New Marketing Strategies for a Sales-Led Industrial B2B BrandNew Marketing Strategies for a Sales-Led Industrial B2B Brand

New Marketing Strategies for a Sales-Led Industrial B2B Brand 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. Joining me today is Carman Pirie. Carman, how are you doing, mate? 

Carman Pirie: Look, it’s the middle of winter, Jeff, which is my least favourite time of year, and I’m at least an espresso or two short. I don’t know how well things are functioning just yet, but we’re going to give it a go. 

Jeff White: Yeah, you made it here, so it’s good. 

Carman Pirie: And we need to, it’s good to have a bit of a disclaimer at the start of the show. That way if you say something completely ridiculous or you sound like an idiot more often than normal some way down the line, it’s already been explained.

Jeff White: Set the bar low. 

Carman Pirie: Indeed. The story, Carman’s Secrets to Success. That’s a bar low. 

Jeff White: However, not setting the bar low is our guest today, Thanks for the segue, by the way. 

Carman Pirie: Oh, I try to tee it up every once in a while. Look, I’m really excited for today’s show because there’s You know, we encounter it’s, you don’t really want to put people into buckets or, companies because yes, every manufacturing organization that we encounter, they have their uniqueness and there’s different aspects to it, but there is a kind of if you’ll forgive the Alex Trebek angle, there’s a genre, if you will, of manufacturers that they haven’t had to do a lot of marketing in the past. An awful lot of the business has been built by relationships and having a bit more of a sales focus. And often they’re either maybe there’s a new generation that’s in control of the organization now. Often these are family manufacturers. 

Jeff White: Or they’re selling to a new generation and need to work differently.

Carman Pirie: Yeah, or they’re just realizing that the people that they’re selling to your point, yeah, are different. And so they’re having a kind of, if you will they’re making the decision to turn the marketing on, it’s weird to think of marketing as a toggle switch, but that’s what they’re doing. And I think, wondering how do we do that? What does that really mean? And what can we expect? And that’s where today’s guest really comes in because she’s been in the business of turning the marketing on for a manufacturer that fits that description. Yeah. 

Jeff White: Yeah. And has had great success doing it. So yeah, joining us today is Tara Vincar. Tara is the director of marketing at Alpha Controls. Welcome to The Kula Ring, Tara. 

Tara Vincar: Thank you. That was quite the welcoming. I feel so special over here. 

Carman Pirie: Yeah and Tara, I appreciate that you didn’t have to complain about your lack of caffeine intake.

Tara Vincar: I don’t even drink coffee I’m one of those rare breeds. 

Carman Pirie: That’s interesting yeah, I’m not sure how I would react to that, it’s, 

Jeff White: Every once in a while we’ve really over-invested in espresso. Infrastructure here at Kula and every once in a while when we were an all-in-the-office company, someone would arrive who didn’t drink coffee and we had to re-evaluate whether or not we’d made a really good decision or not.

Tara Vincar: Yeah. Fair, 

Carman Pirie: Tara, it’s awesome to have you on the show. I wonder if perhaps we could kick things off by, by learning a bit more about you and how you ended up at Alpha Controls. Tell us a little bit about you and the company, if you would. 

Tara Vincar: Yeah, so I’ve been in marketing for I guess it’s over 20, 25 years now at this point, which is wild and scary and weird all at the same time. And truthfully, I’ve been in the B2B space for Probably most of my career. And the last probably 10-plus years would be within the manufacturing space. So been with Alpha Controls now for almost four years. I think it’s been and Yeah, join them truly not knowing anything about instrumentation, which is the business that they are in. We’re a distributor for manufacturers, so we have that middle ground point. I feel like, so I think my manufacturing background pairs very well with distributing for these manufacturers. And yeah, it’s been a wild ride. They are definitely a, or they were, let’s say, a sales-focused business. And then the president, who has taken over from his father he has seen the light with the marketing side of things, and we have taken over and guns a blazing here and saw some positive outcomes from it. 

Carman Pirie: I appreciate you highlighting the distributor-manufacturer distinction. We do tend to lump manufacturers and distributors together as part of being part of the same industrial ecosystem if you will, but this is an important distinction. Yeah, I guess when you were hired four years ago, was it as a director of marketing or did you, was it a kind of a different role that’s morphed into the marketing role? 

Tara Vincar: Yeah. So I began as the senior marketing manager. That’s what I came into. And really they had somebody part-time doing the marketing for them just on a Maintenance level, posting a thing on social media just to keep them somewhat visible. But aside from that, they were really doing a ton of marketing. So the goal for them when they came and hired me was to, again, let’s build this from the ground up. Let’s Tara come in, see what you can do and see what you can make of this. And, let’s bring on a team if we can get to that point and really grow that marketing side of things and see what that’ll do for our business.

