In this episode of B2B Marketing Methods, Terri is joined by Ed Marsh, an experienced consultant in the B2B industrial space and host of the Industrial Growth Institute Podcast. Together, cover the intersection of marketing, sales, and technology in the Industrial Manufacturing sector.

Ed and Terri discuss why transformations in the sales and marketing teams of industrial companies can take a significant amount of time and investment. Ed talks about the importance of commitment and discipline in driving meaningful and sustainable changes within sales and marketing frameworks. He also covers the shortfall in lead nurturing and follow-up, urging companies to develop a robust pipeline and accurate forecasts to improve their sales processes.

Ed and Terri also discuss the evolving roles in sales, caused by the digital overload consumers face today, which has shifted the gatekeeping of information. Plus they talk about the critical role of content in sales strategies, and why it's so important to create an integration of systems across marketing, sales, technology, and customer experience to streamline operations and boost productivity.

Topics Discussed:

• Transforming sales and marketing in industrial companies
• Commitment and variables in industrial transformation
• Role of sales in navigating information overload
• Importance of content in driving revenue
• Strategic role of IT in improving buyer experiences
• Challenges of change and resistance in traditional manufacturing

To learn more about Ed, connect with him on LinkedIn at: https://www.linkedin.com/in/edwardbmarsh/ or

https://EdMarshConsulting.com

To connect with Marketing Refresh, visit: MarketingRefresh.com

This is B2B Marketing Methods. I'm your host, Terri Hoffman, and I'm the CEO of Marketing Refresh. Let's face it. Embracing digital marketing is daunting. This podcast was created to make it more approachable. Join us as we talk to CEOs, sales leaders, and revenue growth experts who will share lessons learned and tips from their own journeys. Hello, and welcome to the B2B Marketing Methods Podcast. I'm your host, Terri Hoffman.

I'm excited today to have a really special guest with us. His name is Ed Marsh. Welcome, Ed.

Thank you, Terri It's wonderful to be here with you today.

So let me start by telling you a little bit about Ed and giving some preview about what we're gonna be talking about today, and then and then dive in. Ed consults with b two b companies on revenue growth, and he is the host of the Industrial Growth Institute podcast. Look that one up and check it out. He has had some great guests and some great content.

Including Terri

Yeah. Thank you. Ed has he's really held a a pretty wide variety of executive level roles at, a bunch of different industrial companies. So he's done that both stateside. He's done that internationally. But I guess throughout all those experiences, he's had a really strong focus on revenue and profit and done that across various stages of the sales channel. I think this is really important for our audience, who's largely manufacturing audience because he's got experience from manufacturing to the OEM channel, to the distribution channel. And one of the things you're going to learn from listening to this podcast is Ed has successfully embraced digital marketing as part of his own revenue growth strategies and now coaches companies on a measurable scalable growth model that is designed to find sale and retain profitable loyal buyers globally.

That's a mouthful because it's a lot. And Ed calls this the overall revenue effectiveness framework. It's also known as o r e. And I'm gonna get him to talk about this, but that's based on, you know, what is the gold standard for measuring productivity in the manufacturing space, industrial OEE. So I think that's a pretty cool connection there that helps tie sales and marketing into a traditional manufacturing term. Ed and I are gonna talk about that framework. We're gonna talk about other areas like marketing and sales integration. We're gonna talk about a term that he, he taught me that's called sales karma.

We're going to talk about accountability. We're going to talk about taking an engineered systems approach to marketing and sales. You don't hear those words together very often, and I think he's got an interesting perspective on it. And if everything I already told you wasn't enough, Ed is a graduate of Johns Hopkins University, and he's a former ranger qualified airborne infantry officer. So, wow, let's take it away and see what we can all learn from Ed today. So welcome, Richard.

Yeah. Thank you for that gracious introduction. Hopefully, I don't drool on myself and and tell everybody that it was you made it all up.

Well, yeah, I definitely didn't make it all up. These are real things. It's kinda weird when you hear those things about yourself. You're like, I have accomplished a few things. That's pretty awesome. So let's start, you know, kind of towards the beginning, because I think, you know, when you hear all of the work experiences you've had in that industrial B2B setting, that's really relevant to the listeners, but I wanna dig into your background a little bit because I'm sure there are many things from your background that you've been able to pull into these b to b experiences. So the one that really jumps off the page to me is your your background as a now I'm gonna get the term wrong. A ranger qualified airborne infantry officer.

Talk to me about that. Like, what it sounds like you served in the military. So can you tell me about that background?

I did. I was in the army and and loved it. And, actually, I I had the good fortune of having a variety of training much earlier in my career than many other people do and was determined I was gonna make it a career and and loved running Raised and Ambush. And I graduated from college, and that's what I wanted to do. Of course, the world was different at that time than it has been for the last 20 years. I was in the in the late eighties. And eventually, what happened was I fell in love and got married and realized that I didn't think I would be able to stay married if I was deployed all the time. There's a few people that figure out how to do it, and I've got tremendous admiration for him, but most can't.

And I didn't wanna fall in that bucket. So I pulled the rip cord and got out.

You're you bring all of those analogies or the phrases from one thing that you do into the next thing that you do. I'm noticing that trend. I love that.

Well, don't flip my switch because you'll get me talking an army talk, which probably won't be appropriate for the podcast.

Oh, no. A lot of my listeners really might like that. So what was what is your degree, from Johns Hopkins in?

So I went to school to be an engineer. I think if I remember correctly, much much like you did. And Mhmm. Statics did exactly what it was supposed to. It it filtered me out. It was it was the course that is designed to get rid of people. And I, you know, I had people tell me just the secret to better grades is better vision. Just get through this course and keep going.

And I didn't feel comfortable doing that. And I ended up really focusing on areas of of interest to me that were largely history and economics. And so I kind of ended up with a catchall degree and, a bachelor of arts degree.

Okay. Yeah. So well and I can see how that the, like, the focus on history and economics probably tied into what you're doing now pretty heavily.

Yeah. The other thing that I was thinking about doing was actually a 5 year program in architecture with a combined bachelor's degree and an architectural degree. And I think I have seen that thread throughout my career because what I really enjoy is stuff that's at the intersection of creative and design with rigorous engineering and process. And and the the combination of those is where I find a lot of really interesting opportunities. And I think that was probably what would appeal to me about architecture when I was younger.

Okay. Yeah, that is interesting. You are, you are interested in a lot of different topics and like practice areas of, of the business world. So that's pretty interesting. Now, how did majoring in that lead you into the army? Like, what was that connection?

There's no connection there. I I went to school on an ROTC scholarship, knew that I was going into the army. And I figured if I was going in, then I wanted to do it as intensely as I could. And, and so that's the path that I followed. My degree was unrelated to what I was doing in the army.

Okay. So as you, I guess, wrapped up your career in the military, you already talked about kind of that desire to focus on your your spouse and leading, like, a more traditional family life is probably the catalyst that that got you to leave. How what were your what were you thinking in your next steps there? Like, how did you get going in in the career path you're in now?

