Evolving Marketing from Sales Support to a Strategic Growth MachineEvolving Marketing from Sales Support to a Strategic Growth Machine

Evolving Marketing from Sales Support to a Strategic Growth Machine 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, sir?

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

Jeff White: Yeah, me as well. It’s good to be recording again after a bit of a summer hiatus.

Carman Pirie: Oh. You know how that works. It’s nice to get a bit of summer vacation in. We don’t get much in the way of summer up here in Nova Scotia.

Jeff White: No, it’s true. And then they close the woods on you, so you can’t even do that.

Carman Pirie: Yeah. We won’t try to take people into the nuances of local news and forest fires and things of that sort. But I am really excited for today’s conversation and getting into the nuances of that because I think the path that we’re talking about today is one that is a common challenge for manufacturers, it’s one that as manufacturers grow and mature. It’s something that they often go through. And I’m really excited to get the advice and insights from today’s guest. I just think our listeners will get a lot of benefit out of it.

Jeff White:Yeah, I think so too. Joining us today is Tom Greensall. Tom is the head of marketing at Pack BGR. Welcome to The Kula Ring, Tom.

Tom Greensall: Thanks, both. It’s great to be here. I’m looking forward to today’s conversation.

Carman Pirie: Tom, it’s wonderful to have you on the show. I’ve gotta say, you drop that bombshell on us just as we were starting that you’re into auto racing, and so we’re gonna resist the urge to just talk about cars, the entire show.

Which would certainly be the predisposition of Jeff and probably me as well. I was like, Ah, marketing is not nearly as interesting. Let’s talk about racing cars now.

Jeff White: Maybe we could make it a LinkedIn post. What I learned about marketing from racing cars.

Carman Pirie: There you go. Oh man, I hate LinkedIn for stuff like that. It’s what makes LinkedIn, as a platform, ultra-annoying.  It’s not just a little annoying; it’s ultra-annoying. Anyway, we’re not getting into that, Tom. What we’re gonna get into today, we’ll get into after we introduce our listeners to pack BGR and tell us a little bit more about yourself.

Tom Greensall: Yeah, I appreciate it. I’m actually based in London, although Pack BGR was based in Ohio and operates in the UK. I’m in a unique position of being in a different place from where I’m working. But as you guys mentioned, I’m head of marketing at BGR, and I’m coming from a tech startup background.

So my previous job was at an AI startup. Before that, I was at a tech scale-up. It’s a very different industry, and it’s been a lot of learning for me, but also I’ve been able to bring a lot of unique perspectives over from the tech world across to the packaging and supply world, which has been awesome.

Carman Pirie: Really cool. What does Pack BGR do? Just let us know a little bit more about the firm, if you would.

Tom Greensall: Yeah, absolutely. So BGR is a packaging distributor. But we like to think we’re a lot more than that. We call ourselves packaging experts. And we’re trying to bring control to the whole supply chain.

So it’s not just about ordering boxes or ordering tape or machines to do that. It’s looking at your whole supply chain and trying to bring efficiencies across that whole package. We are shifting from just doing lots of product sales to doing program sales now. We’re doing multi-year big contracts that are saving our customers multiple millions of dollars a year. By looking at holistically across the whole supply chain,

Jeff White: Did this change to a more program-oriented selling correspond with your arrival at BGR?

Tom Greensall: It came in just before I arrived, but I think they started looking at marketing as a bigger function because of that shift. And it’s a different way to go to market. You are selling to different personas; the way that we’ve been going to market for the last 50 years has been extremely successful. But as we shift the strategy, we need to be looking at doing things slightly differently.

Carman Pirie: Tom, I wanna assure you that as I continue to talk about the firm, I’ll try not to talk about it through the lens of the URL. I’ll just use BGR rather than prefacing it with the pack, as I’ve been doing; the URL has just been stuck in my head, which I suppose is good.

Tom Greensall: From a URL perspective means something is working. Absolutely.

Carman Pirie: Exactly. Jeff was starting to knock on the door of that, the change in the sales process, and your approach, and how you’re the change basically in the go-to-market motion for BGR.

And I think it’s a common challenge for manufacturers that most manufacturers start out as very sales-centric organizations. Sales is almost always the muscle, if you will, that gets developed first. And marketing comes next. And as a result, it often starts as a bit of a support function to sales. I guess the story that we’re talking about here is really about transforming that into a more modern marketing function. And it sounds like that transformation was at least somewhat already underway as you joined. But I guess take us through that, and I’d be curious where the firm was when you joined and how, what were your first, next steps if you would?

