PODCAST: Right People, Right Companies: How to Launch ABM as a Manufacturer w/ Sangram Vajre

The Manufacturing Executive: Episode 10

Listen to this episode here or on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher or Google Podcasts.

Episode show notes

You can market your products just about any way you want to. You can pour money into trade shows, pay-per-click campaigns, or print ads. Personally, I’m a big advocate of inbound marketing, but inbound means playing a very long game. Because of that, I advocate supplementing inbound with identifying the right people from the right companies for a special sales-plus-marketing solution.

I’m talking about Account-Based Marketing (ABM).

Now if you want to learn about ABM, go see Sangram Vajre, author, co-founder at Terminus, and the man who sired ABM from 50,000 feet in the air. Or you can just listen to this episode of the podcast where Sangram and I talk about:

A solid definition of ABM
What intent data is and how to use it
Why you shouldn’t treat all your accounts the same
How small to mid-sized businesses can apply ABM methodology

Resources we talked about:

To ensure that you never miss an episode of The Manufacturing Show, subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher or Google Podcasts.

Transcript of Episode

Joe Sullivan:
Welcome to another episode of The Manufacturing Executive podcast. I’m Joe Sullivan, your host, and a cofounder of the industrial marketing agency gorilla76. So, as a B2B manufacturer, there are a lot of ways to do marketing. Traditionally, many of you have poured money into trade shows, printed materials, maybe print ads, or pay-per-click. Those of you who have modernized your approach and found your way into content marketing, inbound, SEO, and so on. And don’t get me wrong here, I’m a huge advocate for inbound and content marketing, huge advocate. We do it for ourselves, we do it for our clients and with plenty of success. But as I often explain, generally speaking, inbounds is a long game. You’re consistently creating and publishing expert content, you’re building authority for your website and slowly more of the right people from the right companies start to find you and engage with you and start conversations with you.

Joe Sullivan:
And this is absolutely something you should be doing, because it’s sustainable. It’s a sustainable way to grow your business, but there’s no magic button you can push to win inbound game. If you’re doing it right, it requires some serious blood, sweat, and tears in most cases. And it takes time, it takes patience to build that machine. And so, because of that, I’m also a huge advocate of supplementing inbound with a more proactive marketing approach, where you’re identifying the right people from the right companies, those buying process influencers inside those organizations, and then you go get them. And this is exactly what we are going to talk about today. Account Based Marketing, or ABM as it’s often called. So, if you were to ask me, “Joe, who is the one single person I should go learn about when you’re thinking about ABM?” I would point you to Sangram Vajre, and it just so happens that that is exactly who we are interviewing today.

Joe Sullivan:
So, Sangram, to give a little introduction, ran marketing at Pardot, acquired by ExactTarget, and then ExactTarget was acquired by Salesforce for $2.7 billion. Soon after that, Sangram co-founded Terminus, which hit $1 million in the first year, $5 million in the second and $15 million in the third year. Ranking 21st in Deloitte’s Fastest Growing Companies list, named back to back as one of the best places to work also. On LinkedIn alone, Sangram has over 15,000 subscribers to his weekly Becoming Intentional newsletter and over 10 million of his content in just the last two years. Sangram has quickly become a marketing and leadership expert and has been named one of the top 21 B2B influencers in the world by DMN network. Sangram’s the author of two books on marketing, a frequent keynote speaker, a host of a top 50 business podcast called Flip My Funnel, with over half a million downloads and, if I saw correctly, I think 600 some episodes at this point, which blows my mind. So, Sangram, I am literally giddy that you are here on our show today, welcome.

Sangram Vajre:
Well, after that intro, I am like, “Oh my God.” Most people are like, “Can we get it over with?” And just [inaudible 00:03:35]. But Joe, dude, I’m so grateful that you talked to me and I’m on this podcast. I love the fact that it’s your podcast, your episodes are niche in industry, so I wish more people would do that.

Joe Sullivan:
Yeah, absolutely. Well, thanks for being here. I’m super excited for this conversation. ABM is something we’re talking about constantly with our clients at this point. And five years ago, it’s this acronym that most people didn’t even know. You did, but it was an evolving and emerging thing, and especially in the manufacturing sector where marketing tends to be far lagging behind SaaS and also behind most professional services. So, it’s finding its way into the manufacturing world the last few years and we’re big advocates of ABM. So, that said, I’m excited to have you here.