I wanted to go into business, and most of my family have been lawyers and doctors. And and I wanted to go into business, and so I figured the first thing I needed to do was learn how to sell and took a job with a company called Cintas that at the time was just doing uniforms. Now it's much larger. They were just shooting uniforms. It was run by a former marine, and they had a strong military threat to their culture, and they recruited a lot of junior military officers who were getting out of the service. And so I went there, and I was fortunate enough to have a great sales manager and a good location manager who really spent a lot of time talking and coaching and training on sales. I didn't particularly enjoy the job. And so it wasn't long before I found another opportunity that took me into more capital equipment and industrial manufacturing, that kind of, you know, many of us have careers that, develop at least early on by accident.

And that's certainly that's certainly the case in in in my situation as well.

Okay. Would you say that that, your next move from CentOS, did that come from some type of a relationship that you built through your job at CentOS? Or how did how did that connection happen?

There was, I think, a series of introductions, but also, you know, I I I remember very clearly when I met the guy who ended up hiring me. And one of the things that I've always enjoyed about sales is the fact that you can be a little bit irreverent and be successful. And the guy asked me, he said, oh, well, that's interesting. Why don't you give me a resume? And I said, I can give you a resume, and you're gonna throw it in your briefcase and then throw it out when you get back to your office. But if you'd like to have a meeting, I'm happy to find a time to sit down and talk with you. It would actually I learned in retrospect, that was exactly what he was hoping to hear. I didn't know it at the time. But, you know, that was that was the way I kinda stumbled into the next job.

Okay. So when you were I mean, it sounds like you got a lot of coaching at Cintas sales coaching you mentioned. What were some of the things that you learned there that kind of you feel give you, gave you a good base and a good foundation?

So I was fortunate actually in my second job to have a lot of great sales coaching and training as well. So so for the first 10 years of my sales and business career, that was a consistent thread. And it's something that I spent a lot of time focusing on today with companies because I think there's much less of it. But I'll tell you, I think the thing that jumped out at me first was spin selling. I was introduced to that book very early on. And and again, the sales manager was very thoughtful in the way in the way he took us through it. And we spent time role playing. We spent time planning sales calls.

We spent time working on the methodology and just that rigor that the fact that we were going to think about what we were doing, go in with a plan as opposed to just show up and and and see where the conversation went, I think was was really important. The other thing that happened was I actually closed the largest deal that Boston location had had in their history up to that point. And a lot of it was just rookie naivete. You know, I didn't know any better. So I called the guy and got him on the phone and started a conversation and had a series of meetings. But the really interesting thing that came out of it was we we were trying to sell against a competitive uniform service. And the the key to getting the deal, I think, was to do a survey and to codify the survey results into data to put in front of him, to make clear to him that, no, the status quo wasn't okay, that there were shortcomings. And then, of course, we had to get him comfortable that we could help address those.

But simply using actual data from his organization as part of the sales process was a great early lesson learned.

Wow. Yeah. I mean, knowing, having gotten to know each other here recently and, our mutual connection is around a company called Databox. And that is a huge part of what they advocate for is using company data to, like, really uncover things in a creative field, like sales and marketing, that shows you data that can actually, like, help you map out a path and a strategy. Right? So that that's pretty interesting that you're seeing that connection from that point of your career and then now in this point of your career as well.

So That's actually a great question that you asked because I I hear it as I'm saying it. I hear that connection, but I never stopped to think of it before.

Right. I mean, I think what Databox is doing today in terms of the benchmark survey program that they've created, it's it's new in like today's times, but it's really based on things that go back to, you know, like every area of business improvement. Yeah.

And and it, it also feels like a methodology that's appropriate for today's schedules and frantic, you know, over commitments and everything. It used to be, you could sit down with somebody and have a conversation and uncover a lot of the things in conversation that you can't get to now. There just isn't time. There isn't patience. And so using that methodology kind of forces it a little bit. It's a forcing function. You aggregate very specific data from their own people or from their competitors, whatever. It makes it hard to ignore, but it's also a way to get the information that I think people aren't patient enough to, you know, to, to deliver in conversation anymore.

Right. Yeah, exactly. So it sounds like you stayed in that second sales role for quite a time. Were you there, did you say for 10 years?

I think it was maybe a total of 10 years, those first couple of positions. It was 7 or 8 years I was in that in that job. It was in the packaging space. So it was selling consumables and services and capital equipment.

Okay. So one thing that I wanna make sure, I guess, becomes part of the thread of our conversation is I know at different points in your selling career, you have sold products or services that are very high value, like high, not only high impact and high value, but a high ticket price for the actual sale. Right? Like, did that start entering into the equation for you at that point of your career, or was that further

on? I think it was gradual. I think one of the things that I help companies understand they need to screen salespeople for is their comfort with certain magnitudes of transactions. And, you know, when I had never sold before and I wasn't making much money, having just gotten out of the army and I had, 2 young kids. For me, spending a $100 personally was something that I thought about. And so, you know, somewhere, there was a correlation in my mind between what I thought was a lot of money and what I expected buyers would think was a lot of money. And so if I was talking to somebody about a $50,000 machine, that felt like a pretty big deal. Later on in my career, as I was working on $1,000,000 lines and $2,000,000 lines, the $50,000 deal was almost a distraction because it takes almost as much time to close that deal as it does a dozen bigger one or at least it used to back then. But I think that that's an evolution.

I didn't start out comfortable with it.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I really love, the person that was, your manager who was spending time on that spin selling book, because I don't wanna move too quickly past something that you said there. Role playing and practicing is so huge. And that is not something that I observe happening very often for sales teams and salespeople as part of their training process. You know, it's like you wouldn't, as a musician, just go out on stage and play, or as a football player or a basketball player. You, you would never just like run out on the field and start before you practice and really made sure that you're ready for that that game. So, like, really that same principle should apply, when you're selling or presenting or any any of those areas.

I think that's absolutely true. You need rehearsals. You need practice. I mean, the military beat this into me. It's something that we practice, rehearsed, and trained all the time. And people like you and I bear the brunt of this. In many cases, we can help companies generate a lot of leads, and often they'll sell none of them. And is it because the leads all are terrible or because they can't sell and the truth probably lays somewhere in between.

But the reality is that many companies don't sell very well and they don't train and they don't coach. And those are 2 distinct things. There's there's a difference. Training is done as a group for a specific period of time. Coaching ought to be done every day between a sales manager and a sales rep. And and I would argue that if people say they coach and you ask how much time they spend role playing and they say none, they're not coaching. Role playing is critical. Role playing is the way you build the reps.

Role playing is the way you actually work through the techniques that are gonna work, get comfortable hearing yourself, say it, get comfortable going through that sort of a dialogue in order to be able to do it with with a

prospect. Yeah. Okay. So I wanna dig into something here. It wasn't, it wasn't necessarily on the the preview I gave at the beginning, but this conversation is, is presenting a good opportunity. My, my guess or my suspicion is that when you get a call for people who are interested in your services, you are really frequently hearing, we need sales training. Is that true?

It's interesting. I would say that there are certainly a list of common things that people talk about. I don't think the sales training is the highest on the list. In fact Okay. Many cases, they don't think they need it. They haven't stopped to think about it. It's not on the radar. Often what happens is, you know, people will say, oh, we need more leads or we need more qualified deals in the pipeline or we've got too high sales turnover.

