Product Marketing’s Role in Driving Change in B2B ManufacturingProduct Marketing’s Role in Driving Change in B2B Manufacturing

Product Marketing’s Role in Driving Change in B2B Manufacturing 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: It’s the middle of winter in Canada, so I’m cold, but otherwise I’m fine, nobody tuning in wants to listen to me complain about it being cold.

Jeff White: No, that is true, but it is definitely a cold week for sure. We’re getting through it. Looking forward to today’s guest, we don’t often get an opportunity to talk to dedicated product marketers. It is a subgenre of the manufacturing marketing field. It’s always cool to talk to somebody who has some expertise here.

Carman Pirie: Exactly. And if I’m not mistaken, a product marketer who is also an electrical engineer. If my memory is serving me correctly. So yeah I’m looking forward to today’s conversation. 

Jeff White: Yeah. Why don’t we get into it? So joining us today is Alex Koepsel. Alex is the Director of Product Marketing at Vention. Welcome to The Kula Ring, Alex. 

Alex Koepsel: Hey guys. Hey, Jeff, Carman. Good to be with you. 

Carman Pirie: Good to have you on the show, Alex. And was I right with remembering that you were also an engineer in a former life? Yeah. 

Alex Koepsel: Yes. That’s where I started. And I always say I transferred to the dark side of marketing. So I abandoned my engineering past and colleagues, unfortunately, but still have a lot of respect for that side of the business.

Jeff White: You don’t have to give back the ring or do you?

Alex Koepsel: yeah, they did.

Carman Pirie: Alex, tell us a bit about Vention and your background, how you ended up there, if you would. 

Alex Koepsel: Sure. So yeah, Vention is a robotics company based out of where you guys are in Canada, but we serve globally. We sell globally. And it’s really a startup, but more in the scale-up phase. Like they’re past that messy first few years of trying to find customers.

We have a lot of customers, but what’s unique, there’s been a lot of growth in robotics and what’s unique about Vention and what we’re trying to do is we’re really trying to, I don’t want to use the word disrupt, but change the way that people automate because manufacturers, right all around the world, there’s manufacturers in every country that have done things the way they’ve done them for the last 50 or a hundred years. And automation has been that way too, the way that, automation used to be reserved for a lot of big companies that had the capital and experience to use automation. Otherwise, all the rest were left with doing things manually. And there’s a lot of dull, dirty, dangerous jobs that exist in manufacturing that need automation, but people didn’t have access to. So the mission and vision, and I’ll get to then what Vention does to solve this, but we’re trying to make it simpler for people to adopt automation. The buzzword is democratize, as a lot of startups say democratize automation. And the way we’re doing that is by enabling a platform, an online tool that’s integrated, that lets people take automation into their own hands.

So we have all these curated parts and design systems and a library of, not just components, but fully built assembled products, 22 different products that people can choose from. And then what’s cool is they can modify those and they can work remotely with our engineering team for free to fine tune those and customize them to what they need. And so they don’t pay for any of that. They get access to this awesome ecosystem that’s available for them to build any automation system they want. And they don’t pay for it till they click order. And then we even help them deploy it and install it and make sure it’s running correctly. So it’s really a unique approach to automating.

Carman Pirie: Alex is a very cool approach. And I encourage listeners to go check out the website. It’s a real eye opener, frankly. You don’t have to be in the manufacturing space for very long to obviously be very intimately familiar with industrial automation, and frankly, a number of the very much larger players that are in the space. So it’s a really interesting, different take on this and something that I think an awful lot of manufacturing enterprises will be surprised by. 

Alex Koepsel: And sorry, one last thing I’ll add to what’s cool is I know people always love stories of how these things came about, like the founding, and sometimes people just get the idea that’s maybe not so personal to them. It’s just an idea they had. But for us, our founder, co-founder and CEO at the end, he was an engineer. He was working as an engineer at G.E. And I think he had a project where he had to build some kind of workstation or structural system for their factory floor. And he said it was just a nightmare, like having to go to five different supplier sites. He had to find this part on this website, this part from another supplier and this website. And then he had to use a different tool for the CAD, 3DCAD to build it. Then his procurement team needed access to it to see how much it cost? What’s the lead time? All that. So he really wanted to simplify that. That project probably took him 10 weeks or 16 weeks or something, and a lot of approval and guesswork. With Vention we can get that kind of stuff done in two days and it has real time pricing where people know exactly what it’s going to cost. So the procurement team loves that because they don’t have to go digging around to find answers for that too.