Tom Greensall: Yeah, so I’d actually been doing some freelance work for the company for about two years before I joined full-time, just supporting, doing kind of basic email marketing and CRM setup, and that kind of thing. So I knew where they were. And we’re still very much a sales-led organization. Marketing is still the little brother in terms of revenue and growth model for BGR, but we are trying to move away from being purely branding and sales enablement. Which is what it was when I came to be a real driver of growth. We’ve redone our website from the ground up this year, which was a really interesting project, actually, when I was looking at our competitors and people in the industry. What really struck me was that everyone was doing what we were doing, which was just putting information on the website, and it was very educational. You learned a lot. But there was no real purpose to any of the pages. You’d go on a website and you’d think, what’s the market trying to do here? What is their goal for this webpage? And there was no kind of structure or flow. And so that’s what we’ve brought as our website now, we’ve tried to make it much more engaging. We’ve tried to make it. When you come to this page, we want you to buy this product. When you come to this page, we want you to get interested in this program or learn about this program. That’s what we’ve gone, we’ve tried to move away from just being educational and just putting information out there and supporting sales to being a revenue driver in our own right.

Jeff White: You talk about the notion of supporting sales, and I think, as a lot of marketing departments are being stood up, within an organization that maybe wasn’t going to market as a kind of marketing-led organization, often. The marketing department’s role is to produce content and documents and presentations and brochures, and all of those things. The sales have the tools that they need when they’re going out there. How have you approached changing their perspective and flipping that a little bit so that you can do more with very few people?

Tom Greensall: Yeah, it’s a difficult challenge. And, when I came in, I met with the sales leaders and the other leaders in the business and said very clearly, This is what marketing is going to be going forward. This is what our role is, this is what our goals are. These are what my targets are, and if there’s something outside those targets, that’s not my responsibility.

And they were very understanding of that. Now, that doesn’t mean that we’re not gonna create collateral for the sales team, or we’re not gonna create presentations for them. But they can’t just come and say, I have a sales meeting on Friday. Build a presentation for me. There has to be a broader strategic goal for the support that they’re looking for. A one-off sales meeting, unless it’s with a massive client, that’s going to really change, shift a needle. That’s not what we’re here for. You are a salesperson. We have templates, and we have documents that you can edit within our guidelines. You can go in and create that yourself.

So that was the first point. And then the second point was telling them what we’re going to be doing and how that would still be helping them in other ways. For example, the website, we’re now generating a lot more leads for our website than we ever were previously. That’s great for the sales team because now they’re not having to knock on doors; they’re getting leads coming to them.

We’ve launched an outbound advertising campaign, so again, for our E-com team, all of a sudden, we’re now getting more people coming through to the website, and it’s people who know what they’re looking for. So it was really twofold. It was being very clear about what marketing is and isn’t, and two, what that new look will do to help them in their life.

Jeff White: What was the response like as they started to see more performance-oriented deliverables from marketing as opposed to documents and slideshows?

Tom Greensall: I think there’s still a little bit where they’re trying to understand what we are and what we’re doing. I’ve been in the business for less than a year, so a lot of what we’ve been doing has been building the infrastructure, and it’s been behind the scenes. So we are just now, the last couple of months, starting to see some really good performance. So there’s been a little bit of what are they doing? What’s the benefit? What’s going on? But as they’re seeing it now, there is some excitement and understanding of kind of the direction that we’re going in.

Carman Pirie: That’s a really interesting point in this evolution because that’s so often the case is this type of shift is greeted initially with a lot of skepticism. Or just eh, okay. Like whatever. Those make my own PowerPoints. Just whatever those marketing people are on about. But it’s a little bit of the sales are from Venus, and marketing from Mars, or vice versa, or something, is where it often starts. That’s why I like the idea that one of the early initiatives was the rebuild of the site and kind of reimagining how that performs, because to your point, it can impact sales pretty quickly as they start to find themselves working more inbound leads that already have a level of buying intent versus prospecting hard. And then I think the other side of that is the website is often a sales assistance tool for a direct sales organization. Then they start to see the benefit of prospects going to the site and being impressed. Has that been, is that starting to be the story now as the new site is taking hold?