And and often you can gradually start to dig into issues, you know, common issues like lengthening sales cycle, the increase in that percentage of deals lost to no decision, losses to competitors, high sales turnover, not enough new logo activity, not enough meetings. Any of those kinds of things are really a symptom. And so in order and and often what happens when people decide they need some training, they they try to train to the symptoms. So if there's too much discounting, they try to get training for negotiation. But the reality is the reason that discounting's happened is because people get to the end of the deal. They've given a quote without knowing why somebody's gonna buy. Now they're trying to close the deal, and so they're trying to somehow force a close by slashing the price. And if we go back, what we find is they didn't know why somebody needs to buy.

They didn't help quantify the budget. They didn't get the whole whole buying team's buy in. They never met the decision maker. They don't understand the timeline for making the decision. They don't understand the competitive options that somebody's looking at. So if if you skipped all those steps along the way, particularly if you don't know the compelling reason for a person to buy both personally and in their professional corporate role, then you've got nothing on which to to base a close. And so discounting is often a reflection of failure and all those steps along the way. So if you train somebody in negotiation, all you do is end up with people that are more obnoxious at the end that haven't done a good job to, you know, to sell all along the way.

So even when people say they need sales training, often, what we need to do is back up and try to understand just like we would on the manufacturing floor. If if their defect bin is filling up too fast, well, guess what? We look for the root cause. We try to work backwards and find out what's going on. We need to do exactly the same thing in marketing and sales.

Yeah. Okay. I love that. So that what you're describing to are little seeds, I think that led you to creating the ORE framework. Correct? Okay. So explain what that is. I like what I try not to do on our podcast is the podcast is not a commercial for people to come on and sell their services. Right? But what it is is a learning opportunity for people who are in sales and marketing roles and have to figure out like, how do we, how do we move forward? How do I embrace the way that things are evolving in my space? And so I think there's a really good opportunity to learn about that framework and how that could connect to what they might be missing.

So please explain what that is.

So real quick without selling, going back to what you said originally, OEE is well understood in the 10 steps in a manufacturing process and each is 97% efficient, that sounds pretty good. Except your net quality output is only 83%, which isn't so good. And you realize when you begin to look at it that the impact on of each of those steps on the net quality is pretty significant. Well, if you wanna improve that, you find the one that's 92 and you fix that first, and then you find the one that's 93 and you fix that and you work on up. And maybe you don't get to the one that's 98% efficient until later on, or maybe you don't even touch it because you figure you can't really improve it. But you can recognize that the system has has inefficiencies, recognize that over time you wanna improve the whole thing, but also select places to begin to work on it. A big piece is to just understand from a systems perspective that this whole thing has to work together. What's interesting is I talk to manufacturers who for whom that's just second nature in operations and production.

I mean, they don't even have to think about it. When they walk through the factory and they see a problem, in some cases, there's a literal and on cord. They pull the cord, they stop the line. Everyone huddles to figure out what's going on. In other cases, it's not as severe or it may be kind of a virtual hand on cord that they pull, but there's an awareness that we need to stop. We need to figure out what's going on. We need to fix it. We need to go through a PDCA cycle.

We need to test it and see, see what comes out. We need to gradually hit a rate until we improve it. Let's compare that to the way most industrial companies market and sell, which is kind of well, let's see. Maybe, we'll we'll probably spend the same on trade shows next year. Maybe we'll send an extra person to it. Maybe we'll send somebody to walk another show. Maybe we'll run some ads in another trade journal. You know, let's see.

What else should we do? Maybe we'll have a hospitality suite at one of the shows we go to. I mean, it's it's it's really just a very casual ad hoc approach to it. And and in many cases, if if I ask what the defect rate is on the production line, I get a very straightforward specific answer. If I ask what the close rate is for sales, well, you know, my gut feeling is it's probably somewhere around 30 or 40%. We normally, if we get to the table, we win our fair share of deals. Complete dissonance between those 2. So I guess with that background, the answer to your question, ORE, overall revenue effectiveness, is is my attempt to create an analog to OEE to put marketing and sales into a systems framework that is comfortable for industrial manufacturing folks to think about and visualize so that then they could bring the same kind of rigor and process engineering and continuous improvement mindset that makes them so successful in in production and operations and apply that to marketing and sales.

Yeah. Oh my gosh. That's you you just said quite quite a lot. How like, give me a feeling for how that give me a sense for how that lands with leaders at industrial companies.

So we're all humans, right? Each of us is a different creature. Each of us have good days and bad days. And I'll tell you it lands very, there's there's a lot of receptivity and excitement in some cases, and there's tremendous resistance. And it probably resistance is the best word in other cases. So a lot depends on the person. A lot depends on the circumstances. A lot depends on the company and culture. I think that there it's very clear quickly when I, when I bring this topic up, whether somebody is kind of, you think of the Carol Dweck model, growth mindset and fixed mindset.

It's a very easy way to determine who's got a growth mindset versus who has this fixed mindset. And it's also interesting to watch what happens when the private equity partners like it, and the CEO of portfolio company is resistant. Or when the CEO likes it and the VP of sales is resistant. And often there's conflicts that arise, and this helps to kind of clarify and codify some of the frictions like we may talk about later between marketing and sales by really bringing some of this to a very acute and specific point of awareness. When we start talking about metrics, what percent of your trade show leads only got one call? What percent of them translated into meetings? What percent of those meetings became qualified opportunities? And if people can't answer that, then that's that's a problem for both marketing and sales. And that's the kind of question that very quickly I find is helpful to illustrate that dissonance between the way they run operations and the way they run revenue growth, but also can either excite people who say, oh my goodness. This this is this is so wonderful. Let's think about it this way and let's get better versus, oh, man.

I don't wanna deal with this. I just kinda like doing things the way we've been doing them for the last 25 years. What what got us here is probably gonna get us there. And and I don't wanna I don't wanna deal with this hassle.

Right. Well, that that mindset is kind of the, the enemy, so to speak, of fully operationalizing the sales and marketing function. I run into that same type of resistance because we're selling marketing services and it's, there's usually a, we're doing okay. I would like to do better. I, I think it would be great if our business was more profitable and we had more leads and our sales were increasing. And that's what our board and our investors are expecting from us, but we're just going to roll the dice and hope we can get there this way. That's the part that, you know, frankly, it kind of disappoints me when I see that. But I do understand it because I'm a business owner.

My company just took on the EOS framework, which is an operational framework, and it took me 13 years of owning a business before I embraced that.

Right.

So it frustrates me when I see it, but I also empathize with it and I do understand it. I just think that yeah, go ahead.

I think there's a couple other factors at play, particularly in the industrial manufacturing space. Number 1, they're not a startup. They've been doing this. They've got a history of 50 years, and they've grown. Yeah. They've had ups and downs. Yes. They've had some existential crisis, but here they are today, larger than when they started, and they've probably grown an average of 3 to 7% per year consistently, at least over time in aggregate.

And so there's a very strong belief that if they're just patient, that will continue. And they could be right. I don't think so. I think markets are changing very quickly. But that I think is one factor of play. Another factor is the fact that they don't wanna have to scale really quickly. If if a software company adds 50% new customers, they can just spin up new licenses. Yeah.

