It’s a low-power, wide-area network. But the magic of it is that it is battery-operated. I don’t have to tear open walls, so the installation is cheap. And I like to say, our solutions are disruptively cheap. I can provide contact tracing in an entire organization for less than a cup of coffee a day per employee. That just wasn’t possible five years ago. And it’s not the sensors. It’s Microsoft, IBM, Google, Amazon, all have cloud infrastructure now that just five years ago, you would have needed to build out a million-dollar data center just to begin turning this stuff on. You’d have had to tear open walls and put in wiring. You see RFID which is pretty popular. RFID is good, but only in certain installations because it’s expensive. So again, going back to manufacturing, the ROI was there. But we’re at a point now where I could put sensors on every dog, cat, kid, manhole cover, snow plow, toilet seat, refrigerator door, the sports jacket that you’re wearing. I can sensor up everything. And I start getting that data, and I’m driving safety, efficiency, quality of life, reducing carbon footprint. And the economics now work where they didn’t five years ago.

Yeah, it’s an exciting time. That’s for sure because there’s a lot of challenges that a lot of us now, we’re going to be able to solve because we’re going to have more visibility and more insight. Ron, listen, I think we could probably, honestly, go on for another I’d say a solid four or five hours because this has been a fascinating conversation, your background, learning about Microshare, the solutions, your story with the pivot and everything. I really want to thank you for your time, sharing all of this with our audience. I think you guys have a very fascinating and quite honestly, a really critical solution that not just manufacturers, obviously, can leverage, but a lot in other industries. Thank you so much for coming on and sharing with us your story and Microshare’s story.

Thank you very much. It’s been a pleasure. I really enjoyed the personal questions. That’s a little bit outside of the normal with these, so thank you very much. I appreciate the interest, and we’re excited to evangelize what we’re doing. We think it’s really exciting. We’re saving lives. How cool is it to have a company trying to make a profit, but you know what? You’re making a difference. And so we’re excited about it.

And that’s a great purpose. Again, thanks for your time. This was awesome. Alright, so listen, I love this episode. All these episodes, I feel like they keep getting better and better. Check out Microshare, Microshare.io if you think this is a solution that you guys might need in your facility or in your building. Certainly we could talk about contact tracing and safety, and Ron was talking about a little bit of the challenges of looking for issues. If you have your workforce that gets infected, and then you have to close down the facility, your manufacturing plant, or what have you. We kept hearing about all these stories. There’s solutions. There’s technologies out there now that will be able to help to solve that. And oh, by the way, not just get data to create safety protocols, but also other information and insights to be able to increase your operational efficiency and whatnot.

So obviously, it’s a very exciting time from a technology standpoint, data-wise. You know, if you listen to the show, I am a data dork, so I get excited about this stuff. So anyways, I’m going to stop yapping. Thanks so much for watching or listening to the Executive Series on IndustrialSage, and I will be back next week with another episode. And I will see you then. Thanks, bye.

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!

Well, welcome to today’s IndustrialSage Executive Series interview. I am joined by Kirk Knauff who is the CEO of Kaleris in Alpharetta, Georgia. Kirk, thank you so much for joining me today on the Executive Series.

Thanks for having me, Danny. Glad to be here.

Well, I’m looking forward to this. We were talking about this before a little bit, hey, this is kind of exciting. You guys are in Alpharetta, Georgia; we’re in Alpharetta, Georgia. We’re just a couple miles apart, so this is exciting. So for those who are not familiar with Kaleris, could you just give us a 30,000-foot view? Who are you guys? What do you guys do?

So we’re a supply chain execution software company. As you said, based here in Alpharetta, happy to be here. We’re really enjoying this budding Atlanta tech scene that we’re a part of. Relatively new company that’s the combination of three legacy businesses that we’ve acquired and put together to build this supply chain execution platform. About 200 folks work for Kaleris headquartered here in Alpharetta. We also have offices in Dallas and Oakland, California and two big development facilities in Sri Lanka and India. So that’s our footprint as well.

Excellent. Well, that sounds great. So we’re going to dive into a little bit more of what you guys do, some of the challenges that you guys are solving here in just a little bit. But before we do that, this is the time in the episode where we want to get to know Kirk. We want to get to know you a little bit better, so I’d love to know your story, your background. How did you get into this space? Take me back.

Okay. Well, always been in the supply chain execution space or supply chain space, really. I started with a large railroad here in North America in Jacksonville, Florida, straight out of undergrad, on the sales and marketing side. My first job in the industry was an inside sales job, actually, calling former railroad customers and asking them why they weren’t using the railroad anymore. So that was kind of a baptism by fire. And from there, stayed on with them for about five years, and from there I got to know the founder of a small software business here in Atlanta. Moved up to Atlanta to start my career on the software side back in, around 2000. And I guess the rest is history from there. We grew that business over time. We sold it into a private equity company in 2007.

Good timing, yeah.

Yeah. Actually a funny story about that, when we were talking to our private equity sponsors—who are great, by the way—while we were selling the business, we had never had a year-over-year decrease in carloads because a lot of our software still does, it’s involved with rail carriers. We had never had a year-over-year decrease, and the first year after they acquired us was our first year ever, which was 2008, where we saw a decline in year-over-year carload growth. So they kind of gave us a hard time about that, but they understood market dynamics. Anyways, then we acquired four companies between 2007 and 2011 to add to the platform, the supply chain software platform, and sold that business to GE Transportation in 2012. I stayed on at GE Transportation for about seven years, six and a half years, running that software business for GE. So yeah, that’s a quick overview of my background, all software and transportation-related.

Yeah, so I’m curious. You mentioned you jumped in right after college. For undergrad, what were you studying? Was it something that you were saying, “Hey, I want to get into logistics,” or, “I want to get into sales,” or both? What did that look like?

Yeah, I think it was more of a sales thing, as timing would have it. When I first went to college, I thought I was going to be a lawyer, so my undergrad’s in history, actually. I love history and loved it then. Really, the only subject I really enjoyed in high school. Anyways, quickly figured out that’s not what I wanted to do. So I’d just graduated with an undergraduate degree in history from Florida State. Actually, that’s where my daughter is now, too. And while I was in school, I had a couple jobs, but one of them was with an insurance agency, Northwestern Mutual. They were having a big high-performance sales push in training and talent development. So my senior year in college, went through that whole program and then at the time CSX was benchmarking their sales processes, so as luck would have it, that looked really well on the resume. No, I had no idea what a railroad was or what a boxcar was or supply chain software, for that matter. So it wasn’t a big aspiration, just kind of where I ended up.

Just kind of happened. It’s funny. I always love asking that question because it’s very interesting, that journey. Well, I wanted to do this, but I ended up doing that. You got sucked in, basically. The tractor beam just pulled you in.

Yeah, well the entrepreneur side has kind of been the driving force. When I was at the railroad, I loved the railroad and got a lot of experience and learned a lot about transportation and technology, for that matter, with some of the things I was doing. But five years was all that was going to be. I had the itch to go off and do something on my own or a little smaller and a little more, in an environment that you could control personally a little bit better. So the corporate world probably wasn’t where I was cut out for. Ironically enough, I ended up at GE for seven years.

Yeah.

The entrepreneur side is really what was driving my career path.

So how did you discover that? Was that something that you knew going on, or was it something that just started growing, and you’re like, “Hey, this is kind of interesting. I like this,” as you started getting involved with these other organizations, these companies?

Yeah. I don’t know; I guess that question—that’s a good question. I think as a kid, we were a middle-class family, as I mentioned to you when we were talking earlier. My dad worked for IBM. We moved around a lot. He was really influential in creating work ethic and a lot of the values that I respect and enjoy. So as part of that, I was always working, even as a kid, not because we needed the money, but my dad always taught me that’s what you do. You go out, and you work. So I always enjoyed the making money part of it, the working with other people part of it. Even as a third-grader, I remember cutting lawns, things like that. I think there was something in there the whole time, even as a kid that doing something on my own and controlling my own destiny and taking a bigger risk than other people are willing to take was always something I was comfortable with. So yeah, maybe that’s the answer to the question. Maybe it’s always been there, a little spark at least.

It sounds like it has. I hear a lot of these stories where–– especially when you’re a kid. I can certainly relate to it. I remember literally scheming. How do I make money? What can I do? It’s kind of funny. You touched on how your father had an impact, obviously. I think most fathers and most parents would for their children. But throughout your career, is there somebody that jumps out? And it could be career or friend or family, or it could be an event that really had a measurable impact. And I’m sure there’s a lot, but is there one that stands out?

Yeah. Well, people-wise, there is a lot. I would say, obviously, my dad still is. My dad’s pretty retired now; kicks around doing some stuff, but he’s always been a big influence just from the perspective of values and work ethic and that type of thing. The president of the first software company I worked for, his name was Mack Purdy; he actually died recently. He was a big influence in terms of, he was just one of the kindest people I knew. So one of the first people that, in the business world, I ran into that really set an example of treating others how you want to be treated and you don’t have to be sharp elbows in every business interaction that you have, and respecting and loving your customers and appreciating them, and team members. So he was a big one. Then, today the CEO of that same company, his name’s Pete Kleifgen. We still hang out a lot. I consider him a mentor, still bounce ideas off of him all the time. He’s always been the person that set the best example of doing for one person what you wish you could do for a lot of people, so he always took the time to invest in a few people individually. I guess, hopefully, I picked up a little bit of that in terms of how I work with others on a team.

Yeah, that’s great. It’s interesting; you were mentioning treating people the way you want to be treated and that kind of thing, especially with business. You mentioned the sharp elbows. That’s super difficult, especially when you get into scaling a business, PE or bringing in VCs or anything. That’s a very difficult thing to do, so it sounds like you’re pretty fortunate to be able to have a mentor and work with somebody like that.

It’s a balance for sure, and you said it well. I feel extremely fortunate. The people, and even the private equity sponsors that we had then at some of the past companies, and the one we have now which is AKKR now is our private equity sponsor, just tremendous relationship, shares the same values, extremely helpful and not overly involved in operating the business, but adding value every day. You hear a lot of stories that don’t quite go that way when it comes to outside investment in businesses, and I’ve been fortunate enough to land in some pretty good situations.

Great. Well, let’s transition a little bit and talk about Kaleris now. Walk me through your involvement. You mentioned it’s a new company, and it sounded like there’s a lot of acquisitions happening. What’s the story there?

Yeah, so our heritage is a little unique in that—I actually worked for a private equity company for about a year, year and a half while we built out this thesis of investing in supply chain execution software companies with the intention of hopping back onto the operating side, like I am now, once we got it going. So in June of last year, in the middle of COVID, we were fortunate enough to acquire PINC. PINC stands for Positioning, Inc. I think you knew Matt Yearling, the former CEO.

Yeah, he’s been on the show before.

Yeah, he’s a great guy. We still talk, and he’s working on an exciting new venture now. But Matt was instrumental in helping us make that acquisition. They were VC backed at the time. So they were our first kind of platform investment. And just a tremendous company, fast-growing, not a lot of work to do in terms of value creation there and instilling the values that we’d want to see in a company. So great place to start. And then quickly after that, we carved out a piece of my former business to add to PINC which does railyard management and transportation management systems, software systems for industrial shippers. So think about the shippers that are trying to move goods from point A to point B. They’re our ultimate customers and 3PLs for that part of the business.

That’s also a fast-growing part of the business, so we combined that. And then our third acquisition was a small company out of Dallas that does asset maintenance and repairs, particularly around rail cars. So a lot of these industrial shippers who leveraged the railroad for primary mode of transportation have their own railcar fleets. And this company provides kind of a closed-loop maintenance process where you can do the billing and inspections and things like that for that. And that was kind of a product gap-fill for that second business I described. The founder of that business is still with us as well, so really helpful in terms of growing out that maintenance and repair segment of what we do. So that’s a little bit of the legacy, and that all happened from June to October of last year.

Wow, that’s a lot.

Yeah, we’ve been hard at work at integration and branding. We changed the name of the combined entity to Kaleris, and we’ve started introducing that to our customers over the last few months. Now, part of this conversation is introducing Kaleris to the larger market. We’ve had a landing page, just as an example, for Kaleris.com for quite some time. Just this week, we’ve rolled out the official new website that’ll sit over top of the original three websites. So things like that that we’ve been working on, and obviously standing up to business, building the leadership team, a new location here in Alpharetta, and things like that.

That’s fantastic. And obviously, what an interesting time. I think, if I heard correctly, you said June of last year, so June of 2020. Obviously, we were seeing, relative to supply chain, a lot of things going on. We’re still seeing a lot of things going on. Was this something that was in the works pre-COVID? Or is it something that was a direct result because of COVID, or a mixture?

Again, timing was really beneficial. We got to know Matt just before COVID. Actually, the last conference we went to was MODEX here in town.

Yeah, we were there. We were all over that. The last trade show in the world.

Yeah, I think we were all deciding whether we should go or not, and I think about 50% of the people decided to go, and the other 50% decided not to. That was the last trade show. We hadn’t acquired the businesses then, but we had certainly expressed interest by then. And then everything else was virtual from then on out. So we had the good fortune of getting to know them a little bit before COVID when we were able to do that, and then we were able to complete the transaction ahead of time, or during COVID. Same for the other two businesses, we knew the folks there from other folks in our past life, so to speak. So it wasn’t a fresh start. Acquiring businesses or building partnerships during COVID has certainly changed. A little easier now than it was beforehand, a lot of assumptions that we had before in terms of this has to be face-to-face in order to accomplish what you want to accomplish. Those norms have definitely been challenged, and I think we’ve all learned a lot.

So what are the biggest challenges that you’re seeing in the industry right now?

Other than the new dynamic based in just pure supply chain industry, the new dynamic of the importance of supply chain resiliencies is one of the biggest things that we’re seeing. Obviously depending on the vertical, could see some significant impact based on COVID, whether it be positive or negative. So I think looking back and hindsight in terms of everything that we learned during COVID, I think it’s a brand-new opportunity for both our customers and for us to think differently about how technology can help solve some of those problems. I think most of the conversations that we had during COVID and even today are around, what did we learn during COVID? What new challenges did we discover? How do we think about risk differently to avoid some of the mistakes that we made and some of the good things that happened, frankly, for some customers in terms of the outsized demand, things that they’ve never seen before and had to be able to flex their supply chain up and down? So I think that’s a big challenge, just thinking about what’s changed coming out of COVID.

I think another challenge that we’re seeing, not related to COVID is I think our industry, so to speak, industrial shippers, people that are moving things around and the carriers that serve them and the whole ecosystem around that has done a really good job in investing in technology at the point solution level. I think technology has caught up, and there’s enough offerings out there now where the market and customers are really thinking about how to connect all that data that’s coming out of those respective point solutions, which there’s really good ones out there. But it’s solving individual challenges, so given what we just talked about with coming out of COVID and what customers are thinking about differently today in terms of a total solution from a visibility all the way down to the execution-level, I think that’s a big challenge. Where are the black holes? Where’s the missing data? And how do we connect all these legacy solutions that are out there now and add value to their respective businesses? So I think those are the big ones.

Yeah, absolutely. How are you guys positioned to solve some of these issues? Let’s say specifically around resiliency.

Our investment thesis and how we’re thinking about our company in general is that every move matters. It’s kind of our rallying statement or cause, if you will. As we talk to customers at higher and higher levels within the enterprise, I think the solution and the story, the narrative that we can tell around solving specific challenges and across the whole supply chain is a really interesting one. I think it is, at least, and our investors agree. Between the yard management portion, if you think about trailer yard management which was the legacy PINC business, that team has just done a fantastic job with helping solve some of the biggest challenges there.

Same on the railyard management or the TMS system which does a lot of billing, order management, work order creation, those types of things within those same shippers and for 3PLs that are serving those shippers, and then the asset repair stuff. I think you tie all those together at the data level and the analytics level, it’s a really unique conversation that we can have in terms of illuminating those dark spots in the supply chain, really adding innovation to those points of the supply chain which have historically been neglected, and frankly accelerating their transformation. In a lot of cases, believe it or not Danny, there are still sticky notes and paper-based processes.

Oh, I believe it. I’ve seen it.

I think we add a value there on some of those really vertically-based complications that we still see in the supply chain today.

Yeah, absolutely. I think it’s interesting, especially now. No one has a crystal ball in terms of what’s going to happen, hopefully as we’re climbing out. But you keep reading stories, like you mentioned, specifically about having visibility across your supply chain, and you’re moving your raw goods from A to B. I was reading some stories around Toyota and the automotive space. Just the challenges of when you have so many different components coming in from all over, and if you don’t have that kind of visibility to get an understanding of something that maybe ties into your ERP so you say, “We’ve got a problem in four weeks from now because we’ve got stuff stuck on a boat out in the port of Savannah or Charleston or whatever.”

Or can’t get chips.

Yeah, chips is a big one.

Demand planning and all that stuff, it’s a—yeah, that’s part of the unique, and a little bit of what’s changed in terms of that whole looking at—I’ve used the word the supply chain several times, but like you just mentioned, there’s a whole bunch of what I would call individual, custom supply chains, whether you’re talking about automotive or energy or food/beverage, or whatever. They’re all unique challenges. But if you roll it up to the highest level, it’s that visibility so you can actually do something with the data and build software or technology around solving those challenges. But the fun part is, we’re just getting to the point where you have enough data to start to solve some of those challenges. So I think we’re positioned well to help with that, that kind of macro problem. But they are unique, depending on the supply chain. The automotive one’s a fascinating one to watch because it goes up and down so fast based on demand and the challenges that they face. They all seem to face the same thing at the same time, so it’s just big swings in terms of positive or negative from a supply chain perspective.

Yeah, it sounds like you guys got some great tools and some great solutions to be able to have that visibility. I think it’s super exciting because I’m a little bit of a data dork. To be able to unlock potential and see things that you couldn’t see before because they were in disparate systems or what have you. So I think the future is bright, and that’s exciting to be able to unlock that, see the data, get the insights, and be able to make really informed decisions that you otherwise, it’s best guess.

Yeah, or you just had to duct-tape-and-baling-wire it together and do it manually and do your best at it. It makes it a really fun job around here in terms of customer conversations and thinking about what we can potentially do to help solve those problems. So yeah, it keeps everybody with a feeling of purpose around here.

Well, it sounds like you guys certainly have your work cut out for you. No lack of opportunity going forward, that’s for sure. Kirk, I really enjoyed our conversation, our time here. For those who’d like to get to know Kaleris a little bit more, learn about some of your solutions, what you guys do, what’s the best way of being able to do that?

Well, all of our stuff is on that new website that I mentioned, Kaleris.com. And we’re happy to help. We pay pretty close attention to that, obviously, given the newness of it. We’ll try to be as responsive as we can. Also, all the traditional channels, LinkedIn, things like that that I certainly try to be active on and stay connected with the industry and with our customers. So I think those would be the two best ways.

Excellent. Well Kirk, again, thank you so much for your time today and sharing with us your story, Kaleris, and what you guys are doing and just some insights in what you’re seeing in the industry. I know our audience will find it really valuable. I’ve enjoyed it, if nobody else does. No, but I think a lot of people will.

Oh yeah, I enjoyed talking to you as well. Thank you for having me.

Well, thanks for being on. Okay, well that wraps up today’s Executive Series interview with Kirk Knauff who is the CEO of Kaleris. Some pretty awesome technology coming in to really solve the challenge of—a lot of different challenges, but looking at that resiliency in the supply chain and adding some more visibility so we can have some more data and insights about knowing where our stuff is, when it is, and then we can do better planning and a lot more things beyond that. So go check them out at their website, Kaleris.com.

And that’s all I’ve got for you today. Thank you so much for watching or listening. If you’ve not subscribed, listen. You need to go to IndustrialSage.com, and go ahead and subscribe right there. Drop in your email address. We’re going to send you these weekly episodes of all kinds of content, and all kinds of great things are going to be continuing to come through in 2021. So thanks so much if you are a subscriber or listener. Hey, thanks so much; we’d love a review. Reach out to us. If there’s anything you’d like us to cover, say, “Hey, listen; we’d love you to do an episode on XYZ,” let us know, and we’ll do it. Alright, that’s all I got. Thanks, goodbye. Have a great day.

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Welcome to this episode of IndustrialSage. We’ve got a familiar guest here. We have Judson Voss from Chart Industries, and today he’s going to be talking about really the power of inbound and how Chart uses it. And it’s a really exciting thing. So for those who don’t know you, Judson, or haven’t heard some of the earlier episodes because he was on quite a few at the beginning, tell us a little bit about yourself, who you are, Chart, all that good stuff.

Sure. So with Chart Industries, I’m the digital marketing manager. That means most things.