And I’d be curious if I can extend my question. I would be curious to know how much, what kind of shift you are seeing right now in terms of working inbound versus prospecting leads. If there are any kind of numbers we can put to that, but I appreciate that’s a pretty specific question.

Tom Greensall: Yeah. So on the first part of that question, absolutely. And what’s interesting is it’s not just helping the sales team, it actually educates them a little bit. So seven months ago, they came into marketing and said, Hey, I’ve got a customer who’s in this industry. Have we got a flyer for them? Have we got a one-pager for them? But now that we’ve rebuilt our website, and like I said, we were very purposeful about this section of the website. This is the goal. This section of the website is the goal. They’re now starting to learn that actually, they don’t need a flyer. They can just direct their prospects to a certain part of the website, and the messaging is already there for them. So they’re no longer looking for purpose-built material for a prospect. They’re directing to our new website, which is fantastic. Yeah, in terms of the numbers that we’ve been seeing. I haven’t got the exact numbers in front of me. I know a couple of months ago we’d seen. 139, 140% increase in new contacts through the website, which is fantastic. Y’know, it’s a pretty serious increase that’s led you down, though. I don’t have those numbers in front of me. But also because we have been doing a lot of stuff behind the scenes. We’re doing a lot of SEO work. We’re experimenting with improving our GEO performance. We think that the numbers that we’re getting in are actually more targeted rather than just someone stumbling across. You know what we found in the past, we’ve had a lot of small businesses coming in, which is fantastic, but they were doing a $500, $1,500 purchase, and those customers are important, but they’re not our target audience. We wanna be targeting the people that they’re doing half a million a year in packaging spend, and we are now starting to see that shift where the bright people are coming to the site.

Jeff White: Was the e-commerce platform a specific play to appease those smaller businesses that were looking for the 500 or $1,500 things? So you could keep the focus of the sales team on the, half million dollar a year ICP.

Tom Greensall: Yeah, so that conversation shifts to the business, actually, as much as just the marketing strategy. Previously at BGR, any salesperson could and would sell to anyone. So you might have your most senior sales person knocking on the door of a mom-and-pop shop and doing 500 in sales. And the new most junior salesperson person trying to sell one of our programs to a multimillion-dollar business, and that didn’t really make sense. We’re now trying to be a little bit more segmented. We’ve created messaging for different types of businesses, and absolutely, the e-commerce store is for those smaller customers, where they can still go and get the package they need, but they don’t need sales support for that.

And so another sales rep can be more focused on who they’re going after. And these programs that I mentioned, we have programs for different sides of businesses, as well as the different goals for them. So we are trying to break down the business into being more focused, not just in terms of messaging, but in terms of who is and what is focusing on what prospects.

Carman Pirie: That’s really exciting. It’s easy to look in the crystal ball and imagine a year from now, or two years from now, looking at the improvement in close rates and the improvement in average deal size combined. And then when you combine that with the enhanced intent, and a dramatic increase in contacting lead flow. If you could just imagine it just sounds like a rocket ship at this point. That’s exciting.

Tom Greensall: Yeah. And BGR is such a good business, and it has such great products, and the leadership there is so strong that we had a lot of good stuff to work with. So the marketing function wasn’t set up as a business. Everything that was needed to succeed. So we did have a really good starting point. We got great leadership. So it’s an exciting time to be building it from the ground up.

Carman Pirie: Yeah, that’s an important point because, of course, good marketing to a bad product or bad service just means that more people find out how bad it is faster. And then you just fail faster.

Jeff White: Yeah. You gotta have the fundamentals in place first. Yeah.

Carman Pirie: It’s good. It’s nice to, like, a house remodel. It’s nice to be starting with good bones.

Tom Greensall: Exactly. And the other thing I’d mention is, marketing doesn’t happen overnight. So you know, it’s not just put a LinkedIn post out there and go viral and all of a sudden, everything works.

It takes time to build that infrastructure up. So you need leaders who are gonna have that patience and are gonna understand that you’ve got to do the hard work before you start seeing that. Doesn’t mean you can’t get quick results, you can’t get quick wins, but the overall, kinda strategic wins, that’s gonna take a little bit longer. And as long as your leaders understand that, then you can be a bit more patient and do things properly.