They've got additional tech support and customer support, and they've got some other requirements. But if a factory building machines does that, they may have to blow out the back wall or rent a new building across town or, find new vendors for components because they can't source enough of them and hire assemblers. And they've got all kinds of problems associated with scale. And so companies are are reticent to try to grow too aggressively. And so I think that then translates into maybe a satisfaction with with where they are. That's, that's a little bit dangerous.

I, yeah, I definitely see that and agree. Talk to me about something that you just said. Markets are changing. Right? And so talk talk about how I'm I'm assuming you're talking about, like, the buyers. Mhmm. Right? Talk talk to me about that. What are you seeing there?

Well, I'll I'll use what am I hearing? And I'm sure you hear it too. Our buyers are different. Our industry is different, you know, dot, dot, dot. They don't use the Internet. They don't use chatbots. They don't download information online. They don't research companies online. They don't look for they don't research problems early in the process before they even know what the problem is and try to try to use resources online to help them understand what's going on with their business.

And, you know, honestly, that's baloney. Everybody does it. We all have shaped our b to b buying behaviors based on our experiences as b to c consumers, And they're largely frictionless. They're seamless. There's abundant information. We use the Internet for everything. Yeah. You may call somebody and say, by the way, I'm thinking about this.

Do you have any anybody you can refer me to? But of course, they're still using the Internet to research and to try to check if they get a referral. Find out about that company too. I mean, it's just part of how we live and how we do business. And so the idea that somebody would say that their industry is different is embarrassing, honestly. And it's certainly the biggest change, but there's others at the same time buying teams now. According to Gartner research buying teams, I think, for a typical complex sale or somewhere 10 to 15 people, the idea of a decision maker is is almost anachronism now. There's certainly, there is somebody that writes the checks, But often that person isn't willing to buck the committee decision. They're they're willing to let the 10 people of whom all of them must say yes.

It's kinda like a jury. All of them must say yes. And any one of them that's got different personal priorities or is in a bad mood or wants that money for a project in their department or whatever, any of them can say no. That makes it really hard. And if the decision maker doesn't step up and say, I hear you. Thanks for contributing your thoughts. I've decided this is what we're gonna do. Then it makes it really hard to sell.

So those are a couple examples of of what's changing. I think there's also growing risk aversion and growing hesitance that kinda ties in with that with that buying team. So there's, I think, big changes happening in markets.

Yeah. Well and just the way that you describe the whole landscape, that sounds intimidating. Right? And now if I'm the COO or the VP of sales at a big manufacturing company, I'm like, well, that that sounds difficult to navigate. How could I figure that out? Right? And I I think the beauty of the framework that you've created is it takes something that sounds very overwhelming and daunting, and it breaks it down into very simple steps that, you know,

needs to be

diagnosable all along the way where things might be going wrong. Right?

But that's kind of you saying that's what I tried to do. And and they're they many of them are simple. Not all of them. Almost none of them are easy, though. And and that's the reality. And so I understand why somebody feels like it's daunting. And it is. On the other hand, many companies felt it was daunting to really get serious about quality 30 years ago.

And some of them resisted, and they basically went out of business. Others embraced it proactively and some kind of caught up along the way. But every company that was gonna succeed had to go through that fairly wrenching process. And it meant there was some people that no longer fit in the company. In some cases, those were family members and in family businesses. And in some cases, they're a long time loyal employees. But if they couldn't get on board, they they they couldn't hang with the company because the company had to go a different direction. So if if if people just recognize that that do you have to change it all today? No.

Do you have to be aware of where you stand and the gap to where you need to be? Yes. And do you need to begin working on priorities in that direction? Absolutely. I think that maybe doesn't make it less daunting, but makes it more manageable.

Yeah. Easier to take that first step. I mean, if you were setting the expectation with someone about, like, how long it takes to go for that through that transformation, how would you answer that question?

How long does it take somebody to lose weight?

Yeah. I

mean, it's how serious are they? What's their metabolism? Are they willing to stop drinking beer? Will they will they get off the couch and exercise? I mean, we each have individual variables, and we also have personality and, accountability and discipline predilections and all of those fit in. And if if a CEO of a company says, this is fabulous, we need to do it. And one of the elements of what we agree we need to do is create consistent content to appeal to companies that are early in the pre awareness stage so we can begin to shape a relationship with them long before they're ready to buy something. And after we get 2 blog post published, somebody comes and says, oh, I'm too busy. I have to do such and such, you know, and and we start to slip, then the whole program falls apart because it's clear to everybody that the chitter chatter or the pitter patter rather doesn't match the chitter chatter. And that they're they aren't really serious about following through and doing it. So the answer to how long does it take really depends on how serious are you. How willing are you? How committed are you? Is it a board and owner and investor executive leadership driven priority? Or is it something that somebody hopes they can kind of snap their fingers and it's just gonna take care of themselves, take care of itself and, you know, the trade show coordinator can kinda get it done for them.

Right. Yeah. Well, god, speaking of trade shows, you and I have had this conversation before, but how many times do you and I watch clients go to a trade show and then get back with 200 leads or 300 leads and never never follow-up with any any of them? So I I think what you're describing in terms of a transformation makes it meaningful and sustainable and long lasting. But I I also think that there are very specific areas of the sales and marketing function that could be improved that would maybe show other people in the organization like, okay. Maybe this is worth looking into a little bit further. Maybe there is some something that should substantiate a larger commitment from the entire organization to go through this change. Would would you say that's true from your experience?

I think it's absolutely true. And I think 2 easy ones to point to. I mean, almost every industrial company has some low hanging fruit where they've got some traffic coming to their website. And then somewhere buried on a contact us page, they've got a 73 field form that they expect somebody to fill out to quote, unquote, become a lead. And simply having a couple worthwhile downloadable and maybe asking for an email address and having CTAs throughout the website can overnight help them increase more leads. And I I'm sure that you help companies do that routinely. On the sales side, I think simply talking about sales process. If you ask most companies, most industrial companies what their sales process is, it's awaiting inquiry, collect technical details, do a quote, and then hope and follow-up.

And that's not a sales process. That's a set of, you know, admin steps. A sales process moves a project from the initial discovery phase through closed won or closed loss. And simply calling that out, working on developing the sales process, stopping the the the vanity metric of quotes issued and pipeline deals when a lot of the pipeline is unqualified and and, you know, outrageous anyway. Those I think are two examples of where you can, in fairly short order, have a pretty big impact and demonstrate that, yes, there's potential and opportunity with this. And, yes, it's gonna take some work. But when we do it, we actually have a very much more robust pipeline and better conversations. We understand the forecast are more accurate as well.

Right. Yeah. Exactly. So one of those, I guess, tipping points, is how you and I are seeing the, the roles of marketing and sales evolving and really integrating with one another. I think historically and I mean, I started in the workforce in 1994 before the Internet. There there was no such thing as as the Internet or online marketing or digital marketing. Right? And now there is. And so because of that, I think there are huge changes and evolutions that have taken place, and software companies have already adapted to this.

Right? Retail companies, b to c companies have already adapted. Talk about that evolution, please, and then how you're seeing, where the gaps might be for typical industrial companies at this point?