You do print brochures.

I do brochures. I clean the restrooms most days. It just depends on what’s going on. I drink a lot of coffee for the most part.

Yes, there you go.

Yeah, there you go. So that’s my role there and title. What I do is take the strategy of what we’re trying to do and creating revenue and boiling that down to engagement with customers through the digital platform, which is 90% of what the world is today, anyways.

Exactly, and that’s awesome. That’s very much what we’re going to be talking about today is really this thing, inbound marketing, digital marketing. What is that? From your standpoint, what would you define that as? What is it?

What is inbound marketing?

What is inbound marketing?

To me, regardless of whether you’re looking at digital, analog, whatever it is, inbound is trying to figure out a way to get people to find you and to come into what we call this proverbial funnel, to have a way to interact with you. But nowadays, it’s really coming to a website, coming to some digital property somewhere, social media, whatever it is to get more information about your brand, about your product, about how you operate, all that kind of stuff.

Yeah, and it makes sense. And it’s important these days because there’s been a lot of shift in the industry. I’m curious; how long has Chart actually been using some sort of inbound marketing for, and what was that tipping point where they said, we need to go into this and start moving in this direction?

From a digital perspective, probably for the last five years, something like that. The tipping point that that’s my background, so that’s what we were going to do.

There you go.

But the reality is, that’s where the world is today. Looking at a very big picture view of manufacturing or really just old-school organizations–I’m not saying that in a bad way–companies that have been around for 70 years and have been successful. There’s no shame in being that company. They’ve operated in different ways. Some have latched onto the changes, and to some it’s something new. And it’s just a matter of understanding how your buyers operate, how people come to you, and how they find stuff. You’re talking about a tipping point, I remember I was actually out at a brewery talking to some folks, guys in their late 20s, early 30s that own this brewery, really smart business guys too, by the way. And I was talking to them about a product, and we’re setting them up to be, our company as a go-to that would show off our product and understand the technical pieces and be our voice in that industry. And I just said, off the cuff, I said, “You guys were sold by us. What was that experience, and what things could we improve on?” And they said, “Well, first of all, your video and the way you draw people into your site, from our perspective, really sucks.”

Aw, thanks.

I said, hey, there’s something. Maybe if I dig deeper, there’s something I could look at there.

Hey, it’s good feedback, but that’s pretty funny. So why did they become customers? I’m curious, if your videos sucked, or whatever.

Because there’s only a couple of companies in the world that make that specific product, and they came back and said, “It was really hard to find information about your product and you guys, but when you finally came out and visited with us, we just liked the way you did business more than the other companies. And that’s why they picked it. And there’s a balance there, too. There’s this incoming lead, never hearing of you, needing to warm up the lead part, which is getting to know your business. And then the other part is your people and your business. And I think that should be a piece of your incoming funnel is getting to know those folks, unless they’re just not fun to hang out with. Otherwise, it is an important key is that you are bringing them in to learn more about you, not just to go through this funnel and sell them and hit the bottom.

Right, yeah. And I think that’s a really important point because I think there’s a lot of push-back that we hear every single day. And it’s like, well, that works in other industries, but we’re very relationship-driven. And it’s like, well, yeah, but every business is relationship-driven. And I think there’s a misunderstanding that it’s not to replace those relationships at all. I think it’s really to enhance it, to really augment it. You said something really key there. You said these guys were a little bit younger, in their 20s or whatever. And they thought, aw this is–have you guys been seeing a little bit more of that over the last few years?

Yeah, and it only makes sense because if you think about it this way, Chart’s products, but a lot of manufacturing companies, they’re not selling to other companies. They’re selling to engineers. And most of the engineers that are seeking out new products as a part of their business are not the guys that have been around for 60 years that are working in the engineering manager, director’s role. It’s the younger guys, younger girls, that are in those roles that are coming into the business now. And they’re the ones that they’re sending out to seek these products. So just naturally, it’s going to be a younger crowd. I think it probably was all the time. It’s just that before we had the digital piece, we couldn’t figure out who those people were. So yeah, definitely it’s just a matter of the business, especially in a manufacturing industrial side. You are going to be talking to the younger folks at the company.

Yeah. I think also, too, there’s a little bit of a misconception there, too that we always need to be talking to the CEO. And the reality of it is, there’s several different people. These decisions aren’t necessarily going to be made by one person. There’s an interesting stat, actually, that Google came out with in 2015 which says that–and this was, what, three years ago, three and a half, depending on when in 2015–that B2B buyers are, nearly 50% of them are millennial. Very scary stat, right? That’s what they would say. But the important lesson there, and you pointed it out, is that those young men and women are going to be making those decisions. The way that they buy is dramatically different than the way that things used to be purchased 20, 30 years ago.

And it’s critically important to understand that and realize, because it reminds me of business models that just did not pivot. You always think of the Blockbuster and Netflix. Netflix came in, complete underdog, and completely upset the big boy. And I think it’s something like, they had, I think they were valued at, Blockbuster, the highest point was $8 billion. Netflix, I think, is 60 or 70 or 80 billion in terms of their valuation. That is obscene. But it happened slowly. It wasn’t like this overnight thing, and Blockbuster didn’t necessarily recognize, or they failed to recognize it, and it was too late. I hear this constantly from manufacturers, like, jeez, things aren’t working the way they used to, or tradeshow attendance is low. Now we’ve got all these competitors that are popping up. They’re doing all this stuff, and we don’t really necessarily understand it. So anyways, yeah, just to add onto that point.

Yeah, I agree. And speaking to that, and I can’t remember the stat; it came from Joe Pelosi’s stuff, the inbound marketing stuff.

Content marketing is, too.

Yeah, content marketing is, too. I think it’s 90-something percent of B2B buyers today, the first touch is through your website or some digital property. It may not be your website; it may be something, an asset somewhere else digitally that they find you. And that’s just the buyer’s journey today. The main entry point is not going to be some of the things we’ve seen in the past. It’s going to be through a website, through a webinar, through a landing page. Something, somewhere is how they’re getting to you. And even digitally, in the trade, as an industrial area, pass their trade publications. Usually it’s not through the printed material anymore. It’s usually online, through an ad, through an article, something like that that they’re finding out about you, especially videos at a tradeshow and they learn more about you. But it’s not the tradeshow; it’s the video on the website. So the reality of it is, if you’re not well-positioned there, then you’re not well-positioned with 90-something percent of your potential buyers.

Right, exactly. And I think that is, that’s the critical point there in that piece there. That has shifted. You just have to think about when you buy something, whether it’s a B2B purchase or a B2C purchase, what do you do? Do you go to the yellow pages, naturally, and you open–We go into this thing called “the Google.” You Google it, right? And it’s the same exact thing, whether you’re an engineer in a craft brewery looking for a mixing tank or whatever. Case in point.

Yeah, the old days of parts and materials in a big catalog like this they’ll ship to you once a year, you look through it as an engineer to find what you were looking for and then call the company up to get more information, that’s gone. People want to be able to Google it online, find the thing, find more details about it, and then when they’re ready to buy, maybe talk to somebody. But they don’t usually want to do it. You and I are the same way, too. Even big purchases. I want to be educated as much as I can before I seek out the actual folks to get the real details, make sure that what I’m thinking is correct for the product.

Which I think is another really great point is the fact that, I think there’s some stat they talk about. They say that 80% of buyers, when they contact you, they’ve already made up their mind. They’ve already done all their research. They’ve looked at you; they’ve looked at your competitors, and they’re down that funnel. They know who you are; they’ve looked at your material, good or bad. And then that next one, they actually reach out. They’ve already made that decision, or they’re very close to it. So I think the critical thing is, you mention on there that education piece. Nobody wants to, we don’t want to go to a website–we want to be very anonymous. I don’t want a salesperson calling me and hounding me and doing all this. So what have you guys done in terms of inbound to help facilitate that education, that buyer’s journey?

The journey. It varies. Webinars are a big piece. When you’re talking about a fairly expensive, highly technical product, that’s one of the best ways to get there. Two things: they learn about your product, and they learn about you because they get both of those pieces. Hopefully the subject matter expert on that product is the one doing the webinar, so not only do they learn about the technical piece of the product, they learn about the person that they’re going to be dealing with, essentially, the person that helped design the product or get it to market. So both of those pieces are important there. You mentioned before about the CEO, and they’re not going to be the one that’s really buying the product, but they might have an influence. Spend as much time as possible, from an account-based marketing perspective, which is educating each of the different groups in the organization about the company and about the product, really more about the solution. Engineer might be interested in the specs of the product. Everybody else in that company is interested in the ROI. Why are we spending money on this product, and what are we getting out of it? So we try to go across the board that way, so all the different pieces are touched from a digital perspective.

Absolutely, so make sure that the content of different areas, you either speak to that person who’s going to be looking. So if you’re talking to a CEO, don’t talk about, oh, here’s all the amazing features and benefits. They don’t care. It’s, operationally, we think that we’re going to be able to reduce some of your costs by 5% or 10%. Oh, okay.

Even CEOs, maybe at that level it’s more about this is my company. We’re not a shot in the dark organization. We’ve been around for a whole bunch of years. That might be all they need to know at that level, the CEO, the COO. The CFO, he might want to know other pieces of information.

That’s a great point.

I always recommend, if you’re marketing to the CFO, don’t care about the product. Care about the payback. Create a calculator, and use that with the CFO because what they want to do is, they want to be able to calculate the payback without doing any work.

Yeah, right, exactly.

Just like we all do. So yeah, I always recommend different pieces like that that speaks directly to their organizational structure.

Absolutely. The thing is, I feel like it’s really taking those relationships you develop, the way that companies have gone to market in the past, and it’s not really changing the structure of it so much. It’s just changing the medium and the way that it’s communicated and delivered. That’s really it.

In my spare time — the other 24 hours of my day — I’ve helped organizations out on that side, the sales enablement piece. And I work with folks sometimes in explaining how to set up their funnel digitally in the first place through software solutions. The first thing I always recommend is, you want a quick win, it’s go out and interview the sales team and understand how they get leads, what they do with those leads, how they decide who’s the important one, who I should call back first, who’s the guy I’m going to ignore, that kind of stuff and totally just copy it. Digitally, just copy that, and do what they do because the company, you’re a billion-dollar company. You’ve been doing something right for a long time.

You would think so, yeah.

So just copy that digitally. You don’t have to go out and reinvent the world digitally. Just figure out how to support what works already through another format.

Exactly, and I think that’s the key answer in that solution to the whole relationship question. It’s like, whoa, what is this? All this new stuff.

It’s still there.

Nothing’s new under the sun.

There’s some cool new stuff from the perspective of how you get the leads in. It’s easier to schlock around at a trade show for four days and stand around at your booth looking at people like, oh, please come talk to me. There’s other ways to do it. Inbound, essentially, going back to the original question, inbound is a digital method to allow people to raise their hand instead of you seeking them out asking if they want your product. And so that’s what all these cool new tools really help you do.

And the beautiful thing, and I love about it too–I mean, there’s a lot of things I love about it–is the fact that that thing runs, if you set it up right, 24/7. It’s like having a whole fleet of salespeople that are out there doing trade shows constantly. So while it’s night time here in the United States, if you’re a global company, you’ve got stuff, or what have you. Or somebody here, it’s an engineer, and it’s late at night. They’re trying to figure out this thing, and they come–they’re being educated. Maybe it’s that webinar that is pre-recorded, and it’s there, and that the project manager and engineer had put together. And they’re learning, and they’re developing that relationship. That relationship absolutely is being developed there. They’re being educated, and it’s being automated. That is really the key piece is that we can take what you’ve done but then scale it. And that is very, very exciting.

Right, and then taking that information. People will say, I don’t know how to create content. You can probably get your subject matter expert to put a PowerPoint together and record it. That’s one piece of content, but now you can break that into a whole bunch of different things. Now you’ve got, A: you’ve got the slide deck that you can put different places. B: you should be able to go back through and figure out blog posts you can write, articles, just redeveloping what the content says on your website. If people watch the webinar, and they send you an email that says, hey, I saw your webinar, and I thought this was really interesting, put it on your website. It resonates with a customer; put it on your website.

Absolutely

And so there’s all different ways you could take that content and repurpose it into new uses.

So for those who may say, yeah, that sounds like a great idea, why would they want to do it? What does content play in terms of–what’s the why it’s such a big deal in inbound?

Well, because it is inbound.

Ah, well there you go.

The folks at CMI will say that, at least. But it is. There is no inbound. There is the idea and the structure. We talk about old-school and trade shows and stuff, but there is the old-school also of AdWords: “Come to my website, and somehow, you’re going to buy something from me because you see a picture of a product and a product spec under that.” That today is, while it worked five years ago, is old-school today too. We’re just moving faster. So people don’t want to just see the specs on products. They want the story behind it. They want to know what it’s going to do for them, which they’ve always wanted. They’re just asking for it digitally. And so they want to see all those pieces. Well, the content is that. The content is what tells the story, that explains the product. It explains your company. It explains who you are maybe sometimes and ties all that together. But without the content, there is nowhere to land and gather data.

Yeah, it’s taking that education and feeding it throughout the journey at the right time. It can’t be just firehosed, everything, all the–And I think that’s the power of having marketing automation systems to be able to help facilitate and do that.

In the right format, too. So we’re talking about repurposing. Part of it’s because we’re lazy marketers, and we want to get as much bang for our buck as we can by one piece of content. But the other thing is, everybody learns differently. There is that engineer that is going to sit there and watch an hour-long webinar. Just so you know, that’s not me. I go and sign up for a webinar. I get the replay, and I hope to God that they have a Cliff Notes version that I can read through in about four minutes. So there’s that piece of it, and there’s people that like to read and different ways that they like to consume their content. That’s why video podcasts, audio podcasts, blogs, you say which is the best? And the answer is yes.

Yeah, exactly. So wrapping up here, one last question is for the company, the organization that’s saying, this is interesting. We’re thinking about this, and maybe we should do this. What advice would you give to them? Are there any particular key steps? What would you tell them?

I could do this for an hour.

That’s a whole other episode. Maybe we’ll do, we can do a part two if we need to.

To me, for marketers, regardless if your title has digital or not in it or whatever your title is, you need to understand your business and your customers first. Regardless of the digital piece or anything like that, you need to know what you’re selling and why you’re selling it. And why you’re selling it isn’t to get revenue. It’s, why is the customer buying it? So you’ve got to have that baseline in there. But then, when you get to the digital side, you have to be honest with yourself. Say, this is new. This is something we haven’t done before, so we need to figure this out. And just going and telling your resources that you have already, go figure it out, it’s good if they want to take that on. Don’t do that as your main source. I think you’re going to end up flailing around trying to get there. So bringing in an outside resource I think is important if you don’t have it in place. If you’ve got somebody there, they’re the digital marketing king or queen, and they can do it, then great. Go from there. But you’re probably not asking that question if you’ve got that already.

Probably not.

So for the other 99.8% of us, it’s good to go out and seek out other resources, even if it’s just for consulting purposes and ask people what they think that are outside your organization that maybe have done this before, something like that, or just hiring an agency to come in and to that. I think that’s really important to set that up in the beginning. And then, the other piece is trying to figure out what you’re going to get out of it and what your plans are. There’s two things that I think, personally, that kill digital marketing implementations in organizations. One is, they don’t know what they want to get out of it. Well, I guess I should say there’s three. The other one is, don’t know what you’re doing, and don’t ask for help. But they don’t know what they plan to get out of it, so they just have zero ways to measure it.

And on the back side of that is, they don’t have a way to represent to their boss, the next person up the line, what the ROI is going to be. Because what I see people do is, they come in and they say, we’re going to start a digital marketing plan. And their boss is like, eh. And sooner or later they say, so what do we get out of it? And they’re just like, you don’t understand. Digital marketing is the way of the world today. Well, as a business owner or as a CEO or somebody that’s running a business, the way of the world is great. They want to know what specifics they’re going to get. If they’re putting the money into it, what are they going to get back out of it?

Exactly.

And I think you have to be able to portray that to them. Otherwise, you will get stuck.

Absolutely.

We always said, get by, and get sponsorship from the top level in the organization. That’s what you need for whatever project you’re doing. Digital marketing is no different. I think it helps you, too because now you’re like, okay, now I know what I expect to get from it. And now I know what I’m going to measure. And now I know what success is going to look like for me, too. So you cover it all in that—

Reporting, analytics, and communicating that back.

Yeah, having a strategy, all that.

Awesome. Well, Judson, I really appreciate the time. You’ve given us a ton of great information. If anybody had any further questions, they’d like to reach out to you, what’s the best way of contacting you?

Best way is to go to my website, probably, judsonvoss.com.

Perfect, yeah.

I don’t know how I came up with it. One night I was sitting—

That’s a tough thing.

Yeah, I had to change my name and everything. But that’s probably the easiest way to get me through there.

Excellent. Alright, well Judson thanks again so much for the time, as always. I know we’ve seen you here a lot. Hopefully we’ll see you here some more. And thanks again.

You betcha.

Alright. Okay, so that was great, look, another great episode. Inbound marketing, what is it? Why it’s important, why you need it, I think some really big, key takeaways. I think really the big thing is that recognizing and fully understanding that the buying cycle, the journey has shifted. It’s changed, and people are going to your website first when they want to go learn more about you. And you have to ask yourself a critical question: What are they finding when they go and Google you? A, can you be found? B, once you’re found, do you have the right information? Do you have the right content that educates them, that tells them who you are, about your products, about your services so that when they’re ready to contact you or make that decision and contact who they want to go to, that they have been fully educated on you guys? This is the company that we want to go with. Is that set up? It’s a very key thing. That’s the way that we’re going and the way that we’re going to be doing that here.

So thanks so much for watching this episode. And if you have any questions, please feel free to reach out to IndustrialSage.com/questions. We’d love to answer them for you. Please share this; like this. If you’re listening on iTunes, we’d love a review. And, as always, thanks again. I’m Danny Gonzales, and this is 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!

Hey, I’m Danny Gonzales, and let’s jump in today’s episode. I got Chris Handy from Drift, and we’re going to be talking about chatbots. What the heck are chatbots? But before we get into that, Chris, hey, if you could introduce yourself to the audience, tell us who you are and what this Drift company does.

Right, my name is Chris Handy. I work here at Drift as a customer marketing leader. I was an early customer with Drift on the client side, and then I started a Drift partner agency there for about a year. And then they basically said, why don’t you come do that on over here for us? And so I’ve served a lot of different roles in different companies from leadership to sales to doing everything and marketing and all those things. And I just found that Drift was making a platform that really helped accelerate the sales process for folks. And what Drift is, and what we say about Drift, really, is that Drift connects you now with the people who are already interested now, so you can build better pipeline faster. And we do that in a variety of ways. One, you’ve mentioned already, but we’re tied into all kind of areas of communication, especially for sales folks. So if you’re sending out an email or something like that, and they click on a link back to your website, you’re there. You are there to greet them, no matter who you are in the organization. And we can also automate some of those things so that if you’re not ready to chat with someone right now, we have DriftBot which can take care of a lot of things for you and route to you and book meetings and get support questions out of the way where they need to be. It’s a platform that really helps to get things done faster for folks that may not have had a great way to do that before.

Awesome, that’s great. Actually, a quick question on this. Actually, we’re on the client side on there. I’m just curious; was there a particular vertical that you’re involved with?

Right, so I worked with a bunch of different companies as a consultant. And we were implementing other technologies before, so maybe your more traditional marketing technology stack. And what we found is that the implementation of those hadn’t changed much, but the results that came in from those old-style landing pages and gated content on everything, behind mother’s maiden name and deepest darkest secret and all the other things that we let those forms build up to be, they just weren’t working as well as they used to. In fact, the lead volume had decreased by almost half on a lot of our different client accounts, so we were looking for, how can we take this to the next level? And so looking at Drift, and Drift was really early on, we started testing this on our own website. And the first moment we put it on, we started to get people that chose that channel over the other contact us-type channels almost immediately. And we also found that there was a greater number of people that were choosing to contact us overall. So this was really early days before there were bots involved and automation, so it was just chat. What chat allowed for was this brand-new channel that people didn’t like the old channel as much but maybe would’ve filled it out anyway, they chose the new channel. But then all these new people that were not really keen on the friction that forms and landing pages would put into place, they opted to contact us when before, they had not been contacting us. And when I saw that, when I noticed that, I thought, man, this is really something, something we need to be paying attention to. We had tried some other chat tools. They were not really focused on customer experience before. There were far more folks on maybe a support-type environment, and they just didn’t have that ease, that look and feel and experience when you’re actually using it on both sides, on the seller’s side and the buyer’s side where it just feels more natural. It feels a lot more like you’re just texting your friend. And so I knew there was something happening with Drift which led us to implement that with more and more clients. And I realized, man, we’ve got to just make this all that we do because there are not that many companies out there that just focus on this. And so we went deep on that. And it became clear that, while I could keep doing that, there were a lot of things about the product that, I was sending in suggestions and other things that they ended up appearing there, like the same day.