Jeff White: So what’s the compliment now that you’ve been there for four years? Who else have you brought on? 

Tara Vincar: So we’re still a small, but mighty team. Truthfully, it probably took the first year or two for me to really become familiar with the business as a whole again, instrumentation, is not something that I have ever been a part of. So there was a huge learning curve for me in that aspect. And Alpha Controls being a company, again, that I wasn’t as familiar with. Really took that first year or two to focus on my learning and the extensive, research and whatnot, that’s gone into what they’ve done and what our competitors are doing and really just getting a landscape focus of what they have been doing as a whole. 

So we brought on so far, we have two people that we’ve brought on to join us. So I do have a marketing assistant who joined us about a year ago. And then we also have a website administrator who has been again, a godsend truly because without her our website wouldn’t be in terms of updates and keeping up to date with our manufacturers and pricing and new products and wouldn’t be where it is now without her.

So right now it’s just a team of three, but I can see that growing in the future for sure. 

Jeff White: Let’s go back four years to when you were brought on. What did you do first as you were learning about the business? You said you are deeply invested in understanding the controls business. And obviously you’re going to have to be working in marketing as well as learning about the business at the same time. Otherwise, most people would not be long for their roles, I’m sure. But what did you do first? 

Tara Vincar: So truthfully, when I first came in, it was, I came in and I said, this is going to be a learning experience. So let’s start with all the aspects of marketing that we would like to get into and what you’re doing.

And let’s fine-tune those. Obviously, social media is a big one. Everybody’s on social media. And really looking at who our audience is and who our target market is. And what are we posting in the industry in comparison to what, Other competitors in our industry are doing really clean that up a little bit and decide, who we want our voice to be the brand on its own. There was no clear, consistent branding that we had with Alpha Controls. So it was really revisiting that and just let’s pick something for right now and let’s work our way through that. And then end game would be to really revisit that as a whole and make it a little bit broader and bigger and more exciting. I guess you could say, I think from even B2B to B2C. I think there’s been some overlap with that over the past. Let’s call. five plus years or so, I think, B2B space is really getting more into the B2C, side of things. Really looking at that piece by piece. Going through the emails that we were sending and cleaning up those email lists, there are customers on there that we don’t know where they came from or who they are.

Are they opening our emails? Nope. Why are they still on there? So let’s really clean everything up and start from scratch. So we get a better understanding and a better baseline of, okay, here’s where we’re going to start. And then here’s the goal and what we want to get to. So instead of coming in and saying, okay, we need a new website and we need to redo our branding and we need to add five people to the team this year. It was really. baby steps and really learning and taking that learning curve and making myself more of an expert there. 

Carman Pirie: Tara that’s an interesting kind of if you will, stop point, just the notion of, look, let’s just clean up what we’re doing now and make it make some sense because there’s an awful lot, it’s true, that’s what ends up happening is. Things and issues get started, they continue data gets compiled, customer lists get made, they’re not tended to properly, and things get stale. Because there hasn’t been an ongoing investment in marketing. And so I think this is something that a lot of people can identify with. So just that act of cleaning up what was already there other than being able to one benefit is just being able to make sense of it and feel good about what you’re putting out. But you must have begun to see some impact in the business just from doing that. I would think 

Tara Vincar: huge. As for emails being open rates obviously went way up because we got rid of the fluff there and the people that really didn’t want to hear from us probably at the end of the day or didn’t know why they were hearing from us. Our open rates went up, our click rates went up because we’re now talking to the people who actually do want to hear from us, which feels good when you see those open rates grow. And then the same with on the social media side, a lot of our customers and a lot of our brands started taking more notice of us because we were posting on a more consistent basis. We changed the way that we were doing messaging. So they really took notice of that. And then in addition to that, obviously our website traffic started to grow as we started being more consistent with what we were doing. So people were hearing about us more. We were getting, more visuals out into the world where people could actually find us and learning where our customers are and where are they hanging out and where are they talking and where are they having conversations and again, what makes sense, what doesn’t make sense. 

So yes, it was right off the hop, I think within the first year or two, we definitely noticed an increase, especially with our quotes coming in and our services have been rising as well. So definitely a positive direction. Selfishly, I love to say it’s all the work that we’ve been doing, but they weren’t doing a ton of work before then either, right? So even the bare minimum that you’re going to start to do, you’re going to notice some significant growth from that. 