So I would say the evolution is ongoing. I don't think the software companies have adapted to it. I think they're in a process of adaptation. I think they're moving faster than other companies. I think that's driven by the fact they're under such intense pressure from investors to drive results. So they're always experimenting, and they're generally a good bellwether, I think, of where industrials are gonna go. But in terms of buying journey, it it used to be, of course, that buyers were dependent on sales for information. That marketing's role is to place the yellow pages ad, and then sales would fill the phone calls and schedule meetings and conduct discovery calls, determine what they thought the person's problem was, and share information.

That was the only way buyers had access to information, maybe a little bit through Thomas Register, maybe going to a trade show, but Yeah. Sales were the gatekeepers. And, of course, fundamentally, that's no longer the case. And so if people can do all their research, then sales has a role that's different than sharing information. What sales has to do is help buyers buy, help them navigate this overwhelming mass of information, help them understand how to make this kind of decision because it's not a decision that they make very often for for any specific product or service. And and sales needs to help them do that. What's interesting if you look at I think it's Gartner. This got a a, graphic.

Bob Apollo shares it frequently. I think it's called the long hard slog that shows the buyer's journey as just a completely chaotic, convoluted back and forth of progression. Although it's not a progression implies that somehow it's moving forward. It's not always. A lot of times it's moving backwards. And what's interesting about it is that some of the activities are in domains that one might traditionally associate with marketing. And some of the activities are in domains one would traditionally associate with sales, but they might start on the sales side and quickly drop back into marketing and then bounce back and forth over the course of 6 months with multiple people from the company on the buying team being at different stages in that the whole time. And so when we think about the role of marketing and the role of sales, if we have this mindset that there are these silos where marketing creates a lead and chucks it over some wall, and it's up to sales to qualify it and then either ignore it if it's not a qualified, you know, bank qualified deal or work on it if it is.

It's it's just no longer suited to the way that people research and buy today. And so it creates a lot of friction. It pisses buyers off. It makes it hard for buyers to get the information they want, and then buyers get resentful and resistant. And so then they're much less likely to talk to salespeople.

Yeah. No. I agree. I I was talking to a good friend of mine who's an architect about a month ago, and he we were talking about our business, my business. And he said, you know, I guess I never thought about it, but we have to research products that would be used on a construction site all the time and we'd be part of our design. And if we go to the website to do research on the things that we'd like to include in our design and they don't have the right information on the website, we just skip it, and we Google to look for a competitor. And he was like, I I see exactly what you're saying. And I'm like, I know.

That that is a daily occurrence. Right? And so that connection between content and how that would impact the sales is stronger than ever. Right? And it it can truly impact your revenue directly.

And that's a great example because BIM files are kind of the gold standard for construction products companies and and and people in the construction business. That's what folks wanna be able to download because it fits into all their other tools and lets them see how it's gonna work and what's required and all of that. And yet many traditional industrial manufacturers have this mindset. Oh, well, that's, you know, that's privileged information. We're only gonna let the right folks have that. And so they try to withhold it or they put make people jump through hoops in order to get to it. And and it just it it creates friction. And people say there's so many other places that I can fix my problem.

I'm gonna go look somewhere else for the solution. Yeah.

I mean, I love how you timed that siren in the background to Ed. It's like we're putting off an alarm. Pay attention to this. Right. Pay attention to this. So talk to me about content and content production. How what are some, you know, maybe keys to doing that well in an industrial business that you've seen be successful?

So this will freak people out, and it's not not an easy answer, but I believe that you have to have a publishing arm of your business. Now does it have to be like Time Magazine? No. Could it be one person who is a capable editor who understands a lot of stuff related to SEO and content planning and has a journalism background that can go to your SMEs and interview them and compliment that with research and weave it together into a story. Sure. But somebody has to own it, and you have to recognize that content needs to be visual. It needs to be written. It needs to be in video. It needs to be in a variety of different formats.

It needs to be fairly significant in volume, particularly over time. It needs to be consistent in production. It needs to and and probably this is the single biggest friction point for most industrial companies. It needs to be about the buyer's problem. Nobody gives a darn about your product. And if you just start vomiting up crap about your product, then the contents you're creating is a complete waste of the energy and time and resources you're putting into it.

Yeah. Absolutely. You you said a lot there and it it takes so how do you justify that, you know, as an organization? What what you just described could potentially be a marketing manager's job. Right? Whereas that person in the past might have been doing proposal responses, designing flyers, putting together trade show materials, and a slew of other a slew of other things. They might even be the person making your daily social media posts. Right? But how do you how do you work with your clients to sort of justify that role?

So I'd say first, it's not an either or. I mean, all those other things still need to happen. And so you have to figure out how you're going to supplement it. The biggest the biggest barrier in most cases is mindset. We're accustomed. You know, we're a $200,000,000 company, so we've got a 30 person sales force, and we've got a 2 person marketing department or a 1 and a half person marketing department. Somebody make sure we have the right pad and carpet at the show and that they, you know, the shipments arrive on time and the drayage is paid, and we've got the right utilities hooked up. And then somebody manages some journal ads and stuff like that.

And if that's the mindset and if your budget is primarily allocated towards sales and we know that somewhere 40 to 60 percent of salespeople are chronically missing quota, then you have to be willing to say, first of all, we have to increase the marketing budget. 2nd of all, we probably want to begin if we understand that buying journey and how marketing and sales are both selling, that we probably wanna reallocate some resources. Maybe some of those people that aren't performing as salespeople belong other places in the company, and maybe some of them don't belong in the business anymore. And we're gonna take some of those resources and put it into marketing. I talked to you when when you're on my podcast about what an industrial company marketing budget ought to be.

Mhmm.

And I don't know if there's a single right answer, but for most companies, it's, you know, maybe a third to a half percent. And the real answer is probably somewhere 3 or 5 or 7 or 10%. And it's not 50% like a software company. But if we understand how buyers are buying and researching in the role of marketing, how marketing support sales, then we gotta invest more in it. And I so I think back to your question on how you implement a content culture, it's gotta be driven from the top. Marcus Sheridan makes a great great point about how the CEO, the president, the senior leadership all has to buy in, spend time, demonstrate the behaviors, commit to doing it publicly in front of other people, be leaders in that, and hold others accountable for their part in contributing to it. But it also means that you have to you have to be willing to build a department. You need a video person.

Maybe it's part time, maybe it's a contract, but you need a video person. You need an editor. You need a style guide. You need somebody that can do content planning. You need probably a marketing agency to help with the marketing ops piece to make sure that the editorial calendar is created around solid SEO design rather than just, you know, pulling topics out of the air and scrambling the day before to try to get a get an article written. You need all that stuff, all those functions. And that means you need that commitment. You need the mindset.

Yeah. Well, I think that speaks to, you know, one of your favorite topics, which is taking more of an engineering mindset to your sales and marketing program. I mean, it's, I'm in various business groups myself. And in some of them I have fellow CEOs who are manufacturing CEOs. And I always say, like, I'm I actually own a manufacturing company too. And they're like, I thought you had a marketing agency. I'm like, we manufacture content every day because that is how you have to look at it. You've gotta look at what what are we manufacturing? Why are we manufacturing it? How can we manufacture it in the most efficient and high quality way possible so that it checks off all of the goals that it's intended to check off? Right? That's that's how I've always kinda seen it.

