The Manufacturing Executive: Episode 31

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

The Manufacturing Executive: Episode 29

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Episode show notes

The Manufacturing Executive: Episode 28

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Episode show notes

What is Voice of Customer? How can Voice of Customer be used to curate tailored content across your industry? Why is this important?

These are a few of the many questions answered on today’s show with industry expert, Dave Loomis.

In this episode, we spoke with Dave Loomis, President of Loomis Marketing on episode 28 of The Manufacturing Executive podcast. Our dynamic conversation covered…

• How do you facilitate a voice of customer meeting?
• What are the benefits of a voice of customer meeting?
• Understanding the pain customers feel and ideal outcomes 

Want more resources and information?

For more ways to serve others as an individual or business, Dave has written a book called Marketing Is Everything We Do. Dave also suggests checking out New Product Blueprinting by Dan Adams and Jobs to Be Done by Tony Ulwick.

The Manufacturing Executive: Episode 27

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Episode show notes

Somewhere along the way, we all run into that guy…

The customer’s procurement guy…

The buyer.

And with supply chain disruption fresh in all our minds, it’s time we talked to that guy.

In this episode of the podcast, I spoke with Aaron Brimer, a supply chain leader and founder of the The Manufacturing Procurement Guy podcast. We talked about mitigating risk through smart procurement practices.

Aaron and I discussed:

1. Second sourcing
2. Inventory management
3. Negotiation
4. …And the role engineers play in the buying decision

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

The Manufacturing Executive: Episode 26

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Episode show notes

I asked listeners what topic they wanted to learn more about on the podcast.

You said “expanding into international markets.”

So I put the word out among my network and discovered today’s guest. He founded a gas company in 2002 that now does business in many foreign countries.

My guest on this episode is Ashley Madray, executive vice president of Gas Innovations, a producer, purifier, and packager of specialty gases.

Ashley and I discussed:

• Who he is, how his company began, and how it expanded internationally
• Common challenges to international expansion
• The impact of doing business globally

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

The Manufacturing Executive: Episode 25

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Episode show notes

The workplace is experiencing a massive transformation.

I thought we should start at a high level and talk about that.

So we did.

In this episode of the podcast, I spoke with Jon Franko (I just call him “Franko”), my co-founder here at Gorilla 76, about how to grow a great team rooted in relationships.

Franko and I discussed:

1. What employees value most in an employer right now
2. A little thing we do called “Retention Brainstorming” and how it can help you
3. How to use Glassdoor to your advantage

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

The Manufacturing Executive: Episode 24

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Episode show notes

If we create an environment where people on the production floor can help the company be better, they’re more than happy to use their knowledge to do it.

Unfortunately, many supervisors and managers have not been given the training, development, and coaching to do the job on their own or to help the company grow.

On this episode of the podcast, Gayle Noakes, a 20+ year veteran of the manufacturing industry, joined me to talk about building leaders at all levels to achieve business results.

Gayle and I discussed:

1. Giving people the right training for their roles
2. Creating the right balance among activities in complex manufacturing roles
3. Whose voices we should be hearing — but often aren’t — on a daily basis

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

The Manufacturing Executive: Episode 23

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Episode show notes

It’s time to face reality about sales channels, technology, and how people buy.

E-commerce is going to dominate sales. Business was moving in that direction pre-COVID, but the pandemic dramatically accelerated those trends.

You can fight this reality, or you can grow with it.

On this episode of the podcast, I talked with Kevin Haar, Chief Operating Officer at Super Bright LEDs, about the transition to e-commerce.

Kevin and I discussed:

1. What e-commerce can offer now that it couldn’t in the past
2. The impact of online sales in different parts of the organization
3. Roadblocks and challenges in e-commerce adoption

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

The Manufacturing Executive: Episode 16

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Episode show notes

From Industry 4.0 to 3D printing to wearable technology, there are so many advancements happening in manufacturing.

But it’s easy to get sidetracked by these shiny objects.

We need to focus on the problem or goal at hand first. And then APPLY the right-fit technology accordingly.

On this episode of the podcast, I invited Jonathan Hensley, co-founder and CEO of Emerge Interactive, a digital product consulting firm that works with companies to improve operational agility and customer experience.

Jonathon and I talked about:

1. Digital products and services that might be applied in the industrial sector
2. Customer experience in the data
3. Changing operations, supply chain disruption, and labor retention in the manufacturing space

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

The Manufacturing Executive: Episode 9

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

Episode show notes

Back in May, I wrote an article entitled Summer Reading 12 lessons from 12 books for 12 weeks. The author of one of those 12 books, Ian Altman, is my guest on this episode of The Manufacturing Executive!

A bestselling author and B2B growth expert, Ian started, sold, and grew his prior companies from zero to over $1 billion in value. He has since spent years researching how executives make decisions. Ian’s modern approach has helped many businesses turn marginal growth into explosive growth and thrive where their competitors struggled merely to survive.

Ian and I talk about:

• Why you should flip your sales message
• The three questions you need to ask to make an informed decision
• How to weed out wrong-fit clients
• How to pivot away from in-person meetings during COVID-19

Resources we talked about:

• Same Side Selling on Amazon
• Same Side Selling Academy
• Ian Altman’s Website
• Growth In Crisis Course

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 co-founder of the industrial marketing agency Gorilla 76. So back in May, I wrote an article titled “Summer Reading: 12 Lessons From 12 Books For 12 Weeks”, and in this article I pulled standout quotes from 12 of my all time favorite business books. And today, I’m pretty darn excited because my guest is the author of one of those 12 books. So let me take a moment to introduce bestselling author and B2B growth expert Ian Altman. Ian started, sold and grew his prior companies from zero to over $1 billion in value. He has since spent years researching how executives make decisions. His moderate approach has been instrumental in helping many businesses turn marginal growth into explosive growth, and to help them thrive where their competitors struggle to merely survive. Ian is a co-author of the bestseller, Same Side Selling, now in its second edition. You can read hundreds of his articles on Forbes and Inc. And Ian is a founder of the Same Side Selling Academy, rated one of the top five sales development programs globally. Ian, welcome to the show.

Ian:
Joe, thanks for having me on. And I’m flattered that, see, originally you said, Hey, I wrote this thing about the top 12 books on business, and I was expecting you to say, and none of those people were available. So I have Ian here instead.

Joe Sullivan:
No, you made the list, and you are, yeah. I can’t remember exactly how I stumbled across Same Side Selling, I want to say I heard maybe you as a guest on a podcast or something years, maybe five years ago or so. But the book was intriguing, I picked it up and immediately, it became one of my favorites for a number of reasons, which I want to get into today.

Joe Sullivan:
But yeah, and it’s, among a few things I’d love to talk to you about. But first, could you give our listeners a little bit of background on you, just build on the intro, tell us how you wound up where you are today?

Ian:
Well, the big thing, I mean, you talked about my work. I started my first company in 1993. We became a Fast 50 company by 1998, some of the 50 fastest growing companies in the Washington DC region. We were also the only company on the list who was not a government defense contractor. Which was funny, because once we hit the list, we’d get all these inbound prospecting calls from people talking about what we needed for government contracting. We’re not a government contractor. No, no, you’re number 21 on the list. Yeah, we’re not in that space.

Ian:
And we built a software company then, starting in 98, in addition to the core consulting business that we had. In 2005, I got approached by some investment bankers out in New York, we sold the company for cash and stock, and I served as managing director of the parent company. We grew the value of the business from $100 million to actually about $2 billion in a little over three years. And I was flying 200,000 miles a year, I wasn’t spending time with my wife or my kids, and I just thought after a while, why am I still doing this?

Ian:
I didn’t have a good answer, so I stopped. And people said, what are you going to do now? And my first thought was, I’ll just do the same sort of thing. I’ll just build a new company like that again. And one of my friends said, you know, a bunch of us were talking, and any time our businesses were struggling to grow, you seem more excited about helping us fix something in our business than you were about your own business. Why don’t you do that? And I said, do what? They said, well, help businesses grow. And I said, well, there’s a business for that? And they said, well, you didn’t necessarily need that, but most of us, yeah. We go to experts in that type of space.

Ian:
And so I started speaking in, what was this, probably 2008, 2009, something like that. Started speaking at events, and I’ve been doing it ever since. So speaking, coaching and guiding people on how they grow their businesses with integrity. It’s frustrating for me to see the frustration that people have with sales and marketing, because it doesn’t have to be that miserable experience.

Joe Sullivan:
Sure, absolutely. So what came first? The organization, Same Side Selling and your training program, or the book?

Ian:
So the book, we released the first version, I think it was in 2014 or 2015. And so definitely the speaking and everything came first. In fact, the first book I wrote was called Upside Down Selling, that is a really short book that people can read that gives them the gist of, it’s in essence, how do you take non sales people and teach them some of the core principles of Same Side Selling before Same Side Selling existed. And then I met Jack Quarrels, who spent two decades in purchasing and procurement, and Jack actually attended a workshop I was delivering on sales. It was the Upside Down Selling workshop.

Ian:
And I thought, wow, this is cool. Jack’s coming to kind of see what’s going on, and see if he can learn something. And the reality is, that Jack had found that some of the vendors who, they were willingly paying much higher fees to, than other vendors, the common thread was they would say, Oh yeah, I through this program with this guy Ian Altman, and Jack wanted to understand what they were being taught.

Ian:
And when he came to the program, he said, well, this is all integrity based. In fact, this makes perfect sense. This isn’t dishonest, this is totally honest. And then we got to know each other, and said, there are no books written from the perspective of the buyer and the seller. We should do this. And fortunately it’s resonated with quite a few people, enough to the point that we released a second edition about a year ago, and it’s been a very successful road. I just think that the title resonates with people. It’s like, Oh, that makes sense. You can understand conceptually, ah, I’m getting onto the same side, not on opposing sides.

Joe Sullivan:
Yeah. And I think that’s what’s so unique about it, having the perspective from procurement, or the buyer’s side, and then the sales side. I see it all the time, in my world and the world of my customers, where it’s like it’s this battle in the sale of buyer versus seller, and there’s this race to the bottom on price and everything. Yeah, it’s one versus the other, and the whole concept of your book, which I think you chose the perfect name for it, is let’s work together to figure out if there’s a fit. Let’s come to a common solution that makes sense for everybody. So I just thought it was so unique in that sense.

Ian:
Thank you. Yeah, it’s fascinating that almost every book that I’ve ever seen on sales either uses a battle metaphor, or a game metaphor.

Joe Sullivan:
Yeah.

Ian:
And if we take the second one first, in a game, there’s a winner and a loser. In a battle, the loser actually dies. And then we wonder why there’s this adversarial tension, instead of, we use the model or the metaphor of a puzzle that says, look, if you’re putting a puzzle together, you each have to be able to see each other’s pieces, or you’ll never be able to put the puzzle together. And if you’re not trying to put the same puzzle together, then there’s just not a good fit.

Ian:
And so it changes the dynamic, where it’s less about “how do I convince this person that they need to buy from me, they just don’t know it yet”. Instead, it changes it to “look, for the right organizations, we’re a great fit. We’re not a great fit for everybody, so I don’t yet know if I can help you, but if you’re facing these sorts of problems, I’m happy to learn more to see if I can help.” Makes it so that you’re instantly on the same side.

Joe Sullivan:
Yeah, I love that. You know, one of the biggest issues that I see with sales in the manufacturing sector, where the listeners of this show live, and our customers at Gorilla is, everybody defaults to talking about themselves. It’s ‘we do this’ and ‘we sell that’ and ‘our people are the best’ and ‘our competitors are phonies’, and you know, it’s all about us, right? And what I love about what you call the Same Side pitch is that you kind of flip the positioning statement, or the sales message, on its head, and you lead with the customer’s issue. I was wondering if you could talk about that a little bit.

