Forging Pathways to Partnership and Long-Term Marketing SuccessForging Pathways to Partnership and Long-Term Marketing Success

Forging Pathways to Partnership and Long-Term Marketing Success Transcript:

Announcer: You’re listening to The Kula Ring, a podcast made for manufacturing marketers. Here are Carman Pirie and Jeff White. 

Jeff White: Welcome to The Kula Ring, a podcast for manufacturing marketers brought to you by Kula Partners. My name is Jeff White and joining me today is Carman Pirie. Carman, how are you doing, sir?

Carman Pirie: Look, all is well. Jeff, I’m excited about today’s conversation. I think the thing with marketing is it can be really easy to be very tactical and very I don’t know, short-term in your thinking sometimes, so I always like when, a guest kind of encourages us to think about the activity of marketing, planning, and what we’re doing from, differently, and maybe taking a broader perspective or longer-term approach, so I’m excited about today’s conversation because I think it runs just so much counter to where we feel pressures happening in marketing today, 

Jeff White: yeah, you certainly do see plenty of manufacturers and I wonder how much is related to, the understanding or the desire for attribution, to perhaps shorten the timelines about how you think about effectiveness. But yeah, anyway we’ll get into it. 

Carman Pirie: Yeah. Is it that it driving kind of requirements for short-term planning? Is it because of the increasing tactical nature of marketing overall? Is it because of private equity impacts? I’m really curious to dig into this a little bit. 

Jeff White: Yeah, me as well. So joining us today is Lucy Chen. Lucy is the Director of Marketing for Zemarc. Welcome to The Kula Ring, Lucy.

Lucy Chen: All right. Thank you all for having me. 

Carman Pirie: Lucy, it’s awesome to have you on the show. Can you tell our listeners a bit more about you and how you ended up at Zemarc and maybe even tell us who Zemarc is? That would be nice. I know a lot of people probably already know, but for those that don’t. 

Lucy Chen: Yeah, so Zemarc is a fluid power distributor. We’re out here on the West Coast, so we help with a lot of system integration, especially for power units. We are major distributors for Parker Hannifin, some of the major brands and manufacturing that a lot of industries recognize. But mostly over the course of the years, we have developed a lot of different changes. I’ve been there eight years myself. Seen some ups and downs through the economy and the world, but also in terms of the way the company has run marketing the way we approach our customers, the way we relate to our vendors’ structure and develop our marketing channels as well as Looking into our internal culture. So yes, we build a lot of great systems for aerospace, and agriculture. We do a lot of great applications like ground support and even launch pads. But when it comes down to it, long-term planning is a little bit above all of that. 

Carman Pirie: Yeah. And I’ve got to say, you’re, speaking of long term, you’re one of the rare breed of marketers that’s actually been with the organization for more than two seconds. I hear the average tenure of a CMO now is a year or 18 months or whatever they’re suggesting now. But, so it’s interesting that you’re bringing this view of long-term planning and it’s coming on the back of having been with the company for a fairly long time. 

Lucy Chen: Yeah, and I think coming into I think being a marketer, I hear about my peers having a lot of changes all the time, and they’re always looking at what’s the next big thing.

I look at it that way too, but I think the way I apply it is I have to make sure it aligns with the objectives of Zemarc. But also if you want to stick around with a company for the long term, you have to think about, Does this works with the company’s objectives. Can I mould the objectives and how do I build the influence of power to change that and also change the people around me as well? Because I don’t think I would have been around Zemarc as long if I couldn’t get my peers to see eye to eye with me. Like people have to stick with the movement with you. 

Jeff White: I completely agree with you. What’s the strategy for bringing folks along with you? Like how do you engage with them in order to ensure that you’re getting everyone singing from the same song sheet as it were?

Lucy Chen: So it’s going to sound like a really bad rehearsal at first. You’re going to, you’re probably going to introduce the idea and you’re going to listen to all the different reactions. And the truth is a lot of the best conversations started out with me just laying out the ground that, Hey, we’re all like really strong middle managers and directors that are coming together and we meet somewhat on a regular basis to look at the longterm concerns of the company, but also the economy and what our customers are going to face.