Yeah. It makes sense. And and what's interesting is as I've been doing my podcast and spending time researching people who have who have long followed and admired and enjoyed conversations with, but really digging into their background. I'm seeing that fairly consistently. There's an educational background that includes some kind of hard science or engineering or something like that. And I think that that's reflected. They're not nothing against graphic arts majors, but these people that are really yourself included that are really thinking about how to create content as part of a system that advances the company's strategic goals have to think in multiple dimensions. And it's not just, you know, checking the box to get a blog post done every week or 3 social media posts.

It's it's about where the company needs to go, what the company's priorities are, who the buyers are they're speaking to, what the message is that's important, how those buyers make decisions, what they're worried about in their business, and what their customers' customers are worried about. You have to work all of that into it in order to have content marketing, I think, resonate.

Right. Yeah. And I so I wanna connect back to the graphic design comment that you just made. So I would I also very much believe very strongly believe, and and this is a hill I will die on, it also has to look good.

Of course.

So everything that you just talked about, it also has to be done in a a really nice professional design that's consistent. It matches your brand standards. Because it to me, it's like the mindset that you would send a salesperson to a meeting dressed in, you know, flip flops and and and shorts and a tank top. Like, maybe if you're going on a fishing outing as a company event, that would be appropriate. But, you know, you've you've got to think about how all of these things are designed and how they're presented as well, and that needs to be done in a professional way.

For sure. But but form follows function. And you can have Yeah. Brochures with beautiful aqueous coated photographs of your machine or products and a list of specs that does nothing to help people understand how it helps them in their business. And and it's not gonna do you much good. You have to have the substance, and then I completely agree that design and the execution has to be superb as well.

It's no different than product that they're designing and building and selling too. Right? I mean, it needs to look professionally built, easy to understand, but also has to work. Right. So same thing applies.

A perfect example is think about navigation on a website. And it's fascinating. I'm sure you set up, recordings. So Mhmm. Your clients can watch visitors' behavior on their website. And if you watch how people frantically bounce back and forth from nav to page, scroll down back up to nav. It's clear that people don't find what they wanna find on a website. They're thrashing around trying to find what they're looking for.

But the nav is exactly the way the president of the company who was too involved in the project to begin with wanted it because that's the way he or she thinks about it. And when you realize again that dissonance between the fact that we're not solving for the buyer and the fact that we've got these old mindsets about how we wanna do it, a website is no longer a business brochure. It's not a product brochure. It's a source of information to help buyers buy and help them make decisions, help them understand their problems. So a beautifully designed website that's got horrible navigation that doesn't have the right information, doesn't do anybody any good. You have to have both.

Yeah. Absolutely. Both boxes have to be checked. And I think this is a little bit off track from where the conversation is going right now, but I really wanna understand from your perspective because it's so clear to hear, like, the passion in your voice for helping companies solve this problem. Like, why do you think this is such a psychological question I'm about to ask you? But why do you think you're so passionate about it? Like, what is where does that come from inside of you?

I I like seeing people be successful. I like manufacturing. I think manufacturing is cool. I think I think making things is is an important piece of the fabric of community in the country. I think you, you, you have to make stuff. I think, you know, well paying jobs, pride in community, contributing to the economy, all those things are important. And so it fundamentally bothers me when I see people that are so close, but missing it. And and so I think the passion comes from the fact, hey, come on.

You know, maybe with a strong shove, we can get you over the line and you can unlock this enormous potential that you have because you're so close. You're just not quite there.

Right. Yeah. No. I I agree with you. It's I use the word frustrating a lot and I'm I always think, like, I really need to change that word because it sounds too close to angry. But I I'm, like, let down, or I don't know what the right word is, but I you see it, and you're like, if you could just figure out this one part, I think you would be so pleasantly surprised by how it could create more opportunities for your company and employees and and really expand people's growth trajectory personally and professionally. So one of the terms I used in the in the opening when I was introducing you was sales karma. What does sales karma mean? Explain that to me.

So how many times have you been sitting in the office of an executive of a manufacturing company who's lamenting the fact that their salespeople don't have enough meetings, they don't have enough leads, they have a hard time getting deals in the pipeline, all that kind of stuff. And then they get a phone call, and somebody buzzes on the air, comes and says, So and so is on the phone to, to talk to you. I don't have time to talk to a salesperson right now. Just, you know, put them in my voice mail. I think that's sales karma. Now there's a lot of crappy salespeople out there. There's a lot that interrupt. There's a lot that pitch with inane information.

For sure. There's a lot of crap sales. On the other hand, if your problem is your salespeople aren't getting the opportunities you'd like them to have, then maybe what you ought to do is is think about your experience as a buyer and the way you respond as a buyer. And also think about the fact, how many times do you say to yourself, well, jeez, if if they would only listen to my salespeople, we could really help them. Well, how many of those people that are calling you do you think are thinking the same thing and maybe really could help you if if you'd listen to them? So I believe that it's important that companies treat vendor salespeople the way they'd like their salespeople to be treated in the marketplace. And, you know, we could debate that. We could talk about what it means and and how to implement it. But I think it's a fundamental mindset, and it bothers me when I hear a company that's fairly dismissive and condescending towards salespeople who then are struggling to try to help their sales team succeed.

Well right. And I I do think it's a mindset. And I think, what makes it really hard is there are so many just junky, cruddy, not thought out

For sure.

Sales pitches that hit our inboxes and our our our phones every single day. And so you you can develop this kinda, like, hard shell Yep. Against sales. So what I think what you and I both try to focus our time on is let's raise the level of visibility for people who are really attempting to do it right. And they might be messing up. You know, they might be making mistakes here and there, but their intention is very sincere, and they're doing it from a place of integrity and authenticity. Their approach might need some work. But you can you you do have to, like, look past that as a buyer sometimes, I think, to try to open yourself up to an area that might help your business improve.

So I, yeah, I I totally agree with that. It's just that the world right now makes it very hard to do that because there's so much garbage.

Yeah. For sure. Absolutely. But so so commit then to make sure that your company doesn't contribute to the garbage. You know, that can be a lesson to take away. And and and if you ever feel like you agree to meet with somebody and then suddenly you're 10 minutes into the meeting and you've gotten nothing out of it yet, Think about why that is. And it's probably because they jumped into an about us deck. Who gives a crap? What a waste of time and energy.

But then ask yourself, are any of your salespeople going out and doing that same thing? I mean, if if I could just tear up every about us deck that's out there, I'm sure that we could somehow improve sales effectiveness by 20%

probably. Right. Yeah. No. I I completely agree. Let's shift gears a little bit and talk about a board. You know, what is what do you view? And you you have a certification in this area that I'd like you to talk about. But can you talk about the role of a board and owners and investors in terms of, like, how they should be impacting revenue growth in in the business?

So that's a really interesting question. And I can tell you there is not a lot of agreement and there's no clear answer on it. And the size of the company and the nature of the company closely held family owned businesses have different sorts of boards than private equity owned, you know, midsized manufacturers. So a lot depends on the context. Here's, I'd say, at a high level what I would say about the board. The board needs financial acumen. If the company is thinking about an exit, you probably need m and a experience. Increasingly, it's important to be aware of AI and cybersecurity kinds of issues.