Ian:
Sure. Well for starters, that example that you give of people always talking about themselves, and here’s what we do, and here’s the way we approach the world, and everyone else’s evil, is when companies suffer from what I like to call “Axis Displacement Disorder”. And that’s where the person doing the selling believes that somehow the axis of the earth has shifted, and now the world revolves around them.

Ian:
And it doesn’t. In fact, if anything, the world revolves around our client. So one of the things in researching how executives make and approve decisions, one of the things that we did is we run people through an exercise, and I’ve done this exercise with over 10,000 executives around the world. From companies ranging from, relatively small startups, under $1 million in revenue, to multi billion dollar multinationals, virtually everywhere on the planet, except for the continent of Africa, and we haven’t gone anywhere on the Antarctic. So outside of that, I got you covered.

Ian:
And we asked people, well let’s say someone in your team comes to you and wants to spend money on this thing. Call it a Gazurtenblat, it doesn’t matter what it’s called. And they say, we’re going to spend $20,000. It takes 45 days for the vendor to implement it, requires no resources whatsoever on our part, and they give us a 10 year guarantee. The challenge I give people is, what are the five questions you would have to have answered to be comfortable making an informed decision, to either approve or deny that request? And I let people work in teams to come up with their list of five, and then they narrow it down to their top three. And they ask the same three questions everywhere, no matter the size of the company, no matter where they are geographically.

Ian:
And the three questions come down to this. The first one is, what problem does this solve? So think about it, you’re going to spend money. Well, in essence, what problem does this solve? Which, is immediately followed by the second question, why do we need it? Which is, what happens if we don’t solve that issue? Meaning, what’s the problem, and then what’s the consequence of not solving that problem? And then the third question is, what’s the likely result or outcome if we make this investment?

Ian:
And by the way, the distant fourth in all this is ‘what are the alternatives’. And the reason why it’s a distant fourth is that if you answer those first three questions well, the fourth one becomes implied. So the vendor who you’re in total sync with about what problem they’re trying to solve for you, and why you need their help, who happens to also be the same vendor who delivers the best, most likely outcome for you, that’s your vendor. That’s the one you pick.

Joe Sullivan:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Ian:
So if we know that that’s how people make decisions, what problem does it solve, why do we need it, what’s the likely outcome or result. Then, what the heck are we doing by leading with “here’s what we do as a company, and here’s how our widget works”? It does not align with how people make decisions. So instead, what do we lead with? Well, our clients come to us when they’re facing these types of problems that have these types of consequences. For the right organizations, we deliver this specific type of outcome. And now I need to disarm the notion that I’m just there to sell something, so I say, but the way we approach that isn’t the right fit for everybody. I don’t yet know whether or not we can help you, but if those are issues you’re facing, I’m happy to learn more to see whether or not we might be able to help.

Ian:
And that structure is what we call the Same Side Pitch, it’s in chapter four of the book. If you search, if you Google Same Side Pitch, you can probably find excerpts of this for free, if you don’t want to get the book. It doesn’t matter, if people have the book, they know where to find it in the book. So the idea is that the Same Side Pitch follows this construct of entice, disarm and discover. So first we entice by sharing problems that we’ve solved with dramatic or extraordinary results. We then disarm the notion that we’re just there to sell something, and then we trigger a discovery phase to learn more about their situation, to see whether or not we might be able to help.

Joe Sullivan:
So yeah, it’s a great model, a great infrastructure for doing it. And I can see, I love the puzzle piece analogy, because if you can just blatantly say, these are the types of companies that we’re good at helping, these are the problems that those types of companies typically experience, this is how we can help solve those problems. But, not everybody’s the right fit for us. All of a sudden, you start to weed out companies that aren’t the right fit. I imagine it makes you more efficient in your sales process, because now you’re spending time with companies that actually could be the right customers, right?

Ian:
Sure. Well, the idea is this, what people used to be taught – and by the way, we’re going to use G76 as an example. So in a second, I’m going to ask you, well, what are the problems that your clients would face? So you have a second to think about it.

Joe Sullivan:
All right.

Ian:
But what I want you to think about is this. If you’re leading with what people have often been taught in the past is, you ask an open ended question like ‘what keeps you up at night?’. And you might ask somebody what keeps you up at night, and they say, Oh, my dog licks himself. All right. Well, what do you have for that? Do you have a solution? No. So then you’re fishing going, Oh, well, what else?

Ian:
Well, I got concerns about X, Y, and Z. Yeah, we don’t do that either. Now you’re fishing for an opportunity, as opposed to, if you think about it, my guess is, some of your best clients were facing a problem that they weren’t even aware of until you helped them realize that it was an issue.

Joe Sullivan:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Ian:
And so if you say to them, what’s your biggest problem, they might not even realize it. One of the questions that we’ll ask people is, well, zero to 10, how well do your salespeople perform? And no one ever gives a 10, it’s usually like a five.

Joe Sullivan:
Okay.

Ian:
So, how much of that do you attribute to a hiring problem, and how much would you attribute to a skills problem? They go, it’s probably like 80% skills. Okay. So what are you doing to invest in those skills? And it’s like, the head explodes and goes, Oh. Right? But if you asked them, Hey, what’s your biggest challenge? They would never say it’s the selling skill side. But oftentimes, it is. So going back to the Same Side Pitch, if you’re okay with it,

Joe Sullivan:
Yeah.

Ian:
We’ll use your business’s example.

Joe Sullivan:
Fire away. Like a twofer.

Ian:
So what’s the biggest challenge that you solve for your clients?

Joe Sullivan:
I would say the biggest challenge is that they’re not getting in front of enough of the right people from the right companies.

Ian:
And why is that a problem?

Joe Sullivan:
Because if they’re not doing that, then they’re relying on their existing customer base or referrals, and are often stuck serving customers who are not profitable, and they wind up kind of on this hamster wheel.

Ian:
Yeah. Okay. So your Same Side Pitch might be, well, manufacturers come to us when their message of the amazing products and services they have, aren’t getting in front of the right clients. And that means that either their inferior competitors are winning that business, or at a minimum, the company is forced to just keep trying to harvest the existing clients, who you can eventually run out of additional things you can sell your existing clients.

Ian:
For the right organizations, they tell us that we deliver marketing solutions that attract those clients, fill the top of their funnel, and give them a disproportionate share of mind from those ideal customers. But the way we approach that, it’s not the right fit for every company.

Ian:
So I don’t yet know if I can up your manufacturing company. But if that’s something you’re facing, I’m happy to learn more to see if we might be able to help. And so that’s what it sounds like, is first understanding what are those problems that we solve? And then, what the consequence is. Now, I just kind of winged it, so it may not be perfect, but it might not suck.

Joe Sullivan:
Well you know what, I’m glad we’re recording this, because now I can just transcribe it and copy and paste right into our website, right?

Joe Sullivan:
No, that’s right on the money. I mean, it’s exactly the convers- I can understand the power of having that conversation. And especially when you’re in a niche, and you have a very specific type of customer, and you know that customer really well, you’ve seen all these patterns over time, right? While you can’t make assumptions about what your prospects need, you’ve seen these problems before, and you’re able to speak to them.

Ian:
Absolutely. In my business it comes down to, it’s the earning attention side. It’s people feeling that they’re commoditized. So, wow. We’ve got somebody that’s head and shoulders above the competition, but our clients see us as a commodity just like everybody else. Or, there’s this whole shift of how do we shift the conversation from price to value? Because everyone wants to beat us up. Those are the types of things that I hear, time and time again.

Ian:
So that’s when people say, what do you do? Well, my clients are usually facing one of these problems. Boom, boom, boom. And if that doesn’t resonate, it’s probably not the right fit today. It doesn’t mean that it’ll never be, but they’re probably not the right client today.

Joe Sullivan:
There’s a line from your book that I’ve quoted, I’ve had a picture of your book up there, I’ve had the quote highlighted in a number of times I’ve been in front of our own clients, and hopefully it’s sold you some books along the way without you realizing it. But the line that I really love, because it just speaks so well to a lot of things that we preach at Gorilla and try to teach our clients, is this. It says, you said the goal of being an educator is not to convince, but to include a prospect in your perspective or knowledge base, so that you build a common mutual understanding.

Ian:
Yep.

Joe Sullivan:
And I just love that quote so much, because everybody in my world, in this manufacturing world, they just default, like I said earlier, to talking about themselves.

Joe Sullivan:
And that’s all you see in their marketing. It’s brochure marketing, it’s websites filled with product pages, which you need that stuff. I’m not saying you don’t need it. But what we emphasize so much is that you have to take these elements of a consultative sale, and you’ve got to bring them down into your marketing process as well, because the first touch point that a lot of your future customers will have with you is the content you publish and the things you say. And so I was just kind of curious to hear your take on that particular quote, and this idea of being an educator.

Ian:
Well, I always say that the best quotes in the book, Jack probably wrote. But the idea behind this is that when your client or prospect doesn’t decide to do business with you, they’ve decided not to spend money with you, one of two things has happened. Either they don’t believe that the problem that you’re talking about solving for them is that big of a deal, at least not compared to other things on their plate. Or, they don’t believe in the result or outcome that you’re allegedly going to deliver, or both.

Ian:
And so when companies talk about ‘here are our features’ and ‘here are our capabilities’ and all this whizzbang stuff, what’s the client wondering? What problem does it solve? Why do I need it? What’s the likely outcome or result? So the idea is that if you believe in the issue, the impact of the results, and the client doesn’t, it doesn’t count. Similarly, if they believe in it, but you don’t, it doesn’t count. So it’s got to be a mutual understanding. If you both are on the same page about what problem you’re trying to solve, if you’re both on the same page about what happens if they don’t solve it, and you both have consistent expectations about what the results should be, then there’s a level of trust. If you think about it, if you’re buying from somebody, and you haven’t had a meaningful conversation about what the results need to look like, what’s going through the customer’s mind? The client is thinking, yeah, but do they really understand what we’re trying to accomplish?

Ian:
But if you ask the questions up front about what does success looks like, and how are we going to measure it, then it’s just the client saying, yeah, I think they’re actually going to follow through, or not. But at least everyone’s on the same page about what it is you’re trying to accomplish.

Ian:
You know, one of the things that I often share, especially with people in the manufacturing side is, so let’s say you had two different vendors. One vendor is asking you about who needs to be involved in actually making a purchase. The other vendor says, what could put the results at risk, and what are we going to measure together to make sure that we get the right results for you? Well, which vendor would you rather deal with? The person who’s focused on the sale, or the vendor who’s focused on the results? All right?

Ian:
Obviously, the results side.

Joe Sullivan:
Right.

Ian:
And then I’ll say, well, so would you be willing to pay more for the vendors focused on results? And people almost universally say oh yeah, I’d pay more for that. Okay. How much more? And the most common answer is somewhere between 10 and 20% more.

Ian:
And then I asked the following question, which is, so how much less would you have to pay for it to be a good deal, but you don’t get the results that you need? The answer is, it doesn’t matter. If I don’t get the results I need, it was a waste of time and resources, let alone the money. So when companies can learn how to pivot, to focus on results instead of focusing on just getting the sale, that’s when everything changes. That’s when clients routinely pay more for your services than for other peoples. And there’s a whole thing that we don’t have time to discuss today, that talks about differentiation and how do you stand out over the competition.

Joe Sullivan:
Sure. Yeah, I love that.

Joe Sullivan:
Well, Ian, we are recording this in August of 2020. The world is still upside down in a lot of ways, and it looks like it may be for a while. One of the biggest struggles that I’m seeing among B2B manufacturers is they’re not sure what to do with this big gap that’s being left by the absence of trade shows. And not only trade shows, but just being able to get on a plane and fly across the country to see a customer, or a prospect. So many of these companies are reliant on that in person interaction. And so I’m curious, from your perspective, what you’re seeing with the companies you consult, and what you think these organizations can be doing in the meantime to fill that void.