Oh, wow.

They would be there with the product. And that was just amazing to me. I thought, I’ve got to figure out what’s going on up there. How are they able to do something where I just tell them, “hey, I’d like for this to happen,” and then it appears. And it’s the way the product is built here, based on customer feedback and what people are really asking for. It’s like nothing I’ve ever seen. It’s not where there’s this one, singular thing that it has to be, and that we never stray from that. We follow what the customer wants. I just had to be a part of it. And we found a way to do that, and now I’m here leading customer marketing which is so much fun. I get to have even more influence over that kind of stuff and then see one of the best teams in the world, really, build this thing that’s helping sales teams connect with more qualified prospects.

Well, that’s super exciting. So for our audience who might not necessarily—some are familiar with it, and some aren’t. When you’re talking about the concept of chat and chatbots, can you maybe break that down a little bit?

Right, I think this is an important distinction. You may have had an experience, and some people think back to some time they’ve bought a car or something, and they had some chat on a car dealership website or something. That’s not what this is. When we talk about chat the way Drift implements it, it’s more like iMessage on your website where you can come in, and you can just have an easy conversation, and there’s no form to fill out—although a lot of people do choose to put in their email address just because they want to—where people can ask questions. And what’s great is that chat, in this case, it’s got bot baked into it. So it’s not just one or the other. So a bot would be an automated action taken by a clearly-represented chatbot on your website. So we know it’s not Chris. We know it’s not Danny. Ours is called DriftBot, and literally, it looks like a little robot. And so we expect that to behave differently than if I were speaking with a human. But what we’ve done is we’ve created a platform that is all-in-one. So there are a few different ways that you can interact with a company. You can interact with what appears to be a bot at the very beginning, and then a human might jump in if you get hung up on something. Or you can type into what we call a welcome message which is clearly me, or it’s clearly a human at the company, and then I’m expecting for someone to respond. Now, we’ve made it so that both work together really well. So if I type in an open question into chat, a lot of salespeople think to themselves, well, I can’t be there to answer all these support questions and other things like that. So we have a way that we hook into your knowledge base. And so what Drift is going to do… it’s going to look into your knowledge base for an answer first and try and surface that answer and get that out of the way right before anyone has to jump in. Then, if it’s not answered, then it’ll grab somebody. And what we find is that people use that moment to upgrade their knowledge base. It’s like, hey, people are asking for this. Let’s figure out a way to automate that. So you chip away at automating support over time. And what the bot does is it allows you to have a fully-automated experience where folks can self-qualify. For instance, you might have a bot that calls out from the corner of the website, it says, “hey, can I ask you a question?” But other than saying something like any question, we say “can I ask you a question?” And we say, “hey, are you looking to do this or that,” and sort of get people down a singular path so that we can identify more about what they’re trying to do. And then, maybe there’s a moment when we should actually pull in someone to talk with them. Maybe it’s a really hot lead that we already know is qualified. But maybe it’s someone that wants to book a meeting for later. And we’ve got that integrated right in, so they can just book a meeting on someone’s calendar right there without having to do the back and forth. So we’re really looking to automate those most common actions that people, on the buyer’s side, are trying to get done. They need an answer to their question. They need to book a meeting. Or maybe they have a question for someone now, and it’s appropriate and the sales team chooses to operate that way. So our platform, we look at it as the new way businesses buy from businesses. We’re far more focused to being a B2B tool than we are a business-to-consumer tool. I find that a lot of folks in this space are definitely in the B2B crowd. So if you’re selling B2B, and you are looking to make that experience better not only for the people on your site but also for you as a seller, you might want to give that a look just because you can walk down the street, you can be at the Walgreen’s, and you can get some of this stuff routed to your phone if you so choose, which is super cool. So that’s the two different things that work together as an overview and how live chat versus chatbots might work. We may go deeper, I’m sure. I’m sure you’ve got questions.

Yeah, absolutely. I think that’s interesting. I didn’t know about the whole, connecting into the knowledge base. From a customer service standpoint, but also from marketing and sales, being able to learn, okay, what are those questions? I would imagine that would be able to fuel a content strategy. Say, oh, we’re getting all these questions about this or that. Oh, well, great, that’s our content. That’s what we’re going to help to be able to create. And it’s being able to do that, which is interesting. The other interesting thing, too, is that you mentioned that it’s a frictionless touch. So one of the challenges I think a lot of people run into, especially with a lot here in our audience, is that you get this data. You find out who it is, and you’re immediately, let’s get them on the horn. Let’s call them. And it’s like, whoa, wait a minute; wait a minute. Let’s just slow down. People are here. Let’s let them buy and self-educate on their terms. And I think that’s a really interesting thing that it allows that opportunity for you to be able to engage, if you want to.

Right. We can always let people raise their hand. We’ve got sales reps; they’ll come running.

Yeah, exactly.

That’s not a problem. But if they’re not ready for that, why introduce this chase that doesn’t need to be there? It allows us to be a lot more conversational in the sales process and just, hey, what are you trying to do today? Let’s get you going, and let’s get you fixed up.

Yeah, absolutely. Again, that makes a lot of sense in the world. So what are you guys seeing, just in terms of—what’s your vision in terms of the next few years on how you think this is going to play out as to, from a marketing tactic because, quite honestly, I’ve heard a lot about it over the last year or two, but this year in particular, and definitely seeing a lot of this being rolled out on a lot of different websites, very easy to identify the Drift robot. There we go; I get it. But what are you guys seeing in terms of what it’s looking like in the next six to 12 months?

Yeah, what’s awesome is that we don’t have a product roadmap. We literally, and I touched on this before, but we follow what the customer needs. And so I can talk to that. Who are we solving problems for, and what are the kinds of problems maybe we’ve solved to give you a hint at why we do what we do? We’re laser-focused on sales and marketing. So there’s a lot of folks that are out there building best-in-class support tools that tack on this sales and marketing piece. We are looking to build the best platform for sales and marketing on the planet. And if we continue down that path, what we’re going to find is things like that help thing that I was telling you about where we could just automatically, 100% of support completely out of the way. Those kinds of things, they do emerge. And they come into play in really interesting ways. We have all kinds of different skills that our bot has. One of those skills is the email capture skill. It might come into play when someone asks for a meeting or when someone—you can use our product as sort of a universal gate for your content. What we found is that a lot of people have this big, complicated marketing automation system, and they’ve got a legacy of using forms. And they’re not ready to just upend everything and say, okay, we’re not going to take down forms. We’re very much against forms, but we realize that they are in place. And so the best way to ungate all of the content for people who you know already is to say, hey, tell us your email. And then Drift recognizes you wherever you end up going on the website. So why would we ever ask someone for an email again?

It doesn’t make sense, redundant.

It’s—absolutely. So we can offer an experience adjacent to all those forms and landing pages that you’ve got to give someone a fast lane into the content that they’re looking for, so we’ve got skills that take care of that. They take care of that throughout the conversation, and then they make sure that you get routed to either the right person or the right content based on where you are. And so allowing folks to skip that line and not ever feel like, hey, shouldn’t you already know who I am, is part of what we’re solving for. And I think that that speaks to our focus on solving the problems of people in sales and people in marketing who are focused on demand generation. Demand generation is all about sending email and sending people back to those forms, but we can make it better, and we can increase conversion rate because we’re not asking you to fill out those forms. We’re sending you right on through.

That’s awesome. It’s such a different way of being able to propose that information. I love the idea. Even, it’s almost like not necessarily killing forms, but really moving away from that. And then, it totally plays into a much more seamless approach to that progressive profiling to get incremental information as we get along down the process, not having a form that has 15 million, which is a bad anything, having 15 million different fields. I don’t know you from Adam. Yeah, I’m going to give you my address; no. But having that as an iterative process. And I love also what you talked about, how you don’t have a roadmap, per se. It’s really all about listening to the customer.

Right; there’ve been things that we’ve built, and we’ve thought, hey, this is going to go gangbusters. And it didn’t really go off the way we thought it would. And we put less emphasis on some of that stuff going forward and put more emphasis into what the demand is. And that is what’s so great about being close to the customer as an organization. The way I felt when I was a customer is how close we still are with a lot of customers where we feel a real attachment with these folks that help us build the product. When it’s a customer telling you what they want, that is the voice of maybe 100 or 1000 customers who really want the same thing but haven’t taken the time to speak up. So the one thing that Drift uniquely allows us to do is to stay in tune because we get these comments and suggestions all the time, and we’ve got now a cadre of folks that are just, they’re in the inner circle. We know who they are. We recognize them every time. Not just the technology, but we do. They’re trusted advisors because they’re telling us what they need. And we lean on the customer for that.

Well, I think what is great and is such an awesome opportunity is taking that methodology, that idea and being able to, rolling that out, like with our audience. If they’ve got—you’ve got websites; you’ve got all this information there—is taking that exact approach, using that as the ability to listen to what people are asking for and then being able to adjust. And I think that’s, for a lot of people in the manufacturing and industrial space, that’s a big lesson that we’re learning and making adjustments to be able to say, hey, you know what? It’s funny you mention the whole, hey, we develop a product, and we think it’s going to be amazing. It’s the same, exact thing in the manufacturing space. We’ve talked about it all the time. If you’re developing a product, okay, well, let’s make sure first that there’s an actual need for it versus, hey, we think this is awesome. And it may be awesome, but if your customers don’t think it is and there’s not a need for it, well then it’s completely pointless. So this is kind of flipping that, being able to say, hey, look, we can take a pulse, take the temperature, see what’s going on. We might discover things that we didn’t know about, which I’m assuming that happens all the time.

Oh, the product today versus where it was when I started using it as a customer is a completely evolved and, in some ways, very different place to be. The one thing that hasn’t changed, it’s only just gotten a better version of the same way it was is the way it feels when you’re talking with someone in there. I use this hand motion because I find that it’s even better. And so if someone’s out there, they’re already using drift or something like it, it’s even better to use it with your mobile device because that feeling of talking to someone, it very much allows you to be more conversational because you’re using that motion you use with your—

Text message or whatever, yeah.

Friends, right. I tend to have much more direct, more—I call the language business casual. It’s not so informal that you wouldn’t be comfortable doing it, but sometimes you have casual Friday, you wear jeans and a button-down shirt. You can sort of let your hair down when you’re talking with someone one-on-one and be more punchy in the way that you—because if you look at how you text, you’ll send a response to a question, like “do you want to go do this?” You’ll say “yes,” and you’ll send that. And then you’ll say “I was thinking about the same thing.” You’ll send that. And then you’ll say “but what about after, we do this,” and then you’ll send that. So you’ll have three little messages versus this big email. And what I see is that that’s how people use the product who are the most successful, and that hasn’t changed a bit. So this core experience between people who are just connecting with one another which is what we’re best at doing, connecting people now, has remained unchanged despite all of those other things that we’ve added to the product that really just help that connection happen with the right people, and happen faster.

Yeah, that’s awesome. And that’s a big, sometimes, concern, too with a lot of our audience is that you know what? Well, listen; this whole online marketing automation, all this stuff, it seems so impersonal, and no, our business is all about relationships. I know; everybody’s business is about relationships. That is the key. And so I love the ability of being able to do that, to really make that connection happen faster when it’s needed. It’s a very interesting use case you’re talking about, just how the text messaging thing is almost how—yeah, you would communicate maybe a little bit differently that way. I love it. That’s awesome. What would you say to a company that are saying, hey, we’re thinking about rolling this out? What would be some tips in terms of first steps, in terms of rolling out something like this?

Right, so oftentimes this will start either in the sales organization or in the marketing organization. So let’s talk about how it might look in both different instances. So if you’re starting in a marketing organization, a lot of times you’ll find one person who is excited about the idea and is looking to roll it out, but maybe isn’t sure exactly how to communicate all that to their sales team. If you’re not as open-minded and/or educated in what this can do, then the old dog-type salesperson might immediately shut the idea down. So I would say the way to get started is not to go to the sales team and say, alright, now you’re going to be chatting with everyone on our website because—and we’ve done a lot to solve for that, and it’s hard to communicate that if you don’t set the stage first. And so oftentimes, the most successful organizations driven by marketing are, they’re going in and they’re creating some of these experiences in an automated fashion, more so to get a proof of concept out there and just to use it as a lead-gen tool, sort of like what you described before. Let’s ungate most of the content by providing one opportunity to tell us who you are. Now, we’re going to send you off in different ways and make this whole process easier for you. And then as those leads are generated, you can find one person you can show on the sales team and say, hey look, here’s what we’re doing. This is working really well. We’re bringing in new people, more people than before, in fact. And we have a way where we can get people through a qualification process and then book them right on your calendar for a sales appointment. Is that something that—

You would be interested in?

Right, yeah, sure.

Um, okay, yes.

Right, so when you show people hey, look, here’s what’s going on, here’s how this is going to work, and here’s how I’m going to protect you from the massive volume of people who are on our site who may have a question that’s completely unrelated to a salesperson’s day. And so if you could position it that way, then you’re going to be able to get this thing going because you get one person going. They get automatic meetings, and they’re starting to build pipeline.

Done.

It just goes. So that’s, from a marketing organization standpoint, is getting that proof of concept, finding a pilot partner in the sales team. And a lot of times these sort of lines of communications are already there, but sometimes, and particularly in lower-tech or not quite as—you don’t have a bunch of software running all your stuff, basically. If this is a new area, then you may not have people who are focused on marketing operations or some of the things that go along with that. Now, if you’re a salesperson, you have a lot more leeway in this. So you can talk with someone in marketing and get this thing going and sort of bring that pilot person with them. Marketers love the opportunity to generate more leads because they’re measured on that, and how can we get this thing done faster? And I think my best advice would be to put this thing on—and you just go to the app store, you download the app, Drift. And then now you’ve got it on your phone, and you can just have this on you all the time when you’re ready to talk with anyone during the hours you set and the parameters you set up.

No, that’s awesome. That’s super cool. Admittedly, we don’t have this on IndustrialSage, IndustrialSage.com on our website there. But we are totally—

Well, that’s why I’m here, to change all that.

We are totally going to implement it. Actually, it’s been interesting. It’s come up quite a bit, and actually we’ve looked at it. We’re like, gosh darn it, we need to do this. But it’s been interesting how we’ve seen some of our clients roll out with it and different things like that. So I definitely see this as going—we really appreciate your sharing with us your insights on it. I love your story, how you came from agency; that totally flipped the script for you, if you will, and now you have a pretty cool story. But it totally makes sense about the use case and how you guys are using it. So that’s awesome.

Yeah, so if we ever do round two, we can talk about building the next level type bots for your company and what they should be doing. We talked about it being, flipping it again on the focus of your website and saying, can I ask you a question? So it’s the ice-breaker that gets the conversation started that’s maybe the most important thing. And it’s all about writing great headlines, and this goes back to old-school copywriting and all this. We’re not designing a new website and putting snazzy stuff on it. We’re just providing this other experience that other people choose to engage with, and we get to flex our creative skills a little bit on the copywriting. So I can talk with you again someday, maybe, about that.

We’re going to have to have that second version, take two because we could probably go hours on this. For sure, we could go on hours. It’s super cool stuff; love all this technology. But really, at the end of the day, it is purposeful. It’s not like—because there’s so many different technologies—hey, we can do all these things. We can measure all this—yeah, it’s great, but you know. But this is very intriguing, especially as you have more machine learning and AI, all this stuff rolling out to make these things even smarter, better, faster, and all that stuff. That is super cool stuff. As we wrap up here, any last words you’d like to say to our audience about Drift and chatbots and all, where to be thinking for 2019?

Right, one of the best things that I can offer you as a resource is that I’m heading up your Conversational Marketing University.

Okay, very cool.

There’s going to be a lot of education there and some of the things that we talked about, but going in a little bit deeper. So if this is something that you’re looking at rolling out at your company, even if you’re rolling out with another company, come learn, take the strategies that we’ve got in Conversational Marketing University. And roll it out wherever you like. We just want everyone to understand how to do this better, how to make better connections. And you can find that at drift.com/university.

Perfect, that’s awesome. Well, we’ll put that in the show notes, make sure we’ve got that link in the articles and stuff that we have. So Chris, I really appreciate the time. This has been fantastic. I’ve learned a lot; I know our audience has learned a lot as well. So just thank you.

Hey, thanks for having me, Danny. I appreciate your time.

Absolutely, any time. Alright, so, wow. That was an awesome episode about Drift. Who’d have thought? Chatbots and AI and all kinds of crazy stuff. Listen, this is something that I mentioned there. I am not blowing smoke. We are going to put this on our website, IndustrialSage.com. We’re going to see first-hand just how this works, and we’re going to report those results back to you. And I wholeheartedly believe in this. I think this is something that we’re really, you’re going to see a lot more of. And it’s something to be thinking about on how to really augment your digital marketing campaigns to really help your sales teams to be able to generate leads, get them qualified, process them. Your sales teams are going to love you when you do this because that’s really what our job is as marketers is to really generate really qualified leads and really help sales to really close those. So that’s all I’ve got for you today. Thanks for watching. If you have any questions, we’d love to answer them. You can reach out to us; IndustrialSage.com/questions. If you’re listening on iTunes, we’d love a review. Social media, hey, we’d love a share. And until next time, I’m Danny Gonzales, and this is IndustrialSage.

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Well hello, and welcome to today’s Executive Series on IndustrialSage. I’m Danny Gonzales, and I’m joined by a very special guest today. You are in for a treat. Today we’re going to be talking with the executive vice president, Paul Baldassari, from Flex Manufacturing. And we’re going to be learning about Flex, what they do. We’re going to learn about Paul’s story. And we’re also going to learn about this massive pivot that Flex took at really the beginning of the pandemic, and we’re going to hear about their response. And they did some amazing things that you’re going to hear about. So before we get all into it and get excited, I’m going to introduce my guest here. We have Paul Baldassari. Thank you so much for joining me today on the Executive Series on IndustrialSage.

Thank you very much, Danny. I’m honored to be with you today.

Well, this is going to be a fantastic episode. I’m very excited about it. But before we jump all into it, let’s answer the first big question. Who is Flex? What do you guys do?

Well, Flex, we want to be the manufacturing partner of choice. We want to design and manufacture products for our customers that improve the world. Today we operate in a lot of different industries. We do medical products that we’re going to talk about in more detail. We do automotive products, industrial products, products that power the internet on consumer devices as well as enterprise computing and communication devices. And probably for the audience in the room that you sit right now, there is going to be probably five products that Flex made for you for our customers that have the brand on the product. And we are proud that we serve so many people in so many different countries.

That’s great. So real quick, just for context, how long has Flex been in existence?

Flex started 50 years ago in contract manufacturing. Since then, we are proud to produce quality products for our customers. We started in PCBs, supporting basically electronic components on boards. And we increased the depth of our services to our customers, not only doing electronic boards, but today we also do a lot of tests, automation, design for our customers, this great, full products, and do the logistics and repair for our customers that we serve full product range as well, the full depth of the market.

Excellent. Okay, so we’re going to jump in to more about the business and obviously this response that you had with Covid. But before we do all that, I want to get to know Paul. I want to get to know you a little bit more. Tell me. Take me way back. How did you get involved in this space?

It was kind of a fascinating story. I was still a student. I worked for a company that was providing IT services in a summer job. And Flex was my largest client. And I was so fascinated by the products that Flex is doing because you’re always on the forefront of technology that I fell in love with the culture and with the environment. And that was about 23 years ago. So technically, I live my dream. I’m still in my summer job. But I have many opportunities in Flex. And that was really exciting. I started in IT, and I had the opportunity to go into engineering, to go into operations. I led a factory for a while with 7000 people, and that was a big learning for me. I got opportunities to lead quality. At some point, I was entrusted to lead HR for the full company which was a complete segue, but a very interesting experience. And today my team and I are leading manufacturing technology, strategy, quality, and other core functions for the company which is very exciting because you get to learn so many different things in Flex.

That’s amazing. Wow. Okay, so quite the history there. You just fell in love with it, basically. You just—you said internship there out of college, or first job there.