Jeff White: That’s a really interesting way of selling and marketing the product as well, allowing people to almost self serve their way through it. We mentioned at the start that you started off your career as an electrical engineer, how have you progressed through that and landed here in the product marketing space?

Alex Koepsel: Yeah. Good question. So I started, my background in school. University was electrical engineering, went into engineering because I just wanted to invent something one day, right? I didn’t even know. I think even as a kid, I probably thought, I thought an engineer was someone who conducted a train like a train engineer, but then I learned what really an engineer was and what drew me to it was the innovative side, inventing and problem solving and all that. So I started out of school at Lockheed Martin and aerospace defense in Florida, where I’m from, got to do and get my hands on some really cool stuff. One time I had an internship working in a hangar with an Apache helicopter sitting 10 feet away from me as I was working. So that was cool and then got to work on some radar systems, defense and missile systems for fighter jets, and things like that were all very cool. But yeah, what led me into product marketing was I had this itch for more problem solving outside of just technical problem solving of like circuit card design and system design, I really had an interest in what I just call generally the business side of things of like, why are we even building this product? Who is it for? What problems does it solve? How does it generate business value and customer value? How do you reach those customers? I had that interest and there were a couple of things that led me then into formally becoming a product marketer. I tried to start my own company too. So I am a music lover. I’d say I’m an audiophile. So I tried to start a music app for helping people find their new favorite song. That app was called Songrise. I also was doing my MBA at night and had a couple of mentors. All of that kind of coalesced into my mentor saying, Hey, you would be really good at product marketing. You’ve got the engineering side, you’ve got this interesting entrepreneurial startup side. That’s what really product marketers are, you’re in the messy middle of everything, being the mini CEO, understanding the value of a product, who it’s for, the customer value. How do you reach those customers? Very cross functional. So that was the spark that started all, this kind of just. Ad hoc advice from a mentor of mine. And then I started applying online when I left Lockheed Martin and transitioned into the semiconductor industry. So I worked for Silicon labs out of Austin, Texas for five years. And then I’ve been in robotics now for four, so close to 10 years of product marketing experience. I love it. Never want to look back again, love and have a lot of respect for engineers, and I love working with engineers, but I love more of the big picture problem-solving across the board of a lot of different things beyond just the technical stuff.

Carman Pirie: I must say Alex, I think you’re the first product broker I’ve encountered has talked about this notion of mini CEO, is that something that you hear a lot among peers, or is that something that you’ve kind of come up with on your own and think about 

Alex Koepsel: Part of me likes the term and part of me hates the term. The part I like about it is a good summary. And I think I first heard it at Silicon labs from our GM. He described, we had a lot of product marketers at that company, cause there were a lot of products. I think we had maybe 10 or 15 product marketers, but he described us all as the mini CEOs and then. Today, our CMO who just joined recently also describes product marketing as a mini CEO. So it is a good encapsulation of what product marketing does. The thing I don’t like about it is it’s a little arrogant. It’s Hey, I’m the CEO. Like I’m not that type of person, to boss people around or have a hierarchy. I’m not into that. I think, but anyway, yeah, I think it is a good summary of the fact that we need to take accountability or we do take accountability for really the success of the business.

And there’s a lot of things underneath that the product is one marketing and messaging, and there’s another, the assets like the website and things like that, or another, there’s a lot of things that fall under it, but yeah. 

Carman Pirie: It’s interesting because of the topic for today’s conversation, really, is this notion of, what are the dynamics of what it is to manage up and manage across, frankly the organization in terms of nurturing the relationships and creating the right environment for for what you’re doing to flourish really. And I’m curious to understand more about how you think about that. I guess it seems to me that first things first, that mini CEO idea points to one of the reasons why you need to think about managing up and managing across in this role, because it does touch so many people. 

Alex Koepsel: Right. Yeah. I think just to juxtapose it to like where I came from, an engineer when I did design work, I could stay in my own lane and work mostly with other engineers. Occasionally, I had checkpoints with other teams like a project manager or, at Lockheed Martin, we really didn’t have a marketing function giving marketing requirements documents. So it was anyway, in a nutshell, I worked very much in the engineering org, and I could live in that sphere by myself or in a siloed way. Product marketing is very different. Product marketing is working with the product team, both the product managers and the engineering and technical team underneath them, or aside from them, the sales team. The senior leadership team on strategic planning, and on a week-to-week basis, the finance team, in many ways and projecting and forecasting the year, talking about costs and growth and the expected ROI of a new product. So anyway, you’re talking, you’re working with a lot of different teams. And so that’s the cross-functional managing across aspects, the managing up, and I know managing up. Has its separate term and meaning. Sometimes in your career, you can manage up in your career as you manage your manager to help them drive your career. That’s different. And that is true, too.