Ian:
It’s interesting. In the Same Side Selling Academy, we do a monthly coaches corner column. One of the most prevalent topics of late has been, so what do we do when we can’t have in person meetings, when we can’t rely on networking? When we used to get 80% of our leads through these trade shows that now don’t exist, what do we do? And so, what we need to do is immediately pivot to think like our customers. Now, the smart companies already were thinking like their customers, but there’s still time to catch up. Which is, okay, what are the questions that our clients would ask? My friend Marcus Sheridan, in his book “They Ask, You Answer”, Marcus talks like you’re in the marketing world. You undoubtedly know Marcus, as well.

Joe Sullivan:
Love, love They Ask, You Answer. Love it, yeah.

Ian:
And so the whole idea is that, how do you create content that is meaningful for your client or prospect? And it comes down to Marcus talks about his big five of content marketing, five key topics that move the needle. And one of them is talking about price. One of them is talking about best of and comparisons, rankings, and reviews, I think it is.

Joe Sullivan:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Ian:
And so the idea is to make it so that you’re speaking to the problems you solve, not your features and capabilities. So if, for example, you did a case study that talked about how you solve this problem for another organization, it used to be when people did case studies, they would write a little bit about what the client was doing. Then they would write three or 400 pages about themselves and how smart they are as a manufacturer. And then in the end, it would say “contact us for more information”.

Joe Sullivan:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Ian:
And instead, what I suggest is, you condense things and you say, so here’s a manufacturing company that, whether it’s a manufacturer, whether it’s a, whatever their incline is. Here’s this organization, they were having this problem, and here’s why that problem was so important. Notice, what am I starting with? What problem were they trying to solve, and why did they need to do it?

Ian:
Then, I give you an entire sentence. Not a compound sentence, but a sentence that says they came to us for help. And then, you talk about the result and outcome they ended up with, which barely mentions your product or service. So it says, when they came to us and they use the [inaudible 00:25:05] A2020, today they’re able to do this now. They’ve captured more market share. They’ve shortened their time to market, they’ve reduced errors, they’ve improved efficiency, their dogs and cats now peacefully get along together, whatever it is. And that’s all great.

Ian:
So somebody reads that, and they say, wow, that’s really great. It could be a video, it could be text, doesn’t matter. After they’ve consumed that content, they’re only going to look at that if they’re having that same problem. So now we’re already narrowing down our filter to the right people.

Ian:
And then what happens is, they say, wow. Yeah, I didn’t think about the consequences of that. Yeah, I bet you we had the same consequence, and wow, I’d sure like to have that same outcome. Only, the vendor didn’t describe the exact solution. So if you’re that customer, what do you do? You either pick up the phone or you email the company and say, how did you solve that?

Ian:
And then it’s about training the rep who answers that call to not say, “Oh, here’s how we solved it”, but instead say, “what was it about that case that piqued your interest?” And immediately talk about what’s important to them as a customer, not talking about your stuff.

Joe Sullivan:
Perfect, love it. So case studies, but focused on the problem and the outcome.

Ian:
So basically, it’s just taking all of your marketing mindset and shifting it to a focus on what problems do we solve, what’s the information that people are wondering about, and guess what? If there’s a certain problem, you might say, here are three ways to solve this problem. And guess what? You might start by saying, look, oftentimes people come to us to solve this problem, and that’s something that we do. But in the event that you can’t afford to do it the way that we do it, here are two or three alternatives that could work for you.

Ian:
Because the person who’s going to go through all the headaches to do it the hard way, they’re going to do that anyhow.

Joe Sullivan:
Sure, sure.

Ian:
But other people are going to look and say, well, those three ways look like a lot of work, we’re not doing that. Let’s just call these guys.

Joe Sullivan:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Ian:
And then you’re narrowing your field, so if you just put out a whole bunch of marketing hype that says here’s how cool we are, no one’s going to care.

Joe Sullivan:
Right.

Ian:
If instead you say, okay, how do we attract the right interest by speaking to the problems that these people are facing day in and day out, then you’re onto something. In the Same Side Selling Academy, I created a course called Growth In Crisis that we give people, people can access for free. They just go to the website, samesidesellingacademy.com, and you can click and get that course for free.

Ian:
One of the first things I talk about is that in this type of crisis environment, your goal, first and foremost is to be helpful. And so I thought it’d be kind of cynical if I then charged for the course. So we just made it available for free, but it’s the whole idea of, how can you help other people and talk about the problems that they’re facing and how to solve them? And the right people will come back and do business with you, that’s okay.

Joe Sullivan:
Yeah. Makes sense. And so with in person events, trade shows out the door, so creating content that’s actually helpful. How do you get it out there, from your perspective? Are you an inbound guy, an outbound guy, do you like both?

Ian:
It’s a little bit of both. So if you already have a good list, then you’re sharing information, and you’re constantly seeking feedback. Hey, here’s this piece of content we shared. What else would you like to hear? I use LinkedIn Live, and so at the end of every LinkedIn Live, I’ll post something that says, what other topics would you like to hear about?

Joe Sullivan:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Ian:
Because the idea is, I’m just trying to serve that audience. And what are the questions that you have? You know, Hey, play stump the guesser. Ask a question that you don’t think we can answer. Oh, here’s a really hard one. Because if you’re the person they’re coming to you for a lot of answers, then you’re probably also the person going to come – now, if you basically solicit questions for things that have nothing to do with your business, that’s going to be harder, but it can be related to it.

Ian:
I think Marcus talks about, I think it’s Columbia Sports or one of those Columbia Outerwear, I think has a whole app that they produced on knots, on how to tie knots. Bill said, well, they don’t sell rope. Yeah, you’re missing the point. Their audience is people who are on boats, and camping and this and that, who would like an app on, how do I tie this type of knot or that type of knot? So they’re serving their audience, so it’s relevant.

Ian:
But if they were posting something about doing sous-vide cooking, their audience wouldn’t care, because on a boat, they’re probably not firing up the sous-vide.

Joe Sullivan:
Of course, yeah. It’s all about understanding the customer, and being a resource to them.

Ian:
Sure.

Joe Sullivan:
Love it. Well Ian, this has been a fantastic conversation. It’s been an honor having the opportunity to talk to the coauthor of one of my absolute favorite business books.

Joe Sullivan:
Can you tell us the best place for listeners to find you online, where you’d send them and where they could pick up a copy of Same Side Selling?

Ian:
Absolutely. So you can pick up the Same Side Selling just about anywhere books are sold. Amazon tends to be the one of the most popular places now, but you can also get it in the bookstores as well. If you go to Ianaltman.com, you’ll get me, or Same Side Selling Academy, gets everything on the Academy side, and people can always reach out with any questions. Because sometimes people will read the book or hear something, and they’ll post a question, and it’s amazing because I’ll usually get questions that say, well, I’m sure Ian doesn’t actually read these. And then I get the email, and I respond and say, why do you think I don’t read these? Oh, you read them. I’m like, well you sent it to me. If you send it to info, maybe I’ll read it, maybe I won’t. If you send it to me, I’m probably going to read it.

Joe Sullivan:
Yeah. That’s great. Perfect. Well, Ian, thanks a ton for taking the time out of your week to do this. I really appreciate it.

Ian:
You betcha, thanks for all the great questions.

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

Narrator:
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 gorillaseventysix.com/learn. Thank you so much for listening. Until next time.

The Manufacturing Executive: Episode 8

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

Episode show notes

A few years ago, we at Gorilla 76 took a close look at the common components among our most successful manufacturing clients’ marketing strategies.

Then, we boiled these down to seven specific elements. Once we put them together, we built a model we call the Seven Core Elements of an Industrial Marketing Strategy.

On this episode of The Manufacturing Executive, we discuss these seven key elements of manufacturing marketing:

1. Positioning
2. Website Foundation
3. Technology Stack
4. Content Strategy
5. Lead Generation Strategy
6. Pipeline Management Strategy
7. Data Analysis

Resource discussed on the episode:

Downloadable 7 Core Elements Guide and Audit Spreadsheet

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 your host, Joe Sullivan and a co-founder of the Industrial Marketing Agency Gorilla 76. So, a few years ago, we took a close look at all the common threads on the marketing front among our most successful manufacturing clients. And we decided we’d boil them down to seven specific things. And those things are positioning, website foundation, technology stack, content strategy, lead generation strategy, pipeline management strategy, and data analysis. And we decided to put all these things together and build them into a model that we now call the seven core elements of an industrial marketing strategy. These are essentially the seven puzzle pieces that you want present and optimize and working in sync to drive a successful marketing initiative as a manufacturing organization.

Joe Sullivan:
So, what we’re going to do today is take you through these seven things, help you understand what they are, and then leave you with a couple tools really, one that’ll help you audit where you are right now in each of those seven key areas. And then there will be a guide as well that I’ll direct you to that is really a written version of what I’m talking through today. But it will be a good reference point for you to go back to. So, let’s get into it. The seven core elements. The first of these seven is right at the center of your marketing initiatives, and that is your positioning. And we define positioning as the perception of your business in the mind of your customers. So, positioning is not who you think you are, but who your customers think you are.

Joe Sullivan:
And effective positioning, it really all starts by identifying and documenting who your ideal customer is, both at a company level and at an individual human level. And then it’s followed by crafting of positioning language or positioning story that clearly articulates how you create value for those specific individuals. And this is how you can start to shape the outward facing perception of who your business is, or start to be able to influence that. So, let’s talk about the first step inside of that first core element positioning. And that’s establishing who your ideal customer is. So, there are, probably at least from all the clients that we have consulted over the years, they all say, “Oh, we serve 10 different types of customers or 50 different types, and all these different verticals and their big customers and small customers and…”

Joe Sullivan:
I think the thing to do here is to try that identify what are the common threads among your very best customers, the types that you really want to build your business on. Because positioning is really about, it’s forward looking, it’s not about who you’ve done business with but who you want to be doing business with. And often that’s rooted in who your best customers are. So, what do those best customers look like? How big are they? Where are they located? What do they buy from you? What are the triggers inside of those companies or externally that lead them into the buying process? How long and complex is the buying process? How does the sale play out? Who on the customer’s side gets involved in the buying process?

Joe Sullivan:
So, once you’ve identified who those ideal customers are and the characteristics of those, then you want to take a closer look at the individuals who make up the buying committee, or the buyer personas as you might call them. So, these are the people whose attention and trust you need to earn throughout the buying process. Often early on, we’re talking about engineers, technical professionals who are experiencing very specific problems that they need to solve. Maybe plant managers, facility managers, maintenance people. And then as you move up the chain somewhere along the sale, when your sale is complex, you’re probably dealing with procurement. Almost certainly you are. And maybe CEOs, presidents, owners of companies, but who are those individuals that influence the buying process and therefore you need to be able to influence them with the message you deliver?

Joe Sullivan:
What are their responsibilities at the company? What decision making authority do they hold? And most importantly, what are their personal pains and goals and common questions that they ask? These are the things you want to be able to address in your outward facing messaging, in a concise way, through the way you craft your positioning language. But then also in the content you create, which we’ll talk about in a little bit here. Inside of positioning, the first core element, once you’ve identified who the ideal the customer is at a company level and individual human levels, then it’s a matter of crafting language that will speak to them. And what you’re trying to do here essentially is say, who we help and how. What are those issues we solve? What are those common problems we address and common goals we help these types of people from these types of companies achieve?

Joe Sullivan:
And the best structure I’ve seen for articulating this is, we’ve pulled from a book called, New Sales Simplified by Mike Weinberg. And chapter eight of that book is about what he calls his power statement. I would highly recommend spending the $15 to pick up a copy of New Sales Simplified. Mike presents a really great way of articulating who you help and how. And what desired business outcomes do you help transform into a reality? What are the common problems you solve? And focusing on that before you focus on what you do. Everybody defaults in their positioning language to saying, “This is what we do. This is why we’re amazing. This is why our people are the best and you should buy from us. And our competitors are phonies.” But nobody cares who you are, what you do, until they believe you understand their issues and you’ve solved them before.