Jeff White: Now that you’re in it four years and you’ve gone well beyond just producing more content and sending emails as we’ll get into in a little bit but does the fact that you had such success early on make it harder in communicating the KPIs to the management that we’re not always going to just be able to start from fresh and, get a massive lift in, in our overall lead volume and pipeline as a result of the work we’re doing now, it’s going to be more about refinement.

Do they understand that? 

Tara Vincar: Yeah. So I report directly to the president of the company and I think he, he’s bought into the marketing side of things and he’s seen those lifts. This is great because I think one of the biggest challenges marketers have is getting the buy-in from those executives who maybe don’t see the value of some of the things that we do in marketing. And when we talk about KPIs, there are a lot of things that yes, we can track and measure, when you talk about Google and SEO and how we’re ranking and paid ads, you can absolutely see those conversions. Some again, we have a very long sales cycle, right? So again, what somebody might be looking at a year ago, they’re not purchasing until this year, right? So you really can’t get that exact conversion KPI results. But yes, I think the challenge for me and probably part of my biggest fear is eventually once we do level out, it’s going to be like, okay, what’s next? Because we do want to keep on growing. So when you come in for the first, let’s say two to three years, and you’re just doing that refinement and starting from scratch and cleaning everything up. And then within the last year, we’ve now moved offices. We’ve completely done a rebrand with our product and our branding. And in addition to that, we’re currently working on a new website. So those are three major big hits that a lot of businesses don’t necessarily go through for quite some time. So I’m positive right now that those three major milestones for Alpha Controls are gonna again show some real growth, but then it’s going to be the what’s next after this, right? Once the website gets launched, it’s okay, what’s next?

Carman Pirie: This is, I’ve been on about this before, because I call it the newbie gains at the gym, if you’ve never, if you’ve never lifted weights you feel like you’re gaining muscle like you’re going to be Arnold Schwarzenegger in about two weeks if you just keep going. And then all of a sudden it levels out, now you’re, you don’t get any gains for the next two years hardly. 

Tara Vincar: Right? And it’s discouraging.

Carman Pirie: Yeah, I think it’s a, it is an interesting evolution in marketing for sure, especially for a company that’s getting all of those newbie gains from just turning the marketing on. That’s an interesting thing for people listening to be mindful of what they find themselves in that position. It’s probably wise to position those. Early gains and how easy they are a little bit as you go. Not that they’re easy, but easier maybe than what’s coming. 

Tara Vincar: Yeah, a hundred percent. And I think, honestly, I think the smartest move that we made was really, we took that baby step approach, right?

We didn’t, or I didn’t come in guns a blazing. And like I said, let’s make all these major changes. The second that I walked through the door, it was, let’s get an understanding and let’s make sure that, the team and everybody at Alpha Controls understands. How we’re going to get there and let’s take that step-by-step approach. Because otherwise, the buy-in again with the executives at a company is often very difficult. So if you come in saying, I want to spend all this amount of money right off the hop, they’re going to go, whoa, like how do we know this is the right direction? And how do we know that this spend is going to be worth it at the end of the day? I think to your point to get the buy-in and to get, executives in line with the KPIs and the ideas, I think that was the best approach that we could have taken. 

Jeff White: And building that trust is so important. 

Tara Vincar: A hundred percent. If they don’t have the buy-in with you, then it makes your job so much more difficult. Because you got to sell them, right? You got to put on your sales hat there and sell them on the marketing tactics that you want to do and the spend that goes along with that. And especially with a family-owned business. It’s not a multi-conglomerate company, right? Like Pepsi or Coca-Cola or whomever. I don’t know if I’m allowed to say those names on here, but they’ve got, pockets for pockets of money, but when it’s a smaller family-owned business, it’s a little bit different. 

Jeff White: They’re not clients now, but we’ll accept their call.

Tara Vincar: There you go. I just put that out there for you.

Carman Pirie: You mentioned the sales hat. It got me thinking about how has the relationship been with the sales organization. I appreciate that the fact that you report directly to the president may help smooth over some of those bumps. But at the same time have they reacted to that? What have they seen as being the major impact of the work thus far?

