The Industrial Executive

Plagued by a car dealerships’ monthly calls offering to buy his old car, host Todd Hockenberry shows how industries of all stripes can stop using these anti-relationship marketing techniques to work smarter and more effectively to segment and sell to your existing customers by actually listening to them.

The stakes are high. Welcome to 2019. Open discovery is dead. “Always be selling” is dead.

2019 is about making your prospects feel known, understood, and cared about; and only calling/emailing to help them.

Sales roles are declining, 2019 is noisy as ever, and everyone is busy and distracted. Fortunately, Dan Tyre, Senior Leader of HubSpot and Co-author of Inbound Organization, joined me on The Industrial Executive

In this episode, Dan offers 6 proven tips to cut through the noise, create opportunities, and have amazing sales calls in today’s environment.

The only constant is change. Even in business. We even change the way we manage change! It’s not any easy thing to handle for most individuals, so is there any hope for successfully implementing change within a large group of (very different) people?

Dave Sweet is the President of Mecco Marking and Traceability where he’s been able to put his engineering background to great use when it comes to change management at his company. What he’s learned? It all comes down to the individual components playing well with each other.

When he first “brought” change into the company, there was a lot of hesitation. Pretty typical seeing as change tends to bring uncertainty. It’s just natural that people really need to understand the change you’re hoping to implement and have time to digest it before they potentially buy-in.

But there was something he learned during this time: as the leader of the company, he needed to focus more on helping people cope with the change vs actually implementing it. His managers would handle the implementation, but as the leader, he needed to help people cope with it.

“E-commerce doesn’t work for me.”  

“Why?” “Well, we tried it.” “What does that mean?”

Many B2B manufacturing and distribution companies don’t view building a like building another physical location.

You must invest as you go in the necessary features of the store.

Many suffer from having disparate systems that are not well integrated, interrupting their prospects' buyer journey.

This is where Karie Daudt, VP of Marketing and Customer Experience at Insite Software, expertly helps B2B manufacturing and Distribution companies build e-commerce sites that keep buyers engaged through the buying process.

In this episode Karie outlines why every B2B manufacturing or Distribution company should use e-commerce as a strategic initiative now.

Check out Karie’s  Executive guide or request an assessment for your business’s e-commerce needs.

“I was 50 years old when I started using Linkedin. I thought there were a million reasons it wasn’t going to work for me.”

That was Wayne Breitbarth. He went on to write The Power Formula for Linkedin Success, selling over 100,000 copies. I asked Wayne to unpack why Linkedin is the most strategic platform for industrial, B2B, and manufacturing companies.

The short answer: it’s is not just another social media platform, it’s the database we never had.

Check out Wayne’s worksheet on how to use “connections of” the essence of LinkedIn, and what Wayne calls the “referral filter”.

We are talking all things associations with Executive Director at MACF, Sherry Reeves, on our most recent episode of The Industrial Executive. Sherry tells about the exciting things happening in small manufacturing businesses and communities and the ways she’s seeing associations, like MACF, support them while encouraging a new generation of skilled workers find their place.

Understanding the role that digital marketing plays is important regardless of industry, although crucial in the traditional B2B space. Adam Robinson, Marketing Manager at Cerasis, chats with us the role digital plays in the world of logistics.

What’s the secret to having a company that is 100 years old? Glenn Williams, President of Bell Performance, joins us on this episode of The Industrial Executive to talk longevity and the unique environment they’ve created for both customers and employees.

Our guest this week on The Industrial Executive podcast was Ken Gieseke, VP of Marketing at McElroy Metal. Ken has worked at McElroy for more than 20 years and has had front row seats to watch the evolution of marketing and sales within the industry.

He shares with us how McElroy has adapted to the changing marketing sphere and are watching it drive sales.