But the reality is we’re people and we’re wearing a ton of hats and when we’re stressed out as leaders, we’re going to do one a few things probably, subscribe to the model of like survival, our own survival instincts, which is, fight or freeze, which in a meeting, it might look like we’re going to shut down ideas or delay them. What I try to portray to the leadership is, hey, we are human beings and we have to take account, or we have to take accountability for making sure that new ideas have space in our company. So maybe we’re not open to it right now, understand it’s not, no, we can’t do this it’s not, No, not right now, because we don’t have enough resources.

So that kind of starts building the question of when we introduce ideas, we have to also introduce resources. So resources usually look like, in the starter phase, setting up a committee. And holding space where everyone is extremely awkward in that meeting, but we come with, come up with one or two agenda items, we don’t know how to educate ourselves on certain topics. Sometimes it might be around ideas of technology. Sometimes it might be on ideas of integrating two departments. Oftentimes it’s engineering into certain product developments. So When you start off, everyone’s going to have a lot of blank stares and they might say things just to say things but to convert that, it’s about holding the space, putting in accountability measures for the leaders and saying I understand that you don’t have thoughts on this, but you can take a few moments to evolve our thoughts together.

So we meet more regularly, whether it be once a month, once a week, or twice a month, but that regularity of holding space for ideas and thoughts is the starter. It sounds like very holistic but it’s about playing into the human nature to develop leadership for the future. 

Carman Pirie: I’m assuming that you’re really seeing that as a part and parcel of what it takes to think longer term and to be an organization that has a longer-term view of its operations and how it plans marketing, et cetera.

I’m curious, as you’ve nudged the because it feels to me that this has been a bit led by you or that you’re the one that is the voice of taking a longer-term view of things when you think back to when you first joined the firm. And the marketing activities that were at play or how things were happening or when planning was happening versus today, when they, you’ve been able to bring more people along to your vision and evolve the organization. What are the biggest differences between then and now? 

Lucy Chen: It’s a very obvious one. It’s siloed versus collaborative. And we all talk about teamwork quite often. But. There’s siloed teamwork as well. So back when I first started I was actually more in a sales role. I was in a business development sales kind of role. I did a little bit of everything. Like all of the future leaders of this company, everyone did a little bit of everything we were spread a little bit too thin, but we were all hungry. So we all did our own thing and we all did our own thing well. But not so well because at the end of the day if you don’t come together as a company, your resources are stretched thin and then your leadership might not know how to make the best purchasing decisions on the investments for another platform. Consultation, guidance, and maybe a partnership agreement with vendors. We actually don’t know unless we start having conversations like siloed leaders. So I think back then everyone did their own version of marketing. Everyone went after their own territories differently. I didn’t really cover territory for like too long cause I was mostly doing a lot more. Kind of like covering more of an overview of a territory or a series of territories and products. But I feel like all the territory managers did their own version of marketing with different materials, different logos, different everything, and different colours. Who knew there were so many shades of blue?

Also, the website was like never really used, like I think, We all relate to the story of everyone who saw all these resources that were old or outdated or weren’t very usable. And that’s a symptom of having siloed teams and siloed individuals that function like a team. So today, what it looks like is that we have to dictate what kind of resources we need and what we’re trying to do and ask for help on a fairly regular basis. And I think back then there was this pride and joy of being able to get it done on your own. But that’s not going to be how our companies compete in the future. Competitively speaking, we’re not just going against, geographically our California or nationally, but we’re also competing internationally on several different verticals as well not just for customers, but also for our personnel, our resources, our vendors, it is getting extremely competitive and you don’t do it as a team. You don’t really have much competition going forward. 

Carman Pirie: So as we take this longer-term view is it also associated with maybe longer-term views of budgeting as well? Are we looking has the budgeting cadence changed where we actually have maybe greater visibility as to what marketing budgets are going to look like over a multi-year horizon potentially? Alternatively, or maybe in conjunction with that, has it changed how you measure your success? I’m just trying to understand. 