Joe Sullivan:
And so, we need to wrap the outward facing communication around that. So, you can also visit the, who we help and how page on the Gorilla site, and you can see that we have followed this exact structure to write our own positioning language. You’ll see a condensed version of that on our homepage as well. So it gives you a little bit of a tangible model for how that could work. Okay. So, core element, number one of seven positioning. We’ve covered that. We go to core element number two, your website foundation. So, your website will almost always be part of the online marketing conversation. It’s the home base for your company online. It’s the online face of your company. It’s your storefront, even if you’re not physically selling a product or service through it. It’s the place where the right people from the right company that we talked about in core element number one, many of them will have their first interaction with you there before they’re ever ready to pick up the phone and you control all the messaging there.

Joe Sullivan:
And so, we need to make sure that the right messaging is there, the right pieces are in place, to be able to attract the right people there, to engage them, to convert them into leads so that you can start physical sales conversations with them. So, there are some key pieces of this website foundation that we think need to be in place. And one of those is your content management system. We’re huge advocates of WordPress. Probably many of you listening are familiar and your sites run on WordPress. If you don’t, that’s okay. There are other good content management systems out there. But the point is you need your website sitting on top of a piece of software that lets you easily add pages, edit content, make modifications, add new calls to action, there’s a learning center or a blog there that you can publish new content. And so, your website is a growing and evolving beast, really? And it should never be done. It’s not a project that’s ever done. It should be growing and evolving. You should be responding to how people use it.

Joe Sullivan:
That’s why the content management system is such a central piece to that website foundation. So, other parts of this core element, number two, the website foundation, your learning center. You might call it your blog, you might call it your resource center, learning center, knowledge center. Regardless of what you call it, it’s a place to house educational content. Content that answers those common questions we were talking about, that addresses those key problems and objectives your customers are trying to achieve. So, a learning center, again, you could use Gorilla if you’re familiar with us, with our learning center, as an example of what that could be. Another one that I love is CK Powers, is one of our clients, in full transparency, but I love their learning center, ckpower.com. They’re a manufacturer and value added re-seller of engines and generators. And I love the way their learning center has been organized, where you can sort by different content types, by different topics. So, a couple of references for you.

Joe Sullivan:
Another piece of your website infrastructure is having a lead generation system in place. So, calls to action, being able to easily deploy new calls to action, forms that people can fill out to download guides. There’s been a shift in the last year or two that I’m seeing away from gating in too much content, which means, putting content behind a form where you have to submit contact information to download it. And more of a shift to just creating and publishing valuable content and maybe using a newsletter subscriber. All you’re asking for is an email address and trying to build your email list and nurture people that way. Or using a chat bot, a technology like Drift, or if you’re using HubSpot, they have a chat bot software where you can engage people in an automated way, or a live chat where you have a person behind it. But you want to have some methodology in place to convert a visitor into a tangible lead, so that your visitors aren’t just anonymous and you can proactively begin conversations with them.

Joe Sullivan:
So, lead generation infrastructure, also part of this website foundation, which its core element number two is, lead management software integration. So, there’s a CRM and there is a marketing automation software component to this, which we’ll talk a little bit about later. But you want to have a direct tie into your lead management software so that when somebody fills out a form on your site, a contact record is created for that individual in each of these software platforms. Or if that contact record already exists, it’s updated and populated with data on what this person is doing on your site and what information they’re filling out. So, that’s another thing. And then there’s other elements, on page SEO, responsive design, things that make the user experience strong, and help keep them there and move them throughout the site to the content that’s most relevant to them.

Joe Sullivan:
So, these are all elements of core element, number two. Your website foundation. So, let’s move on to core element number three out of seven, which is your technology stack. And there’s so much marketing and sales technology out there these days. There are a ton of things you can and probably should be using, but if we had to break it down into the most essential starting places, they would be one, your CRM, two, your marketing automation software, and three, your website analytics software. Som CRM stands for Customer Relationship Management. And in short, this is a piece of software that exists to keep your sales efforts organized and make your team as efficient as possible on the biz dev front. At the heart of your CRM are contact records for individual leads and customers.

Joe Sullivan:
Inside any individual’s contact record, you can log calls and meeting notes. You can record data points like customer preferences and birthdays and favorite sports teams and all that basic stuff. But a really high quality advanced CRM software will also let you sync your email to it. So, every time you send an email, you can log it directly into your CRM without having to make a manual note. You can assign accounts and individuals to specific sales professionals on your team. You can build task lists with automated reminders to follow up with leads. You can track the life cycle stage of your deals and your opportunities. You can assign values, timelines, and probabilities that deals will close to give you a real time forecast of your sales pipeline. So, these are all things a CRM will let you do. Some examples of CRMs would include HubSpot, which is by far our favorite.

Joe Sullivan:
There’s Salesforce, which is the most popular. But it’s also more advanced and I think is more valuable for really large sales teams as opposed to smaller ones like most of our midsize manufacturers have. And there’s Pipedrive, Microsoft Dynamics, NetSuite, Infusionsoft. These are all other examples of CRMs. Okay. The second piece of your technology stack is your marketing automation software. So, whereas a CRM is a place for managing your company’s interactions with current and prospective customers. The marketing automation software is there to let you streamline and automate and measure marketing tasks and workflows. In short, your CRM is a sales tool. Your marketing automation software is a marketing tool. There’s some overlapping features, but when you deploy both of these side by side, you can build a really effective marketing sales joint strategy and software foundation, I guess. So, some things that your marketing automation software will let you do. Easily deploying onsite lead generation devices, like templates for lead capture pages and forms and call to action buttons, collecting lead intelligence.

Joe Sullivan:
What are specific website visitors? What are specific people doing on your site? Who’s showing buying intent? Who’s coming back regularly? These are all things that will influence your sales process and that marketing can use to feed the sales team and help them make decisions about what to do. So, a lot of marketing automation software is out there at this point. Again, we are partial to HubSpot, but others include Marquetto, Pardot, Act-On. You’ll see all of these out there. And a lot of them have similar features. We just think HubSpot is best in class for what you pay. It gives you really the most bang for your buck. So, the third piece of your technology stack is your web analytics platform. This will probably come from a few places, the no brainer you want to get up and running if it’s not already, is Google Analytics. Probably a majority of you listening are already familiar with analytics to some extent.

Joe Sullivan:
That’ll help you measure things, like how much traffic is your website’s generating? Where that traffic’s coming from? What pages and types of content are engaging and attracting your visitors to you and pulling them in out of search engines? How visitors are moving through your site to points of conversion. So there’s so much there inside of Google Analytics. Other bits of analytics on individual people you’ll pull from your automation software like HubSpot. Okay, let’s go to core element number four of seven, which is your content strategy. I’m going to start here with a definition of content marketing by Joe Pulizzi, who is an author and the co-founder of the Content Marketing Institute. He’s the guy who coined the term content marketing probably 15 years ago or so. But he calls content marketing, “A strategic marketing approach, focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly defined audience and ultimately to drive profitable customer action.”

Joe Sullivan:
And I think the key word there is valuable. And we’re talking about, not about us content or brochure type of content, all that stuff has a place in your marketing strategy, but we’re talking about addressing those problems with objective answers and in depth content that answers the common questions and helps your prospects and customers achieve what they’re trying to achieve. A stat that we lean on often, well, there’s a study that GlobalSpec puts out every year for engineers. And it shows that somewhere around 60, 65% of technical professionals wait until the comparison and evaluation stages of the bi-cycle to make contact with a vendor. And what that tells us is, your buyers are gathering information online. They’re doing it on their own. And they’re doing it all throughout the buying process.

Joe Sullivan:
They don’t care about you until they’re confident you’ve understood their problems and you’ve solved these problems before. And so, your website becomes their first stop and the first interaction they have with your company. The sales process starts there, in your content. It’s your job to publish content that will earn enough attention and trust from them so that they will be willing to start a real sales conversation with you. So, content can come in all kinds of shapes and forms and sizes, there’s articles, there’s blog posts, white papers, buyers guides, case studies, videos, webinars, podcasts, ROI calculators. There’s a ton of ways you can create value through the content you publish online. It’s a matter of thinking about what content your audience is most likely to consume, and developing content that will help them all throughout the buying process to help you generate awareness before they know who you are. And maybe they’re just Google searching a problem they have or a question they have. Answering their common questions once they find you. Establishing credibility for your organization, converting visitors into leads, building trust and nurturing them.

Joe Sullivan:
There are so many polite ways that content will help throughout that whole buying process. And it’s such a critical piece of your inbound and your outbound marketing strategies. Core element number five of seven is your lead generation strategies. So, as you look back through these core elements we’ve talked about, positioning, identifying the right people, and putting the right pieces of the pie in place on your website. We’ve talked about getting the right technology stack in place, developing all this content that speaks to the pains of those most important people and helps them achieve what they’re trying to achieve. Once we’ve got all those foundational pieces in place, now it’s time to start driving the right people to your website, getting the right message in front of them.

Joe Sullivan:
You don’t want to do too much of that until some of that foundation’s in place. And so, this is where your lead generation strategy begins. And there are three ways to do lead generation. And all of these probably have a role for you. It’s just a matter of finding the right balance. So, there’s inbound marketing, there’s outbound marketing, and there’s paid media. With inbound, we are talking about developing thought leadership content and content that, like we talked about in the last core element, establishes credibility for you, teaches the search engines like Google, that you are the best source of information on these topics or one of the best sources. This is what will help give you visibility in the appropriate Google searches which results in traffic, which will eventually result in leads. It’s not that simple of course, there are tactical components to it, strategic components.

Joe Sullivan:
But inbound marketing in short is about establishing authority for your website, gaining visibility that way, and sort of casting a wide net and some of the right fish will swim into it. Some of the wrong ones will. But as the volume of the fish that swim into that net increase, so will the volume of those that are qualified, especially as your content becomes more and more targeted at the right people. So, that’s inbound. Also in your lead generation strategy you have outbound and paid media. So, inbound is kind of the long game. It’s going to take a while for you to gain traction if you’re just starting, you’ll get some quick wins, look at the low hanging fruit. But you don’t win the inbound game overnight. It takes time.

Joe Sullivan:
So in the short term, we’re advocates of having a really strong outbound and paid media strategy where you can say, “All right. Let’s target the 200 most important companies that fit the description of our ideal customer. Let’s develop an outbound strategy where we find the right people from those companies with this great educational content we’re using, we deliver it directly to them.” And then we tell paid media platforms like, say LinkedIn, “Hey, LinkedIn, show this content, whether that’s video or written or whatever it might be. Show this content to people with these job titles, from these types of companies, in these geographical regions, with these commonalities.” And what you can then do is, amplify the distribution of all this great content to make sure as many people as possible that fit your ideal customer profile in your total addressable market see it. So, again, it’s not a super simple thing, but conceptually it is, and that’s the strategy you want to be able to deploy.

Joe Sullivan:
So, inbound for the longterm, paid media and outbound in the short term to supplement that. Okay, two core elements remaining. Number six of seven is your pipeline management strategy. So, this is about what happens after the lead is generated. And so, we’ve talked about attracting the right people to you through inbound or outbound. When you start to generate leads or start with your, say, outbound leads to develop a two way conversation with them, the next thing is how do we help move those people through the buying process? They’re going to buy on their schedule, not on yours. So, how do we nurture them? How do we enable your sales team to nurture them and to develop those leads? So, I would break the sixth core element of pipeline management into two buckets. There’s sales enablement, and there’s lead nurturing.