You probably need some talent management expertise on there. So you need some skills that are important at a strategic level to the business. And it's it's very important, of course, to remember that the board doesn't manage the business. The board is not the operational entity. That's up to executive management. The board's responsibility is to hire, manage, and potentially fire the CEO or plan plan for succession. So the CEO in some privately held companies doesn't like the idea of accountability to a board, and so that creates some conflict. And often the boards aren't empowered to to really do their job.

And if the CEO is the sole owner and and a board member, that's that's their prerogative. That's their decision to make. However, I would argue there's a company really wants to grow. Then you need more than the engineering background, the financial expertise on the board. You need more than the accountant or the lawyer or the golf buddies. You need people that are familiar with how to grow. That means you need marketing and sales, contemporary marketing and sales experience on the board. Not somebody who cold called by driving around to loading dock in 1980 4 back when that's the way you could find new business, but somebody who understands what a BDR does, who who recognizes that that acronym, who understands what sales ops and marketing ops do and how they fit in, who who understands the role of a chatbot, who understands the way marketing and sales get done these days.

Now are they gonna operate the business? No. There's an expression nose in fingers out. The board is not supposed to operate. The board is supposed to hold the CEO accountable, and the CEO in turn holds senior management accountable. But if nobody on the board knows what's involved, then how can the board possibly execute its role of oversight? How can they ask the right questions of the CEO to find out if the CEO is savvy enough and if the team is aware of these kinds of issues and is bringing the right sorts of tactics and strategies to bear on the problem? So I believe very, very strongly that privately held middle market manufacturers must have sales and marketing experience on the board because it doesn't happen by accident. As markets change, it becomes more and more problematic.

Mhmm. So that we actually have a client who is a mid market manufacturing company. They have investors. They also have a board. And there is a board member with a lot of sales and marketing experience. And I think at first that created a lot of tension. Right? Because questions that had never been asked before were now being asked. Right? And so you can either choose to embrace that because it means that there's actual, like, high level buy in and interest.

Be and if you kind of get over that initial discomfort, it actually leads to just really unbelievable support. Right? And and more buy in and more even better questions and challenges and probing into, like, why are we doing this? Right? Like, I think that's also a mindset. If you make that a part of your board makeup, it is going to be uncomfortable at first. But when you make it through that phase of discomfort, it actually leads to so many, improved outcomes, I think. That's Yeah. That's at least been my experience.

I think so. Absolutely. Of course, the CEO has to be open to the input from the board. If the CEO has a board in kind of name only and doesn't hold proper board meetings and doesn't invite discussion and doesn't allow board members to speak directly to other members of the senior executive team and all the other things that are part of good governance, and it's not gonna happen. But if you have a good board and a good CEO and a strong management team and people who are all committed collectively to the success of the business and the attainment of the owners strategic objectives, then it can be incredibly powerful.

Yeah. Yep. So let's talk about technology in this marketing and sales space. What, what are the components of the tech stack, not really that the marketing and sales organization should have in place these days.

So we could talk for a long time about that. I mean, certainly, marketing automation and CRM, sales acceleration, you need a good CMS. You need, chatbots. You need a chatbots. You need a lot of different things. But but before we even go into that list, let's back up and talk about CRM. Do your people even use CRM? If you're an industrial manufacturer, I work a lot with, capital equipment manufacturers, machinery builders. Do you have custom objects in your CRM so that you can track information that is pertinent? I mean, a a a good object might be order history or machine history because you wanna capture information associated with that object that isn't associated directly with a contact or with a company or with a, you know, any of the other common, standard objects that are CRM.

So if your people are not using it, if your pipeline isn't built around a solid sales process, if your people store their opportunity information in a series of emails in their Outlook file, if you don't have custom objects, then there's no point in even thinking about what other items you ought to have in your sales tech stack. You you have to commit to understanding that technology is a driver of efficiency and effectiveness for the team. And through that, you can improve the quality of the buyer, the prospect, the customer experience, and and that you're gonna have to invest in it, but you're gonna have to invest with the marketing and sales team, not with the IT team. Because the IT team has a very different set of priorities, what they want. And I've seen so many potential projects, really derailed by IT involvement. Yes. There's good people in IT, and, yes, they've got important functions they need to perform. But marketing software is not an area where their expertise, in my experience, plays an important role.

Yeah. Well, I think you said something pretty important there too. I think that we've talked a lot about the way that the sales and marketing operations and the roles and responsibilities, how that's evolved. But another, like, pretty common conversation that we run across in, in industrial B2B is, oh, our IT department manages the website. You're gonna have to talk to them. Right? This isn't really on the list of topics had previewed at the beginning, but that to me, that is an immediate, like, sign that they haven't that organization hasn't really realized that the website isn't an IT. Sure. It's technology.

You have to figure out where it's hosted and how that impacts your DNS settings and how traffic is routed. But it it's not really a an IT owned deliverable anymore. But at least it shouldn't be.

I'll take it a step further. I've worked with companies where IT and SES, not only should they own the CMS, but they're going to write their own CMS and they're gonna host it all locally. And so imagine when you've got one person who came up with this hobby project, if they go on vacation or if they get killed in a car accident or, you know, any of the other kinds of eventualities that reasonable businesses need to plan for, you're completely out of luck at that point. It also fundamentally reveals the way a company views their relationship with buyers. If they believe that their sales process determines their their, engagement with prospects, and if they believe that their IT ought to have control of the website, what they're saying, whether they acknowledge it or are aware of it or not, is that the way they look at the world is what matters. And what the buyer wants is, you know, kind of a secondary consideration. I think most companies, increasingly, I shouldn't say most, many, and and increasingly, companies recognize that what they need to do is use technology that will improve the buyer experience. And, chatbots are such a perfect example of this in many ways because early chatbots were clearly about companies trying to just slash costs, trying to use a chatbot instead of a person that they were paying.

The experience was even more abysmal, and and it was a failure. And it engendered a lot of, I think, frustration on a part of buyers. On the other hand, now if you look at the way people navigate a website and realize they can't find what they want, if you build a chatbot well, particularly, it's so easy to pull AI into it now. You ought to make that the easy way for people to navigate a site. In fact, I often advise people, sometimes tongue in cheek, sometimes seriously, that they ought to remove navigation from their website and force themselves to have to use the chatbot to help people. But when you see people engage with a chatbot, get the answer they need, connect with the people they need, and then very quickly move to scheduling a meeting or even talking live with a salesperson in a way that they never would. Otherwise, you realize that if you build the site to accommodate the buyer as opposed to your system, it's so much more effective. It works out better for you as well.

But IT doesn't look at the world that way. IT's outlook in the world and my experience is to to basically lock things down to avoid problems and to spend their time solving problems. And and that's that's a very different approach than the one that I think we need in order to work successfully with buyers and to empower salespeople.

Right. Yeah. No. I I completely agree with everything you just said. I I think too, it's because that is what IT is held accountable for. And if you believe that your website presence and your CRM tools should actually be enabling an easier buying process, they don't, those things don't go together anymore. Right? And it's not IT's fault in my mind. Right.

They're doing their job.

We

should be trying to protect the company and, like minimize any type of risk. That that is what they're held accountable for. And they're they're accountable for, like, productivity. You end user productivity and protecting the company from any type of security risks.