But what I mean by managing up is product marketing. You’re trying to get things done and you need other resources and people to do them with you. You can’t do them by yourself. Usually, and so how do you do that? How do you influence change and persuade people, and get people to rally with you to get stuff done? And that’s the managing up aspect. And a lot of times there’s a few I can think of in my career where I’ve literally needed CEO approval. When I joined a company called Formic a few years ago and got into the robotic space we had to both the lead of marketing, head of marketing and myself had to go vouch for a new brand identity, a new website, these things that were going to cost 200,000 or more that we couldn’t do that on our own, right? We needed to make a strong case up the chain and across the chain as to why we needed that and why that was the business. We can dive into that more, but hopefully that paints a picture for, I’m sure there’s people in the audience that can relate to this and marketing that you’re trying to get resources and allies across the business, whether it’s engineering or finance or the CEO or all of the above.

Jeff White: I think that’s super interesting too, because that requirement to get broad approval for that kind of spend, there’s certainly tons of people in our audience who would identify with that and would understand what’s required there. How are you making that case? Like what resources are you pulling together, and how are you painting the picture of the better future with those marketing assets?

Carman Pirie: Jeff, I don’t know if this connects to your question, but I was going to push on the notion of, are we talking about do you take a systematic or a kind of almost a framework approach to managing and nurturing these relationships, or are we just talking about Alex has the gift of the gab and it’s good talking to someone who can make a case on the farm?

Alex Koepsel: Yeah, it’s a good question now that it’s happened where I’ve noticed a pattern over the last nine, 10 years in product marketing that this has been something that comes up again. I’ve thought about it more recently, now can I codify this? Is there a recipe to this? I don’t think if engineers are listening, we don’t have an engineering formula that you can follow. And I’m not sure, you do this once and it’s going to work. The exact same way every time, but I did think recently about what’s been successful for me and managing up and across and like, how do you get stuff done with cross-functional leaders? And to me, it’s two aspects. It’s one, and maybe none of this is like rocket science, but one is building trust with people.

I think you need an underlying essential layer of trust and likability, and working well with people. If you don’t have that, no one’s going to want to work with you. Like you’re not, you’re going to have a hard time finding people who want to get stuff done with you. I think this is the one where I’m not trying to brag, but I do have a little bit more natural inclination to do this. 

There are other aspects of the formula. The second aspect, which is like persuasion and storytelling and things like that, of how do you really persuade executives? Team members and leaders that I’m still working on. I know there’s a lot of great podcasts and books out there on how to tell a story and do persuasive so that’s more of the aspect I’m working on. That is not a natural strength of mine, but the one that is a natural strength is building trust. And some of the ways I do that are whenever I join a team, I try to come in from a place of humility and listening first. I have been a part of companies where people have joined and they don’t come in listening first, they come in, upturning the apple cart. They start talking, I’ve literally been in meetings where someone joined and they talked the entire first hour of the meeting, and they didn’t ask any questions. And so anyway, I’d say that’s one is coming from a place of humility, listen, get to know your teammate, know what’s going on in their life, what’s working well, what’s not. And then, building just some likeability as you start to work in and add value to the business and work alongside them, showing that you’re an objective person, not an emotional person. I think high EQ goes a long way in B2B or in professional careers. Showing that you want the common good, that you’re a trusted person that wants the same thing they do, which is to be successful in the business, grow your career and help them grow theirs, that you’re not ego-driven.

Things like that are all, maybe for some, easier said than done. I think just being a good person goes a long way. And then the last one I’ll say too is, and this is a little bit more concrete, is get a quick win. Obviously business in your career, you’re going to be measured when you join a company or when you’re part of a company, you are being measured on an annual or quarterly basis or whatever by what you’re doing for that business. So try to get as you’re building trust, a quick win to show that, hey, you know what you’re doing, and then now people are going to want to work with you more. So that’s the first layer or first bucket of it is like building trust with people which again, I think comes a little bit more natural to me.