Absolutely. The great thing about Flex is you see so many different things. It’s like the dream of an engineer that you can work on the forefront of medical. You can work on the forefront of automation. You can work on the forefront on automotive. And you can also see how the technologies and the learning in each of those industries converge together. When you think today about an autonomous car right now, that’s where you merge the thinking of traditional automotive suppliers or automotive companies with the thinking of enterprise computing. When you have an autonomous car today with the edge computing that you need in the trunk, you have basically a small data center. And we know all of that because we produce, and we help our customers design data centers. And since 50 years, we are serving as well our customers in automotive. So we know how to put that in, how to make that server work in a car-type of environment, and with that help to power the future of intelligence cars.

That’s fantastic. So alright, you’re in college. I’m taking you back there. You said you were in IT, so I’m assuming you were studying IT or some facet of it. At that moment, before you took that job with Flex, what were you planning on doing? What were your dreams set on?

In Austria we have a special way of education that, even in high school already, you can learn a trade. So I did communication engineering. So I was always interested in technology, especially around communication engineering, how microelectronics work. But then I got into business administration, and I started business administration with a focus on IT. And that gave me the opportunity when I started my internship with Flex to help Flex manufacture high-tech devices. And if you think about how Industry 4.0 is powered today, it’s all about the convergence of manufacturing technology with IT. So both of my interests are coming together in this company, and that makes it so exciting. So when I started my internship, I was right on the manufacturing shop floor trying to help with IT solutions to make the production process more efficient but also to increase quality through tracking our products’ flow through the shop floor. And I see that with many colleagues and people from my team as well. Today a lot of people have passion about IT, but people also want to have something physically in their hand. We are powering those devices that enable IT solutions to function in an Industry 4.0 world, and that makes it really exciting to work in this company.

That’s awesome. That is fantastic. You’ve had a very long career there, obviously. Is there a moment or maybe a person that jumps out to you that has had a huge impact in your career? That could be personally; it could be a mentor there in your career at Flex. Who jumps out to you, or what jumps out to you?

Let me start from—it is a long career in this company for 23 years, but it doesn’t feel like that because you do so many different things. Every time you do something completely different, you work for a different industry, it feels like a new job. And that brings me as well to my mentor, Francois Babier. As a techie, I focused very much on having the best technical solution, having the best SMT line run the production. And he told me and taught me that it’s really all about the people. And that really was a revelation for me. At the end, we are all very passionate, especially people with a technical background. We want to bring the best solution in place. But everybody can buy the best SMT line. Most of the companies can put real nice factories in place. But customers are not choosing us because we have the best line or because we have the best factory. They actually choose us because we have the best team.

And so for us, developing our teams and making sure that we have these high-performing teams in our company are most important. And at the end, this high-performance team is not only the people within Flex. It’s actually an extension of our people together with the customer team together with our technology partners and our suppliers. And Francois really helped me to understand that. And today he’s still a great mentor, really making sure that we keep always the people agenda as priority number one because at the end, that’s our sustainable advantage, I would say in the industry. And that’s a sustainable value that we can add to customers to help in creating this high-performance teams that together find great, innovative solutions and make that work in scale.

Well, now I understand when you were talking about how you moved into HR a little bit, where that might’ve come from. That’s starting to come full-circle. I can see a little bit of passion there. So yes.

Absolutely, yeah. At the end, it’s really all about people. When we think about our industry 10 years ago, the constraint of growth was always, can you get an SMT line fast enough? Can you get material fast enough? Can you build up a factory fast enough? But today, we are in a world where it’s all about people. All companies I know have only one constraint, and that’s talent and making sure that people work well together. It’s not only good enough that you have genius people in your organization. Actually, you need to bring a diverse team together that can work together. And that got even more complex in collaborative design with our customers. Today we provide a lot of design solutions across the full spectrum where we teach some things to our customers in areas where they have not operated before. They teach us a lot, and we need to have trust and work together. Our mission and vision is we want to be the most trusted partner because that enables an environment where people can work freely together, share ideas, come up with new ideas, and help to move things faster. And specifically through the pandemic, this was so important that we break down these barriers and all work together and create solutions that help us to create a better world and, in that current point in time, keep everybody healthy.

Absolutely. Well, I think that’s an absolutely great pivot point or a way, a great segue as we transition a little bit. You were talking about the pivot with Covid and everything. Part of the story is that you guys were one of the companies that jumped on and said, there’s this huge shortage of ventilators that are coming on, and there was a massive need on a global scale. And you saw that need, and you responded to the tune of where you guys created just a ridiculous amount of ventilators. How did you say, from a business standpoint, we’re going to jump in, and we’re going to tackle this challenge?

So we have been a large supplier of medical products in the past. And with that, we understood the responsibility. For example, we do a large amount of the worldwide market on blood glucose meters. So we understand our responsibility that we continuously serve patients that need help with monitoring their blood glucose. The good thing about medical is, it’s very high-quality products. The challenge that the medical industry faced in the past was that things go pretty slow because you have so much regulation that you need to take care of, and it’s totally understandable when you develop an industry like that that the patient’s health is most important. But once you get into a pandemic where it’s even more important that you get product fast out to the patients that need it, we were able to get with our customers and with regulatory environment and authorities to break down those barriers and speed up not only the design piece but also the supply chain. It takes an enormous amount of time, normally, to qualify all of your supply chain. And some of that is pretty rigid, I would say. So it’s difficult to scale.

Yes.

New technologies like additive manufacturing helped us suddenly to speed up the design process, but even on volume, we were able, with additive manufacturing, to bring parts that were stuck in some countries where factories were shut down. So it was great to have this new way and new spirit together with our customers and produce many thousands and millions more of devices that helped people during this pandemic. And I think that’s going to be a real revolution in the medical segment because now people understand how fast we can be when we break down all the barriers, work together. We are not compromising on quality. We still need the same quality because we are actually providing people that save lives. But if they go wrong, they can also put people at harm. So we don’t want to risk anything on quality, but we’ve shown that with better collaboration, we can be much faster and help much more people.

Absolutely. And to that point, I want to be clear on here. I just want to make sure I have my facts correct. You had not ever manufactured a ventilator prior to 2020. Is that accurate?

The ventilator story was really about how you can speed up design, how you can speed up volume REMS, and how you can also mitigate supply chain challenges. One of our key suppliers in the ventilator business was shut down. So we were supposed to deliver 20X more ventilators from one month to another, and we couldn’t get one component. So what do you do? We have today 106 additive manufacturing printers in the company. We put all of our brains together, and we basically used every, single piece of capacity that we had to provide components that we could use for ventilators. We scaled up, from a people perspective, from an asset perspective, and it was really great. Switching to the masks, that’s something that we learned in February last year.

I was in China in late January, and Covid just started up in China. It was not really a thing yet in the US nor in Europe. I remember we had our first Covid contact in Europe, beginning of March, and by then people still thought that this will go away. Unfortunately, it did not. And we took a decision beginning of March that we are going to produce our own masks. And we have not produced a single mask before. So together with one of our trusted partners, we actually designed and bought 12 manufacturing lines. We distributed them in 10 factories around the world because, at that time, the conversation was about could you actually move masks from one country to another. The government started to put in supply chain restrictions. And so we diligently put together not only manufacturing but also supply chain strategy that we could serve from those 10 strategic locations all of our people internal and also strategic customers and suppliers. And now we’ve produced over 80 million masks.

We did not have a shortage at all in the company about face masks for our people. We also provide a lot of masks to communities, to families. What we’ve seen during the crisis is that most of the Covid infections actually don’t come from within the company—we have very strict measures from social distancing to disinfection, so we have a very decent protocol—but come from the outside when kids bring it from school or people meet friends outside. So we want to give as many masks as possible, not only to our people, but also to their families that they can protect themselves. And we are donating a lot to communities as well.

That’s amazing. That’s fantastic. During that time—you were mentioning a lot of the government restrictions and challenges relative to supply chain. You had suppliers that were completely shut down in other countries. Not to mention that even if you did have access to it, the delays were huge. So as sure as something as—you have a boat stuck in a port that can’t leave or it’s sitting out waiting to come in from wherever and there’s weeks to months where they’re behind. How did you navigate that, from setting up, looking for new suppliers? How did you navigate that?

There is the IT piece that comes in. So already before Covid, we created a global supply chain system that provides us real-time supply chain information. So today we have a very good view on where are all the different parts in the world? Where are the parts incoming? What are the risks? And that system even allows us to look at a specific event. So if there is an earthquake in a specific country or location, which factories are hit? Which of those factories actually impact our factories and impact our customers? And we can go back to our customers. So first of all, we can react really, really fast.

Second, due to our global scale that we operate today in 30 different countries, we are able to mitigate some of those supply chain shortages with internal manufacturing, some of that through our traditional manufacturing, some of that through additive manufacturing, and then work with alternative sources. So we have internal teams. As soon as we saw part shortages, we looked into, can we qualify other suppliers? Are there other companies out there that can do something similar or can convert fast enough? And I don’t want to say there were no problems. We had plenty of shortages, but we were able to overcome those together faster for our customers, and especially in the areas where it’s about helping people; that was most important. And I want to thank the team as well. People have worked crazy hours, like in so many other industries as well. Our team did crazy hours, and the motivation that we can help people, especially when they need it most, made everybody work twice as hard.

Well yeah, absolutely. And I can only imagine. It sounds like you guys were actually way ahead of the curve compared to a lot of other manufacturers. We keep hearing about supply chain resiliency and obviously, that being a huge theme, especially as we move forward, looking at really managing risk, looking at—just analyzing the supply chain from getting a lot more granular than it was before. And so I think it sounds like, because of some of the technologies you had in play, you were able to respond a lot better. Had you not had that in place, you probably wouldn’t have had those kinds of results. Does that sound about right?

Absolutely. We saw it already in the past. Fires, earthquakes, and so on, always had an impact on—and the supply chain is incredibly complex today. If you look at a cell phone, a cell phone has, today, about 2000 parts. You miss one of those parts, you cannot produce the cell phone. And it’s even a bigger disaster for us financially because then you have the 1999 parts on stock, and the one part is missing. And you’re converting everything into revenue, you have more inventory, and the customer is not happy. So it really forced us to have a very solid system. And as I said, our system today, if there is an event on a single point on the planet, then you see immediately which of our suppliers may be impacted. We can contact them directly or see that directly from the message feed that we get automatically in, see which of our plants are impacted, talk with our customers and take mitigation measures. But it had proven pretty resilient as well in Covid times.

Covid did not hit the world at the same time. First, China was shut down; then, Europe started to be shut down. Then parts of the US, then Mexico, and so on. So there was always a little bit of leeway that you can take from the areas that are currently not so impacted that you get some of the components, and that’s where our system really thrived. But at the end, in a global pandemic, for sure we learned a lot as well that new technologies are helping us to improve, automation is very important, that you can scale, also that you reduce the number of people that need to be in a factory. We try to have in the areas where we were highly impacted by Covid, to have as little people as possible in factories and have them work from home. Automation is a big helper for that. Additive manufacture is a very flexible technology. If you’re missing certain components that you can 3-D print them yourself and use them to bridge the supply chain gap. So I think, overall, it helped us a lot to improve our system. It has taught the whole industry a lot as well as governments. We’ve seen a huge regress to have more local manufacturing, especially around medical and other critical products in region. And with our 30 sites worldwide, we are in a very good position to fulfill that demand.

That’s fantastic, really an amazing story. I’ve got some numbers here I just want to run over to help to really convey to our audience what this really meant. One of the things you were talking about in terms of going through the R&D process and reducing the amount of time you’re able to actually go from the R&D to full-on manufacturing to shipping out, I have a note here talking about that. And typically, instead of having a 12 to 24-month cycle going—obviously, you have regulation; you have all this stuff—you’re able to go and produce stuff in a matter of—is this correct? I have six weeks, six weeks.

Absolutely, yeah.

That’s incredible. And you were able to produce more than 50,000 ventilators in just a few months again, knowing all the supply chain issues and the challenges. That is fantastic. You mentioned about additive manufacturing, which is obviously, it’s a great new technology boost we’ve had over the last—it’s relatively new, all things considered, which I think is super exciting, especially for the future, as you mentioned being able to respond. It’s really that time piece. Then, we talk about masks. With the masks, you had never produced those before. And now, I have a note here, you’re generating more than 62 million, or you’ve generated more than 62 million in under a year. That’s a small number. I’m just playing, obviously. 1.5 million masks per week. Pretty amazing. Absolutely amazing. And I think you had a great synopsis, a summation of everything as far as what you’ve learned in going forward. As we wrap up this episode here, going forward, if you could boil it down a little bit, what is your biggest takeaway? What is Flex saying, hey, this is what we’ve learned over the last 12 months? Seems like the last five years, but it really has been 12 months. What’s the biggest takeaway?

My biggest takeaway here is, and I want to thank our customers, when we get to think out of the box, we can make the impossible happen. So that, as you said, 12 to 24 months on a product development cycle, that’s in normal times. And really, we were able only to boil it down to six weeks because everybody was working together under huge pressure, obviously. But also we have a very open mindset and are excited about helping people. So we’ve shown that we can do it. I think there are many more health challenges. There are many more other challenges out there, from feeding people to providing safer transport to providing more safety on workplaces and so on. So together, we can achieve pretty much everything when we work together as a team and we take down barriers. And I think we can all be very proud that we were able to achieve that all together and, again, suppliers, customers, all folks really—kudos to everybody.

The other part is, digital revolution in the industry is key for future success. I was talking about the resilient supply chain. The resilient supply chain is a result of real-time digitization of supply chain. The same thing is important on the manufacturing floor, making sure that you gather all of the data that you have and create information that provides you insights that drive real business decisions that make a real difference. So Industry 4.0, digitization is key for us. Automation is key for us because we want to be able to manufacture. Even if our people cannot come to the factory, we want to provide an environment where people can work remotely and still produce high-quality products on the shop floor. Simulation, I didn’t talk about it yet, but has been key as well. So making sure that we have a common model that we can all share our thoughts and agree on how things should look like in the future enables us to be much faster and enables us to be much more efficient.

We have trained, by now, people in every factory. We are creating digital twins or have that, actually, in most of our factories already. During the pandemic, we were optimizing continuous blood glucose meter manufacturing and many other projects with simulation, and I think that’s going to be key for the transformation in the future. It not only told us that we can work remotely over Zoom and we can work on digital models together, but it also creates a new dimension for us. Before—we can actually go forward in time and do things on a digital model together and agree on what the optimum should look like before we start putting machines in place and before we put bricks and mortar in place to build buildings and do many more simulations and pilots and learn what best-in-class will look like in the future before we put things in. And then, it’s fixed and it’s more difficult to optimize.

Absolutely. Paul, listen, I really enjoyed our conversation. This has been a fascinating story. I’ve loved hearing and learning about you. I think it’s awesome that you got introduced to Flex 23 years ago, and still there today, and just instantly fell in love with it. And you’re helping to solve some incredible challenges and do it in an amazing way. So there’s definitely something very special going on at Flex. Thank you for sharing your story. Thank you for sharing Flex’s story with us today. I’m sure we’re going to have people that are going to want to learn more about you so they can go check you guys out at flex.com; pretty easy to remember. But Paul, thank you so much for your time and, again, sharing your story with us.

Thank you very much, Danny. My pleasure, and I also want to take the opportunity to thank the full Flex team and all of our partners what is an amazing job during the crisis and looking forward to continuous innovation that we do together.

Awesome. Well, that wraps up today’s Executive Series. Man, that was a great story with Flex and Paul. So many takeaways from that. I think a lot of people look at the whole pandemic with Covid, and I guess there’s two ways of looking at it. There’s glass half empty, glass half full. Obviously, there’s been a lot of—it’s been definitely challenging on multiple levels. And there’s definitely been, when you look at the deaths and things that are happening there, not good stuff.

On the flip side, there’s been a lot of things that we’ve been forced to look at and reevaluate. We’ve always been talking about automation and digital transformation in Industry 4.0, all these different technologies and these emerging technologies that are happening. We’ve all been forced, all across every industry, really, to think differently and do differently. And I think that is one of the big silver linings that we’re seeing and sharing stories like we’re hearing with Paul over at Flex and how they responded and big takeaway about what we can do when we work together and we focus and remove barriers is pretty incredible. So anyways, that’s all I’ve got for you today. Thank you so much for watching or listening on today’s episode on IndustrialSage, the Executive Series. I’ll be back next week with another episode here, and I’ll talk to you then. Thanks.

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!

Alright, so you are in a treat for today’s episode here on IndustrialSage. I’ve got a very special guest. Her name is Joanne Sanders from EWISE Communications, and she’s going to be joining us today, talking about the importance of messaging with, particularly if you’ve got international companies and you’re expanding, looking to go outside the United States, or if you’re a foreign company and you’re coming here. Joanne has a ton of experience and knowledge there. She’s also on the board of directors for the World Trade Center of Atlanta.

She also serves as– let me look at this because there’s so many things– serves as international marketing liaison for the Georgia Manufacturing Alliance and this year as well. She is very, very popular. She won the Georgia Latina Excellence Award for business and technology. And not only that, the city of Atlanta actually gave her an award as well. So she’s been incredibly busy. Stick around for this episode of IndustrialSage. You’re not going to want to miss it; it’s going to be awesome. I’m Danny Gonzales, and this is IndustrialSage.

So Joanne, thanks so much for joining us on this episode of IndustrialSage. Before we really get going, and we had an intro… you’ve got a lot of great background there. But if you could just introduce our audience to who EWISE is a little bit deeper EWISE Communications and yourself and a little bit more of your background, that’d be awesome.

Yeah, so really, the way that I explain EWISE is really explaining how EWISE began. Really, I’m a former sales executive that was really, quite honestly, frustrated with marketing.

Wait, frustrated with marketing? That never happens.

That’s right. So frustrated with marketing, meaning that they were producing a lot of materials that were great, that were beautiful, but they weren’t in alignment to the buying process. They didn’t speak to my buyer. They actually weren’t helping me close the deal. So a lot of times what I would do is I would receive these marketing pieces that weren’t really helping me, so I would basically end up redoing them. And so finally, after a while, I thought, you know what? Why don’t I go ahead and start my own group here, my own agency? And so EWISE came about. That was about nine years ago, and because of that sales background, really EWISE has turned into a target marketing agency.

EWISE really focuses on helping companies launch products, launch into new industries, launch into new regions. A lot of companies have their own marketing person, but when it comes to expanding and really making a big leap into a new market and so forth– and really, it’s a business decision much more than even a marketing decision– that’s usually when they bring me in. And because of that, we’ve actually done a lot of work on the international front. We’ve worked with a lot of international manufacturers, in fact, that are trying to come into the US or to the European market. And we’ve also worked with domestic manufacturers that are trying to expand overseas. That’s a little bit about EWISE.

No, I love it. I love the whole–there’s so much friction a lot of times between sales and marketing, and so you hit the nail on the head there. But segueing into our topic and everything that we’re going to be going on as far as the international companies and that specialty, talk to me a little bit about that. What are some of those challenges? Are there challenges around that?

Definitely. The thing about it is that there’s a lot of different nuances when it comes to doing international marketing. So general marketing is really packaging a company, understanding your brand, getting your messaging, your value proposition, really articulating that, and then turning that into pieces that support that and then campaigns that reinforce it to your target audience. But when you’re dealing with international, you really have to take a look at all of those things because you do all of those things. But you have to look at it from a universal perspective. You have to make sure that a message is universal and that message, yet, can apply to different regions and that you can massage that particular message, that brand, to be applicable and to seem localized, yet it’s still communicating at a broader audience. There is cultural nuances that you have to take into account. And so there’s a whole other dimension of things that you really have to think about when you’re doing international marketing. There’s really no room for assumptions. There’s no room for that. You really have to be careful when you’re doing that.

And that makes a lot of sense. I know there’s a tremendous amount of companies that are foreign that are making their entrance into the US markets. I know here in Atlanta and Alpharetta, there’s a ton of all kinds of European companies and Asian companies that are here. So what are some of those challenges that they might be facing, coming in as a foreign company, an international company, trying to break into a new industry in the US market in particular. What are some of those challenges from that marketing, that messaging standpoint they might be looking at?

So if you split them up both ways, there’s the foreign companies that have moved into the US market. They’re trying to further anchor into the US market. And a lot of times, those companies… they were successful overseas. And so they’re trying to come into this market, and they’re applying basically the same rules of engagement—

We’re going to rubber-stamp it.

That’s right, exactly. And they’re applying the same kind of rules of engagement into this market, and you can’t do that. And so they’re having trouble recruiting workforce or recruiting people to come to their company. They’re having trouble sticking the landing when it comes to this particular market. So a lot of times, it’s a lot of cultural, just a lot of understanding the different business models and the different business dynamics when you’re a foreign company. But when you’re a domestic company that’s trying to expand overseas, you almost have to apply that in the other direction. You can’t assume that the business culture and your business practices and whatever has led you to be successful in one particular market will apply to the other. And so you’ve got to make sure that you open your mind. You check everything, and you don’t run on assumptions.