Lucy Chen: Yeah, that’s a really good question. So when I first started out, I thought budgets were very straight out. You ask for the money and you get it approved based on the ROI. Now I evaluate how much collaborative effort, can I get into a budget. So I’m not only looking at the budget that Zemarc is willing to put in, but we’re also looking at the budgets our partners are going to contribute. So it’s about, if you have a budget set for something, And you have no partners going in it with you whether it be internal with another department, or it be external with a vendor, or even like sometimes we do DEIA projects with customers. There is a multiplier in value when you collaborate. With internal and external resources. So if I have a budget set for say $10,000, not too bad for maybe a very small show I’m going to say that, my goal isn’t necessarily to just fit everything into $10,000. I’m trying to find a matcher that I can bring in as many partners as can match. Cause my rule of thumb is, 50 percent of what Zemarc is putting in. I need to find the other 50 percent through partnerships. That has created the best collaborative budgeting hack I’ve ever seen. Not only does it, make it easier for your boss to say Oh yeah, we’re only spending half the money at this point, but it’s also creating a very genuine ROI that the market needs because it’s showing that not only you in one company sees the return, but multiples of you see it as well. So you share the leads, you share the collective efforts. You also share the resources. I like to also make sure that because we have the largest stake of 50% we control the branding and the messaging. We’ve gotten pretty good at it over time because we know our vendors and we know our partnerships really well and you do need to lead your partners.

So I think in terms of how we do things traditionally back then was like, get the money, do the project, do it with a lot of sparkles. And I’m just like, No, I think if we cannot sparkle together, I don’t know if that’s a weird way of putting it. I’m like, we’re gonna sparkle this but I think it’s about doing a lot of the collaborative efforts together to gain an ROI that’s not just in the numbers, but there’s also intrinsic value that is long term. 

Jeff White: I think, man, there really is something about having everyone involved investing together. It’s a pretty simple principle. Even just thinking about my kids, if you want to buy something expensive, I’m not going to buy it all for you. You need to contribute at least half and then you’ll take care of it. Like that’s how my son bought his first bike. 

The idea of using your partners that well not using partners, but working directly with your partners that way also allows them an opportunity to elevate their presentation to the market along with you who are driving this and pushing everybody to do more how have you found their contribution to have changed over time as you’ve gotten more deeply integrated with them?

Lucy Chen: yeah, it’s very interesting because I’ve done this collaborative effort for at least five years and I have to say in the very beginning, I was more of the mindset of I just needed more money for the budget, and I think that’s how this idea even popped up in the beginning, but I saw the value very much immediately thereafter execution. So in the beginning, the partners, they’re not hesitant. They’re hungry. But confused. There’s not a lot of direction. So it’s what I was talking about earlier when you set up committees, everyone goes into a room, just not really sure what the direction is. But the idea is that you’re holding some space that can be contributed towards the following year. And maybe even the following decade. It’s about holding space in that partnership. I think in the beginning, what I noticed a lot of is just, they’re just sending in resources and then expecting some kind of like magical like they’re like, so do we make money now? It’s just there are not a lot of connectors between point A and point Z.

So I try to perform very much like a traditional marketer at the time. I looked at a lot of like metrics, this is how many conversions we got, yada yada. And it’s just like handing them a report after taking in their money. But now I have to ask them, like what? What do you see as your value? I have an interview process when I work with our partners. I’m not saying I’m going to exclude you, but I want you guys to think, and I want you guys to reach upwards in your infrastructure to see what resources can you bring down and bring across, it’s more a Thought leadership in that way that I’m not just trying to say give me your money, which is great let’s work on this together, which is also great But I need you to also extend the message to your leadership and I think I’m seeing a lot more of that and I try to make it easier over time.

