Marketing Beyond Metrics: Championing the Customer Experience with Alec GrahamMarketing Beyond Metrics: Championing the Customer Experience with Alec Graham

Marketing Beyond Metrics: Championing the Customer Experience with Alec Graham Transcript:

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, mate? 

Carman Pirie: I am delighted to be here, and you?

Jeff White: Yeah, no, I’m pretty stoked with this conversation. I think it’s gonna be interesting, 

Carman Pirie: Every once in a while, we get to zig where often we zag or yeah, we zag where often we zig or something, but have a conversation that’s just fundamentally different about the world of marketing these days. So, I have high hopes for this one. 

Jeff White: No, I think it should be interesting and hopefully take us in a lot of cool and unique directions that I don’t think we’ve explored before. So…

Carman Pirie: Time will tell. We may have to edit that part out. If it ends up being not cool and new…

Jeff White: I’m sure it will be. So joining us today is Alec Graham. Alec is the marketing manager at LEL International. Welcome to The Kula Ring, Alec. 

Alec Graham: Hi. It’s my pleasure to be here. 

Carman Pirie: Alec, I really wanna know what LEL International is, what do y’all do there? 

Alec Graham: So let me start it off, LEL is probably one of the most probabilistic companies that I’ve ever encountered. And that comes from, there’s multiple business streams. There’s LEL critical, there’s LEL dcom, there’s LEL cx, and there’s LEL International. And each one kind of powers the others in this beautiful, chaotic ecosystem that they’ve created. So that’s what initially drew me to this company. They operate a lot less like a traditional corporate structure and more like this brilliant accident that started generating serious profit and now we’re learning to scale with intention and… So what it is today that we manufacture is generator enclosures for both mobile and stationary solutions. Where it got interesting is it grew naturally out of it, not building these enclosures, but actually sourcing scrap metal and generators, critical power equipment. And from sourcing this equipment, you go to the end customer. What do you do with that equipment? What we wanna do is we buy it from you, we package it, and now we’re starting to do all the ancillary things that leads us to solve problems for our clients. 

Carman Pirie: That’s very cool. How did you end up there, Alex? How long have you been with the LEL? 

Alec Graham: I’ve been with LEL for about nine months now. So my journey started at a little company called EPC Power. So, for all B2B manufacturing marketers out there, the EPC in that name actually does not stand for engineering, procurement and construction. It is just something that they said we need an A name, let’s choose one. And it ended up being this huge, phenomenal thing in the inverter industry, which was the EPCs.

Jeff White: A lot of three-letter acronyms here. 

Alec Graham: Exactly. Yeah. I know. I don’t know why my brain keeps leading to these companies. I just like them, I guess so. EPC was a little teeny tiny company. When I first met them, I was in the warehouse, and I was just organizing stock and trying to rearrange it so that they could do things more efficiently. Funny enough, it was where I got a lot of my interest in UI UX because when I was storing things, and I’m six feet tall. I’m a little bit of a tall guy, but our stocking clerk, who would come in and move the parts from the warehouse down to the manufacturing engineers she was five feet. So when I was rearranging all the inventory and I was saying, okay, I’m gonna put this way above my head, and she was about 55 at the time. She can’t reach and take a 60-pound box that is for someone who is six feet tall, way above his head, move it down to her level and then take it away from there. So I had to readjust the entire system for her, and that really got me thinking and interested in how you solve solutions for everybody.

From your customer to your employees. How do you build lengthy operating systems that are good for everybody? That improves the efficiency and the experience along the way for your customers and employees. 

Jeff White: Man, those little epiphanies of empathy, where you get to see something you didn’t necessarily consider and how it’s impacted others. And then take that into your work and internalize it and bring it forward. I find that very interesting.

Alec Graham: I think we all have to, as marketers, we exist in this really ambiguous space where sometimes the answer is of course, to do the wrong thing or to do the wrong thing multiple times. And when you’re existing in an environment where the average can be an extremely useful tool, but it can also be a very dangerous thing. The reason that outliers are so important is that you can build around the outlier, and you can usually find it in a very lucrative environment built around the 1%. And once you’ve optimized for the 1% and you get them to love the product, you can usually scale that down to make a whole lot of people love the product. 

Carman Pirie: I think this is knocking on the door of what we said we were gonna talk about today, which is this notion that some of the magic of marketing isn’t initially obvious.

And it doesn’t come from the output or the deliverable that’s created necessarily. Help me understand how you think about it. Like when you say that, when you talk about how, in some ways the process is the valuable part of the work.

