The Kula Ring

Eve Chen has spent nearly three decades asking how companies turn market opportunity into predictable revenue, and her answer centers on who is actually doing the buying. With Forrester putting the average B2B buying group at 13 internal stakeholders plus nine external influencers, she argues revenue teams need a buyer’s playbook as rigorous as their seller’s playbook. Drawing on a night navigation exercise from her time in the Australian Army Reserve, Eve explains why the map stops working when the terrain changes, and why manufacturers should raise safety and procurement concerns early. The payoff is readiness on both sides of the deal, and forecasts built on evidence instead of gut feel.

Marcelo Kreindel took an unlikely route into manufacturing marketing—from an Argentinian software career to fifteen years running a wholesale gelato business to building North Shore Steel’s marketing department from scratch. That winding path shaped a rare kind of patience, and it produced the insight at the heart of this conversation: the message discipline marketers apply to customers is exactly what they fail to apply to their own sales teams and leadership. Rather than complaining that the organization doesn’t appreciate marketing, Marcelo turned the lens on himself, treating internal misalignment as a communication problem he owned. It’s a candid, empowering look at how personal responsibility, continuous learning, and trust move marketing from tolerated to understood.

Inbolt’s AI vision guidance now steers 200+ robots across 100+ factories at Stellantis, Toyota, Ford, and GM, and Carl Standertskjold runs the entire marketing function alone. He joins Jeff and Carman to talk about what changes when a startup shifts from landing first logos to expanding inside a plant, and how a team of one holds up under it. Carl builds every plan down from the business outcome, leans on an AI-first stack, and still draws a hard line where human judgment and creativity can’t be handed off. The conversation explores the two roles he’s hiring, why systems thinking separates the marketers who thrive, and where real buyers actually spend their time.

Chloe Linsmeier has spent twelve years marketing Advanced Blending Solutions, a plastics-equipment manufacturer in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, most of it as a team of one or two. She walks through the trade-offs of a tiny marketing function: the creative freedom of no approval chains against the impossibility of keeping pace with shifting AI, AEO, and zero-click search. Her throughline is relationships. In an industry where nobody stays and everybody knows everybody, she built a career and a pipeline out of showing up, asking questions, and refusing to sound like she had it all figured out. It’s a candid look at how a younger generation is quietly reshaping how manufacturers market and buy.

Josue Vermes took a winding path—high-end wine, JPMorgan, Amazon apparel at HanesBrands—before landing as the most senior marketer at Carolina Handling, a Raymond forklift dealer expanding into intralogistics. In this episode he makes the case for borrowing B2C discipline without abandoning B2B fundamentals: geotargeted paid media, streaming TV built around football season, a video-first podcast, and a TikTok channel his own leadership questioned. The throughline is counterintuitive: broad, low-intent reach and a genuine brand personality aren’t a distraction from pipeline—they’re part of the growth strategy when your buyers are younger than you’d expect and educating themselves on channels most manufacturers refuse to touch.

Maria Birdwell came to industrial packaging from media and advertising, with no B2B background and no allegiance to how the category has always sold itself. At Franklin Mountain Packaging, a corrugated manufacturer that started up in 2022, she markets a young company against multi-generational competitors by refusing to fight on age or even on machinery. Instead she lets customer requirements drive the conversation and, in a recent pivot she credits directly to macroeconomic uncertainty, leans the whole message toward flexibility. She tells Jeff White and Carman Pirie why she downplays sustainability, why video of machines in action outperforms everything, and why marketing means nothing if operations can’t capture and convert the lead.

Benjamin Toomey didn’t come to additive manufacturing from engineering — he came from fireworks and craft beer. That outsider’s vantage turns out to be the point. In this episode, Ben tells Jeff White and Carman Pirie how he went from feeling like an alien at his first trade show to becoming a “messenger” who can connect large-format 3D printing to a stranger’s field of interest. Along the way he makes the case that marketing complex technology isn’t about being the smartest person in the room or hiding what you don’t know — it’s about building a common language, grounding claims in data, and keeping the divergent outside interests that let a marketer connect dots the engineers can’t.

Chris Persson sells something buyers never see: polypropylene fiber woven into cars, couches, and carpets. On this episode he unpacks the peculiar challenge of marketing an ingredient brand with a guerrilla-sized budget, and why the sustainability pitch keeps colliding with a price tag. His answer is a reframe he calls “sustainability plus one” — lead with a greener story, then stack innovation, cleanability, and low specific gravity on top so the customer never has to choose good over cheap. Along the way he makes the case that a manufacturer’s deepest competitive moat isn’t its equipment but the decades of intellectual property walking around on its factory floor.

Nancy Verdezoto-Feijoo spent 15 years as a reporter and editor in Ecuador before landing in Manitoba as marketing manager at IHT Group, which builds heating, cooling, and lighting systems for the swine industry. She argues the newsroom taught her the one skill industrial marketers most often skip: listen before you speak. Her buyers are technical, deeply experienced, and allergic to buzzwords, and they talk to each other, which means a single bad experience travels faster than any campaign. Nancy walks Jeff and Carman through months-long buying cycles, why proof beats claims, and why she treats marketing as a growth function rather than a support function.

ElectraMet uses electrochemistry to pull copper and other critical minerals out of industrial wastewater — technology invented by PhDs and sold to wastewater managers at the world’s largest semiconductor fabs. Chris Richardson, a communications major with no electrochemical background, has to make that legible without dumbing it down. His answer isn’t better explaining. It’s association: make sure Google and the LLMs know which published scientists belong to your company, then build content on top of that link. Along the way he argues GEO is mostly just SEO done well, that earned backlinks still pay dividends, and that the surest way to win over a camera-shy expert is to show them what the internet already says about them.