Tara Vincar: Yeah, I think truthfully, I think they were excited. I think a lot of the sales guys on our team have come from companies that maybe had a larger marketing team or a larger marketing presence. So they were used to that, right? So when you’re working for a smaller business who was very sales-focused as opposed to, having the support of a marketing team. I think they were excited initially when I joined just because it’s, all right, now we’re, again, we’re seeing that growth. If we’re getting marketing, that means we’re doing something right. So let’s continue to do that. So I think the buy-in for the sales team was a little bit easier initially, and then, Again, I always say sales and marketing have love-hate relationships. Obviously there are, some sales reps that are very old school and it’s very sales-focused. And it’s very what do we need marketing for? The sales guys were the ones that were getting in there. We’re the ones that are selling everything. So there are definitely, I think, some that are a little tougher than others. But I think once they again, start seeing the analytical side of things. So before my time, there was no, reporting going on. There were no presentations from marketing to show what we were doing and what we expected to do. And what does that look like after our year? When I came in, I definitely, every year do a presentation for the sales team to let them know, okay, here’s what we’ve done this year. Here are our results year over year. So they can see that. positive change. And I think the analytics and the numbers, those don’t lie, right?

I think that again as salespeople, they’re very numbers-focused. So I think that resonates with them and says, okay, this is actually working. So you get that buy-in a little bit more and build that relationship with them. And then I think as they saw the positive changes. So we’ve now started to have, one-on-one calls with our sales team. So it’d be me and each sales rep and have those conversations every month to say, okay, what is it that you’re working on? What are your challenges? What can we do to help? So we really understand what they’re working on and what the customers are that they’re currently targeting so that we can, again, assist them and support them in any way that we can on the marketing side.

So it’s really getting to understand their market and what they’re doing. And I think again, it’s, it’s more personalized and it’s that one-on-one conversation as opposed to, we’re just doing marketing as a whole, we’re sending press releases out and we’re doing blogs and we’re doing all the things, but what are you doing for me personally? And I think that has also really helped. 

Jeff White: Man, that you know, that, that desire to create the relationship with the sales team will just have so many dividends. In the end, I can only imagine it’s helping on all sides to drive things forward. You mentioned that you’ve been investing in a new website as well as the next phase of your work at Alpha. What’s been the biggest challenge with that? Is it the site’s not live yet. Is that right? 

Tara Vincar: No, it’s not. Hopefully, knock on wood by the spring. We all know how these big projects can go sometimes, but that’s our goal right now is to have that kick-off in the spring 

Jeff White: Yeah, never give an actual date. But yeah. So what’s been the most challenging part of a website is a big project and a lot of moving parts. Yeah. What have you found challenging and what’s been really rewarding?

Tara Vincar: good question. I think probably one of the biggest challenges is that you’re, again, you’re involving different parts of the company within that process. We’re including sales in there because we do e-commerce. Really that sales journey and what that looks like and what feedback they’ve gotten. From customers who have used our websites because they’re picking up the phone if they have issues, right? And then we have, the president and we have our director of sales and we have our inside sales and we have marketing in there obviously as well. So I think it’s, everybody has these different ideas also. And then I think some people love to put on their marketing hat, even though they might be very sales-focused. So it’s just reeling them in and really driving them back down to the marketing side of things and what that looks like for the customer journey.

And again, putting different people’s opinions and thoughts and trying to reel that in and everybody coming to that same conclusion. I think it’s one of the challenges that we’ve had. And then second to that is just obviously the time that it takes. We’re super excited about this new website. It’s going to be really a game changer for us. Our website is the face of our brand. We don’t have a retail space for people to come into and visit. So we really pride ourselves obviously on the journey and the visuals and the brand and everything that’s on our website. So if that doesn’t look good, then that doesn’t look good for Alpha or as a customer coming to our website, right?

So I think we’re super excited about it but it is a lot and it is very time-consuming to put this together and You know developing new copy and finding new images and videos and content and we have so many new pages that we don’t have on the website currently that will be net new for us. So I think it’s time management truthfully is finding the time in addition to doing all the other day-to-day where we’re already crazy busy. Now you’re throwing in, creating a website from scratch into that mix. So really manage your time. But I think it’s going to be worth, all worth it at the end when it’s finally over. But that also has the excitement factor, right? So it’s, oh my goodness, we didn’t have these. Pages or these options for our customers before and now we’re going to have that and the journey is going to be so much smoother and the analytics are going to be so much better.

And there’s just so much positive that’s going to come from this website. So even though there’s going to be challenges and bumps and hiccups along the way. We’re just like, I wish I could just turn it on right now. Snap your fingers or do the. The witch little what is she from?

Carman Pirie: Wave of the wand? 

Tara Vincar: Yes, the wand. Bibbidi Bobbidi Boo. And, we have that finished already. But we’re trying to.

Jeff White: If you ever find that, let us know. 

Tara Vincar: Yeah, I know. 