Sangram Vajre:
Man, what’s also exciting in general for me, when I think about this five-year, 2014, 2015 when we started Terminus and just the idea of ABM, the idea of Flip My Funnel, in that sense is that my own understanding of that has evolved. I wish I could say, “Man, I knew, Joe. I knew exactly what this is and this is…” Not true at all. In 2015, what I understood and when I wrote the first book on Account Based Marketing, there was a concept that I felt, “There got to be a better way.” And then, in 2019 when I wrote the second book, I feel like you could see that I literally moved on from, “Oh, it’s not just a better mousetrap, it is actually a better marketing strategy. It’s a better go to market strategy. So, it’s no longer ABM for the sake of ABM, it’s B2B.” So, it’s been fascinating to just go through that personally from a journey perspective.

Joe Sullivan:
Yeah. I know you’ve seen it all, you were at the forefront of this movement. And so, given who we’re talking to here, we’re not talking mostly to people in software who tend to be super innovative in the marketing front. A lot of my audience here on this show is mid-size manufacturers. Like I said in the intro, they’ve leaned on trade shows and print ads in the past, and are starting to do more content marketing the last few years in inbound. But can you just give an overview, what are we talking about here exactly when you’re talking about Account Based Marketing?

Sangram Vajre:
At the core of that, there are probably 179 buzzwordy definitions of it, so I’ll save you from that. In the layman terms, it is really focused marketing and sales together. That’s it. It’s a one team approach to go after the right accounts that matter to you for your business and you do any and everything to win those accounts. And I say that, and then people are like, “Well, wait a minute. Isn’t that marketing and sales is supposed to be?” Yeah, you’re right. They should be, but that’s not what’s happening. Most organizations, marketing is giving salespeople leads and the sales team is like, “That’s not the right lead,” but if you really boil it down, why is that happening? It’s not because sales don’t want leads. It’s not that marketing is just giving them bad leads. It’s like there’s no sales empathy in the process. And what I mean by that is the title of a salesperson in most organization is account executive.

Sangram Vajre:
So, they already understand account. You ask any salesperson, “What are your top five accounts that you’re working on?” They would tell you, they don’t have to look at Salesforce, they don’t have to look at anything. But if you ask your marketing game, “What are the top five accounts your sales people are working on?” They have no idea. And therein what lies the issue of inbound only, or anything like that as you shared, it’s like, “Yes, we got a great top of the funnel content. But gosh, if you don’t help our salespeople win, we’re going to lose our jobs.” And that’s what Account Based Marketing allows you to do is to be on the same page with your sales team. So, again, it’s literally the definition getting boiled down to, it’s a focused marketing and sales approach.

Joe Sullivan:
Yeah. That’s a great overview. And I think, like you said, in lay man’s terms. Because I think a lot of people hear about ABM, it’s described to them and some people will just say, “Well, isn’t that just sales?” And well, no, not exactly. We’re talking about creating focus here, but marketing and sales working together.

Sangram Vajre:
Yeah, it does. You can go and if you want to go advanced just for two minutes, yes, we can actually have intent data. So, imagine this perfect world and that’s happening for a lot of advanced companies. So, everybody wants to just up level their thoughts, forget everything that you’re doing but just up level. Think that you’re here watching a movie and it’s a 3D movie, so put on your glasses and here we go. So, imagine what’s happening with some of the top companies that are doing this is something like this. They have a list of target accounts and that’s probably 1000 or 1500. They look at intent data that allows them to see which of these 1500 accounts are actually looking for stuff that you are selling without using your company’s name. And then, they’re able to say, “Oh, out of this 1500, these 100 accounts are actually starting to look for stuff, so they’re in the very early stages of their identifying a need in their company. Why not activate our sales team and marketing team to go after those accounts?”

Sangram Vajre:
And imagine, put that on rocket fuel and see if you can do that for every business. And that’s what’s really happening and that’s what 5 years from now will happen. Where every organization will try to get ahead as a competitive advantage in the hearts and minds of the people they’re trying to sell, not when they are ready to buy because at that time they already have made their decision and now you become one of the things that they have to check the box for the financial team that they have looked at three different vendors. You don’t want that, that’s too late. You want to get in early and higher in the organization. And I think that’s where a lot of this intent data and more of that higher level information is super valuable.