I think when you get into minimizing any kind of risk, then it becomes counterproductive. Risks risk is a business decision. And so IT ought to set a policy for the type of passwords in CRM and how frequently they're changed. They ought to be clear that the marketing software doesn't have openings in the back end that somebody can get in and access all of the information. There certainly are functions and responsibilities for IT within that. But if you have to submit a ticket to IT to create a new page on website, or if you have to submit a ticket to IT to create a workflow within your marketing automation or create a sequence within your sales software, that's a problem. It's just it you're you're you're holding back progress.

Yeah. Yeah. And I don't know if you see this, but I do. I think a lot of times, because they haven't built that that new revenue operations part of their team, or they haven't redefined how that works, what happens is they say, oh, well, we can just give that to IT. Right? And that that's that's a mistake. Right? That's that is saying we're gonna expect a dog to meow like a cat. Right. It it's not going to happen.

So

Or if you happen to find a sales process and you ask IT to set up your CRM, including a sales pipeline, well, guess what? It's it's not gonna work because nobody's explaining to IT what really needs to happen. Nobody has thought about it. Nobody's designed it. And so, of course, IT can't create it properly either. So, definitely, all these pieces, let's go back to this OEE or ORE analogy. It's an Engineered system, and they all have to fit together from the board and the strategy, through the marketing, through the sales, through the technology and the customer experience, it all has to integrate together.

Great. Yeah. Well, I'm I'm gonna tie our conversation together because I think we have wow. We have really put a lot of great content out there. I really appreciate it. I wanna tie what you just said together in terms of the ORE framework. If you were going to start a conversation with an industrial manufacturer, like, where do you start that conversation? How do you go about helping them kind of take that first step?

So the conversation normally starts around it sounds more like a sales conversation because they typically don't think about marketing. They think about the outcomes. Are you getting enough sales meetings? Are you in enough new logos? Are you getting enough leads? Is your forecast accurate? How's sales turnover? Do you are you losing a lot of salespeople? What percent of your people are making quota? Those kinds of questions begin to, kind of reveal some of the frustrations of potential problems. And then if part of it is not enough leads, not enough new meetings, not enough new logo account activity, well, those are often at the intersection of various marketing and sales problems. And so if you dig into them, you start to understand, and and then they, through the conversation, start to understand that it really is an integrated system. A great way to get to that point is to do a lead audit. Say, hey, let's look at your leads. Let's understand what percent have actually been followed up on.

What percent resulted in meetings, which is your most expensive but best performing lead source? In other words, lowest cost per lead or lowest cost for customer acquisition. What percent of your leads only had one contact attempt? What percent of your leads were associated with different product lines compared to, you know, where you are trying to to generate them. Various various things like that will illustrate or reveal a lot of situations that, again, often are at the intersection of marketing and sales. And and it helps then through that conversation for people to say, jeez, I think I get it. This isn't just about sales training. It's not just about digital marketing. It's about this integrated mindset about revenue growth.

Yeah. Yeah. Well, I'm gonna I'm gonna end us with some some fun questions

Okay.

That have nothing to do

Nothing embarrassing, I hope.

No. Well,

I don't think so. I mean,

you can you can always decline to answer any of these questions, but I think they're all fun. Right. What is your favorite trip you've ever taken?

My favorite trip is probably one where I had all of my kids and some of their wives and girlfriends. And, we were sitting on a roof overlooking the Mediterranean at 2 in the morning drinking cognac and, having nice conversation. I think that's probably a favorite one.

That sounds pretty awesome. What okay. This one, I I love music, so I I think this is always a fun question, but dead or alive, is there a musical act or group or, you know, performer that you would love to see?

I think none that I can think of that I that I haven't seen. I enjoy a lot of different kinds of music. I enjoy the experience. I enjoy the environment. I, I probably don't listen as critically to music as I should. I just kinda let it, go around me and and enjoy going to see it with with different people. I can't think of any that I really wish that I I could see or would have seen that I didn't have the opportunity to.

Well, what what was your favorite? Could you name a favorite?

I'd say there's there's different favorites. I mean, depending on I I remember seeing the firm and and that was really cool in many ways because of the origins, between between bad company and and Led Zeppelin. You know, Buffett seeing a Buffett concert is inexperience, whether you consider yourself a parrot head or not, and I don't. But, I mean, it was a great thing to to see and experience at least once. It's seeing seeing Garth Brooks in concert was a great experience that whether you're into country music or not, it was great to see. And, of course, now as as some of these people like, sing Toby Keith one time, you know, just having some of those opportunities, I think, were were great.

Yeah. It sounds like you've been to a lot of really good shows. That would be tough to pick. What what is a, like, a book that you find yourself frequently recommending to people? I know you read a lot, so this one might be tough too.

Yeah. So, so I talk to people about a lot of different kinds of topics. I think if I was trying to get somebody to think about selling, it would be maybe spin selling or challenger sale or gap selling. It probably it depends on where they are in their process. And I'm not saying that I completely endorse or or or subscribe to any of those series. I think that the best outcome is an amalgamation of a lot of different kinds of ideas, but those are great sales books. On the other hand, if you're thinking about geopolitics, then I think the 4th Turning is Here by Neil Howe is a great book that kind of gives you context to think about some of what's going on in the world.

K.

I think the, Carol Dweck's book on mindset is a great one to help people contextualize the way other folks look at the world. I get very impatient with fixed mindset as part of part of my frustration often with IT. I tend to be much more growth mindset. So those those are those are ones that come to mind quickly.

Okay. And then, my last question is, what is your favorite job that you've ever had?

I'd say either being an infantry officer or being a consultant, doing what I'm doing, what I'm doing right now. They're both great in, many ways. And, you know, both obviously have have unpleasant aspects to them as well. But for me, again, going back to your question earlier, I get such a charge out of seeing companies unlock huge potential that I mean, I think this is this is a lot of fun and very rewarding in many ways.

Yeah. Yeah. I agree. Great answer.

Thank you.

Okay. So to wrap up, Ed, I would love it if you could tell people how to get in touch with you. Like, if if somebody has listened to this episode and they're interested in connecting, what's the best path they can take?

I would say the best way to find me is either on LinkedIn, and I think I'm Edward b Marsh, if I remember correctly. But if you search Ed Marsh on LinkedIn, you'll find me. Or through my website, which, is is undergoing a rebranding, it will be edmarshconsulting.com. That's edmarshconsulting.com. So between those 2, LinkedIn or the website, those are gonna be the best places to find me. You know

what really stands out on LinkedIn too? If people are searching for you, look for the American flag. It's Ed Marsh, and then there's a little American flag. And that if there are multiple Ed Marsh's, that'll be the fastest way to figure out which one is the right one.

There you go.

And we'll we'll make sure that we have, links to your profile and the website in our show notes as well

Thank you.

So people can just look there. But yeah. I it was really awesome to have you on. I think you shared so many different things that I think can be helpful to our listeners. So again, we appreciate your time today, Ed. Thank you so much. Thanks for listening. Please be sure to follow us on your favorite podcast channel and leave us a review.

We'd love to hear from you. You can connect with me on LinkedIn or visit our website at marketing refresh.com.