Carman Pirie: It’s, this may be this is a strange question perhaps, but get me thinking. Which says as you mentioned, look, as you said, it’s time management. I’m trying to get this website launched. There’s lots of content to write. There’s lots of stuff to do. That’s in addition to all the other stuff we do. And I think that’s if you’re just for lack of a better way of putting it, if you look at the collection of tactics and stuff that’s being done on the marketing side today, versus what was being done four years ago, it’s obviously a lot more.

My question was marketing changing a lot of all the things that you’re doing what do you think will be the first thing that goes away that you stop doing because it’s no longer effective? 

Tara Vincar: Oh, good question. Truthfully, I don’t know if there is anything that we’ll stop doing per se. I think we maybe we’ll take less of a focus on it. So I’ll use, I don’t know if this is a good example or not, but I’ll use Twitter and X as an example for us. That platform itself just isn’t feasible. For you to be successful using that platform, you really have to have somebody on it pretty much 24 seven. Once you post something on X it’s gone within five minutes. So if nobody didn’t see that the chances of them seeing it are slim to none. So you really have to continue the conversation on there. So truthfully, we don’t put a ton of effort onto that platform because it’s just not feasible for us as a smaller team. TikTok is another example. I know that’s a hot topic over the last month or two, especially in the U. S. But, that’s another one where we would love to see that grow and we’ve seen some definitely positive engagement on that platform, we probably get more views and engagement than any other platform. So we’d really, I think, to fine-tune that a little bit and do a better job of it, but that’s something that, again, it’s parked as a side burner where we’ll do the minimum that we can right now, but once things slow down, then let’s come up with a growth strategy for that. I don’t know that we’re gonna nix anything per se, but maybe cut back. Trade shows are another example where obviously we participated in quite a few of those pre-COVID and then COVID happened and obviously trade shows shut down and turned into a more virtual type of trade show for those that were able to do that. So that’s another thing I think that we need to revisit a little bit as we do what we’ve gone back a little bit and done a couple, but definitely not to the magnitude that we were doing them before. Does that make sense to continue to do that and put efforts there in the future? Or are there other aspects that we should be focusing on?

So yeah, cut back, I think. Just revisit that. I don’t know if we will.

Carman Pirie: It’s not in the nature of marketers to think about stopping to do things, right? Like we’re usually talking about what the next new thing is.

Tara Vincar: and next year, who knows what’s going to come out?

And we’ve got AI right now that we’re dealing with. Marketing’s a complete learning, I think career point, where it’s, with sales, nothing really changes with sales. The process is still typically the same other than maybe the job or the brand that you’re selling for, but really that process is very similar, so marketers. Things change every year. Just when you think you’ve figured it out, the algorithm takes a turn and you’re changing it up again. 

Carman Pirie: I think that I’m sure we could have a good sales debate if we could have somebody that would come on and talk about how sales change dramatically. But I do understand and agree with your point that marketing is the business of new very often.

That’s why I thought that maybe asking what goes away first was a weird question, but I wanted to ask it anyway. Tara, I wonder as we draw our time together here to a close beyond launching the new website what has you super excited for this year ahead? What is the, what are you seeing on the horizon that you’re most excited about?

Tara Vincar: Yeah, the website for sure. Obviously, that’s a big one for us. But as a whole, I think as we grow, I’ve been, for the last three-plus years. I feel like I’ve been so caught up in the weeds where you’re trying to develop the strategy, but you’re also the one that’s actually physically executing everything. So I think now that the team is growing and we’re, all these big things are coming and this website is the biggest piece I think that we’ve had in the last four years. I think once that gets launched, it’s really being able to take that time and focus on the strategy side of things. So I’m excited to again, look at what is next and what can we do better. And we’re right now, we’re just running by the seat of our pants here and trying to keep up. So it’s very executional focussed. So I’m really looking forward to the strategy side of things and being able to take a step back. Now that I have help on the team to execute some of the day-to-day stuff. I’m really excited about the strategy and really looking at what that looks like future forward and continuing to grow. I always say it’s, I’ve come from huge corporate companies that I’ve worked for in the last few years. And now this is like that first family-owned business. That’s a little bit smaller. And I just feel like it’s a lot more rewarding. You feel like you’re working for people as opposed to just a brand or being a number. So excited to see what we can do as a marketing to really grow that business for them. 

Carman Pirie: I look forward to watching it unfold, Tara. It’s been wonderful to have you on the show today. Thank you so much. 

Tara Vincar: Thank you. I’m so glad that we were able to do this. I was very excited to meet with you guys. 

Jeff White: Wonderful. Thank you, Tara. 

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