Sangram Vajre:
But I’ll tell you, Joe, since 99% of the organization is not doing it, I think almost every person listening to this has a competitive advantage, because in your industry, this intent data may be such a foreign concept. You don’t even have to go there. You may literally, if you would probably be crushing your quotas for the year by literally making sure that sales and marketing agree on a set of accounts and marketing has programs not for everything else out there, but for those accounts that you need to close this month, this quarter, this year.

Joe Sullivan:
Yeah, I totally agree. It’s beyond what a lot of companies in this manufacturing space have already been thinking about. Can you talk a little bit more about intent data and make that a little more concrete for some of the listeners? What exactly are we talking about with intent data? Where does that come from?

Sangram Vajre:
Yeah, so there’s a lot of different data providers out there. Bombora is one of the foremost providers that we partnered up with at Terminus, and lot of our 1000+ customers use. It literally gives you information about… So, let’s say you’re a manufacturing company. You are actually selling some of the manufacturing tools and supplies for, let’s say, Home Depot. Let’s just take that as an example. Okay? And now, that’s what you want to do. That’s one of your account is Home Depot, that you know you can serve them better. It’s great. But you don’t know when Home Depot is going to be looking for it. You can have your sales rep go after and call them up. But if they have 1000 people [inaudible 00:10:34] list, you don’t know which one to call at 8:00 AM in the morning. The priority for sales team just doesn’t exist. So, imagine if you could literally identify Home Depot, somebody over there starting to search some of the keywords and one level deeper there is that let’s say they start looking for manufacturing, supply chain oriented things that aligns with your industry. You can buy those keywords from somebody like Bombora and say, “If anybody searches on these keywords that are related to my industry and my product services, even though it does not say the name of my company, I want to know that.”

Sangram Vajre:
So, what they would do is every time somebody from those companies that you are interested in are looking for those keywords anywhere online, not on your website, but anybody in the wild, it will alert your organization and your sales team. Now, you can see where it goes from there. Now, all of a sudden your sales team and your marketing team, if you’re really looking to take you to the next level is, “Gosh, we got the list.” You won’t just have your sales team call. You will say, “Marketing, let’s actually run some campaign. Let’s just do direct mail with this account because this is one of our top accounts, and they are obviously interested in this topic. Let us be the first one to break into this account and show them that we care and show them that we’re interested.” You can create landing pages specifically designed for your company name slash Home Depot and drive people from there to your landing page.

Sangram Vajre:
So, the level of sophistication can just keep going up depending upon the size of the deal that you’re trying to sell. But that information, dude, right now is readily available compared to five years ago when I started talking about ABM, intent data was nowhere to be found. Nobody really understood what intent data was even, but right now, with all the cookie tracking, IP tracking, KIBO tracking, this information is available. The question is are you going to take the next level of interest and does that matter to you? Or we can go through the MQL, the SQL, the SAL and all these different layers. We’ve qualified people because you don’t have those accounts [inaudible 00:12:41] but in Account Based, there’s no qualification. There is no handoff. It’s like, “Home Depot is on the website. Boom, we need to start calling them,” because there’s no qualification in the process. So, you really save so much time and energy if you really do it well.

Joe Sullivan:
What a great way to be able to channel the time and energy of your team, as so many people are out there on the sales front just flying blind. Their account list is an account list that’s just based on firmographic characteristics. This size company in this part of the country with this many people or this much revenue, but they don’t know who’s buying and they don’t know what activity people from those organizations are doing online to gather information during the buying process So, it makes a ton of sense to be able to help enable your sales team by channeling their energy into the right places where they’re going to have much higher success rates.

Sangram Vajre:
Yeah , and I think what’s really fascinating, Joe, I have seen marketers get promoted. I’ve seen marketers become CMOs in their organization. I’ve seen people getting a lot more bonuses. I really have seen… I remember Daniel Day, who was one of our customers, but he was At snowflake and I moved to another company, I think he’s still a customer of ours at Snowflake. I remember when he came and he said to me… We do this all hands thing where we have a customer come into the office every single month, come in and now we do it virtually, obviously, but we have been doing that for over a year. It’s probably the best marketing program I’ve ever run is not anything else, but have a customer come into the office and share what’s going on, what matters to them about them. So, everybody in the organization knows who you’re doing this for.