Joe Sullivan:
Sales enablement is marketing’s responsibility to help your sales team develop the right processes, to enable them with the right data, and to give them the right content to help develop these leads. So, when I talk about processes, I’m talking about, who manages inbound leads? When a new inbound lead comes in or a lead from a paid ad comes in, who’s responsible to reaching out to that person? What messaging and points need to be communicated to them? What’s the follow-up cadence? And then, what data points can marketing supply them? So, if let’s just say you have an outbound campaign running to 300 people, which 20 of those 300 people clicked through to your website, and of those 20, which five seem super engaged and they’re coming back and they’re looking at pages that might indicate some level of buying intent? This is all information you want your marketing team to be able to help sales, process, and understand so they know where to spend their time.

Joe Sullivan:
So, the other part of this pipeline management strategy is the nurturing strategy, lead nurturing, which is largely a marketing responsibility. And here we’re talking about, being in the inbox of your existing contacts and all these new leads are generating probably at least every other week or so. It just depends on your business. For some of you, it might be weekly. For some of you, it might be monthly. But you want to consistently be delivering value to them, not sales messages, but sending the new, helpful video or written content that you’re creating that addresses issues that they care about. So, when you can consistently be in front of them in creating value, you’re naturally going to drive more and more valuable conversations over the course of time. Some people are ready for that conversation now, some will be ready in a month, some will be ready in two years.

Joe Sullivan:
But I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve had conversations with people that have said, “Hey, we’ve been reading your content for the last two or three years and the time’s right now. And we already know you’re the first company we need to talk to because you’ve been teaching us all along the way.” That’s what you want to be able to replicate inside of your business. The seventh and final core element is data analysis. So, there was a time when measuring marketing results was all about tracking impressions and reach and how many people are getting their eyes on us. And that absolutely still has a role, but there’s also a lot of tangible data that we can now harness. And so, we need to have the software in place and the systems in place to be able to track leads all throughout the buying process. How many individuals are we reaching? What percentage of those individuals are actually converting into leads? What percentage of those leads are sales qualified? How many of those are turning into tangible opportunities that we’re quoting business for? And then, how many of those are actually turning into revenue?

Joe Sullivan:
So, these are all metrics that we need to be looking at throughout the buying process. I do like to put the caveat on this that, especially if you’re a company with a long sales cycle that plays out over a year or more, which I’ve seen plenty of that, especially when you’re selling, say, expensive million dollar equipment, and you might sell 20 pieces of equipment a year. The sales cycle is long and you can’t look at a six month marketing effort and expect there to be revenue there. Right? But we need to look at these leading metrics like traffic, and sales qualified leads generated, and then pipeline revenue. How much work are we quoting? Is it with the right people? And that’s the type of data you want to be gathering. So, those are your seven core elements.

Joe Sullivan:
Recapping them very quickly. Core element number one is your positioning. Core element number two, your website foundation. Three, your technology stack. Four, content strategy. Five, lead generation strategy. Six, pipeline management strategy. And then seven, is your data analysis processes. So, the last thing we’ll do here is, I’m going to leave you with two resources as I mentioned. If you go to Gorilla76.com/7 elements, you’re going to find two things there. There’s a downloadable PDF version of everything I just talked through. It’s a really long in depth designed PDF guide that can serve as your guide. And then there’s a downloadable spreadsheet that we call the industrial marketing audit scorecard. You’ll score yourself on 35 points, five for each of these seven core elements. And it’ll show you where you’re strong, where you’re weak, and maybe help you figure out where you need to invest some time and energy into optimizing your strategy. So, that pretty much covers it. I hope this was helpful. And we hope to see you on the next episode of the Manufacturing Executive Podcast.

Speaker 2:
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.

The Manufacturing Executive: Episode 7

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

Episode show notes

Automation cannot replace human labor. Rather, the key is to augment the workforce by equipping humans with the technology they need to be more effective, more efficient, and safer.

Tracy Hansen, President of North America and Global CMO for ProGlove, a German maker of wearable digital interfaces and operations analytics for industry, joined this episode of The Manufacturing Executive show. She talked about the ways manufacturers need to pivot with technology as they look at how to emerge from this pandemic in one piece.

Here’s what we discussed with Tracy:

• How wearable solutions can augment the human worker
• Examples of the ways wearable technology improves safety, efficiency, and productivity
• The wearable technology solutions executives should know about
• …And what excessive automation looks like and how to avoid it.

To ensure that you never miss an episode of The Manufacturing Executive, 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 co founder of the industrial marketing agency Gorilla 76. So if you’ve been listening to the first handful of episodes or so of the show, you’ve probably noticed that a majority have focused on marketing or sales related topics, but we’ve designed the podcast to cover growth from a variety of angles. And one of those angles is technology. So our guest today is at the forefront of that movement. And on that note, I’m super excited to introduce Tracy Hansen, president of North America and global CMO for ProGlove, a German maker of wearable digital interfaces and operations analytics for industry. Tracy brings more than two decades of strategic brand building experience at startups, scale ups and Fortune 500 firms to the role. She’s a student of disruptive innovation, championing ideas that stretch boundaries, mobilize teams, and deliver business breakthroughs. Tracy, welcome to the show.

Tracy Hansen:
Thank you. It’s wonderful to be here.

Joe Sullivan:
Tracy. I found you through an article that you recently published on manufacturing.net back in May I think it was that covered some ideas about how manufacturers need to pivot as they look at how to emerge from this pandemic in one piece. And since then, I’ve connected with you and your team at ProGlove. And I had a chance to see your thinking behind some of the things that are going on in this industry 4.0 world we’re now living in and in particular, what caught my attention were some of your thoughts about this misconception that automation can replace human labor. And the argument I’ve seen from you and supported by high-profile business figures like Elon Musk and some of the biggest technology companies in the world, including Apple, is that human labor is still very essential. And the key is not to replace human labor, but instead to augment the workforce by equipping humans with technology, they need to be more effective and more efficient and safer. So I’m excited to unpack all this stuff with you today and sort of drawing your insights and experience for our listeners.

Tracy Hansen:
Wonderful. Glad to talk about all of this stuff.

Joe Sullivan:
Great. Yeah, I know it’s your world. So before we get into the thick of it though, I was wondering if you could just kind of give us a little bit of a quick background on ProGlove and also tell us a bit about your personal journey that brought you to where you are today.

Tracy Hansen:
Absolutely. So as you mentioned in the introduction and thank you for all of that, ProGlove is a german manufacturer, we’re based out of Munich. And we also are headquartered in Chicago. So we are a four or five year old company. We were founded after our co founders won the Intel make it wearable contest. It was an idea that they had germinating around how to make people in the assembly line and manufacturing more effective and more productive. And the thing that they made, the wearable device that they made is a wrap that you can put around your hands and I’ll show you, in case you use video.

Tracy Hansen:
They put it on your hand and very quickly have a scanner that is as light as a matchbox on the back of your hand, but has the power of data intelligence, realtime feedback, and really clear data capture on the manufacturing floor. So it shifted the focus away from how do I use all of these tools all around me into one wearable device that you can put on the back of your hand within seconds. And the team from there grew to be a multinational company with more than 500 companies using our product on the manufacturing and supply chain universe.

Joe Sullivan:
Wow. Super interesting. And then such a unique advancement. I’ve seen pictures of it. I haven’t seen or heard you talk about it yet though. And to think it’s that light and I mean, it makes a ton of sense.

Tracy Hansen:
One of my favorite analogies is when you think about scanners and anybody who’s assembling anything that has multiple parts is likely scanning and the supply chain. Everything we touch, eat, drink, wear has been scanned multiple times as scanning is as an integral part of our day to day operations. And the traditional handheld scanner weighs as much as a Volkswagen beetle at the end of a given shift. So you can imagine the stress that it puts on the human, who is working with these devices compared to something that weighs as much as a matchbox. So not just the ergonomics of it, but the human first human centered approach to technology is so crucial when we think about things like wearable devices.

Joe Sullivan:
Yeah. And so Tracy, what has sort of led you to ProGlove? Can you give a little background on sort of how you got to where you are today?

Tracy Hansen:
Sure. So in graduate school I had discovered just in time technology, just in time processes, Joseph Denning, the whole world. And wrote my thesis on ISO 9,000 and how to grow your business and move into quality and control and process. So my degree and my thesis was on ISO 9,000. And from there I moved into manufacturing. I worked at a hardware company called NetApp based out of Silicon Valley for about 15 years and had a chance to meet a gentleman named Andreas Koenig. Who’s a real leader and visionary and building business and bringing technology to market.

Tracy Hansen:
So after I left NetApp, I started to move into the startup space and into scale up businesses when Andreas called and said that he had discovered ProGlove, met the co founders and thought it was just a phenomenal organization that was poised to really bring something new and innovative to the market and wanting to break open those markets specifically North America. So he tapped me to join. I came about nine months ago and have really seen the opportunity that this company has to offer manufacturers, assembly lines, supply chain, you name it to do something great and innovative. Not just with the scanner, but with the software that we have behind it.

Joe Sullivan:
So the ProGlove sort of presence in the United States is relatively new still. Kind of in its infancy and you’re helping bring it to life.

Tracy Hansen:
Absolutely. Brand new. We started about two years ago here and really hit the ground running about 18 months ago. And the last year we’ve seen explosive growth in North America.

Joe Sullivan:
Interesting. What’s what’s your customer base look like? Just out of curiosity. Who are-

Tracy Hansen:
It has a lot of different factors. So we started in the assembly space. So automotive manufacturing in Germany. Some of our big customers are… Every major car manufacturer that you can think of, they are likely using the ProGlove scanning solution on their assembly line. BMW, Audi, Volkswagen, you name it. Then we moved into aviation. So companies like Lufthansa. Now we’re going deep in the retail space. So e-Commerce is exploding. So anybody who is with warehouse distribution and logistics, they’re finding great use for our technology. And we’re also seeing growth in healthcare. So both of the frontline healthcare in hospitals, in universities, as well as in the back office with the design and distribution of healthcare goods.

Joe Sullivan:
So we’re recording this in July of 2020, and we’re in the thick of everything going on with the pandemic. And I’m just kind of curious how does this fit into the mix and a wearable solution that sort of augments the human worker. Obviously healthcare is at the forefront of all that. I’m just kind of curious to hear you talk about that.

Tracy Hansen:
Sure, yes. So we’re in a very interesting time and starting at a new company, right? As we headed into the post COVID world or, I guess we’re still in COVID world, has been really interesting. And the challenges that we were talking about as a company in the early part of 2020 have shifted very dramatically. At the beginning of the year, we were looking at scale and innovation and deployment of new technology. Now, what we’re looking is how can I bring in technology that will speed up my operations, keep my employees safe, help me onboard and train new employees quickly and adeptly. How can I used technology to enhance the worker and in a time where safety is absolutely at the forefront of every operation leader’s mind. So the good news is we didn’t need to pivot too terribly strong in this whole universe, because from the very beginning, we were focused on the human. The human at the center of the workforce.

Tracy Hansen:
We’ve never strayed from that. And while it wasn’t our intention to have a solution for the environment we’re currently in, it naturally fit into this space because our customers, our prospects, the people that we talk to day in and day out are really challenged with shifting the business, to accommodate new requirements for health and safety for their employees. Bringing on new employees as they’re rapidly, spinning up robust e-Commerce solutions. I mean, you think about it as we shift to e-Commerce, you need more people to do the picking and the packing and the logistics and the delivery and so forth.

Tracy Hansen:
As we’re looking at our manufacturing and assembly teams, they’re looking at how can I have safe social distance? How can I make sure that I’m using a solution that is personal to me. So if I have wrap, that’s my wrap and I’m not sharing it with three other employees, is that safer? So our human centered design are focused on keeping employees safe, has always been a core part of our vision and our culture. And that’s what people are talking to us about now. And that’s what’s attracting them to these types of devices.

Joe Sullivan:
So a shift more, would you say to the safety focus than the increasing efficiency focus or is it a lot of both and just given how the business world has changed in a few months?