I try to make it a point that, hey, Vemarc’s here to make all of our marketing resources plug-and-play for you, it makes it easy to present it to their boss. It’s hey, they have five marketing channels that they utilize and everything like that. All those, yeah. Basic short-term planning things are there. But is it the short-term planning or is it really only the tools to get into the minds of all our leaders that are within their level and above them to think long-term with us? So I think that’s the main difference. It sounds a little, a little bit more abstract. But what it looks like in reality is more engaged vendors. They’re like asking you questions about what to do next. They’re asking you what shows you want to participate in. They’re developing their own programs, which, is always flattering when they do a little bit of a copycat. But ultimately, I think all these little Pieces are symptoms of having good collaboration that you’re changing, not just your company and their company, but you’re shifting the industry as well.

Jeff White: I think it says a lot that I asked you about how your partners have changed. And the first thing you told me was that you had changed and learned and taken so much away. So I think, that really speaks volumes about how you’re approaching this. 

Lucy Chen: Yeah. It’s all about an involvement that if I don’t change with them, then I’m leaving myself behind, there are a lot of moving parts. I think it’s the difficulty of long-term planning is trying to have a macro view on a lot of things when in marketing you want to hone in on the specifics. And you have to see how all these little pieces actually ultimately make sense together and how it’s workable and sustainable with the team you have. You have to remember the people that work for you and with you are humans and they have a sustainable, sustainability limit. They’re not always going to hustle extremely hard. And you have to also give them a really good reason to do so whether it be a person or an entity like a committee or a partner or a larger systemic like industry, you have to look at why it’s going to be the driver that connects and also moves things forward.

Carman Pirie: What’s the hardest part about managing up with all of this and selling this to people more senior than you? I guess what’s the hardest part about proving that, hey this is going to work if we focus on some of these longer-term measures? 

Lucy Chen: I think some of the biggest mistakes I’ve made is when I compromised on the why. I think that’s how you lose sight of The partnerships that you developed over time. I think what short-term planning does is it forces you to focus on certain metrics that may or may not be important long term, but it was a really good reward system to feed into telling their management, and their bosses that they’re doing well and to give the correct, information about this is how many conversions of leads we got on this project, that campaign, and this is how much money it has attributed to. It makes us lose sight of the intrinsic value of what long-term planning is, and it’s that it’s going to be beyond the monetary measures. I think we all hope that technically the money would be there, the return will be there, but I think it’s difficult to always try to remember the abstract portions of why we’re working on this, trying to convince leaders that the, that either it’s like, Hey, this is about the future of education for the industry. Hey, this is actually about promoting more competitiveness that is international and it’s, they see things differently that way. When we play in that game, I think a lot of times I find difficulty Writing a report of how we’re doing in the long-term planning, finding the right metric to show that doesn’t discolour what we’re trying to do.

Carman Pirie: Yeah. And I’m, I can almost picture you arguing with your former self, given the fact that you used to have more of a sales hat on, and sales folks are notorious for measuring success by quarters not by even years, sometimes. So this battle must be somewhat internal as well.

Lucy Chen: It definitely is. And I think the challenge is that the internal battle that I have, this is an internal battle that a lot of salespeople business developers and marketers face too. So I have a very deep level of empathy for them because it’s not an easy hurdle to get past. Cause the way we define success. Essentially these three main areas of business have always been very short term. And I think their version of long-term has been changing over time as well. So it’s hard to mould your why, so it still feels authentic to what you know is going to create the biggest return for like the industry or the bigger purpose.

So oftentimes for me right now, I see the bigger purpose as breaking silos in the industry. I think there are far too many of them. We end up with like too many of the same resources and resources that actually don’t necessarily they’re not aligned. They’re not prepared to mobilize for the next stage. There’s just a lot of moving noise and we’re gonna get more of that with technology being intense nowadays. We’re gonna get a lot of platforms and different ways to measure and analyze. There are a lot of expensive tools and inexpensive tools. In the day, how you place that on your chessboard matters. It’s not just about having the pieces, because if you have all your pieces placed incorrectly, you’re really going to just start losing it to the competition because you weren’t thinking about how everything connects. You weren’t thinking seven moves ahead. 17 moves ahead. Who knows? 700? Is that possible? 