Alec Graham: I can get into it where I was looking at our critical inventory, which is chillers, coolers, generators, that sort of ordeal, and where does the customer go to finally acquire our product?

So you start with, sales and marketing, you bring them in, you have something fun where you get to optimize there for SEO or UI and UX where you have, instead of show me our inventory, you could say, show me my generators or my chillers or my cooling towers, whatever the why, whatever the reason that people have come to us. For which I think airlines, American Airlines and Delta have done experiments on this, and you can optimize for about 5% increased success rates if you would show people and add a personal identifier to it. Changing the actual context of the conversation. And then you go into it, you bring it into the company, and then how do we do that in the company? Where do you get the entire process from the company, from? You have logistics coming in, you have the customer service aspect coming in, and there’s so many different avenues that go down to it.

So when I started exploring that in our company, one of the things that I found is we didn’t really have a customer service. The customer service team would come in way too late. There wasn’t a proper handoff and just nothing really happened. The customers were left high and dry and there wasn’t enough information, and then products would arrive or they would go and no one would really know what was going on.

So the first step there, and this is the process of generating advertisements, we found out that we’d need a customer service team so that we can actually properly push people through the flow. So now, when people come in, once the deal happens, ’cause people are willing to do up to $500,000 on digital sales, I think there’s been a couple findings about that come out in B2B environments.

So we have more and more people who are doing digital sales. You have a customer service team who now is not on the sales side, but someone who’s solely dedicated to experience of your customer. So how do you get the internal team going to logistics. How do you make sure logistics have everything that they need, that they’re doing their jobs, that they’re being effective?

So when the customer actually wants to order a product, they can actually get it delivered at the time they need it delivered. And from there you can move on as I did to the warehousing and service team, which would be, how do you make sure that the warehousing and service team are making sure the product actually works, making sure the product is clean and making sure that the product has all of its fluids and everything replaced. And then now that you have all the products put together, it’s clean, it works, and it’s ready to go out. Alright, where’s the next step? Is packaging the product to actually have a, let’s say, a user manual that you can put with that product, to say, whether it’s from yourself or the OEM, depending on where you’re shipping that product.

Giving the user a quick way to set up the product, and here’s a quick way to use the product. And so when you get into that from marketing, it doesn’t all come around and you think of it as a marketing process, but it’s, you’re increasing your surface area to exposure for positive upside optionality.

So you’re putting more out there for your marketing self to be involved in your company. And the more you can optimize for the experiences we tend to do. You can make your whole company better from a structural…

Carman Pirie: are you fundamentally advocating that marketing is more than the voice of the company, but more importantly, maybe it’s the voice of the customer inside of the company.

Alec Graham: I think you have to be, there are so many bad actors in the space, not just in marketing but in general, where they talk about this a lot, and I believe the book is called Nudge by Richard Doer and Cass Suton. They talk very heavily about sludge in companies and outside of companies. If you take a company where they’re putting in a ton of sludge, a very easy example is with subscriptions.

We all know that there’s subscriptions that you’ve signed up for, and then you go to the fine print and you say, okay, if you want to cancel the subscription, even though you signed on online, you have to fly to Indiana. You have to go in person. You have to yell at the owner to say, Hey, take me off your dang list.

I don’t wanna be subscribed anymore. Which is ridiculous, which is why Britain and the United States are all looking at changing laws to make sure that it’s as easy to unsubscribe as it was to actually subscribe and even in B2B. Businesses, there are people who implement this sludge just to make it as worse as possible, and they’ve run away with $20,000 and you’ve realized that they didn’t actually do anything for you.

Carman Pirie: So your customer advocacy is basically the antidote to that? 

Alec Graham: I would say that customer advocacy is making sure your customer’s taken care of inside your company, reducing sludge, or the only sludge you’re putting in is to help them in the long run. 

Jeff White: I like that. But I wanna latch onto some turn of phrase you used a few moments ago, increasing surface area and exposing different elements to outside perspective and to learning.

It’s, there’s a similar kind of concept in cooking around increasing the surface area of proteins and things like that to create more crispy bits. You’re like looking to create more crispy bits within the organization by offering more opportunities for customers or heat to reach them.

That’s pretty cool. I like that as a notion. 

Alec Graham: You have to be interested in people in a lot of things. As a marketer, I think one of the most fun anecdotes I ever heard was, if you’re an accountant and you sit down in a coffee shop, you’re probably not gonna get better at accounting, but you could very well be a better marketer because you sit down and you watch how people actually operate and go about their day more and more in companies, as people look for solutions which operate off of efficiency, you have to look at what is nonsense. And what actually makes the experience better for them? That doesn’t actually increase the efficiency, but will long-term increase the efficacy of your employees, ’cause they’re happier, they like the process better. How do you make things just easier? The whole point, I guess, is that marketing should be put in that role because we have a tendency to try to make people happier.