Tracy Hansen:
It’s a lot of both. Safety is first and foremost. We actually, and in all transparency, we had a few deals or customers that we were talking to where they’re like, Hey, we got to pump the brakes here. And then once we started to talk to them about the safety component or they came to us talking about the safety component of what they’re trying to implement, it became evident that the human first approach lent itself to the challenges that they were facing.

Tracy Hansen:
It’s so important to our customers and the people that we see in the field to care about their employees, to focus on what will make them efficient, yes of course, but safe in the environment that they’re working in. The second part is really around speed of adoption and speed of operation. So efficient, absolutely still a crucial, but as so many of us have had to pivot and do something different or faster than we had prior, the idea of complete digital transformation, complete overhaul of operations was put to the side and they wanted to look at what can I do to enhance the workforce I have and bring things up quickly without a lot of training, without a lot of complexity.

Tracy Hansen:
So ease of use was crucial because speed was paramount. And I’m sure like you, I’m sure like me, you’ve probably experienced a lot of… Because of COVID things are delayed, because of COVID things are slow. And that resulted in a lot of re-imagining of what needed to happen in assembly, in supply chain across the board. So it’s pretty pervasive. Those two things speed and safety are a recurring conversation that we have with almost everybody we speak with.

Joe Sullivan:
So could you get kind of tangible for listeners here and maybe talk about a few specific examples where wearable solutions that augment the human worker can help with either efficiency or safety or just helping productivity. Would love to hear some real, tangible examples that make this concrete.

Tracy Hansen:
Sure. So there’s a couple. So let’s start with the sharing of tools and assets. So making it wearable, instead of sharing a handheld scanner, right? So every time I’ve put it down and one of my coworkers picks it up, I had the potential to spread germs or to create an environment that is unsafe. And then the time it would take to clean everything between every single scan would become quite a slowing technique. When I have a wearable device, something that I’m putting on my body and it’s mine, I am now less room for contamination, less likely to unintentionally share a germ that I don’t want to with a coworker because it’s mine and it’s on me. Then the second thing that I would say is from a wearable safety standpoint, we introduced in our own floor, we’re a manufacturing company and assembly company as well. We create the devices on our own premises. We needed a mechanism to allow our assembly team to know when they were too close to somebody. So we created and innovated a proximity sensor.

Tracy Hansen:
So I had the wearable device and through our mechanisms of communication can either through optics, through sight, through audio or through haptic, so feeling, let somebody know if they’re too close to another coworker. We rolled it out on our floor. And then we realized our customers might need it too. So we made it free and available to all of our customers. They could download it right from our website at no additional charge. And then we extended that out to anybody who wanted to download our PG connect, our ProGlove connect solution but maybe it didn’t have our wearable device. So they could have it on a cell phone, something on their body, but not our scanner so that they could keep their employees safe. That’s the second thing.

Tracy Hansen:
And then the third thing around speeding things up and how does wearables speed things up? We introduced Mark Display, which has on the back of your hand an E ink reader that allows you to, as a wearer of our device, to see instantly what you need to do next, what’s the job to get done. So I don’t have to go back to a terminal somewhere on the picking floor or go back to an office to get a printout, to know what the next job to get done is saving vital minutes and sometimes seconds, every time I’m doing the job on the shop floor. So those are just three examples of how wearables can keep you safe and keep you moving faster.

Joe Sullivan:
That’s great. Now, along the lines of augmenting the worker, what other innovations are you seeing out there that executives should know about?

Tracy Hansen:
Wearable technology is pretty exciting. We’re so used to it as humans and consumers, whether it’s the Fitbit, the watch that you’re wearing, the phone that you’re carrying. We have it integrated into our daily lives. So if you bring that to the shop floor, you bring it to the manufacturing plant, and you start to realize that that wearable technology, when used in combination together can create such effective streamlined processes. You can start to envision having a human digital twin that creates a set of data that you can now, as an operations manager, see what’s happening on your floor every step of the way. The visual I like to use is when I have a truck come into my plant and I’m unloading the truck, I’m scanning things, I’m bending, I’m looking, I’m hearing different things. And if I have a wearable technology that is helping me as the worker, know where to put the pallet, where to put the box, and then as a peer comes, where to take the box to, how to assemble.

Tracy Hansen:
And all of the wearable technology that I have on is feeding me realtime information, giving me haptic feedback on if I’m going in the right direction or picking up the right box. It gives me the intelligence right there within my body to do the right thing, the next job that needs to get done in the right order. From a worker standpoint, it’s much more efficient, it’s less stress and trying to figure things out. From an operations manager perspective, it gives me the intelligence I need to know how to improve my production line, how to improve my operations, how to keep my workers again very healthy and safe, remove obstacles that get in their way or eliminate challenges that are placed in front of them that are unnecessary obstacles. As an executive looking to figure out what to do next I’m really hone in on the human and understanding what are the steps the human needs to take next, to be more effective, to be more efficient.

Tracy Hansen:
Years ago I read a book called the Mythical Man-Month. Are you familiar with it?

Joe Sullivan:
I’m not. No.

Tracy Hansen:
It’s a book by Fred Brooks and it’s this whole concept around adding more people to… Some people think, Oh, if I had a software project that I need to deliver against, I can add more people and that software project will get done faster, right? More people means faster. Well, when I look at what’s happening in this assembly floor and then the supply chain, I sometimes hear similar things like, Oh, if I add an automation, things will get faster. Things will move faster. And I kind of feel like we need to have a simple, a mythical man month concept, the mythical automation month if you will. Because really at the end of the day, it’s the human and our ability to respond and to think and to move the product forward, that creates the momentum and efficiency.

Tracy Hansen:
And when you think about automation and bringing automation into the assembly line, the manufacturing floor, the supply chain, you sometimes displaced the efficiency because the thinking is automation is going to solve all the problems, but really automation can create more challenges, different challenges. So our thinking is let’s focus on the human, let’s focus on what the processes are that they do and use wearable technology to move the needle faster. And that’s what I think executives need to really hone in on is using the assets they have and enriching that experience versus displacing those assets with things that will just introduce an entirely different set of complexity and challenges that might result in that mythical man month that doesn’t yield the results they’re looking for.

Joe Sullivan:
Yeah. I love that. So many things related to automation, I imagine sound perfect in theory. And then when you get into actually implementing them, you realize that it creates new hurdles and obstacles. And what you’re saying it makes a lot of sense. It’s a good sort of segue into the next few questions I have here. It’s one thing to augment a worker and another to attempt to fully automate or attempt to fully automate a process. And my understanding from what I’ve seen from you is that a lot of companies tend to run into these obstacles. And so, what does excessive automation look like from your perspective and how can executives avoid it?

Tracy Hansen:
Each business is different, right? Where some companies need automation and it could be excessive for a different business. So I think we need to look at these uniquely. If I were to say, Hey, I have an opportunity to go in and fully automate the entire environment and there’ll be no humans involved. I think that would give you great pause because even automation requires humans. You need technicians, you need process engineers, you need a different skillset certainly when you have automation. It’s just different. So when I think about what’s excessive, I think if it’s totally rotating over to we’re going to automate everything. Where I’ve seen successes… I’ve had an opportunity to go to a number of different warehouses and assembly floors now, and I’ve seen the balance of automation.

Tracy Hansen:
Where automation makes sense, where using systems and robotics to move the process forward makes sense is partnered with where the humans make sense, where is critical thinking required, where is more dexterity required. Those two things when balanced out create an incredibly efficient and elegant solution. So my recommendation for executives would be to find the balance. Anytime you say all or 100% or everything, you’re probably leaning towards excessive. If you’re looking at collaborative automation and human collaboration, you’re probably on the right path.

Joe Sullivan:
That’s a good answer. I read an interesting article the other day about Apple’s manufacturing process. And here you have the most profitable technology company in the world and one of the most technologically advanced companies probably in history and they’ve repeatedly failed to automate their production lines. Is sort of what I gathered from the article. And it’s led them to turn back to human labor time and time again. And so what do you think that failed attempts from even the biggest companies in the world like Apple can teach manufacturing executives about efficiencies, automation, the role of human labor, et cetera.

Tracy Hansen:
Yeah. The article you’re referring to is really insightful. And they’ve been trying now for close to a decade. I think they started in like 2012 with their partner in China to bring automation to life. And they were going to replace all the human workers with a million robots. What I love about that example, and I think we can learn from is that it’s okay to fail, right? It’s absolutely okay to fail and to attempt different ways to bring the automation to life. It’s okay to experiment. And I encourage it, I think it’s really important. It’s how we discovered the wearable solution, right? Prototyping, risk and attempting. What I think the best thing we can learn from the Apple example and from others I’ve seen is bringing humans in to the design stage. Bringing humans into the process. So they over-rotated, to my previous answer, they over-rotated to we’re going to do all robotics.

Tracy Hansen:
As we see they’re moving forward and others like them, as they’re realizing humans aren’t going away. Humans are part of the solution. How can we bring humans together with technology to create a solution that is efficient and effective. So I think the Apple example is perfect. I think their experimentation has shown us that humans are essential. And you mentioned Elon Musk earlier, same thing. I think they were trying to replace humans in all of their assembly lines for Tesla. Humans are essential. We cannot underestimate the role that humans play in assembly and manufacturing.

Joe Sullivan:
And I think that’s a great message to send. What I’m gathering from you here today to kind of wrap this up is that all the technology out there that is maybe feared by some, as a replacement for human labor it’s really, when used properly, it’s there to make people more effective and more efficient, to keep them safer. Is there any last things you’d say here to a manufacturing executive about just the importance of putting technology alongside workers rather than using it to replace them.

Tracy Hansen:
Just that. Technology is beautiful. Robotics are great. IOT, internet of things, is absolutely a way of the future. Artificial intelligence can be so powerful when implemented the right way. Humans aren’t going away nor is technology. And I think the insightful, innovative executive is going to be the one that can look at both and put them together in a way that is meaningful for whatever problem they’re trying to solve. So that that balance and the understanding that we need both is going to be the thing that will set the leading executive apart from the rest.

Joe Sullivan:
I love that. Well, Tracy, this was a super interesting and valuable conversation. I really love what you’re doing at ProGlove and the mindset you’re bringing to the industrial sector, especially during a super challenging time in the world for everybody out there really. Can you tell us the best place to find you online in case listeners would like to get in touch or learn more about ProGlove and about what it might be able to do for them?

Tracy Hansen:
Sure. The best place to find ProGlove is on our website ProGlove.com. You can also find us on LinkedIn. We’re very active and love having conversations with our industry peers on LinkedIn. And you can find me on LinkedIn as well, Tracy Hansen.

Joe Sullivan:
Beautiful. Well Tracy, thank you so much for taking the time to join us on the manufacturing executive. It was a pleasure having you on here.

Tracy Hansen:
Thanks, Joe. It was delightful.

Joe Sullivan:
Great. To the rest of you, we hope to see you next time.

Speaker 2:
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.

The Manufacturing Executive: Episode 6

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

Episode show notes

Something’s not going well, and it’s your job to fix it. Where do you start?

You can’t rely on your charm and good looks to make a change happen. Instead, you have to work through proven processes that alleviate distress at companies.

On this episode of The Manufacturing Executive Show, Rob Tracy, consultant and author of How to Fix a Factory, talked about specific processes that can solve problems at distressed organizations.

Here’s what we discussed with Rob:

• Why Rob wrote How to Fix a Factory and who he wrote it for
• How value-add reporting can give distinct insight into P&L
• The 10 core systems that must be operating with reasonable proficiency for the factory as a whole to have good outcomes
• Rob’s new idea called The Business Forward Framework

Additional Resource Mentioned in the Episode:

Traction: Get a Grip on Your Business by Gino Wickman

To ensure that you never miss an episode of The Manufacturing Executive, 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 co-founder of the industrial marketing agency Gorilla 76.