Jeff White: What’s the trajectory of the marketing team itself, like your HR complement? I think you have mentioned two and a half full-time resources currently. How has that grown since you’ve been there in the last year, and what are the kind of skill sets and scale of that team that you’re gonna see in the future?

Tom Greensall: Yeah, so it’s two and a half people, including me. We have a freelancer who is with us most of the week, but not full-time. We’ve recently brought on a freelancer who is a specialist in this digital advertising because that wasn’t the course that we had in-house, but we don’t anticipate that growing. Yeah. It’s 40-ish sales reps versus two and a half marketing. It’s very misbalanced or unbalanced, but we are trying to find ways of scaling what we do. So we are really leaning into AI as a way of not doing the work for us, but a way of making us more productive. As marketers, we’re trying to build repeatable processes, and I think the freelance model is a model we’ll go with. Rather than having a full-time hire, we’ll be looking for specialists with the skill sets that we need. And we’ll be using them for a certain period of time, and then we’ll be scaling back their involvement, and then maybe shifting our focus. And I think that is the way that a lot of marketing teams will go over the next five years. With the influx of freelance marketers with the growth of AI and AI performance, there’s no need to have a full-time hire, which takes a lot of your budget. You can be a little bit more working at a smaller size and more efficiently.

Carman Pirie: How have the… It’s obviously still early days in the realm of AI, and making the marketing function more efficient and effective via that technology? Has that been so far? Would you say it’s met your expectations? Have you been able to achieve the level of efficiency and effectiveness gain that you had hoped for as you started down that path? Or are you finding the benefits are lagging a bit? I’d be curious.

Tom Greensall: I think what we are finding is the short-term gain is actually negative. So you spend a lot of time learning the skill or learning a certain AI model, and you don’t quite get the results you want. But once you invest a bit of time in it and you understand how it works, and you’ve maybe trained it on your own data. Then all of a sudden, the results shoot up.

And, you have to go through that pain of learning the model, and sometimes it’s not the right model and it’s, and you’ve invested a lot of time that maybe you don’t get back. But overall, we now use it to create video assets from photos, which saves a lot of time, a lot of money on getting someone in to do the videos themselves. We have a writing GPT. So we’ve trained the GPTs on our brand, on our messaging, on our writing style, and it now does a pretty good job of creating content to 90, 95% of what we need, and we just need to tweak it. We’ve got a custom GPT that looks at our SEO and our GEO performance.

So rather than me having to go into send version and going through the mid of dashboards on there, I can just go and get a quick report. You have to learn how to use it, and you have to use it properly. I think a good way of looking at it is it’s like a very intelligent intern that’s got the skill sets of someone who’s very senior.

If you give it the right instructions and you give it the right training, it will do really good work. If you try and cut corners and don’t give it the right inputs, you’re gonna get really bad outputs.

Carman Pirie: I think that’s really helpful guidance, as I think a lot of marketers find themselves being pressured by the C-suite, et cetera, to leverage AI in order to find efficiencies. It’s nice to set some expectations around what that journey’s going to look like, and I appreciate you mentioning that. Yeah, you gotta go through a little bit of pain first before you start to see some of the benefits.

Tom Greensall: It’s not a magic button, but it is really powerful when it’s used properly.

Carman Pirie: One of the things I find often in this type of evolution of the marketing function is that there is there’s some low hanging fruit initially just in building a more proper digital foundation and getting some of those foundational elements in place that help capture kind of high buying intent, rich inbound demand, like every kind of category has some of that out there, like the, that low hanging fruit to pluck, but then. After that digital foundation’s been set up and the conversion focus has been implemented, and maybe a proper paid search program, then that low-hanging fruit of the inbound high buying intent leads starts to dry up a little bit. It is not an infinite pool of them. And then you have to shift to how you think about driving awareness. I’m going somewhere with this, and it’s for a sales-focused organization and for sales-focused manufacturers. Sometimes I think the budgets required to truly drive brand awareness are frankly, they’re not interested in spending that kind of money.

Does any of that align with your reality? And if so, ’cause I’m guessing it is, how are you navigating that or thinking about it truly, how are you thinking about driving net new brand awareness in a previously very, in currently very sales-focused organization?