Sangram Vajre:
So, I remember Daniel Day coming in and saying, “You guys have changed my life.” And we’re like, “Come on, now. We’re not in the business of saving lives.” He’s like, “No, you don’t understand what you guys have done.” And this is already in 2018, early 2019 maybe. And he was like, “Well, look, I know I can walk into my CFO’s room, I can walk into my CEO’s room, I can walk into my CMO’s room and tell them exactly how what I do drives business. I can tell them of all the pipeline that they look at every single quarter to say are we going to meet our numbers or not?” That’s every company’s challenge, every quarter you’re looking at it. You’re looking at are we going to meet the number or not, you’re looking at it like a hawk. He’s like, “I can tell very clearly, within a ballpark of a few percentage points, which of these accounts we are going to close and which we have absolutely no chances, just bullish sales person saying that they’re going to win.”

Sangram Vajre:
And the reason he can do that is because he can go and say to them like, “Hey, look, we think we’re going to close all of these 50 accounts. Let me tell you, out of these 50 accounts, only 10 accounts have spent any time on our website. So, the chances of the rest 40 closing is slim to none. That may be like, I don’t know what they’re doing, but only these 10 accounts, there are more than three people from that companies spending time on our website. So, I feel very good putting a pipeline number to say that these 10 should be part of our forecast. Not the 40, 40 is gravy if that happens.” And he said, “Nine out of 10 times, I’m literally this close to helping our sales teams forecast the right number.” Now, Joe, think about the power as a marketer you have to actually help your organization forecast where the revenue numbers are going to be.

Joe Sullivan:
So powerful. Well, Sangram, your most recent book, ABM is B2B, came out what? Late last year, was it?

Sangram Vajre:
Late last year, yeah. October-

Joe Sullivan:
Okay, yeah. I owned it within a few days of it going live and had read it a few days later, I think in two sittings or so. It’s a fantastic book and I encourage everybody here to pick it up, but there’s so many quotable lines from your book. But one that I had highlighted that I think really summed it up for me was this, that you wrote, “Not all accounts are equal in value, so why are you creating equal experiences for them? It’s okay to play favorites. In fact, it’s necessary. Assigning tiers is the fairest way to make sure that you design experiences that reflect what each account is worth. Your top tier gets wined and dined, your bottom tier gets Sprite and takeout.” I thought that was so great because it just touches on this on, you said it, not every account is equal yet we’re treating them all the same. We’re not looking at things you’ve talked about, like intent, et cetera. So, can you unpack this idea a little bit more about account tiers?

Sangram Vajre:
Yeah, absolutely, Joe. And thank you, it’s one of my favorite quotes too because… And just so you know, and I’m very open about writing books and stuff. Hey, look, I’m running a company and so I’m not writing every single word in it, but majority of my content came from the podcast that [inaudible 00:17:24] have been doing something really cool. And I literally hired a comedian to help me write a book. And I’m very open to that because I sat down and said, “Here’s all of my content, but I don’t want B2B to be boring to boring. I want it to be better to better. So, help me make this better.” Som I would put it in front of him like, “I want to write about this concept of you have to treat accounts differently and that sounds so boring. Can you help me?” And he came up with idea of like, “Hey, you know what, what if…” And so, he made it sound so much better. So, I’m very open and share people like, “Look, I’ve no problem getting and taking help, and so should everybody take help when you need it.”

Sangram Vajre:
And that example is really the crux of the entire Account Based Marketing idea. If your newsletter that you write goes to everyone, if your webinar goes to everyone, if your podcast goes to everyone, then everybody’s the same. And if everybody’s the same, then you’re watering down the level of experience that you should be creating for your top tier accounts. So, the way we used to fly, Delta Miles, you want a different tier so you can get in early and get a seat and all those things. The tiering, B2C understands this really well. For whatever reason, in B2B we don’t consider experiences based on the size of the deal, the type of the deal, the length of the deal and that makes everybody look the same. And here’s the biggest challenge, your million dollar deal that you’re going to close and a $50,000 deal. And I would encourage everybody as a challenge to go back and look at your biggest deal and your smallest deal, and look at the experiences you’re providing them today. Maybe do a chart and just write it down and see. And if you are 99% of the things, if not 100%, are the same, you got lucky is the only thing I would say. Or you’re overspending on your smaller accounts, you don’t have to, or you’re actually not spending enough to close those deals, more of the bigger deals.