The second is you asked, I think Jeff is how do you position that against, let’s say you’re asking the CEO for something, whether it’s investment for a new website, or you want to go invest in exploring a new market to grow your position in it in a way. That fits along with their momentum and their goals. I think the easy part, the easier part of that is asking what are their goals? Because sometimes when you’re doing stuff in your career, you don’t know what the answer is. But luckily, in this situation, if you’re trying to figure out what your CEO or leadership team’s main goals are, the easiest way to find out is just go ask them. So you don’t need to spend a lot of time and energy trying to guess if you have a one-on-one, or you can find time with them. Just literally ask them. Hey, would love to hear about what your top priorities are right now? What will make a successful quarter for us this year? What are you hoping to achieve by the end of the year? I want to learn and see how I can help with that. That’s number one is asking and understanding what their goals are. The second part of that is then trying to position what you have in mind against that. And that’s the hard part. I’d say the thing I’m working on is the storytelling. The thing that I have done in my career that has worked is showing them the customer feedback or some sort of data. People can always argue against a story, but it’s hard to argue against data sometimes. So there’s been times I’m trying to think, yeah, back to a company. I don’t want to name the company specifically, but I wanted to show that our sales conversion was not as good as it could be because of our pricing. I think we had a pricing problem, and rather than just stating that as an idea, Hey, this is Alex’s idea. I really went and did some digging in Salesforce in our CRM to show that a really high percentage of our deals won. Most of them were under a certain dollar amount. There was a very clear cliff where, if we presented this X price, that we didn’t win any of those deals. It was like super clear. So that’s another very essential or good effective way of showing a leadership team or someone that you’re trying to get buy-in from that there’s change that needs to be had. So I don’t know. There’s a lot of different things there. Hopefully that made sense that those are the kind of two buckets I see. But yeah, what do you guys think? 

Carman Pirie: I think that makes total sense to me, and this notion of trust as currency, really, especially early on, but I don’t think it ever goes away because if you lose the trust of your peers, then you’re hooped to begin with, but, I think it’s easy to listen or to hear that advice.

And or even as you were saying it, you were treating it as a bit of an of course, or like it might be obvious to folks, I’m not sure I, I think it’s helpful for folks to maybe be reminded of that notion of if you can be front of mind that particularly early on in the role, you’re trying to have that notion of to develop that trust as currency, because it will help fuel your career progress.

Thank you very much. And at the same time, the notion of mining for that earlier quick win, I just think that’s really good advice. Of course, it makes sense, but it’s not always what people are thinking. 

Alex Koepsel: Yeah, the phrase that comes to mind, which I just heard a few years ago, I know it’s probably been around as a phrase forever, but what is it? If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together. That really sums it up, right? There are times where you just need to get it done. And if you have the resources and empowerment on your own to go get it done, sure, go get it done. But again, in a lot of organizations and especially in marketing and product marketing, you need other people to get stuff done and you can’t do it alone. And so that underlying trust currency is needed and it’s a good thing. No, it’s just intrinsically good to do anyway, as a person and for your career, you never know. We’re all helping each other. You never know when you’re going to need help in the future, too. Yeah. 

Carman Pirie: I’m guessing as you highlighted the fact that I think you said you were based in Florida or originally from Florida but you’ve worked with folks in Austin, currently working with a Canadian company, that’s painting a picture that at least a portion of your work is being done remotely. How have you found that dynamic impacts this notion of managing up and managing across with people that you may not actually be either meeting or seeing in person on the regular? 

Alex Koepsel: Yeah, great question. I would say, luckily, with Zoom and Google Meet and all these digital tools and having the virtual access to everyone at this, just as much as anyone else and Slack, right where you get instant messaging, like you do, stay connected to people. But I would, I think, where you’re going and I agree, I’d be curious what the audience thinks, but there is a whole different approach or a different world of working fully remote, like luckily with Vention, I’m able to travel up and see our team. Most of our team is in Montreal. So I go up there once a month and that time is priceless. I think you need face time to build relationships with people. That’s one aspect of what you’re asking is you can’t replace that. I don’t think you can develop a relationship with someone just through a computer. And actually a great example here is I skipped over this in the beginning when I talked about my resume, but I had a very short stint in sales.

So, after there was a time where I took a leave from product marketing and tried sales for a little bit and that company I was with, they didn’t really want me traveling a lot. They said, Oh, we can sell through the computer, just do virtual demos with people that will be sufficient. Like we don’t need to have you traveling all over the US to visit customers. And I really disagreed with it. Like I had a hard time to really sell and build trust with people who are making a purchase decision through a computer so I don’t know that was just a really personal true experience that reinforced the power of seeing people and working with them and even honestly one of the times you get to know people the best is when you go out after work for a beer or food a dinner or something then you really get to know people.