Yeah, but also like I said, it’s easy to think seven moves ahead as an individual, but it’s really hard to do it as It’s really hard to do 700 moves ahead as individuals. So that’s why I think it’s always an ongoing challenge to get people aligned with you. So you can do 700 moves ahead collectively and not lose your pieces along the way. Cause you’re gonna, you’re like, Oh, okay, I have this new platform. And then everyone’s yeah, great. And then everyone does their own thing again. Happens all the time. I think finding consistency in building a long-term plan is really difficult because it’s really hard to always nail down the details of what it is without turning into a short-term plan.

Carman Pirie: There’s a certain amount of the details that need to be coloured in as one goes, the longer term you do. And I think it can be a bit of a struggle if people want to if people want to know to the penny tactical level what is going to be done to enable a strategy four years from now. It’s probably they’re asking the wrong question, right? That level of detail is a fool’s errand. So I guess I, I hear what you’re saying there. It can be hard to bring everybody along, keep those keep all those 700 chess pieces lined up and on the board as you see fit, over a longer-term horizon.

I think a lot of marketers are probably asking themselves these days, especially in the world of AI and junior marketers in particular wondering if if content writing even is going to be a thing. Or, a variety of other marketing tasks that are used to absorb people. I’m curious as you put on your long-term planning and thinking hat more just as a marketer, not with respect to your current role or your current company. What are you seeing as, if you were advising, giving yourself advice, if you were starting your career today, what would what advice would you give yourself? As you look ahead long term and try to plan for that success. 

Lucy Chen: Don’t forget the politics. 

Jeff White: You’re not going to avoid them anyway, so 

Lucy Chen: Because like they’re always there the politics is always there and I don’t really mean just like government politics I mostly mean like corporate politics and there’s also team politics. Just like even individual politics you’re going to find yourself very contrary to your own beliefs because you’re Your definitions of success are not going to be aligned with what you thought it meant. And I think that’s a reflection of what your company is doing. And also it’s a reflection of what the industry is doing.

If you find yourself very conflicted, it means the definitions of success aren’t aligned. So I was like, don’t forget the politics, but also a lot of people love to develop really strong strategies. Like you’re gonna be so invested because I know I was I invested in I was so invested in like probably 10 plus platforms and I always got rejected for the idea nine out of 10 times I got really good at being rejected. I feel like my numbers would have been more successful if I had just been more aware of the political landscape of the leadership and that I understood where they were at. And you can only move them as far as one or two steps. So similar to chess, every piece has its own movements and it has its limits. You cannot make 50 runs in one turn. That’s not really allowed. It’s not to say it’s against the rules, let’s play a weird game. Why not? But most of the people there, they’re not trying to play against the rules. They have a belief in what the objective is.

You have to be aware. It’s what is their what is within reach of their next steps and playing politics is about being aware of those things. If I were to go back and give myself more information, it would be like, Hey, ideas are great, but you have to check in way more often. And you have to hear yourself explain it to them and see how they understand it.

And you have to adjust it. And I think that’s the start of a collaborative nature. Ultimately, most people are going to tell you you’re crazy. If you have enough foresight, you’re going to come off extremely crazy. But the goal is to not come off crazy in the first move. And to move them towards the crazy with you. So then by the time you’re telling them what is absolutely crazy, they’re like 50 moves in and they didn’t think it was crazy at all, yeah, but part of long-term planning is really understanding, the politics of how the people around you are. And it’s not exactly manipulative, it’s also about the evolvement of yourself.

Carman Pirie: I think that’s amazing advice, Lucy. I’m thank you so much for sharing your experience with us today on the show. I think that just ended in a beautiful place with a great piece of advice. I think almost anybody can use it to strengthen their career. 

Jeff White: A hundred percent. 

Carman Pirie: Thank you so much. 

Lucy Chen: My pleasure. Thank you both. 

Jeff White: Thanks a lot. 
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