Sangram Vajre:
And so, an example of that would be like we have done recently, we do webinars like everybody else, but now we have started to do webinars based on industry. So, we would only get 10 or 20 people. That’s all we need. We’ll put them together in the same industry and have conversation about how to solve problems in that industry, period. As opposed to trying to say, “Hey, here’s the top of the funnel content for eCommerce marketing,” they’re saying, “No, here it is. Let’s bring together CMOs of manufacturing industry together and talk about that.” It is such a different conversation. It is such more richer, deeper conversation we’re happening. So, you just start looking at we would do a webinar just to get ideas out, but then it would be webinars that are accelerators for, and in that case, we’re doing five or 10 people. I think people and companies are making huge mistake by treating all accounts the same. They’re losing so much money because your competitor right now is wining and dining somebody, is actually giving them really good takeouts or whatever they’re trying to do for them. And if you’re treating everybody the same, you’re completely missing the opportunity that you have at hand. So, I’m glad you brought that up.

Joe Sullivan:
Yeah, well, you can see how it all fits together. You use things like intent data paired with the information you might already have about an account to make smart decisions about where you’re going to have more success. And then, to the broader audience, there are things you’ll do. Your content will play a role there and your newsletter and stuff. But then, as you look inside that smaller group that is the right fit, and they’re showing signs that they’re in the buying process, then those are the ones where you can deploy more of your time and energy too.

Sangram Vajre:
And it changes the game. I’ll give you another example of this real quick. And I share about, but this one it’s in the book, you might remember Pramada, they are probably fits more into the sweet spot of the customers that you probably have and the people who are listening to it. They only needed 100 deals to close in the next two to five years. They don’t need 1000 because every deal is at least a million and it can go up to 10 or something like that. So, really big deals. So, they didn’t care about number of leads, they didn’t care about traffic and stuff. But when they started Account Based programs, their traffic dropped by 70%. Now, anybody who’s thinking of marketing and, “Well, if the traffic drops, you’re not a good marketer. What’s wrong with you?”

Sangram Vajre:
But their pipeline and revenue was going up. So, they looked into what happened and what they identified was because they were so targeted on their list of accounts they were going after, they would only advertising and engaging with these 100 accounts that they had identified as their total addressable market. And as soon as they did that, everything was to them and they didn’t do anything else, that’s all they focused on. They actually went from 22 different technologies to six. Did everything they needed, so their cost of acquisition overall dropped by about 62% just by that. So, when they started to do that, the traffic automatically dropped but it was coming from the right places. So, that’s the questions that we all have to ask. The vanity metrics, that is one of the other things that I jumped into the book for as you might remember, is that I think we’re measuring too many false positives in vanity metrics. I used to measure website traffic going up is great. Now, I ask the question, “So what?” I used to look at number of downloads are great. Now, I ask the question, “So what? Are they the right people? Are there from the right tiers? Are they the people that we want more of? If not, we actually figured out how to waste our money.”

Joe Sullivan:
That’s such a great point. I love that so much, and it’s a concept I’ve talked about with clients too. You articulated that much better than I ever would have, and you see the same thing happening when you’re repositioning your business. Gorilla, we moved from being more of a generalist firm into serving the industrial sector seven or eight years ago, and we’ve honed that more and more. And I was talking about how every time we honed more and more, our traffic dipped more and more. And then, it would pop back up a bit but the quality of leads that were being generated on our site, the people who were appearing on our site were becoming higher and higher because our message was so focused. And it’s a similar thing going on here when you’re running ABM. The volume is misleading, and if you’re looking at those metrics alone, you’ll probably fire your marketer because those vanity metrics,, as you call them, are going in the wrong direction. But it doesn’t matter, look at revenue, look at new customers, are they the right customers, is your pipeline growing? So, I think that’s a really great point.

Sangram Vajre:
Yeah, man, I hope more companies take note on that.

Joe Sullivan:
Yeah, that’s great. So, something I’ve observed online, you can maybe validate this or speak to it from another perspective, but a lot of the content you find, if you’re looking for ABM or Account Based Marketing information or examples of it, almost everything I find is with either huge enterprise organizations or software companies. And I’ve found it a little difficult to find… We developed our methodology with our clients for doing ABM with midsize B2B manufacturers. I’m talking about companies that do $10 million to a $100 million a year in sales, and some of those customers are enterprise, others are smaller. But how do you think ABM methodology can be applied to more small to midsize businesses? Do you think anything changes or is it the same thing?