That’s one of the biggest things that people do is that they assume a gazillion things, and they assume that– Well, I’ll give you some examples. A lot of companies, of course, they’re working on digital marketing campaigns. And they assume that, here in the US you’re doing Facebook and Twitter and LinkedIn, and you’ve got a model here. And so they assume that, well, I’ll just replicate that model, and I’ll do it in Spanish. Or I’ll do it in another language. Well, the reality is that there are rules in different cultures. So for example, if you try to do a digital marketing campaign in China, in Asia, there’s other social media platforms in that market that are different, that no one has heard about here in the US. When you’re translating different campaigns and different things, you have to make sure that those messages resonate in different languages. Otherwise, you could really step in it. For example, a lot of times they include email marketing as part of those digital campaigns, and if you’re trying to do email marketing in Europe, Europe has ridiculously strict email privacy laws. And if you start doing email marketing, something as innocent as sending an email or an advertisement through that medium and you violate some of those rules, you can get heavily fined, and in some cases, you can even end up in jail.

Really, in jail?

Right, and so you’ve got to really be careful. You can’t assume that a particular marketing initiative that worked in one country or in one region is going to work for another.

Right. Well, it sounds like there’s a lot of different things. Outside of the culture, it’s also understanding, what are the rules? What are the rules of the playground over here?

Absolutely. Well, here’s another example. For example, a lot of times people assume that the purchase path of a product is the same in one region versus another. I was raised overseas; I was raised in the Caribbean. And here, if you buy something, if you’re manufacturing tomato sauce or something like that, and you buy it here at the grocery store. You also buy it at the grocery store in Latin America, but there’s also small convenience stores, and then there’s whole communities around those convenience stores, and they’re at every single corner. But actually, if you just focus on the grocery store, you miss out on a huge part of the purchase path of most people that are buying that particular product. And so a lot of times, people don’t think about– they think about, how do I create awareness, and how do I do that? But they don’t think about the supply chain and the purchase path and where the buyer is and how they are buying. And that’s really different in the different countries, based on infrastructure and for a variety of reasons.

That’s really interesting. So note to self, no spamming in Europe.

That’s right, no spamming in Europe.

It might work here, mainly. But over there, you said you might get in—

You could get into trouble. You can get into big trouble, yes.

That’s pretty interesting. I wouldn’t be surprised if we’ll see that maybe down the road over here. I know Europe went through a lot of privacy issues and things. And I’m sure that’ll make its way over here to the United States at some point.

Yeah, well and I was just going to add, so I recently spoke at the Georgia Manufacturing Alliance. They had their annual conference about three weeks ago now. And that was one of the things that caught everybody’s attention. They thought, oh, my gosh, I didn’t realize. It’s like I said. Something as innocent as that could get you into a heap of trouble. So you really need to work with experts that really understand what they’re doing and really can at least set that foundation from an international marketing perspective and help others understand what kind of systems that you need to put in place in order to make sure you’re successful.

That’s some really great information there. Didn’t know that. So it goes back a little bit to, and we talk about it here all the time, is really strategy personas, looking at that persona development, that’s another level. So you could have your personas leveled out here for the US. But then it’s like that is not necessarily going to translate to somebody overseas. Or maybe it does, but how you reach them is going to be completely different.

Absolutely. If you’re trying to get into the healthcare market in Brazil, it’s going to be very different than trying to penetrate the healthcare market in Asia or in Europe. And it’s all about, there’s different buyers involved, and you have to understand who that persona is and that buyer profile. There’s different buyers. There’s different people that are part of that purchase process and that decision-making path. So it really is. You cannot assume that whatever has worked in one market is going to work in the other. You just can’t assume anything. That’s probably one of the biggest things is that, when you’re dealing with international marketing, you almost need to go back and go back again and go back again and make sure that you cross your T’s and dot your I’s and there’s no assuming anything.

That sounds like a whole lot of fun, dealing with some of these things.

Yes, it’s a lot of detail-oriented work, yes.

I can only imagine. So bearing this in mind, what are some high-level things to keep in the back of your mind to… expanding into a global market or even those companies that are here?

So I think two things. I think messaging is really important. And it’s important to make sure that you have a universal message and one that is simple. And a simple message doesn’t mean generic; it doesn’t mean boring. It means that you’re just keeping it simple, that you’re using words that everybody understands in order for you to, at a macro level, be able to communicate with everybody. For example, FedEx, “The world on time.” Simple statement, everybody understands that. And they can then mature that and say, “The world on time” or “Brazil on time.” They can take that and massage it for the specific markets that they’re dealing with. But at the end of the day, it’s something that encompasses everything. The other thing I would say is, when you are communicating, make sure that you’re using the power of communicating through words and communicating through design. Visuals can really help cut through a lot of issues, especially when you’re dealing with international markets. And it’s important to make sure that you’re cognizant of how those two are working together. I was reading an article about Louisiana. And Louisiana, nothing is more mouth-watering in Louisiana than a picture of a crawfish with the word Cajun on it.

I’m hungry now.

But the reality is that not everybody understands or has seen a crawfish. Not everybody understands the word Cajun. So if Louisiana’s trying to target and market to other people that have never visited, then what they need to do is they need to adjust that picture. You need to be able to communicate. They need to, instead of a close-up, because that could look like a scary animal, you have to draw back, put it on a plate, instead of just saying Cajun which everybody there understands, you have to talk about unique spices that come from this region that will make unique seafood taste mouth-watering good. And when you explain it like that, it’s simple terminology, but it speaks to everybody and actually allows people to grasp at what you’re trying to communicate to them. And it’s just really important that again, you have a simple message that everybody understands and then, you marry communicating through words and design. That’s usually the ticket to being successful.

Interesting. So… makes sense. I imagine, though, that not everybody takes this to heart and actually implements this the way that they probably should or could. Any notable blunders that come to mind of any–a little bit, a few?

A few, yeah. Yeah, I’ve got a couple. So there was a–this is one that I shared at the summit with the Georgia Manufacturing Alliance. There was a golf ball manufacturer who was doing very well in Japan. And they were selling large packages of golf balls, and they were doing great. So they thought, how do we take things to the next level? Why don’t we create a smaller package that people could pick up at the cashier, at the convenience store, wherever else. And so they created this sleeve with four golf balls in it. Well, the problem is that the number four in Japan, the sound of the number four means death. So nothing in Japan is in fours. They’re in threes and fives, but they’re not in fours. And that’s a cultural element that the marketing department didn’t realize. So think about it. They produced all of these packages. There was packaging that had to be reassessed. They had to do promotional materials around this. They had to do all of this stuff just to then lose money because then, all of their sales started going down. They’re like, well, what happened? Wait a minute; this is a cheaper product. This was going so well. This is actually a cheaper product. Why are we losing money on it? Well, because they forgot that cultural detail. And see how one little simple thing made a huge difference.

There’s also another one that comes to mind. There’s a very popular beer company, and I probably shouldn’t say the name. A very popular beer company, they had a popular promotion here in the US called “Let it loose with” this company, just let it loose. And so really popular campaign here. They said, you know what? Perfect. We’re going to roll this out into Latin America. And so they did almost a verbatim translation. And so you can imagine, a verbatim translation actually meant, “you’ve got the runs” instead of kicking back and relaxing. And so it was incredibly embarrassing, and they were horrified. They had spent millions of dollars on advertisement just to then have to pull it all back. People were laughing at the brand. And so they ended up having to pull back. Those are some examples.

And I use blunders; I think blunders are good examples of how we can learn and how we can pay attention. You need to make sure that your message translates well, not just your brand message, but your marketing campaign messages. Make sure that it translates well. You’ve got to validate it. If you take the extra step of validating, you’re going to save–think about it. You save millions of dollars. These companies could’ve saved a whole lot of money. Talking to experts that are, again, looking at specific things to make sure that you’re not missing anything is just highly important. I do as much communication as possible around this in order to build awareness because a lot of companies here that are, again, trying to anchor further in need to be cognizant of those kind of things, too. So there’s a German company here that’s trying to–why aren’t people just buying my things? Focusing on the things that resonated with the buyer in Germany, you’ve got to make sure that it actually translates well into the US market, and the same the other way around.

That makes a lot of sense, and it’s really interesting. To put it into perspective for their American viewer, talking about– I really like the Louisiana example. We know in the United States, Texas barbecue is really good, and so trying to market that. Maybe New England– New England clam chowder down in—

That’s right; exactly.

But to your point, you’ve got audiences who don’t know that or have those nuances. That’s very, very, very difficult. And I can even see that happening here domestically as well, all the different regions and the areas. And so that’s definitely, it’s very important to be able to look at and assess that.

Yeah, well and I think particularly now that customer experience is really important and all those kind of things, it’s really about the buyer, really about the buyer processing information, experiencing everything. And you really just need to be very cognizant. The buyer has always been important, but now almost more than ever. And so you really need to pay attention to what you’re doing. And honestly, the world is becoming global, so this is good practice for any marketer to really start implementing international marketing. And if they’re not familiar, then bring in an expert, set that foundation, and then get going and let your marketing department go because the world is becoming smaller and smaller.

Right. And I think you addressed as far as how to avoid some of those blunders. You mentioned really surrounding yourself with experts and people that really– Are there some key takeaways on that? Saying, look, if we want to go into the South American market or companies that are foreign and are coming into the United States, are there four key steps or something that they might be able to take? What would you recommend to those companies before they go whole-hog into something?

Well, so it’s funny because within the Georgia Manufacturing Alliance, I’ve now created an international manufacturing group, and it’s precisely for that reason because most people don’t know what to do. I’m a domestic manufacturer. I want to go overseas.

Let’s expand.

Let’s expand, but where do I go? Do I go to Latin America? Do I go to Europe? Do I go here? Do I go there? Same thing for people trying to come into the US. The reality is that it always depends on your circumstance. But sometimes, if you’re trying to come into the US, foreign companies a lot of times, they don’t know about incentives that are available to them. They don’t know about those kinds of programs that are available through the economic development branches that are here within the state. And so part of the group’s purpose is to point people in the right direction depending on what they’re trying to do. If they’re domestic companies, they think, well, I can’t afford to start exporting. There’s grants for people that want to actually export. And so people don’t even realize that those kind of resources are available to them. When they’re expanding overseas, or they have an overseas workforce there’s things like taxes that change. And they’re like, okay, well what do I do now? And their local CPA might not really know about international tax. But then, there’s groups here that focus on that.

So part of the purpose of the group is to try to work with the foreign companies as well as the domestic companies and point everybody in the right direction. It always depends. I can’t list four things to think about, but I think the most important thing is just look out for resources. Surround yourself with people that are available. The good thing about Atlanta is that Atlanta does so much international marketing. There’s over 70 trade centers here and trade, as far as the Swedish-American Chamber of Commerce and those kinds of trade groups here. And the reason they’ve invested here is because Atlanta does so much business with those foreign companies. Those organizations are great resources as well. Of course, each one of them is going to be a little bit partial. Come to Sweden; come to Brazil, and everything else. But they can answer a lot of questions as far as, if I was to go to Brazil because I just visited and I really liked it, how would I go about doing that and so forth? So there’s resources like that. There’s the State of Georgia. They’ve got a pretty robust international program there. And then there’s over 200 international organizations including the World Trade Center, which I’m a board member of that is there to basically do a lot of that match-making and to bring together a lot of expertise together and allow people to network. And so there’s a lot of resources available, and obviously within the group, with the Georgia Manufacturing Alliance, that’s part of my purpose is to try to point people in the right direction.

So making the right connections there.

Pretty much.

Surrounding yourself with experts and really jumping in, taking advantage of the resources that are available.

That’s exactly right. And a lot of times, it doesn’t cost you anything to do that exploration. And so it’s just about making the decision. Okay, we want to explore this in 2018, 2019, whatever it is, so let me start surrounding myself with the right people that can point me in the right direction, and getting knowledgeable because you want to be, you want to know what you’re buying before you buy. You want to know what you’re in before you embark on that, and that’s the smart thing to do.

Well, this has been fantastic. It’s been a lot of great information.

Thanks.

There’s a lot of nuggets of wisdom and great sound bites that I think is great. It’s really a good eye-opening conversation here. I think one of the big takeaways for me anyways, that I thought was interesting was about how some of the digital marketing tactics that are working here in the States, you can’t rubber-stamp that and say, oh, hey, that’s going to work in Europe. I don’t want to land in jail. or other–hey, you need to be aware of other social networks in other countries that we had no idea about. So really, at the end of the day, it goes back to that strategy and that persona, really getting an understanding of what’s working in that market. This has been fantastic.

Thanks. Thanks for having me.

If anybody has any questions, they’d like to ask any questions after this, we’ll put all your information you’ve shown us. But what is the best way of reaching you?

You know, you can find my contact information on ewisecommunications.com. Or you can call me directly at 404-644-2779.

Perfect. Thanks so much for joining us.

Thank you for having me.

Well, thanks again for watching or listening if you’re on iTunes to this episode that we had here with IndustrialSage with Joanne Sanders with EWISE Communications. Really great; a lot of great information here all the way from companies that… if you are expanding into the United States or companies that are in the US, and they’re looking to go and expand their global reach. Some really strong considerations from a communications and a messaging standpoint that, hey look, the stuff that we’re doing here, whether you’re US-based or you’re foreign-based, may not work in the country that you’re looking to expand. So really, really surround yourself with experts who really understand how to take your product and your service and your messaging and really apply that to where you’re trying to expand and go.

And really jump into the resources. A lot of great resources around here, if you happen to be from Georgia. There’s the Georgia Manufacturing Alliance. Joanne started the international sector of that group there. Make sure that information is in the show notes there. But there’s a lot of resources out there to help you be more successful. So again, key takeaway, really invest. Research; look at where you’re going to go. See what’s going to apply and what isn’t. And thanks again for watching. Like always, if you have any questions, please reach out to us, IndustrialSage.com/questions. And be sure to like, subscribe, share, review, all that good stuff. We’d love to hear back from you. And we will talk to you next week. Thanks.

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Alright, thanks for tuning in this episode of IndustrialSage it’s going to be a really great one. We’re going to be talking about marketing automation. So if you’re a company that is thinking about making that transition, you don’t have anything there, and you’re saying, I think we want to get into Pardot or Marketo or whatever that is. You really want to watch this episode. Alternatively, if you are a company that’s already done this and you have Pardot and Salesforce and you have a huge marketing tech stack that’s like this and you’re realizing, Oh my gosh I think we went in a little too fast, a little too quick and we feel like we are completely over our heads. This is a really great episode for you.

So for today I have a very special guest. I have Andrea Tarrell from Sercante, who specializes in this and she’s going to be sharing with us her best practices and tips and tricks and strategies on how to make sure you have a really successful rollout with it. If you’re evaluating it or maybe if you’ve already done that and you’re trying to figure that out. So, stay tuned it’s going to be awesome. Again, we’re in the beautiful Optimum Productions studios and I’m Danny Gonzales, your host, and this is IndustrialSage. It’s going to be awesome. You’re going to love it. So I’ve got Andrea here and Andrea has got a lot of awesome experience but before we really jump into this, just let our audience know a little bit about you. What’ve you got going on?

Yeah, thanks for having me. I’m really excited to be here.

Of course, yeah.

So I’m the Principal at Sercante. We’re a consulting firm that specializes in marketing automation in Salesforce. So helping teams optimize their technology and their processes, basically at every step of their lead to revenue flow.

Awesome, that sounds great. It sounds like it’s a kind of a very needed thing. So since you are an expert in this area, let’s talk those companies that have used that, I think sometimes there is a little bit of a I’m guessing here. Maybe there might be I don’t know I might know a few companies or so that said, Hey we need to do this. We need to go from no CRM. We’re sending emails through, I don’t know, maybe something maybe through Gmail, and we’ve got a CSV data list. But you know what, gosh, we need to go ahead and make that transition. Let’s go Salesforce. Let’s go marketing automation. Let’s you know, and then– and then, oh this is so cool. You can do all these different things. And the tech stack is like this. And then next thing you know, you’re like, Oh my gosh I think we went a little overboard and this is a lot more difficult than I thought it was going to be. But I don’t know. Does that ever happen? Is that like a thing?

A hundred percent. Yep, I see that all the time. Companies have made a huge investment in software. So platforms like Pardot, HubSpot, Marketo, Eloqua. And they’re investing time, energy, manpower in building programs on these amazing platforms, but they’re kind of looking around and saying, okay are we really getting what we were promised? And is this giving us the value that we need?

Right, yeah.

So kind of connecting the dots between what’s happening on the marketing side and what’s actually translating into close one revenue, that’s a gap that a lot of marketers are seeing.

So it’s interesting too. I always find that interesting because you know that’s really the unique value, one of the unique value propositions that they have is that look you actually have the tools now that you can tie all a lot of those marketing activities from a marketing automation platform, and because it’s connected to a CRM, that you could actually look at that and you can run it, and say, Hey, look we’re doing this activity and we’re generating X over here. Obviously it’s not as simple as it sounds. I mean what are some of those pitfalls that you’ve seen and you know maybe what are some things that some companies can do to try to avoid that?

Yeah. Yeah, I would say that in theory it’s simple, but it isn’t easy.

It always is, right?

Yeah, so I mean you know the workflow that you want to happen. You want somebody to visit the website. You want them to convert to a lead. You want to nurture that lead and then hand it off to sales when you’re ready. But, all of the different technology pieces and all of the different process steps along the way there’s a lot of details to work through.

Sure. But, I mean that whole area it can be a little maybe sort of subjective too. And I think that’s where some of that, you know, in theory like you said, you can kind of jump from the point of, “Here, we want to do this.” We get a lead. Here, we get– and we’re going to nurture. Lead score. All that good stuff, but then I think there is maybe a little bit of a challenge of like, Oh, we can measure this and then we can do this. And then there’s all these really cool tools that we could, you know?

Yeah, and I think a lot of marketers, they look at the number of leads that are coming in and they’re excited.

Leads are great.

Yeah, leads are wonderful. But then if you ask their sales team what they think of them, they’re decidedly unimpressed. A lot of companies when they’re first getting started with marketing automation will go to sales and say, okay what leads would you like to see? Almost every sales rep that I’ve asked that has said, well give me all of them. And I’ll decide what I want to follow up with. But that’s a losing battle. So I would definitely caution companies against doing that. So being really thoughtful about when a prospect really is ready to buy, and when sales needs to get involved. It seems like marketers are owning more of that pre-sales process than they ever have before. And the lines between like what’s marketing and what sales is kind of becoming blurred.

Very blurred, right. And, you know, rightfully so. And every day, I mean it’s getting more and more, I think those lines are getting more blurred because that gray area is there. So I think you mentioned it: sort of a key point there. You’re saying that I think it’s interesting when you go and you talk to the sales rep and say, Hey which leads do you want? Well just send them all to me. I think that kind of speaks maybe back to a little bit of strategy, persona development, all that. And you’re saying that, Hey, when marketers say, look we’ve got all of these leads, this is great. But I think the big key question here is, are they the right leads? Are these people that are returning? ‘Cause yeah you can fill leads all day long. You turn a PPC campaign, and sure people are clicking on your website, people just, you know, doing form fills and all this. But, is it like, are these key client– are these the personas that we’re looking to develop and sell to?

Yeah, that’s a great point. And I think that’s a judgment call that sales is trying to make every day. They have an unlimited number of people they could follow up with. So they’re tasked with where am I going to spend my time? And if your leads don’t fit their high value profile, they’re just not going to pick up the phone and call them.

Yeah, right. No exactly.

So I think kind of the next frontier is like how do we get tools into our sales reps hands so that they get the right prospect at the right time with the right content.

Gotcha. Yeah, I knew that. So maybe, you know, let’s speak to that company that is maybe thinking about investing. Saying, okay, you know what we want to go ahead and jump in this marketing automation. And maybe they don’t even have a CRM, maybe they do. But they’re saying, Hey, we want to do some of this. What are a couple of steps or a couple of key things that they could do on the front end before they go and make that investment to be able to really maximize that and making sure that they’re set up for success.

Yeah. I think the first key is that it’s not a marketing decision or an IT decision. It has to be the sales, whoever’s your VP of sales, sales director, whatever that title is. They have to be a hundred percent bought into the concept of online lead generation and lead nurturing and see the same vision that you do or it will fall flat every time.

Okay. Interesting. That makes sense. You brought in another key point that I kind of forgot about, but IT. But it’s interesting. So making sure that it’s set up. Okay what other things are there that, you know, that would help them to make sure that they can roll out that successfully?