Joe Sullivan:
Today, I have a unique guest in the sense that he can be called both a manufacturing executive and an author. Let me take a moment to introduce Rob Tracy. Rob is the president and founder of Rob Tracey Consulting. With more than 30 years of leadership experience in the manufacturing industry, Rob has become an expert in navigating the sector’s distinct challenges.

Joe Sullivan:
After publishing his first book in 2019, How to Fix a Factory, Rob now uses his unique perspective to reveal issues, reset expectations, and restore working order in manufacturing companies across the nation. Rob understands that every company’s situation is different and he doesn’t believe in just mechanically applying the latest tools and hoping for good results. He works to realign companies with their core values, touching each level of the business to truly provide a holistic analysis of what’s going wrong.

Joe Sullivan:
People-focused and practical, Rob sees through the clutter of everyday obstacles to find the root of the problem. His “boots on the ground” approach ensures that issues are not only identified but solved for good. Before founding his consultancy, Rob held leadership roles with prominent companies, such as Anderson Windows, Pentair, Intek Plastics and CliftonLarsonAllen. In addition to being highly experienced with [Lean 00:02:09] and EOS practices, Rob holds a bachelor of science in industrial and operations engineering from the university of Michigan and is a graduate of the Minnesota executive program at the university of Minnesota’s Carlson school of management.

Joe Sullivan:
A lifelong learner and observer, Rob shares his latest insights about business strategy and life on his website blog. So, on that note, Rob, welcome to the show.

Rob Tracy:
Thanks very much, Joe. Looking forward to our conversation.

Joe Sullivan:
Well, Rob, you and I first connected back in January of this year. So, I think you stumbled across my company, Gorilla 76, online one way or another, and realizing we had overlapping audiences, we struck up a conversation from there.

Rob Tracy:
That’s right.

Joe Sullivan:
So, you have been a long time manufacturing guy, as I noted in the introduction. I know that you’re potentially shifting gears in your career or maybe broadening your horizons a little bit, but regardless, I’d love to hear from you about how you got to where you are today, and also where you see yourself headed?

Rob Tracy:
Yeah, I’ll try to keep the bio brief. Like I said, I’m an engineer. I grew up in Michigan. Been around manufacturing all my life. My dad was part of the foundry industry at General Motors. First job out of school was at General Motors and I found it was just way too big. And I started moving to some different places, each time going to progressively smaller organizations.

Rob Tracy:
And I settled as the CEO at Intek Plastics. After going through some of those other companies that you mentioned. And I found that I just had a passion for that 50, 60, $70 million company, a few hundred people, because you can move fast. You can get things done. You can make an imprint and make a dent.

Rob Tracy:
For the last five years, I’ve been doing consulting work and for the last 20 years… Well, [inaudible 00:03:50] operations is my fast ball. I’ve been more at that senior level for the last 20 years. The last five years as a consultant, I’ve really been focused on helping the C-suite people get a handle on their business on a wide range, general management stuff, not just operations.

Joe Sullivan:
Awesome. And I learned from talking to you months back that you had just published your first book, How to Fix a Factory, which was really interesting. And as you know, we talked more and decided you’d be a really great guest for the show. I read the book over the last few weeks and I found it super interesting. And in particular, there’s so many nuggets in there specific to the manufacturing industry, but so many just great business principles that even I can relate to.

Joe Sullivan:
I’m a marketing guy, so the book’s not written for me, though I had takeaways. But tell me a little bit about who the book was actually… It was truly written for who your audience was and at a high level, really what it’s all about?

Rob Tracy:
I’ll start by saying that writing a book has always been on my bucket list. I wouldn’t have called myself an author, but I guess I am now. It was a challenge, but it was a lot of fun. It was good growth experience.

Rob Tracy:
The book is targeted at senior leaders and small to mid-size manufacturers. That’s the sweet spot. And by senior leaders, CEOs, COOs, VP of ops, CFOs, those kinds of people that can really influence the overall direction of the company. A plant manager would get something out of it. I think other people, all the way to a production supervisor would get some value, but the target was at senior level.

Rob Tracy:
What I was trying to do with the book, first, I believe my goal was to make it practical, short, one plane ride across the country and you got it. Non-jargony, I tried to… I don’t, there’s no lean words in there. None of that stuff, I just want to have common everyday English. But, what I found is after spending time in a lot of companies, I’d always find myself working in some distressed organization. Something wasn’t going well and my job was to go fix it. And for the longest time, I thought that was just my art and charm and good looks that was making that happen. And what I realized is I actually do have a process I go through.

Rob Tracy:
And so writing the book was a way for me to get it out of my head onto a piece of paper. But what is that process? How do I go about that? Because even though the challenges are different, the path that takes us is often very similar. So, that was the goal. That was what I was trying to accomplish and share that insight.

Joe Sullivan:
So, the book is called How to Fix a Factory. What are some examples of situations in a factory or a manufacturing facility that constitute fixing?

Rob Tracy:
Yeah. Well, as you can imagine, it runs a wide gamut, but I’ll give you three examples just to… Because these have been more common lately. One would be a situation where they’re not taking very good care of customers, and not shipping on time, and lead times are extending and they don’t know why. They’ve tried stuff, they’re running over… They’re doing all kinds of things to try and fix it and it’s not getting any better.

Rob Tracy:
And so I’ll go in and I’ll help start peeling back that onion. And I’ve seen situations when one company, the problem was that they weren’t tracking their production throughput very well. And production had dropped by about 5%, which doesn’t sound like much, but over the course of weeks, it starts to add up. And the next thing you know, they’re in a hole and then they got to dig out of it.

Rob Tracy:
Another place, the customer service was placing orders on the factory that were far in excess of the capacity of the factory. They didn’t have any sales and operations plan to keep the two linked together. That’s been happening more… Even as the pandemic has hit, you think we’d have all kinds of capacity. They’re still struggling with that issue. So, that’s one issue.

Rob Tracy:
Another one would be, just misinterpretations of financials. The standard cost systems that have been in place for eons in manufacturing can give very, very misleading information that lead to bad business decisions. And just managing profitability and understanding the role of product costing, but also understanding capacity and throughput and how to really drive financial performance. Standard cost accounting doesn’t help very well with that. So, we use something or I use something called Value Add Reporting, direct P&L’s, so helping them get a little different insight into what the P&L can look like and how to drive it. So, that happens a lot.

Rob Tracy:
And then the third one is talent. We all know talent’s a struggle. Unfortunately, a lot of the clients that I work with haven’t really taken a strategic look at their talent. And I think, talent, the fight for talent is going to get you raised up to almost the same levels as fight for customers. And it needs that strategic view. And so many clients are just going to temp agencies and they’ve got this revolving door of people, which creates all kinds of issues. So, just helping them get re-grounded on it and raise their talent plan to a more strategic level. Something that is a real common issue.

Joe Sullivan:
Yeah. I hear the talent problem so often from the… Because our client base is very similar to yours. It’s mid-sized manufacturing companies and you’d think that, even with… Well, you hear so much about automation and the negative things that the common, the general public, thinks about automation and replacing human beings and taking jobs away. And the reality is a lot of manufacturing organizations can’t find people who want to do the job. They don’t want to do the dirty work. They don’t want to work third shift. They don’t want to do things that put them at safety risks, of course. And that talent recruitment part of it and retention as well as is just so important, but so challenging.

Rob Tracy:
There’s still a lot of factories that don’t look like a cleaner room. You see the ones that look really pretty and epoxy floors. There’s a lot of them that’s still fairly industrial. And it’s really hard to get people that want to do that work.

Joe Sullivan:
Well, a substantial chunk of your book covers a topic that you describe as the “core 10 systems”. And I’m going to read a little passage from here. You had written, “All factories have a set of core systems that must be operating with reasonable proficiency for the factory as a whole to have good outcomes. When a factory becomes distressed, it’s usually due to weakness in one or more of these core systems.”

Joe Sullivan:
Now, I know from reading the book, we could probably do an hour long podcast on each of these core 10, but I’m wondering if you could give us a bird’s eye look at what these 10 systems are. Maybe a synopsis of each so we’ll understand what’s important from your perspective.

Rob Tracy:
And so let’s… I’ll just give a little bit of context. I would call these core 10 related operations. There’s others, there’s financial systems and HR… There’s other systems, marketing sales, this doesn’t cover those.

Joe Sullivan:
Sure.

Rob Tracy:
These are operation oriented. So, I’ll just buzz through them. The talent system. We talked a little bit about that. That’s raising talent up to a strategic level, talent brand. And really how are you going to attract, recruit, hire, retain, great culture, those kinds of things.

Rob Tracy:
The second one is a core 10, is a clean and safe factory. And we can use the buzzwords of 5S. I didn’t do that. I just say it’s a matter of being respectful to our people, we need to have a factory that’s clean, well organized and safe for them to come to. And if you don’t have the discipline to do that, then you probably don’t have the discipline to do a lot of the other stuff that needs to be done to run the place.

Rob Tracy:
The third one is a management system, and that’s really the management structure. That’s having the right ratio of, from the plan manager to how many superintendents, to how many supervisors, to how many leads. Because one of the biggest issues I see is they’ll have a supervisor recovering 50 people, and then they wonder why they can’t follow through on stuff and do continuous improvement, or aren’t running the place well, it’s because he’s spending all day administering because he doesn’t have the right structure. So, that’s been the next one.

Rob Tracy:
The fourth one is an equipment reliability system. And that’s just making sure that the people on the floor have equipment that works and gets the job done and produces a quality product. So, maintaining it well, keeping it up to date. The buzzwords should be TPM and all those things, but it’s just about, do we have equipment that’s reliable and working? And if it’s not, then we can have a problem.

Rob Tracy:
Fifth one is the quality system. Quality system is just making sure that we’ve got the tools and the processes in place to ensure that we are passing good quality on to our customers. And internally that we’ve got good product going from one operation to the next, and that it’s not eroding our capacity and our throughput and all those things. When that happened, well you don’t have good control of your quality.

Rob Tracy:
The sixth one is supply. And so the supply system is managing, who do you choose to buy from? What quantities? How do you flow it in? How do you make sure you got good quality? And if you don’t have a good quality… A good supply base, that’s healthy and taking care of you, then you’re going to struggle inside your operation?

Rob Tracy:
The next one is in the inventory system. So, inventory is just the lean, we will. I just wanted to talk about one piece flow while I’ve never seen it. Every factory has got inventory. And so the inventory system is making sure that it’s under control. You know where it’s at. You can find it. It’s being rotated properly, so that when it does time come to put it to productive use on the line, or in a workshop, you can go get it and you’re not losing stuff.

Rob Tracy:
Eighth one, is the sales and operations planning. Talked a little bit about that problem earlier. Sales and operations planning is creating that linkage between the sales group and the operations, any… Probably the financials as well. And making sure you’ve got that ongoing two or three months forward look to create alignment, and we don’t have customer service putting out more on the factory then they can produce. At the same time, operations has to understand what they need to do to take care of the customer and where they should be adding capacity and taking capacity off of table.

Rob Tracy:
The next one is data and measurement. That’s just about having the right measures up and down the chain from at the cell level, what’s important to them? What do they need to measure? All the way up to the senior leadership team, what should they now be watching? What I see at times is they’re missing a key measure, and performance has slipped in on it, but because they’re not watching it, you get this erosion that ends up having a big impact over time. That was the example I gave about they weren’t watching their throughput and 5% went away and they ended up suffering.

Rob Tracy:
And the last one is the operating system. The operating system is that hard one to describe because it’s the overall framework for how do you run the business. What is your meeting pulse? Whether that’s your weekly staff meeting or your quality system meeting, is how do you set your priorities every 90 days? And that’s really where I’ve been focusing a lot lately on my things.