That’s one, I’m trying to think of the other. Oh, the other thing that you miss and I don’t think there’s any way of replacing it is those water cooler conversations. I actually have two people on my team right now at Vention and luckily I get to see them once a month, but there’s a lot of side conversations that they hear being in office and being around the rest of the colleagues and Vention employees that I don’t hear, but luckily they do a good job of keeping me privy of those. And we communicate on a regular basis, but I definitely miss out on a lot of those side conversations that happen that can build trust. So those are the challenges and I’m not sure. It’s probably a good thing for me to think about now that I’ve been remote for let’s see five, four or five years since COVID. Yeah. How are other people tackling that Same problem, but I’d say the one that’s been helpful is when I work, now that I work for Vention, a company that’s willing to expense my travel once a month. That’s great. It’s awesome to get up there and have face time 

Carman Pirie: yeah, I think if there’s one bit of advice that anybody listening to this podcast could take, it’s find yourself a gig where you can be in Montreal once a month. That’s just about the perfect kind of rhythm. 

Alex Koepsel: Get some poutine once a month. Yeah, 

Jeff White: I would go there more than that if given the opportunity. I think it’s great too that you’ve got coworkers that can slide you the in jokes so that when you show up, you actually have a bit of a sense of what the conversation and the tone is, what’s the mood in the room.

Alex Koepsel: I’ve learned a lot. Yeah. I’ve been a venture in just six months now, but I’ve already learned a lot about Montreal. It’s a great city. It’s interesting too. I didn’t know they had a Formula One race in there. I’m not, and I’ve learned that I’ve been in a lot of different cities now that have Formula One, which there’s not a lot in North America, but Austin is one. Montreal is one. I think they started one in Miami. I didn’t live in Miami. I grew up in Orlando, but anyway, I’ve coincidentally crossed paths with all the areas that do Formula One racing. So. 

Jeff White: I’ve only seen one live, but I was in at the Hungaroring a few years ago. Saw it there. It was pretty incredible. But one of the things that I’d like to dive into just a little bit because, as the director of product marketing, your product is automation. Yes. But in a lot of ways, the way that people interact with you and build out their solution virtually and digitally, that’s as much the product that you’re selling as the robots and co-bots and other automation components that are coming out the other end. How does that virtual tool impact how you do marketing as a product marketer? 

Alex Koepsel: Yeah. They’re really, we almost, we probably should create a better name, but we have two sides of the bit like a two-headed beast business. That’s the way we describe it. Sometimes it’s like we have the automation products we sell, like you said, which is more of a traditional way that the industry operates, which is more sales led. It’s, yeah. Talking to your champion who then helps sell up the chain to the buyer and to the executive committee, so it’s very traditional sales-led normal, long lead times, long sales cycles. But with Vention, it is unique that we have this platform where it’s very self-serve.

We have a lot of customers who literally just sign up. Sign on, log in, build their own system, order it. It’s very, this digital 21st century approach to automation. It’s more product-led growth, I would say, which I know is a buzzword, but it’s rethinking how people find us. So it’s finding ways, we can clearly communicate on our website what we do, which every marketing team is trying to do, that’s one of their main missions, is clearly explain what you do. The website is a big storefront for that. Giving them tools to try things out, with product-led growth, part of that philosophy is giving people something to play with before you ask them to fully become a customer. So we have some tools for that and we have some new things we’re planning this year to lean into that. We’re trying to think we’re trying to borrow from. We have some ideas this year to borrow from other industries that aren’t even automation. If you think like e-commerce, like Amazon, just what Amazon has done with transparent pricing, transparent reviews. We have a lot of ideas around what we can do, and that is something unique that transparent pricing and lead times. Not every automation company does that. Most of them are behind like a firewall, a paywall of, Hey, talk to our sales team and we’ll get you a quote. So it’s this again, long drawn out process. Whereas with us, it’s all self-serve. So if you’re browsing around, you think you need some robotic machine tending cell, you find it on our website. It’s going to tell you exactly what that’s going to cost. You don’t have to talk to our sales team. So it’s, yeah, it’s trying to rethink a, just a better experience. It’s probably more common on the consumer side of things and other consumer businesses. I wouldn’t say we’ve fully cracked and gotten there, Vention has been around for eight years, so not super young, but not super old either. So we’re still learning and pushing the envelope on things. And that’s something we’re definitely doing this year and we’ve got on our agenda for 2025. 