I think there also needs to be a constant dialogue. So having that conversation about, what are the right leads to pass along? And not taking that first answer of, “Well send me all of them,” as the bottom line. But, kind of negotiating a shared vision of success. Like, what do we expect to happen with these marketing efforts? How do we measure it? And then having that conversation over and over and over so that everyone’s on the same page about how we’re tracking, what’s really happening, and you can address the strategy as needed.

Yeah, and I think that that makes– a key thing that I could pick out is making sure to have that conversation over and over again. Sometimes that conversation will change a little bit and I think that it’s important because if you’re doing it right, you’re kind of measuring it. You’re looking at things you’re saying, Hey, we’re we’re measuring this and we’re seeing this over here. You know what? We just discovered something that we didn’t think about. Maybe we need to make an adjustment and that’s okay. But if you’re not analyzing that and looking at that and then having those conversations, then you can miss that.

Yeah, that’s a great point.

The other great point is just communicating that. And making sure it’s like, Hey, let’s have the come to Jesus whatever with everybody like look, this is the goal. This is where we’re going. Let’s not forget like this is what we want to do. Because I mean it’s so easy to be like, Oh wow, all these amazing things. Let’s go this way or that way, you know, and just being grounded.

And part of that grounding exercise as a team is sitting down and mapping out, okay what does lead nurturing look like for my company? So if we had the perfect sales process that we could make fully automated, what would that be? If you don’t have an answer to that question it’s really hard to automate a process that doesn’t exist.

Yeah, and I think again I mean it’s kind of like putting the cart before the horse or the, yeah, that’s right. Did I say that right?

Yeah, cart before the horse.

I get those so confused. Right. But you know that saying right?

Same deal.

So if I’m hearing it correctly, having that process mapped out ahead of time before even saying, Hey, let’s figure out which platform is going to work well for us. Let’s look at the sales process, but also the nurturing process. And like, what does that look like? And what are the steps? ‘Cause maybe I guess you maybe work a little backwards from there and say, okay, now let’s find a tool, the right tools that fit that need versus the other way saying, well, this is what we have. How can we make this work with what we’ve got?

Yeah. So taking the process that you want to replicate and using technology to support that. Not using technology to try to sub in for a process that doesn’t exist.

That makes a lot of sense. So bringing in the right people, the decision ahead of time, making sure that you have a clear understanding of the objectives where you want to go, and then really mapping out that process ahead of time. So don’t buy the stuff, you know, don’t buy the tools and get all that. It’s really, Hey, let’s figure this out, and then that should influence that purchase.

Yeah. And if it’s sort of like a half baked idea in your head, like, okay, we know we want to call webinar leads and send them three email touch points. Before you roll out a huge automation program for that, try it with a handful of leads and see what happens. Like make sure that it’s the right process to automate before you go through all that legwork.

Before you go whole hog on that. Okay, yeah that makes sense. What else? Are there any other tips for those companies that are saying that they’re thinking about making that investment, but they haven’t done it yet? We’ll get to those who have, and see there, but…

Yeah. Yeah, I guess for companies that are considering making an investment in marketing automation another piece to consider is, do we have the content to support this? Like what are we going to be sending people? Do we have white papers, blogs, videos, things that we can get in front of people in an automated way because the process, the content, and the technology are kind of the three things that come together to make a successful program.

Process, content and technology. Okay I like those. Those are great three key points. Yeah, good point about the content. Sorry.

If I had to throw a one fourth one in there, just mixing it up. Data. So do you have clean prospect data? We also can’t email people who we don’t have email addresses for.

We can’t? Oh okay. Alright, can we spam people?

Hopefully not, hopefully not. But going through your Salesforce data or whatever CRM you’re using or Excel spreadsheets if you’re still in that place. But doing an audit of that, using a tool like Brave Verify, Never Bounce to scrub any bad emails off of the list. To start with clean, fresh data when you get going.

That’s a great point there. Yeah, clean, clean data. ‘Cause you can get in some trouble when you don’t do that.

Pretty quickly.

Yeah very quickly. So we might’ve had a few experiences with that in the past. That was great. So we’ve got, gosh, I’m trying to remember to recap this. Making sure you’ve got the content, which I think is an overlooked thing a little bit too. It’s like, oh good let’s go ahead and buy this thing, but then you’re kind of missing like, okay what are we actually going to send in it? There’s a lot. It takes a lot to develop the right content. Obviously it’s a question of budget. It’s a question of resources. A big question is, is this content actually relevant and really helpful? I think also making sure that, is it actually working? Making sure that the content you’re going to put in there is measurable to, you know, as much as you can make it. Which I mean obviously not just getting it into a system like this is necessarily going to make it automatically measurable. There’s so many little tips and tools and tricks and you know, all kinds of things that you have to do to be able to do that.

Yeah, and another thing to think through is like what is the content that your sales reps are actually asking for? Sometimes as marketers we can get carried away with all the content we could create. So the blogs and explainer videos and things that are more like ready for the top of the funnel. Whereas sales might be looking for something that’s a little more geared at, okay what do I need to get in front of this prospect that I want to close?

Right, yeah. So something a little bit more it doesn’t have to be as flashy, but maybe something a little bit more, you know, more informational.

More action-oriented. Yeah.

Great point. So I mean, honestly, really at the end of the day we say this a lot here on IndustrialSage, a lot of it just goes back to strategy. Instead of just saying, look, let’s put together a plan. Let’s figure all this out. What is this going to look like? Let’s pretend that we don’t have this. And let’s kind of, like you said, build out that process. Let’s talk to the right people that need to be involved in this, certainly IT, sales and let’s figure out like, Hey, who do we need to really attract, like what kind of leads? What do they look like? Persona, you know, verticals, all that good stuff, because all that’s going to flow backwards. We can kind of work backwards from there. Right? Content and the data making sure that you’ve got– a, that you do have data that you can use or you have access to it. And it’s clean, all that good stuff. Okay.

One hundred percent agree.

So, alright. Let’s jump to the– what about those companies that might’ve already done this? And they’re like, yeah you know we went from literally– I know a few companies who may or may not have done this, but so yeah we’ve got a website it’s like from the 80s and we don’t have a CRM. We’ve got a bunch of Excel spreadsheets we’ve got a CSV and that’s where everyone’s at, but yeah, gosh darn it we need a CRM and we need marketing automation, so we’re getting Salesforce and we’re getting Pardot and we’re going now. Boom, let’s go. And then we need all these other tools and all these other things. And then, you know, they’re like, Oh man there’s a lot here. This isn’t working as much as I thought. What do you recommend there? In that situation.

Definitely recommend the crawl, walk, run approach. So after you implement a big platform like Salesforce or a marketing automation tool, set quarterly goals of what you can– like bites you could actually chew. Because otherwise a year later you look at your contract and you say, okay like what have we really done with this thing? We’ve paid twelve plus thousand dollars and have we really seen the value?

Right, yeah. Yeah. So otherwise you might be doing the opposite when you’re running and then you’re walking and then you’re crawling, ’cause you’re just like, crushed. Like, “Oh my gosh, this thing’s so busy.”

Yeah and a trap that I see a lot of companies falling into is using their marketing automation platform like a glorified email marketing tool. So just using it to send like ongoing list emails which it’s great at, but there’s so much more that it could do.

That’s what MailChimp’s for.

Yeah.

I love MailChimp, they’re great. Actually, they’ve got quite a bit of automation tools and stuff in there but anyways, you know, Constant Contact maybe. I don’t know.

Yeah, you don’t need to pay a marketing automation price tag for like, MailChimp level functionality.

Exactly. Not downing MailChimp. We like MailChimp.

Yeah we love MailChimp.

It’s just different tools, right?

Yeah.

So, okay.

Yeah, so at least on a quarterly basis, I would say reviewing the functionality that you’re not using and kind of just doing a high level state of the account audit can be useful. Especially with new features coming out and integrations improving new connectors being released. It’s important to stay on top of that stuff.

No, that totally makes sense. What about that company that– so, I mean those are really great tips here, but what about the ones that are just realizing like Oh man, we are way over our head like in this. Maybe they’re eight months into it, or like you said the renewals coming up or something and you’re just like, ah, geez. You know what steps do you think at that point to say, Hey, look, we’ve got to figure this out ’cause we were just, I don’t know.

Yeah. Yeah, I mean definitely considering a partner and being realistic about what your internal capacity is, is important I think.

That’s a good point. Yeah, yeah.

Another thing to consider is like how can you move the ball? I’m going to use two metaphors in the same sentence, but how do you move the ball without trying to boil the ocean? Like how can you make progress without feeling like you have to tackle everything in the world that could possibly be automated? One way that I’ve seen people successfully do this is by running like pilot programs. So picking like three to five sales reps who… not necessarily your top dollar sales reps, but the ones that are the hungriest. The ones that actually care to follow up on leads that marketing has generated. So work with them to build a little pilot program. Design a follow-up process that they can test and give you feedback on, and use that to kind of springboard what you do next.

No, this is such a great tip. I mean that’s– you know, and I think that’s the beauty of the product, ’cause that’s really what it’s built for. Is to be able to help. And once it’s actually functioning and working well it’s amazing. You know, the sales teams they’re all excited because they’re actually providing really qualified leads and really helping them on their job. You know, it’s essentially you can kind of like take your Salesforce a little bit more and flip it all to a little bit more, you know of an inside sales type approach. And it’s exciting once that is there. So, yeah.

Yeah, the way you put it: helping sales do their job, that’s what it’s all about. I also think it’s worth sitting down with your reps and just watching them do their thing for a while. Like see how they use the system, sit in on their pipeline meetings, ride along with them to a sales call and just see what their day-to-day workflow looks like. I can guarantee you we’ll see like five to ten opportunities for automation right out of the gate.

That’s a really great point. Actually, oh wait– there was a couple of episodes we had, they were talking about basically the same thing. Saying, look you know, they spent, I think maybe it was once a week or once a month, but they would do that spend time with the sales team just to get an understanding. Just to, you know, get in their shoes and just you know be that fly on the wall and say, Oh, you know, how can I help make your job a little easier? Let me think you’re doing this thing over and over and over and over. Maybe there’s a template or something we can quickly make that you could use when you respond back to people or maybe there’s, you know, some sort of trigger that we could use that.

Yeah.

All kinds of great things like that.

Yeah, and what parts of the system do they get excited about? Like, are the lead revisit alerts? Is that making their day? Or what functionality can you roll out to help them get excited about what you’re trying to do?

That’s a really great tip. I’m going to ask you this other question. Do you sense sometimes that there is– I mean data is awesome and you’ve got all the analytics and all kinds of stuff. At what point do you feel or do you feel that there is too much data or too much analytics, too much information? I mean, does that, can that be a challenge?

Absolutely. Yeah. I mean as marketers there’s all kinds of data points we can look at. I mean like number of website visits, number of visitors, time on site, bounce rate, conversion rate, all of those numbers don’t mean a whole lot to people outside of the marketing department. We need that data to improve what we’re doing on the marketing side. But when it comes to like reporting that out and sharing that information, information overload is a good way to have everybody tune you out.

That’s true. That’s a really good point. And to the point to kind of circle back to that conversation we had before making sure to communicate the results and the things that are going on there. Do you have it like a list, like maybe a top whatever, as far as metrics like here are the ones that you should really be caring about and looking at, and these are the ones that we should be focusing on.

Yeah. I think the ultimate goal is to get to the point where you can say marketing contributed this much to pipeline. This is a dollar sign of number of opportunities we sourced. And a dollar sign of number of opportunities we influenced. That’s the perfect place to get to.

Absolutely, yeah.

If you can’t quite get there, if your data’s not in a place where you have that information, reporting on lead metrics is kind of the like the next best thing, but would definitely definitely encourage you to look at your process so that you can track lead to revenue the whole way through and report on those numbers.

Actually I’ve got another question. As far as reporting are there any other tools that you might recommend? I mean just outside of, you know, tools that are built in specifically within like your part out of your Marketo are there other tools that are more helpful with that or you know?

Yeah. When it comes to bottom of the funnel reporting, Salesforce is really the powerhouse there. That’s where everything comes together and we connect all those marketing dots to the ultimate dollars. In terms of other reporting platforms, to be honest I do a lot of reporting in Excel.

Hey, it’s a great tool.

And some of the native reporting in marketing automation platforms isn’t anything to write home about.

Sure, yeah.

But yeah once you come up with a great dashboard template, it’s something you can reuse over and over.

So just downloading CSVs and different, you know, different lists and different things and kind of meshing all that data together. Okay, perfect. No, that’s great. So, alright. Well Andrea thanks so much for that. That was a lot of great information out there. And so if there’s anybody that has any questions how could they reach you? What’s the best way?

You can find me online. Twitter, it’s at Andrea Tarrell. I also have a blog called TheSpotforPardot.com.

Perfect, alright.

Post content there about weekly.

Okay. Excellent. Alright, well, thanks again. And yeah, Hey, listen, as always, thanks for joining us on IndustrialSage. A lot of great information here. Look if you’re one of those companies that have gone ahead and made that big investment into you know Salesforce or a Pardot, Marketo or whatever, and you’re realizing, oh my gosh this is completely over our heads. Look, take a step back. Really kind of break things down, you know, focus in on some of these pilot programs and really get traction there. You know, it’s okay it happens.

For those other companies that are thinking, hey, we need to make this transition, we haven’t done it yet, make sure that you plan ahead of time. Make sure you talk to the right people ahead of time. Make sure you have a really good understanding of the leads that you need to be generating. Really looking at those personas, looking at those verticals that you want to get in front of. Looking at what success is going to look like. Making sure that you have content ready to go. Make sure you’ve got data. I know it sounds like a lot. It is a lot, but it’s going to be amazing once you have that set up. And so it’s going to be successful, you can make it make it successful. I am butchering my words, but it’s okay. We’re going to keep going.

So as always, thanks so much for watching this episode. If you have any questions, please feel free to reach out. We’re answering your questions every week. IndustrialSage.com/questions. And on social media please share this, like this. You know do all the things post content, ask us questions. If you’re listening on iTunes, we’d love a review. That’d be awesome. And as always again, thanks so much for watching. I’m Danny Gonzales and this is IndustrialSage.

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So you can think about us as a two-sided network or marketplace like an Uber or an Airbnb where we’re matching a lot of this highly-skilled capacity that’s out there with the demand that is out there in the marketplace.

Welcome to IndustrialSage, a free video podcast series all about digital marketing for industrial manufacturers. Hear interviews with your peers, and find out how they’re solving the same challenges that you might be facing in your own field. Coming to you from the Optimum Productions studio in Atlanta, Georgia, this is IndustrialSage.

Alright, so let’s go ahead and jump in today’s episode. I’ve got Aaron Lichtig here from Xometry. Aaron, thanks so much for joining us on IndustrialSage today.

Thanks for having me, Danny. It’s great to meet you, and we’re big fans of IndustrialSage.

Awesome, we love to hear that. So for those who aren’t familiar with Xometry, can you tell us a little bit about who you guys are and what you’re doing? You’ve got a really cool story.

Yeah, for sure. So Xometry, we are a custom manufacturer. We manufacture custom parts on demand for a variety of customers, mostly within the United States, within North America. Now, when a lot of people think of the manufacturing industry, they think of large factories like a Foxconn or someone producing hundreds of millions of parts or finished products for sale to consumers. But actually a big chunk of the manufacturing industry in the United States is in custom manufacturing, and these are prototypes; these are smaller and medium-sized jobs that are done not necessarily in enormous factories or enormous plant facilities, but in smaller shops. There are actually 190,000 small shops around the US who do great work but have less than 20 employees. And so our business was founded back in 2013, and it was launched into the marketplace in 2014.

And there are really two parts to what we do. One is our instant quoting engine, so customers, anyone who has a 3D CAD file of any part he or she wants to make, you can upload that into our instant quoting engine which is a machine learning-driven technology that scans that part, looks at the dimensions as well as other things like materials and finishes that the customer specifies. And then, it instantly comes back with a price for that part based on the quantity that’s desired. And we do this across a range of custom manufacturing processes, 3D printing and additive manufacturing which is how we got our start when Xometry first began. We were focused on that industry. But now we do CNC machining, sheet metal fabrication, urethane casting, injection molding, basically the whole slate of custom manufacturing processes. So the customer comes in, gets that quote from our instant quoting engine. And then, we make that part for them and get that to their door. And a big part of how we do that is through our network of manufacturing partners. So we have over 2500 manufacturing partners that are qualified to manufacture on behalf of Xometry. And when the jobs come in, we post those jobs on a job board that our partners are able to see based on their capabilities along with a price, what we’ll pay them to do that job. And then, they take the jobs; they make it. We guarantee the quality; we inspect it, and then it goes out to the customer who has initially quoted it.

So you can think about us as a two-sided network or marketplace like an Uber or an Airbnb where we’re matching a lot of this highly-skilled capacity that’s out there with the demand that is out there in the marketplace. So let’s say you’re a really skilled CNC shop that’s based in Ohio, but you’ve only got 15 people. You don’t have the big marketing and sales force. It’s going to be hard for you to get jobs with some of our bigger customers like BMW and GE, both of whom are also investors in our business, as well as NASA, US Army, customers of that scale. But we can bring those jobs to you and help the partners make more revenue. And we actually now have multiple partners who are making over $1 million a year just on Xometry jobs.

That’s awesome.

Yeah, we take great pride in our ability to help customers make what they need to get made as well as to deliver revenue and jobs and more opportunities to the facilities that are a part of our network.

That’s awesome. I love the analogy, the Airbnb of custom manufacturing. And I think, one of the things that I love about it is you’re saying, for me anyways, you hit the nail on the head with, I know a lot of custom manufacturers that are like you mentioned, the 190,000 and the less than 20 employees. That whole sales and marketing effort can be really challenging in terms of getting their name out there. And so I think that’s awesome how you guys are stepping into that void to be able to help provide value and visibility to be able to offer that service offering. And I love the fact that on the front end, from a customer standpoint, that you’re making it really easy. So if I’ve got a part that I need that we can just go online and, on demand, put the CAD files up there, and boom, turn that around, I think that is really awesome. I would imagine that the time that you’re able to minimize that time from the traditional experience of saying, hey, calling up a custom manufacturer, let me send you over these CAD files; get back to me in a couple days or whatever on what this might look like. What’s that time that you’re seeing, that reduction in terms of the turnaround time?

It’s a big reduction. Literally for hundreds of years, custom parts manufacturing required you to deliver some kind of design or file to a specific shop or spend a lot of time on the phone going back and forth, time spent quoting each job manually. But with the rise of digital and our platform–and there are some other platforms that instantly quote or give fast quotes out there as well. But what we’re able to do is, we can shorten that quoting time. There’s no back and forth; there’s no sending Excel files and CAD files around. You just upload your file to our secure site. That price comes back to you literally within seconds, and that’s a price that we’re going to stand behind.

Okay.

Yeah, so you get that price. You know what it is. If you want to get it, we have, in some cases with some of our 3D printing processes, we can get you parts in as fast as one day, usually within a couple days. And so when you take out that time that you’re saving on the quoting as well as the fast production time that we have, you’re getting those parts in hand very quickly. As innovation and iteration cycles have gotten a lot faster in general over the past few years, our goal is to enable companies to do that as fast, as cost-effectively as possible with very high-quality work. And the companies that are able to do that are going to be the ones that win in the market because their products can get out there faster.

Yeah, and really jumping on the whole digital transformation train, if you will, but a sense that you guys didn’t have that transformation; you were essentially born in that, born of that. And I think it’s such a great value that you’re providing, and to promote from a supply chain perspective, how fast we can help all of these other manufacturers to be able to get to market faster and help to solve the challenges they have for their clients and really shorten everything across the board. I think that’s absolutely fantastic as well as also opening up the opportunities whereas I would imagine that sometimes it can be a little difficult or a little challenging, instead of talking to one custom manufacturer, and they’re not a fit; let’s talk to these guys. Okay, they might not be a fit; let’s talk–hey, we’re able to send that out to a whole list of qualified companies and do that much faster. And so the name of the game, obviously, is speed. Iterate faster, better, cheaper, right?

Definitely, yeah. We want to do it faster, and we also want to give you, with our machine learning-driven model, the instant quoting engine as we call it, it gives you a price that should be very fair and very efficient out of the gate. And within custom manufacturing, there’s a wide variability in terms of the kind of quotes that you get for a particular job. But what we do, our model trains on existing files that we have. And the more files it sees, the better it gets and the closer it gets to what we think the real market price is. So when you come to Xometry, you know you’re getting a really good price. It’s not a swag that somebody is making up. It’s something that’s actually driven by technology. So there’s more efficiency on the pricing front as well. It could save you some time there. But yeah, our goal has always been to help folks manufacture great parts as quickly as possible and have them there on demand.