Sangram Vajre:
It’s a really good question, Joe, because I think ABM is not for everybody.

Joe Sullivan:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Sangram Vajre:
And it goes back to recognizing who your customers are is so important. So, I think people who think that we can sell to everybody, that’s just not true. I used to think that, I assume when we started Terminus, we said, “Well, we can sell to everybody. Our market cap or market size is $5 billion.” It was just nothing but ego and bravado, it wasn’t anything real in a sense. The reality is that five years later, we are 1000 customers right now. So, your market size that big, why didn’t you close faster? So, I think we have to get real with ourselves. We have to look back in the mirror and say, “What is truly our customer size?” And what I’ve seen that on an average, if your bill size is about 50K and if you have more than three people to four people [inaudible 00:25:410] part of the decision making process and if your sales cycle is longer than six months, I think ABM is a perfect fit for you.

Sangram Vajre:
Anything lower than that, I think you start compromising in areas like, “Well, how much time and energy?” Because you would not have the time to do it if you’re doing transactional business. Another example would be if you’re a big company selling to really small deals, like $100, $200 subscription or $1000 subscription, ABM is not a good fit for you because that will take too much of your time. It’s a transactional business. You’re better off getting a brand oriented conversations in the marketplace and bringing people together on it. As opposed to that, you could actually be a 10 people agency, but if your deal sizes are over 50K or 100K, ABM is perfect for you. Why wouldn’t you do that? Because now you have to be very personalized, prescriptive around how you’re going to reach out to it. So, it really depends on who your customers are in some ways and the size of the deal, the number of people involved in the decision making process and also the length of those deals.

Joe Sullivan:
Yeah, that’s a great answer. And so, it’s less about you and your company and more about the types of deals and the size of deals you’re making with your customers. It makes perfect sense. A lot of the companies that we consult are what you described. They’re an equipment manufacturer and they sell a piece of equipment that’s $600,000 or $2 million, and there’s a six to 12 month buy cycle and they’re talking to engineers and plant managers and procurement and the C suite. And there are all these different people on the buyer’s end who are going to influence the sale somewhere along the way, and those are the situations typically where we say there needs to be an account based component here because it’s worth investing in that sale, the time and energy of your people.

Sangram Vajre:
Yeah. It really is super critical because that’s where you actually mind might be seeing, if you are an organization listening to this right now and thinking that, “Well, I have a different goal for my sales and marketing team. We have a lead problem. We may be having winrate issues.” The real issue that you really have, in my opinion just looking at, it’s not a demand problem. It’s actually a pipeline velocity problem, and that happens because those deals that you already identify the accounts, but they’re not moving fast enough. So, you need to figure out what’s wrong with that. And we keep going back to the marketing team saying, “Hey, pump in more leads, pump in more inbound.” I would literally guaranteed, because we are literally in the middle of the year right now, organizations can stop having any more lead generation whatsoever right now, and focus on pipeline and expansion programs. They will hit their number. As a matter of fact, they will crush their numbers for the rest of the year. If they made their overall budget for net new demand zero, don’t get any more net new, whatever’s in the pipeline and close them or whatever is in your expansion deals, try to close them. And whatever comes through inbound is great, that’s gravy. They will crush their quota because they will be less distracted, they’ll be more focused and they will drive [inaudible 00:28:38].

Joe Sullivan:
Great summary, love that. So, where do you see ABM headed? The software’s changing so fast. Your own software, but also the things you’ve described. The way intent data’s becoming more available to us. Where do you see things going in the next few years?

Sangram Vajre:
Well, I already wrote the sequel on ABM. ABM and then ABM is B2B. So, I’m already washing my hands of the fact that, “Hey, look, I thought ABM is the future, but in reality, the second book, [inaudible 00:29:05], but ABM is actually B2B. So, two years, five years from now, ABM may not even exist. It’s just better marketing.” So, what I think is opportunity for all of us is this idea that I shared earlier, and maybe that’s what I’ll write next is B2B is not boring to boring, it’s better to better. And I think there’s an opportunity for all B2B companies, manufacturing or anything, is that we have an opportunity to create really better experiences for our customers. And I think what most companies are doing, if you really look at it, we’re creating boring experiences for our customers.