Carman Pirie: You teed up a 2025 question perfectly and so I’ll be contrary and not walk into it at all. And because I wanted to ask something more broad, around this notion of managing up and managing across. As we bring the conversation to a close. Can you think of specific instances or even titles where that’s the most difficult? And if so, what’s your advice for people heading down that path? 

Alex Koepsel: When you say what, which titles are most difficult, you mean like the types of roles, like product marketing or like some other role that probably runs into this scenario a lot?

Carman Pirie: More like as a product marketer, you have to manage up and manage across to a variety of people, titles, and you also need to manage up and across a variety of initiatives and the types of ideas. So is there either a thing or a recipient, a title, a person that proves to be the most challenging and if so, what advice do you have?

Alex Koepsel: Yeah. The ones before I say what would be the most challenging or easiest, or I’ll just say who those players are that I’ve come across and worked with the most in product marketing. You’re always going to be working with the product team. Naturally, actually, sometimes product marketing sits in the product org. Usually in the past in my career, it’s in the marketing. I’ve always sat in the marketing org, but sometimes product marketing is in the product team. So either or it’s always going to be this relationship between product and marketing. So there’s going to be some cross functional work. there and then, managing up, you’re always going to be managing up your immediate manager. So for me, the director of product marketing, my boss or manager is the CMO. So I’m always working with her to also influence change. And then the last one I work with the most honestly is usually the CEO. And I think if you’re at a large company with over a thousand employees, or something like maybe you’re not interfacing with the CEO a lot. I think at Silicon Labs we had over a thousand employees and yeah, I didn’t work with him that frequently. It was more with the GM that reported to him. But since then I’ve worked at companies that are like 300 employees or less. So it’s, you’re not that far removed for the CEO. So to me, it’s always as a product marketer, you’re always interfacing with the product team, your immediate marketing leader and the CEO. There might be other instances where other people like the COO or CFO are involved, but those are more rare, I would say. So in terms of your question of which are the most challenging, do I have any advice for those? I think it’s less tied to the role and more tied to just the chances and probability of people like the personality, like some people are just easier to work with and have that same mentality you do. And you guys have a better bonding relationship, and you guys have the same vision. Do you see the world the same way? Do you have the same goals for the business? And so it’s really just more a matter of chance and finding those people. That think like you and are motivated to do things like you are.

If they’re not, if they don’t have motivation, it’s actually harder to solve than, it’s really hard to motivate someone if they’re not motivated. But I think changing the way people think can be a little bit easier. It again goes back to her persuasion, showing them with some data, maybe reframing things. I always try to start meetings with questions first and understand their perspective. You don’t want to walk into a meeting without knowing where everyone else stands a little bit. Yeah, getting a sample in some context before you go into things. 

Carman Pirie: I think you’re painting a nice picture of the complexity of it all, Alex, and the nuance of it, which is in and of itself, obviously very helpful for our listeners.

Alex Koepsel: It is complex, and I’d say some of the advice is don’t give up on the first try. I think I always have this mentality or like a visual in my head of if you hit a wall, fine that’s okay. Try a different wall. If you hit another wall, okay maybe there’s a door. Keep going. Keep walking down. You might find a door somewhere so that’s why. It’s nice, like once in a while, I don’t know, maybe 20, 30 percent of the time, if you want to get something done, the person might already be ready to do that with you. This kind of happened that the company Formic I mentioned when we wanted the new website and the new brand positioning, we had both my manager, the head of marketing and myself were aligned. We went to the CEO. He was pretty aligned. He coincidentally had advice from someone on our board of directors who said the same thing. So he was already open minded and ready to do that. So it was a fairly easy process. So 20, 30 percent time you ask and it just happens. It just flows and happens and you don’t have to fight it.

Other times though, again, you hit that wall and you’ve got to find some different ways of trying different things. Maybe go get some buy in from some different people, go get some data, do a little bit of homework on Salesforce, maybe go talk to some customers, that’s really the advice I’d say. Like you said, it’s complex and don’t give up.

Carman Pirie: My goodness though, there’s almost any room you’re in has at least four walls, so you can’t just hit one, right? 

Alex Koepsel: Yep. Yep.

Carman Pirie: And that’s solid advice. Alex, thanks so much for joining us today. It’s been great to have you on the show. 

Alex Koepsel: Yeah. Likewise. It’s been good to be here with you guys and the audience. Hopefully it was helpful to them. Like I said, I know it’s not an engineering equation where you do this and you get that out, but hopefully there’s some nuggets in there. 

Jeff White: I think that works best with our audience anyway, they’re mostly marketers and salespeople. Thanks Alex.

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