Joe Sullivan:
Yeah, that’s great. Good synopsis of each. And I love having a framework like this, because I’m sure as our listeners are hearing you talk about these, there’s probably a lot of heads nodding. These are all issues that any manufacturing leader deals with, but to be able to have a structure to follow and say, put them in buckets and have a process for addressing each. I see the value in that, because it’s the same in my business and the way we approach implementing marketing and sales program for example.

Rob Tracy:
Right. But what I see is, when you go in and you look at a company that’s struggling or a facility that’s struggling, they may be fine on nine of them. And it’s just one of those 10 that’s undermining everything. So you get… I think you said it earlier, you have to be reasonably proficient in all of them because any one can turn into a weak spot.

Joe Sullivan:
Yeah. And it provides a great system too, I imagine, for auditing somebody up front and saying, where are you strong? Where are you weak? Where can we move the needle the most and pour our energy? Because you can’t attack everything at once, right? Your resources get thinned out.

Rob Tracy:
Absolutely. Yeah.

Joe Sullivan:
Well, number 10 on that list, I want to talk a little bit more about, and have you really unpack it? And that’s the operating system, because I know that one of your big initiatives right now, personally, is developing a formalized operating system that a company can hold in their hands and take and deploy inside their business. So, tell us a little bit about what you’re doing on that front, what you’re developing as far as an operating system goes and what also inspired you to develop that system?

Rob Tracy:
Yep. Absolutely. I wish I had used a different term than operating system. Because it sounds like MS-DOS back in the eighties. The operating system is that framework for how you run the business. And so if your listeners are familiar with EOS, the Entrepreneurial Operating System, that’s an operating system. Verne Harnish has got Scaling Up, that’s an operating system. I’m creating my own. I got very familiar with EOS, both as an implementer, where I went to all the training, but also work in a company that was using it for three years. So, I’ve got that “boots on the ground” view.

Rob Tracy:
And there are lots of things I like about it. And the thing I’m creating, which I’m calling the Business Forward Framework, it has elements of that, but we’re going to come at it a little differently, because I don’t think EOS is a good fit for all companies. You’ve got to have a certain personality profile that’s different to be an ideal client for them. So, I’ve got six buckets that I’m going to put mine in. You got to have the right strategy. You’ve got to have right culture. Right people. A 90 day focus, this is critical that every 90 days you’re resetting priorities and determining what you’re going to focus on and work on. Having the right data and metrics. And then something I call habits, and they can be the medium habits, but even though one of my favorites is just a habit of “just say it”.

Rob Tracy:
So we set the tone that says, when we’re together and we’re talking, whether that’s just you and I, one on one, or in a meeting, if it’s in your head, we’re going to say it. We’re not going to block out with things being unsaid and then go talk behind people’s backs. And we say things to each other and not about each other, that’s just a habit.

Rob Tracy:
So, what I want to do to fill a different niche with this framework is come at the implementation different. Instead of having just one size fits all that this is how you go about implementing it, is help come in, figure out where they’re at, where the good starting point is, and then create a custom roadmap for them and then be with them to implement. And I’m only going to work in industries that I’ve got experience in. I’m not going to be an agnostic generalist.

Joe Sullivan:
Yeah. It makes sense. The implementation of a framework like this is just so key. And I know, I’m familiar with EOS, which is, for those of you listening who maybe aren’t familiar, Gino Wickman was the author of Traction, which I’ve read three times and we’ve borrowed elements of it for our business. We’ve never fully embraced the full system, although we’re thinking about it at my company Gorilla right now.

Joe Sullivan:
But he describes the implementation side of things as traction. And as you put this framework in place, at the end of it, now you’ve got to actually hit the ground running and you have to… People have to be bought in and you have to follow through on doing it. So, I don’t know if you want to speak to that because I know you’re obviously in EOS, you’ve been there and been an implementer and know that system really well. So, maybe speak a little bit to that idea of gaining traction, or in your case, the implementation element.

Rob Tracy:
The element. Let me think about the best way to talk about that. There’s a lot of things in EOS around how to get that traction. Some of my favorite things is, we talked about the 90 day pulse.

Joe Sullivan:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Rob Tracy:
That is… And there’s a 90 day pulse and an annual pulse. So, in that strategy, so you know you’re all stroking the same direction is critical, but then breaking things down into 90 days, where you say, what are the top priorities? And we’ll do facilitated sessions where we’ll come up with all the possible ideas that we could do in the next 90 days, list them out. And it might have 100 on the list, and we’ll narrow it down to five and say… And then we’d scope them. I’m a big fan of writing one-page project charters that talk about what’s in scope? What’s out of scope? What are the milestones? And then you integrate those into the weekly meeting where every week you’re checking in saying, are we on target or are we off target? So, you don’t lose sight of them and they don’t go sit on a shelf. So, those are just some of the tools and techniques about how to drive performance forward.

Joe Sullivan:
Yeah, I think there’s even research out there. I remember reading in Traction that, the human mind is built in a way that it can handle about 90 day milestones and not much more than that. So, when you have these big and these massive goals that you’re trying to accomplish for the year or beyond, you shut down and wind up getting nothing done, unless you can break it down into smaller chunks, right? That could be maybe attacked in 90 day segments.

Rob Tracy:
Absolutely. Yeah, even if it’s a huge project, by doing an ERP implementation that might take two years, you can still say, what are we going to do in the next 90 days? And then we might be in the next 90 days, we’re going to do software selection. In the next 90 days, we’re going to get our data cleaned up. In the next 90 days, we’re getting at least… When you have something that’s a year or two out, it can seem like you’ve got an awful long time to implement, and the things on the back burner and you don’t really work on them. 90 days is that timeframe where it’s long enough that you can get something done, but short enough that you’ve got some urgency. You got to get moving because time is burning.

Joe Sullivan:
Yep. And then I think those weekly touch points become so important because it creates accountability, right? If you wait a month, if you only touch base with your team as you are implementing these 90 day milestones, well, then everybody waits until day 29 and says, “Oh man, I got to get all this stuff done.” And you hack your way through it.

Rob Tracy:
Yeah.

Joe Sullivan:
Versus weekly, you create consistency and accountability for each other, right?

Rob Tracy:
Yeah. Yeah. We want to avoid that college students syndrome where you keep pushing it off and then cram at the end. It just doesn’t work very well.

Joe Sullivan:
It makes sense. Well, Rob, anything else you wanted to touch on in terms of your operating system? I think this was… I’m curious where… Is it available out there for people to look at yet? Is it still in the works? I’m curious if people want to look at your operating system or-

Rob Tracy:
I would say I’m about 90% done.

Joe Sullivan:
Yeah.

Rob Tracy:
I don’t have it out and published anywhere. That’s not up on my website yet. So, probably the best thing to do is reach out to me through LinkedIn, be happy to talk anybody through it. Talk and I can help compare and contrast it with the EOS, I’m still an EOS fan.

Joe Sullivan:
Yeah.

Rob Tracy:
I can help show where there would be different so they can make a right decision. But yeah, best thing to reach out to LinkedIn or go to my website. My contact information is on there. It’s just simply robtracy.net so pretty simple to find.

Joe Sullivan:
Beautiful. Well, Rob, thanks a ton for doing this today. This is a super valuable conversation. I learned a ton. I’m sure our listeners are saying the same and really like what you’re doing. So, appreciate you joining.

Rob Tracy:
Yeah, I appreciate that. I love manufacturing. I’m glad I had a little chance to get to talk to you and your audience.

Joe Sullivan:
Great. Well, thanks Rob. And to the rest of you, we hope to see you next time on The Manufacturing Executive.

Speaker 2:
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.

The Manufacturing Executive: Episode 0

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

Over the past two years, I’ve written 50,000+ words of content to help manufacturers figure out how to grow their businesses. And collectively, our team of 18 Gorillas has published a whole bunch more.

So it was natural to ask:

What other media could we explore to publish these insights?

That’s how we made the decision to launch The Manufacturing Executive, our podcast to help leaders of manufacturing companies grow their businesses.

On this show, we bring in voices from outside our company to talk about their successes, their struggles, what they’ve learned, and what’s working and what’s not in industrial marketing and manufacturing sales.

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

Transcript of episode:

Kelsey:
Welcome to the introductory episode of the Manufacturing Executive. We’re here today with Joe Sullivan, a co-founder of the industrial marketing agency, Gorilla 76, and the host of the show. How’s it going today, Joe?

Joe:
It’s going great. And I’m excited to get this thing off the ground.

Kelsey:
Absolutely. We’re going to have a lot of fun today, talking about what this podcast is going to be. To give everyone a bit more context, my name is Kelsey Kohrs. I’m one of the producers of this show, and today we’ll be talking about what you, the listener, can expect from this podcast. But before we jump into that, Joe, tell me a little bit about yourself and about Gorilla.

Joe:
So I would consider myself a consultant to manufacturing organizations, on the marketing and sales front. My agency, Gorilla 76, I co-founded with my business partner, John Franco, back in 2006. And we have evolved over the years. It was probably, I don’t know, maybe eight or nine years ago when we officially committed to working specifically with mid-size [B2B 00:01:50] manufacturers. Our earliest days, we were an agency serving anybody who was ready to write us a check, and we found very quickly who we were best at serving, who we liked working with, who we could actually produce results for. And we decided to just own it and brand ourselves as an agency specifically in the industrial sector. So we’ve been doing it ever since. We’ve built a team of, at the time I’m recording this, 18 people, all based in St. Louis, Missouri. And yeah. So here we are today.

Kelsey:
That’s phenomenal. Tell me a little bit more about why you guys wanted to start this podcast.

Joe:
Sure. So for years, really, ever since we committed to serving the industrial sector, we have also been committed to producing resourceful, helpful, objective content that is literally just there to help manufacturers figure out how to grow their businesses. So a lot of sales and marketing advice. A lot of it’s been in written form, and we’ve really picked up content production the last few years, as well. I think I personally have written over 50,000 words of content in the last two years, which is about a book, about a business book. And so it was a natural transition for us to say, “Well, what other media could we explore here, to publish these insights?” And then the other thing was most of these insights have come from inside our company. A lot of my own, a lot of different experts inside of my company, strategists and copywriters, journalists. People who have different skill sets in the marketing world that could be applied to manufacturers.

Joe:
But what we wanted to do here is bring in voices from outside our company. So leaders of manufacturing companies, CEOs, and presidents, VPs of sales and marketing. People who are in the trenches trying to grow manufacturing businesses. Let’s bring them in, let them tell their stories, let them talk about their successes and their struggles and what they’ve learned and what’s working and what’s not, and be able to share that with their peers. And then we also wanted to bring in others who may be consultants in sales, or marketing in the B2B world, that can also bring perspectives from the outside. So making this less about just what’s in our brains and more about everybody else out there who can bring something to the table for our audience.

Kelsey:
I love that. And I feel like that will really resonate with your listeners, hearing stories both internally and externally, bringing in those people. That’s really cool, kind of what listeners can expect as they’re tuning in. And if a listener wants to connect with you, if they have got ideas for topics, guests, episode ideas, how can they connect with you?

Joe:
Sure. So I always direct people to gorilla76.com/learn. So that’s Gorilla, like the animal, G-O-R-I-L-L-A 76.com/learn. This is our industrial marketing strategy learning center. It’s essentially an ever-expanding bank of tools and articles and resources, and now podcasts, that are all there to purely educate and help. So I always send people there. If you want to click connect personally, you can fill out the Request a Consultation forum in the top right corner of our site. That goes directly to me. And then I’d also encourage you to find me on LinkedIn. So just look for Joe Sullivan, Gorilla 76, and I’ve built a network there and publish a lot of content there as well. So that’d be the best way to get in touch.

Kelsey:
Awesome. And that actually wraps it up for our introductory episode. Joe will be taking over the reins for episode one and beyond. Thank you so much for tuning in today. And I’m really excited to see this show grow. It’s going to add so much value to your listeners.

Joe:
Super-excited as well.

Speaker 2:
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.