Carman Pirie: How do you find that squares against the general, if you will, inclinations of a corporation that’s an organization, an apparatus that’s built around trying to encourage efficiencies, reduce spend, maximize return, et cetera feels like it might be difficult soil for this idea to gain purchase in.

Alec Graham: It is ’cause marketers have really bought into that idea where we tell, we say, oh yeah, we can definitely prove that everything we’re doing is very valuable. I always like the example of airlines again, Delta or American, who have purchased a Boeing or another aircraft of a considerable cost, $320 $500,000, and they say, okay, we have this grand fantastic airplane.

Let’s talk about what we’re serving on board. The sandwiches, the soups, the salads, whatever we’re gonna sell. That doesn’t make any sense. That’s just absolute nonsense, right? Why would you possibly show off those services when it’s not the product that we actually bought? There’s no direct one-to-one correlation with that.

And you have to think about that in companies when you’re going off… Okay. I know we’re not gonna be seeing direct revenue from this, but, six, eight months down the line, there’s the fantastic story of with Jaguars new branding that they’re doing of a kid who saw a Jaguar commercial when he was 12, and now he’s looking to go buy as many jaguars as he can. And he has, he is one of the largest Jaguar owners in the world, but it’s because he saw a commercial when he was 12. Now, what’s the return on investment on that? You can’t directly tie back that campaign all the way. Then, just like with those higher cost customer channels, such as trade shows, things like that, when I talked about earlier, you are increasing your surface area for exposure.

Deposit upside, optionality, which is not a quote I came up with, I can’t remember his name now. I think it’s Tim… You’re putting yourself out there to become more likely in ways you never expected. And it’s really hard to justify that expense to A CEO or A CFO especially, which is why it’s the death rattle of a company when A CFO becomes the CEO, because then everything has to have this one-to-one direct return and really a allowed of CEOs have to operate off of the potentiality of a business, which is how LEL has operated as we have gone into more and more environments, more and more.

Customer universes. We have found more and more gold there, and we keep digging. Sometimes we don’t hit a big vein, or sometimes we find nothing at all. But every now and then, you find this big mountain of gold just waiting there, and you dig it right up, which now that wouldn’t happen if you’re operating off of a deterministic spectrum of one-to-one.

Jeff White: So the CEO needs to have faith that there’s a little magic. 

Alec Graham: I think most do I think that is what Rory Sutherland talks a lot about in his book Alchemy, derived from the name itself, is that there’s so much magic in marketing itself, and you can’t directly tie what all of it is. And in fact, you usually have that flat surface area to go all the way around and to hit people on a large basis, so that you can eventually pull someone in.

Carman Pirie: I’m picking up what you’re putting down, and I’m not gonna disagree with you or Rory, frankly. I guess how have you found advocating for these ideas in an industrial manufacturing space? In some ways, these are not the CEOs and CFOs who are famous for having a little bit of faith in their thinking.

Alec Graham: In the United States, I think it would be a really good discussion if we could look at the extraordinary rates of economic growth that we’ve experienced, directly tied to the veneration of sales and marketing. So as we tie down those experiences. I’m looking back and I think you have this one idea I had at a trade show, which was, why don’t we bring in a comedian who is familiar with the idea of electricity inverters and that sort of device, bring him in. Have him either just walk around the booth, or we have a show where he’s up there for a little while. The director at the time really hated that idea. He said, These are engineers. They don’t like to laugh. I think if you really look at it, people would love that topic. They want something unique. You don’t want to be exactly like all your other competitors who have the same staunch graphics that say we have 99.9% uptime, and you go in there, and there’s no actual proof, and you just have the sales guy talking your ear off. You need to have your marketing around there with that little bit of magic.

Carman Pirie: I wonder, one of the things that I think that has happened in the industrial manufacturing space over the last five, or so years, maybe a bit more than that, is that it used to be said, oh, they’re digital laggards. They haven’t invested. I think that’s largely not the case anymore.

It’s some of the time when you think about some of the PIM systems, ERP integrations and things of that nature, powered by large manufacturers. Those are very advanced digital presence and advanced marketing executions. I’m wondering if we’re sitting at the precipice of a world in a time when what you’re suggesting isn’t that foreign or that challenging for a manufacturing or industrial CEO, maybe they’ve gotten their head around this a little bit more.