Sangram Vajre:
So, the reality is that we look at it and see it, and we expect that. That’s the problem, we haven’t raised the bar on experiences. So, I feel like it’s almost a new movement that I feel or sense coming is going from, “You know what? So what I’m a manufacturing equipment company show up selling whatever I’m selling. Why not create campaigns that are you’re sending Harley Davidson?” Make it feel so real, so genuine, so personal that you actually move people to purchase, move people emotionally to make them think that, “Hey, I want that.” And I think that transition really hasn’t happened in B2B. So, my thesis is we are probably going to go through a Renaissance period of, “All right, the boring to boring is off, now everybody’s got to be creative and create more better to better experiences.”

Joe Sullivan:
Great answer. What’s on the horizon for you, Sangram?

Sangram Vajre:
Well, for me, I don’t know, man. I’m doing so many different things. The podcast, company’s doing good. I think I shared with you maybe on a separate note, I started a private marketing group and-

Joe Sullivan:
I’m a ember. Yeah. A recent member.

Sangram Vajre:
To me, that’s my playground right now, Joe. To test ideas, to see what’s going on, give other people a voice that may not feel comfortable being in the outside world and give a voice and videos and stuff like that. I want to see more of marketers become CMOs in the future. I think most marketers don’t really know what it takes to become that. But for me, my heart right now really is focused on building another community where people are actually hungry to be better marketers. And I want to see that happen with their lives and their work. It’s a big community we’re headed, so if anybody wants to join, they can hit you or me because you know it’s all invite only, so that’d b really cool.

Joe Sullivan:
Exactly, there’s some really cool stuff happening there already. And I like your tagline is something like, “It’s all about getting 1% better.” Just continuously getting 1% better at marketing.

Sangram Vajre:
[crosstalk 00:31:42], man. I think there’s a compounding effect of that. I never understood until it started to become. And when you’re intentional about it, that every week I’ve got to get 1% better. I don’t know what it is and how it is. But when you take an audit and say, “Hey, I got 1% better,” it’s not daunting for you to become, like 1000% better by any stretch, but we all can get 1% better. But what’s the beauty is that imagine if you get 1% better truly every week, that’s 52% better at the end of the year. So, it’s the compound impact of that is profoundly life-changing. So, yeah, that’s the goal. That’s why we do the survey every Thursday, religiously. Are we getting 1 % better? Are you doing something? And there is a matrix that allows you to think about you can make a great connection and become 1% better because now you just learned about someone or something and that makes you better.

Joe Sullivan:
That’s great. Great concept. I’m excited to get a little more actively involved in it. Just joined a few weeks ago and it’s very cool. Yeah. Well, this has been an amazing conversation, so many great nuggets in here. I know our audience is going to get a ton of value on it. And so, where’s the best place for listeners to find you online or to learn more about Terminus, to pick up a copy of ABM is B2B? All this awesome stuff you’re doing, where would you send someone?

Sangram Vajre:
Well, two things. One, I would love people to send me a LinkedIn message if they got something out of it. What did they learn from it? If there was something that just jumped at it. If you did, I’ll send you a free copy of my book. How’s that?

Joe Sullivan:
That’s awesome.

Sangram Vajre:
Yeah.

Joe Sullivan:
You better take him up on that. Yeah.

Sangram Vajre:
Yeah, well, take me up on it. I don’t care how many people come to me. Tell me one thing that really connected for you and hopefully we will do more. I will do something with it and I’ll just shoot you a copy. No questions asked.

Joe Sullivan:
Well, hey, we don’t even have to send you the Amazon then if you go that route, so that’s a deal. Awesome. That’s great. So, check out Sangram, find him on LinkedIn, see what Terminus is doing. Look for his book, ABM is B2B. Peak.community is the community he’s started for marketers. A lot of stuff you can take away from following Sangram. So, just wanted to say thank you for doing this. It’s been an awesome episode and thrilled you could be a part of it.

Sangram Vajre:
Anytime, Joe, anytime for you.

Joe Sullivan:
Awesome. And as for the rest of you, I hope to catch you on the next episode of the Manufacturing Executive.

Joe Sullivan:
You’ve been listening to the Manufacturing Executive podcast. To ensure that you never miss an episode, subscribe to the show in your favorite podcast player. If you’d like to learn more about industrial marketing and sales strategy, you’ll find an ever expanding collection of articles, videos, guides, and tools specifically for B2B manufacturers at gorilla76.com/learn. Thank you so much for listening. Until next time.