I love that. I love that model; I love the technology and how it’s all digital from day one, from the input and making it a lot easier. So bearing that in mind, we were talking a little bit about digital marketing. How are you guys–because I imagine, you essentially have, if you think about it, you really have two people that you’re reaching out to. You’re reaching out to A, custom manufacturers to help to build that network, so that’s one outreach in sales aspect. And then, another one is, obviously, the other manufacturers who need custom manufacturers. So what does that look like for you guys?

Yeah, so we do think about those two audiences differently. On one side, our target is design engineers, mechanical engineers at all levels. We work with some of the biggest companies in the world. We also work with individuals who are trying to prototype ideas. We welcome everybody. There’s no minimum order quantity or dollar amount on our platform. Anyone can quote work from us. So on one hand, we’re trying to reach that target as efficiently and effectively as possible at great scale, at national scale. We’re primarily in the United States. We have some business in Canada and Mexico as well. And on the other hand, we’re trying to reach high-quality partners. We call them partners. These are the shops that qualify to be a part of our network, so we want quality leads coming in. We then qualify them; they make a test part. We do an assessment of their capabilities, and then they start off, if they pass that, with smaller jobs and work their way up as they prove that they’re able to deliver for our customers.

So there are two separate channels; there are two separate targets. So there are different tools that we use for each of those. In both cases, the majority of our marketing mix is digital. But we’re really looking at how can we– we think about the See-Think-Do-Care model which is a model that we use. I worked at Google for six years on the marketing and sales side. That’s the model we used there. Looking at, within each of those audiences, at people who are in the See audience are ones who don’t really have any awareness of what we do. How do we introduce our concept and our value? The Think audience, those are people who, they may know of us, but they need to be persuaded. They’re thinking about their decision; how do we effectively influence them? And then, Do, these are the people who, I’m ready to buy right now. How do we get in front of them as efficiently and effectively as possible in order to make them a part of the Xometry franchise, get them to come on board? And so we’ve got plans for both of those audiences across those dimensions.

Okay, so we’ve got these two audiences there. And you mentioned you’re primarily digital. Are you able to share what your martech stack is or what you guys have done, what you’ve had success in or failure? What does that look like?

Yeah, I can speak in general terms.

Sure, yeah.

Some of that–like I said, we launched back in 2014, and we’ve been slowly scaling up our marketing since then. We now have a team that’s focused on growth marketing which is my team. And what we’re charged with doing is bringing more customers in the door, the people who have CAD files and want to make parts and will ultimately be good customers for us, people we can help. And then, on the partner side, we’re also trying to bring in those new partners. And we also recently launched a business called Xometry Supplies where, actually now we have an ecommerce storefront from which we sell aluminum. We sell machine tooling, and we’re going to expand into other types of supplies as well. So in addition to becoming partners, they now also can buy supplies for their shop from us to help make their shop more efficient. A big thing for us is making our partners as well as our customers able to manufacture more efficiently. That’s the growth side that we are constantly using tools, a wide variety of tools to bring people in the door and then to move them down through that See-Think-Do-Care funnel and get them to order from us.

And then, there’s also a team that we have here led by my colleague Danny Chang who is the relationship marketing team. And what they do is they are focused on how do we work with the companies and customers who have ordered from us before, using the toolset of relationship marketing. Again, much of that is digital as well. So how do we get people who have already ordered with us to come back and use us some more, as well as on the partner side; how do we get our partners to continue to be active, to take more jobs from Xometry and start to grow their revenue with us? That’s how we think about marketing. And as we’ve scaled up–as I mentioned, we’ve been a digital company from the beginning, digital in our DNA. So for us, it’s not really a transformation so much as who we are. Digital is our essence. We are a digital manufacturer.

In your DNA.

It is, absolutely. And as we’ve grown, we continue to look at a wide range of digital tools and building out our CRM programs for folks who have engaged with us in some way in the past.

Yeah, because we all know the digital tools, there’s only a few of them out there. They never constantly change. Well, one thing that I thought was interesting, and I was hoping that you could elaborate on it a little bit more, there’s all kinds of different terminology you’re hearing. We had actually an episode with the chief marketing officer–well, that’s not the official title, but that essentially was the old titles– chief marketing officer for ABB’s Electrified Products Division. She was sharing with us, well, now we’re a lot more customer-focused. And so my title used to be CMO, but now it’s global experience officer. And so I think your title is VP of growth marketing. You were talking about growth marketing there. Talk to me a little bit about, what is growth marketing for those out there who aren’t, they’re like, okay, another term. What is that?

Yeah, I’ll talk through how I got to this spot as a growth marketer here at Xometry. I started my career as a traditional brand marketer. I worked at Procter & Gamble for about seven years.

A little, small company.

Yeah, yeah, a little company in Cincinnati. There, I did primarily brand marketing and brand management. So I worked on teams that managed very large brands, Tide, Downy, Bounce, Gain, mostly in fabric care. Then at Google I held a number of roles; worked in industry marketing and then, worked on the direct sales side, the media side for a while helping to build the digital marketing programs for mostly larger companies. What I found throughout my career is what I really enjoy most is growth and innovation and helping brands grow, helping businesses grow, helping companies grow. And I think that the reason why the title of this role specifically is growth marketing is, we’re at a stage in our company right now where growth is very important. We are a venture-funded startup. We raised $25 million last July, so we are continuing to grow. Our growth trajectory has been really strong, especially over the last year or two. And so my team, why we define it as growth and relationship is so my team and the folks that I work with, what falls under growth are PR, content, all paid media channels, that type of thing, anything that is bringing people in and helping us to grow our business.

And then relationship marketing, the real strong focus on that is so that team can really get in deep with our customers, understand their needs, and really focusing on doing what’s right for them. Now, there’s certainly areas where these overlap. For example, a promotion could work just as well for customers as it could for growth and acquisition. But I think we are here at Xometry very focused on how can we grow and scale quickly to serve more people. And it’s not about us. Every company wants to grow, but we believe we really have a great offering, and we want the maximum number of people who are within our target, engineers, mechano engineers who are designing products who have their CAD files ready to go. All of them should be trying Xometry, and all of them should be checking us out. We really believe that, and that’s the mentality we bring to what we do every day on the growth side. And growth, it encompasses many of the things that other companies use to segment their marketing departments. A big part of growth is direct response marketing. A big part of growth is brand marketing. A big part of growth is content creation and storytelling. So that’s why we think about it that way instead of saying, okay, this group does brand; this group does direct response. We really want people to be thinking about how do we reach more people or how do we better serve and learn more about the people who are already buying from us.

No, absolutely. That makes a lot of sense, and I always like hearing these stories because you’re like, what’s the method behind the madness or the methodology there? And by the way, I like the logo there.

Oh yeah, I’m trying to make sure everybody see this.

Yeah, so it’s very good. No, but it’s very–it looks, I guess from a branding perspective, it’s modern and fresh, and it’s different. It’s engaging, and I think that’s something that we—

This is actually—

Oh, sorry?

This one here, this is the Xometry vintage t-shirt.

I like it.

We have a vintage one as well as the one with our traditional logo, which you can see on our website. I’m rocking the vintage today.

I like the vintage.

If you want one, or if anyone in the audience wants one, just have them send me an email; we’ll get one out to you shortly.

Oh, my gosh, love it. I’ll be sending you an email. We’ll send you an IndustrialSage one. But we don’t have vintage IndustrialSage; we need vintage IndustrialSage ones.

Let’s do it. Let’s make it happen. I know a guy.

Yeah, that might–no, but it’s, I just think the idea of just, you see that more with tech companies. That’s a very–you said you were from Google prior. That’s a very tech company kind of thing, and I think that that, we’re going to be seeing more of this coming into the manufacturing space. And I love it; I really like that feel, and it’s exciting along with the whole business model and the vision that you guys have, that’ll really help to really grow these companies. You guys are really invested. Obviously, you will grow, but then help these custom manufacturers and just really solve this gap and really help people to get their parts faster. That’s awesome.

Yeah, we’re in the manufacturing space, but we are a tech company. That’s why we’re located where we’re located. When the founders of the company, Randy Altschuler and Laurence Zuriff were looking for locations for it, part of the reason that they moved it to the DC area–we’re headquartered in Gaithersburg, Maryland. We have offices in Bethesda, Maryland, as well. And part of the reason they headquartered it here was because of the tech talent that is available here. We have to design our machine learning models. We have a software engineering team; we have a data sciences team that creates these, and they are knee-deep in technology every day. Now clearly, being experts in manufacturing is a core part of what we do as well. But we think about everything we do through the lens of technology. Xometry is a tech company. We’re a marketplace platform that’s enabled by technology.

Awesome, love it. Aaron, thanks so much for coming on IndustrialSage and sharing some information across board about Xometry, what you guys are doing, the growth marketing. I almost said growth hacking, but growth marketing and just how you guys are viewing things and really looking to completely change the world of manufacturing, custom manufacturing and really bringing that essence of technology to market for manufacturers. So thank you so much. If anybody would love to learn more about you guys, where should they go?

Yeah, so we–first of all, thank you for having us. It’s been a real pleasure to be here. It’s an honor to have a chance to talk to you and share our story with your audience. If you’d like to learn more about Xometry, the best place to go is xometry.com, X-O-M-E-T-R-Y.com You could also email me any time. My email is alichtig, [email protected]. You could also find me on LinkedIn, Twitter. You could also follow Xometry on, we have Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, Twitter, so check us out there. And when you come to the site, make sure if you’ve got some 3D CAD files, check out our instant quoting engine. Upload your files; it’s always free for anybody to use. Get your pricing, and play around with it. See what we do, and we’d be excited to work with anyone in your audience.

That’s awesome. Thanks so much for that. We’ll definitely be checking you out. I’ll be sending you an email for a t-shirt. We’ll send you a t-shirt. Thanks for coming on.

Alight, thanks, Danny.

Alright so another great episode here with IndustrialSage. There’s a lot of different things that you could pull out from this. And I think that one thing that, it just screams to me is, yeah, digital transformation, we keep talking about it. This company is coming in and taking– Xometry is, I think it’s an awesome business model on what they’re doing. I think one of the very first takeaways that I had was just that whole customer experience that they’re bringing in at the very beginning, just thinking about, how can we make it really easy? What do we want? We want information very quickly and on demand. I want to run my business, and I may need these parts, and how quickly– I submit some CAD files, and boom, I get an instant estimate. Obviously we know how quick that is making the process better so that we can have the lead times a lot lower, and I can get back to my customer. Think about the customer. Think about how we can make it easier for them. Think how you can use digital means to be able to do that. I love the whole growth marketing thing; that aspect, instead of having everything siloed as brand and content and whatever. It’s all together. This is really the vision and that goal there.

So a lot to unpack here, so I hope you enjoyed this episode. And we’re really thankful that Xometry was able to come in and that Aaron was able to come in and share some of his experience and what they’re doing over there. So thanks for listening, as always. If you have any questions, we’d love to answer them on the show. You can reach out to us, IndustrialSage.com/questions. If you’re listening on any of the podcast channels, whether it’s iTunes or Spotify or Stitcher or all the other half a dozen ones that we’re on, we’d love a review. Obviously we’re on social media; share our stuff. We’d love it. And thanks for listening or watching, however you’re consuming this. And we’ll catch you next week. Thanks.

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, IoT, I’m sure you’ve never, ever heard of that in your life. Or maybe the industrial fourth revolution. Well, it is here, and it is not going away. And it is really awesome. So today we’re going to spend a little bit of time with Steve Latham from Banyan Hills Technology, and he’s going to walk us through some ideas and some strategies and some tips on how to actually use IoT solutions and to be able to have them to influence your digital marketing or just your marketing in general. It’s a really cool topic. There’s a lot of interesting use cases in here, so don’t miss out. You’re going to want to watch this. I’m Danny Gonzales, and this is IndustrialSage. I’m so excited to jump into this episode. So we’ve got Steve Latham here from Banyan Hills Technology who’s going to be walking us through IoT. What is that? Well, if you don’t know what that is, you’ve been living under a rock for a while, I didn’t know you know what it is. But we’re going to get into it from a marketing standpoint. It’s going to be really great. So before we really get into all that stuff, Steve, if you could just introduce yourself to the audience, tell us a little bit about yourself and Banyan Hills Technology, and we’ll go from there.

Absolutely. So Steve Latham, I’m the founder and CEO of Banyan Hills Technologies. We’re a company that’s five years old, and we are focused on— we’re an IoT company. We’re bringing an IoT platform called Canopy to market, and then all associated services along with IoT.

Okay, great. So IoT, industrial fourth revolution, all these great acronyms. For those, for the two people who are watching this who don’t know what that is— I’m not throwing shade. But if you’re not 100% familiar with it, what is it?

Yeah, absolutely. It’s such an overused term in a lot of ways.

A little bit, yeah.

Yeah, so IoT, very simply at its core is about taking any machine or any device and then, connecting it, figuring out how to connect it to the internet. and then, leveraging the power of the internet to monitor that machine, maintain a constant conversation with that machine to remotely manage it, and create entirely new experiences based on the fact that that device is now connected.

Yeah, and it’s amazing. There are so many different applications on it. And so from a manufacturing and industrial side, a million different use cases. We’re seeing an obviously, even just focusing it from plant operations, creating better efficiencies, better output. But there’s also a whole other aspect of new products that are coming out as a result. Talk to us a little bit about that, some of the things you’re seeing.

Yeah, it’s absolutely— in the consumer space, so direct to consumer, I think everybody is now gaining in familiarity with these solutions like smart thermostats or smart lighting systems inside of a home, even smart doorbells so that you can tell when someone’s accessing your house from a remote location. And so I think, on the consumer side, we’ve seen the market be flooded with all kinds of really creative and innovative solutions. And so the consumers are starting to get an education on what IoT really is through that type of consumer engagement. And then, if you think about now, when a consumer walks into an enterprise, they start to expect that the same type of experiences that they have in their homes are now replicated inside of these big enterprises. And so we’re starting to see the adoption of really smart technology in enterprises, large industries, like we’ve never seen before, which is really, really exciting.

That is exciting. And I’ve seen— it’s funny you mentioned the doorbell thing. I think I’ve seen that on my Facebook, the ads, the person looking who pings you on your phone and stuff like that. And then, even— I think one of the greatest ones is those little sensors that’ll detect water, so you put them around your faucets or toilets or whatever so you can detect that. I think, what a great way to be able to really solve some of those challenges from a manufacturing standpoint to consumer. Obviously, there’s enterprise applications to that as well, to be able to help solve some of those challenges around, hey, maybe we manufacture toilets or the inner workings there, but how can we help make that experience, to your point, better?

Yeah, I think on the enterprise side, what’s really, really fun to see is that an enterprise now is really trying to do several things. Any business that’s running a retail footprint or a physical footprint is trying to drive down costs through operational efficiencies. They’re trying to come up with new ways to create revenue streams. And that’s just the basic premise of a lot of business. And so the value that IoT brings in that case is that if IoT can help, through its implementation, drive automation into a physical footprint, that’s going to naturally reduce the cost for the operator, which is why you’ve got these enterprises or enterprise operators gaining in comfort with trying to pursue these. But then the things that’s really, where I start to get even more excited is so now, if I’m an operator of a facility, and I’ve got a connected thermostat or an HVAC unit and also a connected lighting system, and I’m managing those through one automation platform, can I start to correlate data from those two control systems and then drive entirely new experiences for a customer?

So we were talking earlier before the show about if we can tell that it’s Steve Latham that enters a property, and we know enough about Steve to where we can personalize the physical experience inside a building by maintaining a constant connection to these control systems, think about the power of that. There was a customer that we had that was in the gaming industry, a casino. You think about a casino, and you think about all the connected devices. If we know that, based on the profile of the customers that are in that casino, that we can drive a real-time, almost flash mob marketing campaign where on an instant, we turn all the screens to a certain color, a certain branded experience, we turn the music to that— really, a physical advertisement where the consumer gets merged into this experience, that’s pretty powerful stuff. Totally different way of thinking about marketing.

That is super powerful. We touched a little bit on that experiential marketing aspect. From a digital marketing perspective, personalization is a really big thing. We’ve been seeing that a lot. But what I think is interesting is that IoT is opening that to be able to expand that beyond a digital experience. But they can kind of play together. So your example there of being able to, you enter into this facility, you put your information in there, and then the system knows who you are and because of that, they can adapt; they can personalize that experience there. So having those customer profiles and that information accessible through a database and having those right points there, play that together, and you’ve got digital plus that actual real physical reality experience; you’re able to drive that based off of that. I think that is awesome. It’s amazing.

Yeah, I agree. I agree.

Also on that note, on personalization too, some of the things that we’ve seen, which is interesting, and I think that we might be seeing this a little bit more based on your example there, is that even in just outbound communications, some applications you could take from that is just looking at cost savings that you’ve generated for your client based on implementing this solution, having that built into an automated reporting tool, or being able to say, hey look, we’ve implemented this solution or this tool that we’ve sold to you to help measure your, I don’t know, your tank usage, the amount of gas that you’ve put into this tank. Or we’ve been able to reduce the amount of deliveries by X amount, being able to help automate that a little bit and then communicate that.

Absolutely, right. Yeah, there’s this journey that our customers end up going through when we implement our product. Our product is all about any devices that you have in your retail footprint or physical footprint; it doesn’t necessarily need to be retail. Any of those, we can connect into one management platform. And usually, the journey that we take a customer through, the first thing that they want to do, they’re very cost-focused. They want to get visibility into all those connected devices. They want to make sure that the availability of those connected devices maintains a very high threshold, that they’re healthy, that they can start to do things like preventative maintenance or predictive service on these machines in order to keep them up and running.

And so usually, it starts with monitoring, just help me monitor all of the assets that I have deployed in this environment. Then, we take them, once everything is connected, then you can start to show them, we call them IoT campaigns which is really about, now that we’ve got real-time events coming from one device, is there a particular pattern that should trigger a reaction? And so that would initiate an IoT campaign which very well could be a marketing campaign. It could be flash mob advertising, or it could be as simple as creating a ticket and dispatch a technician to go service that unit. And so then we take them from this monitoring mindset to this idea that we’re going to help them create entirely new experiences based on the real-time data that’s coming in through the platform. And then the final destination really gets at what you were just driving at which is, let’s say you have 30,000 connected locations, and within those locations, you’ve got, on average, 50 to 100 devices at that location.

You think about all of that data that’s coming into this central management system and how can you use that data? Once you get enough history, you can really start to develop. It’s not just one location that’s providing you what might be data or trends in isolation. You’re looking at 30,000 locations at scale, and you can really develop some ideas about patterns that are occurring inside of your business that you can start to drive reactions. And so that data, that final stage, is really about using the data to become way, way, way smarter about your IoT campaigns. But then also, now you have data that’s really interesting for the industry you’re serving, and they’re willing to pay you for it.

Exactly, it’s another product.

Right, and that’s really the typical journey. So it starts at monitoring, and it goes to this enhanced customer experience, and it lands at this really massive data store that becomes extremely powerful for them.

Well, what I love about that is that it’s all about— well, a couple things— all about the data. So in everything that’s going on, it’s all data-driven. But the thing that’s really cool to me is that there’s a ton of creativity inside of that. One of the things, I think there’s— so I have an accounting background, and some people are like, how do you have an accounting background, and then you’re doing some creative stuff? One of the things I think is interesting is that, on the creative side, we’re always telling a story. But when you look at the numbers, there is a story inside those numbers. And I think that’s what bringing in these kind of platforms and having that data gives you the ability to be able to have that marble block, if you will. And there’s a story inside that. Now, we just have to chisel away and work away to figure out what that is and say, oh, wow; we just discovered now that we can connect all these different data points to be able to drive this marketing campaign.

Or now we have a whole new product that we can— it just dorkily gets me very excited about all the opportunities that it poses. It’s really just a matter of stepping back, analyzing it, looking at it, and then thinking creatively, okay, well what does this mean if we’ve got this connection? And to your point, we’re seeing this trend over here. Well, maybe if we see a lot of people performing XYZ function, maybe we could at that point, we dispatch somebody. Well, maybe we’re sending an email; we’re just going to trigger an email that we’re going to fire out to say, hey, just wanted to let you know, we’ve detected this; we’re dispatching this. We’re on top of it. And from a customer service standpoint, it’s okay, wow, this is great. They’ve already gotten— we’re detecting some abnormalities; we want to keep the up time up. We don’t want any down time.

I’ve got a great example of that which is exactly what you just said. There is one of our partners and a customer of ours is in the self-storage industry, and they manage access control systems within self-storage. And they have their technology deployed across over 35,000 locations.