Alec Graham: It might be true, and I’d be interested to know how AI is going to affect that space, too. So as they’re trying to wrap their mind around all these different spaces, how they differentiate themselves and as they go to the reliance on AI to create products, and you get even closer together than you might have ever been before, or they’re gonna be more explosive outcomes where people would just suddenly go off the walls, you know bat-shit crazy, and do something completely unrecognizable to everyone else.

Carman Pirie: In some ways, it’s a category that has had to deal with AI and automation in many cases before the consumer categories have. There’s the knocking on the door of AI, it’s not pure AI, but industrial automation industry 4.0, et cetera, versus if you think about consumer categories, they haven’t been maybe as impacted by that. I dunno. 

Alec Graham: That’s where you go with like ABB and their marketing, which they are a very heavy automotive industry, where they showcase all of their fancy tech and robot arms that are building all of their different devices and things like that. But the real outreach of operating off of LLMs and deterministic versus probabilistic AI to actually do your marketing for you, and how you reach out to your customers.

It’s an interesting space where you get into, where you have your Starbucks, where there’s the recent actual. People were voting against Starbucks because, oh boy, now it takes too long, it’s too slow to get my coffee. When before, that was the whole business model of it being slow to get my coffee versus the also the implementation of, the robots, the AI, whatever you want to call it, of the self scanning that you could see in grocery stores or even the idea that came around and it happened when my grandfather was running Marshall Stores of putting in RFI codes onto all of the products so that you could just walk out the door and it would just go straight to your credit card and you’d be charged. But then there was also this unique revolution that came about of slow checkout.

Same thing where you would have to slow down and you want to get to the checkout so that someone would talk to you. And there’ve been some stores who have also been starting to implement that. So as you go into this AI space where you know, how quickly do you want it, it’s hard to beat for like email instantaneous and free.

But is that the best model? Would it be better if something were a little bit slower? And took a little bit more time when people appreciate that more. 

Jeff White: Man, as the person who always gets stuck behind the lady who is just looking for someone to speak with. I’m not the guy for that, but I can see it and I think it, it takes looking at it from the perspective that most people are talking about how fast we can get through things and how quickly we can get it out the door, so what’s the opposite of that? How do we differentiate from that? Who are the types of customers that might benefit or want that kind of extra touch point along the way to increase the stickiness with you and the business? Seems like an interesting concept. 

Alec Graham: I think you can get that where you have to prepare your customer, or you prepare yourself for the experience you’re going to have. If you’re going to a hibachi place, typically you’re gonna say, oh, this is pretty just terrible because it takes forever to get your food. There’s some guy in front of you cooking, and you’ve gotta sit around with all these other people, very close shoulder to shoulder.

If you were just going in expecting a normal restaurant, it’d be terrible. However, if you prepare yourself that I’m going to a hibachi place where it’s gonna take an extra two hours to get my food, but it’s gonna be wonderful, and I get to talk to the guy right in front of me who’s actually cooking the food and he’s doing tricks, then it might be a really wonderful experience.

Jeff White: Context is everything. 

Carman Pirie: So where’s this going? You’ve been with the firm for nine months. I’m assuming, in some ways, that your approach to marketing, the way you think about this, is what attracted the firm to you. As you look in the crystal ball over the next 12 to 24 months, what do you see as being the mountain that needs to be climbed here?

What’s the big challenge ahead? 

Alec Graham: I think the biggest challenge, so I would say that there are a couple things, is first optimizing for the digital and AI age is gonna be really challenging, especially for this kind of services that we are offering. Like national level storage and communicating those ideas very rapidly and quickly.

And with Google optimizing for those short little. Google snippets. How do we really convey that if we don’t have pricing on our e-commerce site, right? If we have a generator that we’re offering, but we can’t say what the exact price is ’cause either the OEM will get upset with us, or because we wanna be able to negotiate on the price, how do we draw customers in with those?

Now you also go into some other larger marketing ideas, which is communicating a larger sales category, expanding the customer universe across this, as I said, we’re probabilistic, so we’re going to so many different sales avenues at once, spreading ourselves a little bit thin, which can be problematic for companies.

And how do we really effectively attack that from a marketing perspective? These different channels, especially with our leaders here, they are probabilistic, but they are not advocates of these higher cost customer channels. They wanna see what is possible with the efficacy of the transaction, how quick can you make the transaction with it being as with the largest payout possible.

And they’re really optimizing for that end. And so the biggest challenge is. And I think all marketers are facing that right? How do you get the most bang for your buck? How do you get the most outta your time? How do you say, stretch $1 into $500 and say I might have spent $1 on this campaign and it resulted in $500 worth of business, but that business was seven months later.

Jeff White: In a world where everything is supposed to be measured and seen through that kind of lens, and all the dashboards that are available in every tool. Known demand in marketing, are you finding that you have to push back on that, to avoid that CFO becoming the CEO sort of question?

Or are you presenting any form of metrics that are tracking where things have come from, or is it more open than that kind of across the board in terms of marketing performance? 

Alec Graham: There’s usually a couple of different metrics you can go off of, right? There’s your customer’s average happiness.

How happy were they with the actual transaction? How easy was it for them to come in and purchase your product? And when they have a problem, how easy is that to actually solve? There was a colleague who was in pharma, and they experienced this, I think it was about four or five years ago, where they noticed she led her own pharmaceutical department, and she found out that all of her adversaries were going through and really improving the customer satisfaction. They were implementing all these different customer success teams and making sure that when the customers actually had a problem, whether that was, they didn’t get all their pills, they were incorrect, there was some problem with the medication, or the pharmacy just did not have the supply chain necessary to keep up the amount of drugs that they needed a the time, implementing the customer success team was immensely costly and had no benefit. But within the next two years, all companies that had not implemented a better customer success team had fallen off the face of the earth. So there are a lot of those things around, like how happy the transaction is, how well it goes?

And then, how many VIP customers, how many people do you have coming back, or how many people are just recommending you? One of the ways that I would say you can show how effective the campaigns can be is by going to the random people who are in your industry and are they talking better about you?

And if you propose yourself as somebody, and this is one of the benefits of going to a trade show and expanding that net that you can throw. Going in and just seeing, hey, this is one thing that I used to do at a previous job. Go to a bar where there’s a trade show. Talk to the people there and see what they know about your company.

And if they don’t know a lot, that’s probably not good. But if they do know a lot and it’s not good, it’s also not good. But then if they know some things, and they don’t know too much about what you do, but they at least know that your customers are having a good experience. There you go. You start having far better customer outcomes.

It’s spreading around, and there can be that non-transient, or that I should say, that transient experience from your customers going in from one to another of just. I like the idea of, I don’t know who originally said it, but once you have a thought, 20 other people have the exact same thought. So once you put the ideas out there that your customers are happy, you keep making them happier, it will get around that you are treating your customers well.

Carman Pirie: How do you and part of this recipe is really about lighting many fires and seeing which one takes or which ones take potentially. Do you have any… is it just a gut feel, as when you’re maybe lighting too many, when you’re spreading yourself too thin? Or do you have any kind of science or advice behind it that you would share?

Alec Graham: It’s very difficult to go to, especially if you’re proposing a marketing campaign and say, This is based on just my gut. They probably won’t take that answer very well. There’s this… I wish I could remember her name. She was a poker player who wrote a book about decision making and she wrote this great book, the twice bitten once shot, or once bitten, twice shy where you, even though you go and implement a correct decision and if it doesn’t work out, it still could be the correct decision the next time.

Trying to advocate for people who feel on instinct could be correct for a reason that they don’t know. Like I discussed earlier, why is advocating for the snacks on an airplane a good decision despite it not being about the airplane or the service or anything. You could instead, you just get a great amount of feedback or feeling about how good the airline is gonna be based on the snacks that they serve.

I could go into the psychological impact of the tiny adjustments that you can make to change the perspective of somebody who’s coming in as a client. And you have those massive butterfly effects that can carry out, that change the entire perspective of your customer to make them actually enjoy the experience, like I would say again, hibachi of going in, and you could really entirely change the perspective of your potential customer.

Jeff White: I think that’s really interesting.

Carman Pirie: I don’t yeah. It is been a fun conversation. Alec, I think it’s really we’re really challenging listeners to think about how they can navigate. The challenge that they have overall, that marketing is expected to have a perfect answer to your point, this notion of deterministic decision making.

And I really like the challenge that you brought forward today. It’s an interesting one I think for our listeners to try to ponder and digest and integrate into their work. Thank you so much for sharing your experience. 

Alec Graham: Thank you very much for having me. I was really glad to be able to go over some of my experiences in the marketing campaign going over how it’s not all just one-to-one experiences, how to improve your actual customer outcome, not optimizing for the efficiency of the transaction.

And just trying to think about it, I always like to go back to Charles Stachy when there was a beggar that he found outside, and he had a sign that said, Help, I’m hungry. And he wrote under it, I’m Hungry. And it’s spring, and it completely changed the amount of donations he was getting, ’cause it changed the perspective that people had of the beggar.

Carman Pirie: Yeah. Fascinating. 

Jeff White: Thanks a lot, Alec. 

Alec Graham: Thank you.