That’s a lot of locations.

A lot of locations.

A lot of data.

Exactly. And one of the things is we’ve been talking to their customers about the value that IoT brings to this space. Almost every customer said, hey, could you tell us when a customer is about to leave by access control data? Which seems very logical, right? If you’ve got a customer that, there’s a lot of activity when they move in, and there’s a lot of activity when they move out—

But in between—

In between, it’s pretty silent. And so if you start to see increased usage, that would suggest that they’re probably going to leave. And that should trigger some sort of light touch to the customer initially just to say, hey, check out these incremental services like a moving service, for example. So I just think that more data, more visibility into a physical footprint through IoT can drive all kinds of new campaigns that we’ve never thought about.

What a great use case there. Whether you have that moving service or not or being able to partner with somebody, again, it’s helping to solve the challenge. You’re taking that data; you understand what’s going on. Hey there’s something— I love it. And I think, it’s one of those things, I don’t know, necessarily, there’s a finite path, per se. Obviously, you have to have some sort of platform in place to be able to have that data and be able to analyze it. But just stepping back and thinking, what could we do to help make a better experience for our customers, or our customers’ customer, depending on who that is? That’s awesome. Another question is, is there such a thing as too much IoT? Or just because we can do something, I suppose we can measure it— I imagine, is there a balance?

Yeah, a lot of times— and I’m a big advocate of this. I almost feel like we’re a little past with IoT as an emerging technology trend. IoT has arrived. It’s here; it’s on our face. It’s being used. There are standards that are coming to life around IoT. And so I feel like, in the last 12 to 24 months, we’ve really seen IoT arrive. But previous to that, one of the warnings that I would give a lot of people that would come in is, I would say, make sure you understand the value proposition that you’re pursuing before you just go experiment because at the end of the day, if it’s not enhancing the customer experience or changing your cost or revenue profile, you have to ask yourself if it’s worth the experiment of doing it. And so I absolutely agree with you. The good news to that question is because of where IoT is in its lifecycle, I think that we’re a little beyond a lot of experimentation. Things are really hardening and coming to life in a way that I think is pretty powerful for IoT. I think there are new emerging technology trends that are coming to life as a result of IoT that have that risk profile.

Sure, yeah. So last question: speaking to a digital marketer, I am working for a manufacturing company, and we have got some IoT solutions rolled out. We have some things that are maybe helping us from an efficiency standpoint in our plant operations but also on the products that we have manufactured. What advice would you give to somebody who’s sitting there, different things that they might be able to do to be able to make their digital marketing campaigns a little better, a little smarter?

Right, well I think there’s probably a few different ways to answer that. I think first and foremost, the advice that I would give a customer if they were asking me that would be that, focus on your strength. If your core competency is manufacturing hardware, that’s your 80, 80% of what you do, so focus on your 80, and develop relationships with firms that have a strong presence around digital marketing or IoT as a discipline, and leverage that to help you get that product to market. I think that, if you’re a manufacturing company and believing that you can become a consumer or even an enterprise marketing company around IoT is probably a little bit of a stretch. Some companies can do it, obviously. But I think most of the time, especially initially as you’re considering this, developing strong relationships with companies that can help you develop the right message is really important.

And without a doubt, the most important thing to do, I believe, is to understand what your customers want. Understand the real value proposition of what it is that you’re building so that your message can be really focused, really targeted, and solve the right problems for them. I think, back to the point that you had previously, a trap is that you have just built something that technically is very cool and very fun. But it doesn’t actually solve the issue for the customer. And so your product is wrong; your marketing is wrong. You’re missing the point. So I would say, off the cuff, the two things that I would recommend are: get to the voice of the customer; make sure you’ve got that right. And then, develop the right partnership with a company that can help you target your message for that customer.

I was hoping you would give us a silver bullet answer. But it’s a very consistent theme here on the show all the time. It goes to really looking at the personas, really getting an understanding of your customer. What are their challenges? What are their needs? And when it comes to product development is making something that is actually solving a problem, or is it just really cool, and you think it’s amazing?

Yeah.

Just because it’s really cool and it’s amazing, it might not take off. But if you’re solving a challenge, you’ve got to go through all of that. Alright, well thanks so much for coming on. If somebody has a question and would like to reach out, what’s the best way of contacting you?

Sure, so you can reach us; go to our website. It’s www.banyanhills.com. You can reach out to [email protected] to get in touch with us, and we’d love to talk with you.

Awesome. Well, thanks for coming on.

Yeah, thanks so much. Appreciate it.

Excellent. So alright, IoT, a lot of great nuggets of information here. I think one of the coolest things that I took away was the endless amounts of possibilities there are if you have an IoT solution that’s implemented or if you’re thinking about doing that. From a digital marketing standpoint, from a marketing standpoint, are you able to take that data and create better experiences, whether that’s digitally or even in person in that physical reality. So think creatively. Think about, okay, if we have access to the data, analyze it. Spend that time looking at it. Try to help to figure out what you might be able to do with that. It could be as simple as, if you’re dispatching preventative maintenance calls, being able to send an email campaign to be able to communicate hey look, we’re helping. We’re on your side; we’re helping you to solve that challenge or make sure that you guys don’t have down time. Things like that, they’re simple, but they really mean a lot.

So hopefully you took something away. I know I did; it was awesome. If you are listening to this on iTunes, hey, we’d love to have a review. If you have any questions, we’d love to answer them; IndustrialSage.com/questions, we’ll answer those for you. Please share, like this, send, do all the things. And until next week, I’m Danny Gonzales, and this is 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!

Hey, alright, we’ve got an awesome episode for you we’re lining up here. We’re going to be talking about social selling. What is it? I don’t know. But we have Brad Banyas here from OMI who’s going to tell us what it is and why you need to use it. I’m Danny Gonzales, and this is IndustrialSage. Alright, let’s go ahead and jump into this episode. Brad, thanks so much for joining us. We have Brad Banyas here from OMI who, basically what they do is they do a lot of sales force, marketing automation, and social selling strategies and integration kind of things. So before we get into this topic on, we’re going to be talking about social selling, Brad, tell us a little bit about OMI, yourself, your background, all that good stuff.

Good, yeah, so we’re 19 years old this year; just turned 19. We help companies implement and execute CRM, marketing automation, and more recently, new social selling platforms. So companies struggle with that because there’s a lot of opportunity. There’s a lot of products, a lot of services. They don’t know, really, what fits for them. So we typically help anyone in the small to midsize business area and can come in with them and help evaluate tools on their behalf, help them get better sales processes or marketing processes on tools they’ve invested in in the past, and maybe they’re not leveraging those.

That never happens.

Yeah, actually, most of our clients actually have CRM in place, and so we help them execute that and help their teams better evaluate some of the new things that are going on in the market like social selling.

Perfect. And that’s a great lead-in to the topic we’re going to be talking– because I think a lot of us have heard of social selling. You talk about it, and probably some of us or a lot of us, or maybe none of us– I don’t know–are actually doing it and engaging it. But I think what is really interesting, you have been hearing about this probably over the last two years or so, social selling, so let’s break that down before we get into how to do it. What is it? How would you define it?

Yeah, I think a lot of people are like, is it just a buzzword? And in some cases, it may be. But social selling has really come out of the CRM space. And so what happened with the CRMs, people thought of it as a big database that you put data in, and you can’t get any information out or information changed on your contacts and your prospects. So what social selling really is about is the technology such– people are familiar with LinkedIn, probably the most recognizable platform that people use every day, new tools like Nimble CRM that are really catered to helping you to reach out and build more information about a lead or a contact where it will automatically go out and find information on your social accounts, so it builds a social dossier. So what that does, in the past we were all looking through books or buying lists or procuring other lists and trying to import them into CRM. The problem was, there was really no contextual information around that individual. So social selling is really built around that realm to help you identify that person, learn more about that person, and be able to reach out easier across different mediums. Traditional was phone and email; now it could be Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. So it’s really bringing that front and center to the sales and marketing teams of these companies to interact more easily and more readily.

Yeah, absolutely. And I think it’s such a great thing. It’s funny, too; it’s like maybe it’s a new term, but the reality of it is the basis and the premise of what goes on with it and how you do it, it’s no different than sales probably was done 100 years ago, 200 years ago. It’s the same process; it just has a different face to it. But I think sometimes it can be a little challenging, a little daunting because it’s like, wait, essentially we’re talking about getting on social media platforms like Twitter. Do I really need a Twitter? In certain cases it’s like, well, it’s interesting because everybody has their own, there’s all these different tools. You mentioned maybe not even email 20 years ago, but your phone. Now, it’s all these different things. Here’s my phone; here’s my email; here’s my LinkedIn; here’s my Twitter; here’s my Instagram. Look at all these different things here. So what are some practical applications in terms of using that in the sales process? How might a salesperson, and even marketing as well, how might they use those tools?

Right, so part of the reason I’m going to step back as why it’s becoming more relevant is the whole way that people buy services and interact with your company has changed. Before, we would educate through a number of ways, mediums like magazines or trade shows, and that’s still effective in some cases. But today’s world is not about, can I find you or do I know who you are? But it’s, how do I better communicate with you or really build that relationship that used to be taken over time, maybe years, down to weeks or months to build a trusting relationship? So some of the ways that people use social CRM today is really being able to target that ideal person around their interests on things like LinkedIn. You can put categories in of what you’re interested in, CRM, manufacturing, certain things, boats, automobiles, whatever may be—

The niche.

Yeah, and the niches that you can define will then allow you to closer target that group of who you might be able to reach out to. So one example is, obviously we’re in the CRM space, so we want to know people that are using platforms like Salesforce or Nimble or other products that we consult on. So it’s very easy for us to identify those relationships. And then once we do, we find certain common things that’s going on at that company. Maybe there’s a job opening that was posted. Maybe there’s other what you would call storylines or tags that are important for us to know this person may be worth engaging with. And we use those tags, and they are made readily available and the social tools to bring it to our attention. So then we can focus on messaging. We can focus on, how do we want to communicate? Maybe we just reach out via LinkedIn. Maybe we call them, or maybe we put them in a nurture campaign to get them warmed up to talk to us versus aggressively going after them.

Exactly. So really, what you’re talking about there in that explanation is really that omnichannel approach. Really, we have all these different channels, if you will, to be able to reach contacts. So maybe you put that in part of that sales process, part of that cadence. You’ve got, maybe it’s an initial phone call; and then it’s an email. And then I think what you’re really talking about there is engaging with somebody on the outside. If somebody’s putting a post up about whatever, like it. Maybe make a little comment on it. Or, like you mentioned, if somebody has a job posting or something, well maybe you know somebody that might be a really good fit for that job. Say, hey, I’m going to share this with such and such or send that link, and really providing some value and helping them.

And that’s a great point. What social CRM has done and social selling has done is bring those listening points or those things that are going on front and center so that you can act on them. And you can actually become more helpful to someone. You can actually say, hey, I found this article; I know it makes sense for you. Or I know you go to Disney World every year; here’s a great article on Disney. So some of the things that we’re doing you mentioned briefly in the automation space is things like gifting or things like bringing their attention to something that, if you know someone, it means something very much to them, that they love Disney World, send them a nice card that’s personalized about something with Disney or a character on it. It’s about really trying to connect with that person at a human level and then begin to do business versus our old cold calling, call, call, call, you need it, you need it, you need it. And you just can’t get to those people anymore. So social CRM and social selling is really helping you nurture these relationships or find some type of common ground with an individual to then be able to really see if your products or your services are right for them.

Yeah, a couple of key things in there you mentioned. At the end of the day, people want to do business with their friends. It’s a really great tool of being able to start to build that relationship. And the other thing that you said that, I love it there, really is providing value. Provide value first. Instead of, hey, come buy from me, buy from me, buy from me, it’s making that initial connection, and start having these interactions and building that relationship by providing value. So maybe looking and seeing, what can you do to help make their day better or solve their challenge or whatever that doesn’t have to take a lot. You mentioned, send them a little gift. You see them; they’re putting this post on–people pay attention. People love that, and that stands out way more than, hey, you want to buy this thing from me?

Exactly, and the world is so funny, whether people believe in networking or referral marketing or referrals in general. In the consulting world, you get a lot of referrals because you don’t necessarily have a product that you can see, so you have to build trust and get referrals. And things like LinkedIn have been so successful because you’re building that network; you’re building that referral network. And I can go to any industry expert that I know in LinkedIn and say, we’ve got a client that’s got a problem, and I know you guys can help them. It has nothing to do with me, but I’m going to introduce you to them. That’s a different approach, and our clients remember that. I may not know anything about electrical engineering or whatever it may be, but based on our network and the strength of our network, you can disseminate hey, I’ve got a client that’s got a problem, and is there anyone out there who can do it? And you’re using the speed of the internet and these social tools to bring those expertise together and then solve problems. And it works. So you can’t take the traditional approaches; I’m going to go sell you this. It’s earned over time with the things and the good deeds or the referrals you provide over time.

One of the best things, I think that’s a key differentiator between being a vendor versus a trusted advisor. And I hate the word vendor; I really do. But I had an experience a couple weeks ago. Somebody called me, and they said, hey, listen–it was somebody, we hadn’t sold anything to them; we were talking to them. They said, hey, I’ve got a question for you about this, and it was kind of outside. But I thought you might be a really good person to. But hey, I guess it’s pretty good that I’m calling you, asking– we made that jump, and we trust you, and all that stuff because there are some times, they had other challenges that, completely unrelated to the products and the service that we were selling. People say, hey, look. We see you have this problem over here; I need to connect you with this person over here, and let’s do that. People totally remember that.

Oh yeah.

And they’re like, thank you because this was a big pain in my butt, and you’re helping to solve it.

It’s funny you mentioned the vendor comment because that’s something we dread. We want to be a trusted partner. And when someone says vendor, it’s the kiss of death, and you’ve just been commoditized down to a point that, next time it comes up, you’re gone. So whether you’re selling pencils or whether you’re selling Teslas, customers want to feel good. They want to do business with you, and you’ve got to add some value or differentiation. So some of these, back to these social selling and these tools available like we mentioned, Nimble, and LinkedIn, and all these great tools– that are very affordable; everyone can use them. Some of them are free– is it’s bringing that information and aggregating that information where you work, in your email, online, and it’s, anyone can use it. The old days of where you had to enter information in on Danny or– nobody wants, that’s death to a salesperson that has to sit there—

Do data entry.

Yeah, for three or four hours and do research and do that. And it’s a large percent of their time. In most cases, it’s a day a week. If you can give that selling time back to them and get them networking, get them interacting with some of these available software tools out there, it saves them time and money, and you’ll win more business.

Now, I’m going to make a little bit of a pivot on there. Let’s bring some of that marketing into the conversation in terms of the tools and the market. How can marketing help support some of this because obviously, it’s outbound? Call it SDR work or whatever. How does marketing come in to be able to help support that?

Right, I think staying away from the technology side, what some of this has been able to do is for really marketing and sales to align more around the customer profile or the segmentation. So in some of these services we’ve talked about, I have the ability to tag someone as, I need to nurture those people. They’re interested in automobiles; they’re interested in software or whatever it may be. The ability now for marketing to work with sales around nurturing them and pulling those leads and tags and executing a content strategy– these people are interested in automobiles; we only want to send content about automobiles to them– really has evolved, and it’s not as difficult as people think. So one example would be, you’ve heard people talk about drip campaigns, automate campaigns. It’s really irrelevant. It’s more about finding someone’s interest, knowing what they’re interested in, and slowly giving them relevant content. Same thing with the referral that we were talking about. Giving them relevant content over time so that, when they’re ready to buy, they know you’re targeting them, not for boats–it’s an automobile that I’m looking for.

Yeah, and they knew who they’re going to go with on it. So that’s super key. We talk about this on the show all the time, that alignment between sales and marketing. Sales out there; they find these people. Okay, maybe they’re not quite ready to go, but let’s continue to nurture that conversation. That’s where some of these tools, whether you have these tools or not, but marketing should hopefully, in an ideal world, come in to be able to help to nurture them and provide that content, really to provide that education, to help solve their challenges so once they are ready to go, to your point, good to go.

Yeah, and it’s really interesting because more of the content, where in the past in the traditional world, marketing had all the content or managed all the content. What we’re seeing that’s been successful is, in many cases some of the sales team is directly with the clients and getting feedback. So some of these things where sales-generated content, specifically around video, people creating their own video, people using that video over and over again just to try to get through to someone. We’re seeing really where they’ve had success in sales that the marketing and sales teams are coming together and jointly saying, hey, Danny did an awesome job on this kind of video for this client. We need to take this and put this into our marketing and our sales process for our other teams to learn from. And that’s been, we’ve seen that over and over be a success.

So it’s really, instead of having that lone wolf approach to the sales. I’m just heads-down; it’s really bringing in that team.

Exactly. And the wins today are a lot easier to share. They’re more visible. But as far as executing some of these sales processes and social selling processes, there’s been– in the past, everyone was a little hesitant. I don’t want to enter data. I don’t want to do that. Well, these kinds of tools are really beneficial around building your brand as an individual no matter what company you’re working for. It’s building your brand, and that’s really what it’s about. It’s about you’re confident in your products; you’re confident in your services. But you are the brand, and in the past, that’s not been the case. Well, the entity is the brand, but you as a representative have been empowered through a lot of these tools. And they’re readily available. And that’s how people really connect. So I think some of it’s good.

That human connection.

Yeah, I think it’s good, human to human.

Exactly.

It’s all about that. It’s funny how, as much technology as we have and such great automation and things we’re doing with artificial intelligence, at the end of the day, all these tools are making us do is be better at communicating our message more succinctly, more directly because it has to hit at the right time. The sales cycles of 20 years or five years or six years are being pushed down.

Absolutely. Alright, so my last question here would be, okay, somebody says they watched this, and they’re like, you know, I haven’t been doing this. Maybe I should be doing this. It sounds like it’s pretty valuable. What key tips or advice would you give to somebody that is saying, you know, I want to start doing this?

There’s a thing called the internet which we all know.

Google.

Yeah, you can Google it. You can learn anything about some of these concepts we’re talking about. I would say, if you haven’t been on LinkedIn, it’s one of the largest business networks in the world. It’s not new, and it’s something that I think will help you learn. You can get in; they’ve got some new things now that train you on social selling. You can literally get learning classes from LinkedIn, directly in LinkedIn. So there’s a company called Microsoft that bought those guys. Other things you can do is go out and look at tools like, we talked about these Nimble CRMs and these new, really simple, the easy-use tools where they connect to your existing tools you’re used to like Google or Microsoft Outlook. They connect dynamically, so it’s not like you’ve got to be a real tech wizard. And just start playing around and reaching out to people trying to link in with them. Have a subject; have something readily available that you need to talk to them about or that is relevant to them, and just engage, and you’ll be amazed. So if you start, and you’re like, I only have 20 people in my network, if you consciously do that and look for the right people, that network will grow. You will become a trusted part of the network, and it will bring you more business than you can imagine versus the traditional ways of cold calling or direct mailers.

That’s awesome.

Get at it, and good luck.

Well, Brad, thanks so much for coming on. That was awesome. There’s a lot of great information here, a lot of great takeaways. If somebody would like to ask any questions, how can they get hold of you?

Yeah, so we’re at OMI.co, as in company, so just OMI.co. You can go there; there’s a plethora of information about what we do, some of the topics we’ve talked about today. And you can call, and we actually will pick the phone up and actually speak to someone. Or you can email us or Twitter us or do whatever you want, but that’s where the best place to go would be.

So if you need the plethora of information, go call Brad.

Call OMI, yeah. There are 100 people behind me, by the way.

Excellent. Well, thanks again for coming on. Hey, listen, another great episode here. Social selling, really awesome, really, really cool tool here. A couple takeaways that I can think of, that I pulled out here: Look, really leverage the social media platforms that you have. LinkedIn is a very easy tool to use. If you haven’t really used it a whole lot, set that up. Get your profile picture up there. Put your information in there, and start engaging. Maybe even just set some time up, I don’t know, once a day, just for five minutes. Go look; go join these groups that are in your industry. And start commenting. Start looking at people you know; help to solve their challenges. That’s really the goal, and to really cultivate that relationship. There’s a lot of other great nuggets of wisdom here, so if you have any questions, we have everything in the show notes.

And, as always, if you have any other questions that we would love to answer for you, you can write in at Optim–not Optimum Productions because that’s the production company here– IndustrialSage.com/questions. We’d love to answer your questions. If you’re listening on iTunes, we’d love a review. Please share our content, like it, post it. And as always, enjoy. We’ll see you next week on IndustrialSage.

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