Tom Greensall: Yeah, it’s a really good point, and yeah, I agree with the kind of marketing budgets. Probably not just in this industry, in general, leadership doesn’t understand the investment that’s required to get the proper results. We’re currently at that point; we’re just shifting at the moment. So we’ve got our product advertising set up and running and are seeing some good results. Like I said, we’ve got a new website, so those low-hanging fruit, we’re at the point where we’ve got everything we need running to achieve that. And now we’re starting to shift our focus to, okay, how do we look at this more for the funnel? How do we bring in new customers? And for me, that is looking at these program-type deals, which is, it’s new to the industry.

So it’s not just introducing a new customer or a new company to the prospect. It’s introducing a whole new concept and a whole new way of looking at supply chains. And it’s looking at new markets, and we are pretty big in the markets that we operate in. And our next phase is, let’s move into new markets, particularly geographical markets. So the way that I’m looking at it is we’ve got some really good results. We’ve got those low-hanging fruits, and so I can take that to leaders. Here are the results we’ve got: our ROAS has been fantastic. But if we want to go to the next stage, we’re gonna need a bigger budget. And so it is building on the previous results, but again, it comes back to, I mentioned, and you need patience from leadership comes back to educating them as well. So, danger, understand that the next stage is not gonna be quite as quick a result. It’s gonna take a little bit longer. If you can try and set some goals along the way. So if you look at that full funnel, the first bit is awareness. How many people are now following this on LinkedIn? How many people have gone to our website because they saw an ad, even if they convert? That’s fine. Then you’ve got interest.

How many people are now spending more time on a website or going to multiple pages? How many people are feeling informed or reading white papers? And so you have to educate them that the goal is not a conversion. A goal at that stage is simply getting them to the website and being able to retarget them down the road. But that takes a lot of patience and a lot of education on their side.

Carman Pirie: Yeah, it’s really hard work. It really is. If there was a return on ad spend that they get when they first stand up that paid search program and start seeing the inbound leads flow. If you’re expecting that kind of return on ad spend for net new brand awareness advertising, it’s like you’re ready to be really disappointed, and therefore it puts marketers in the position, as you mentioned, where the success that you’re holding up as the reason why they should invest more. Maybe not the success that they’re going to be getting from those other investments isn’t going to be quite as robust, or at least as quick. So it takes some dancing. I appreciate you peeling back the texture of that a little bit. I think there’s a lot of learning and just from marketers who find themselves in that position. Thinking about that and being mindful of the mind shift that you’re trying to create in the leadership.

Tom Greensall: Yeah, and I think one of the ways that we are looking at it, we haven’t started this program yet. We’re still in the kind of sizing phase, but one of the ways we’ll be looking at it is. One, we’re gonna be selling programs, which, as I mentioned, are multi-year, bigger contracts for our customers. So, as a business, that’s still a fairly new concept. We don’t have many of those deals, so that’s exciting for leadership because they’re trying to get the groundwork rolling. And two, it’s those new markets, rather than having them hire a whole sales team in the new market, which is what they would’ve done five years ago. I can say, let’s do some experimenting. Let’s focus on certain markets and see what meshing works for them, see what interests them.

And then if you know there’s interest there, then we can look at doing a bigger rollout. So it’s trying to understand what their goals are and giving them a win that might not be monetary, it might not be dollar-based, but it’s something strategic that’s gonna help them, with the way that they’re thinking about marketing as being a strategic function. And actually, this is one of the challenges that a lot of marketers have if they’re in a sales-led organization. Results for leadership are always dollar-based. How many deals did you have? How many dollars does that drive? What’s our revenue marketing is a lot more strategic than that.

There are a lot of metrics that aren’t necessarily directly related to dollars in the immediate time, so it’s how you would train them to think more strategically with their focus and with what they’re expecting in terms of returns.

Jeff White: I like the notion of looking at some of those metrics that, in a lot of organizations, more people follow you on LinkedIn and things that are more engagement style metrics, as opposed to monetary or revenue or pipeline metrics. We might poo-poo those a little bit, but if you’re doing them as an experiment to see if you can enter a new market or a new area or something like that in order to boost awareness. It’s not a bad thing to be able to provide that, as well as the harder metrics of things that actually drove revenue.

Carman Pirie: I think Jeff, what you’re saying there is we can look at them as vanity metrics in some way, but I think that’s because sometimes what marketers do to drive them, so you go and buy a bunch of fake followers to drive your vanity metrics. That doesn’t help anybody. But, so I think it starts from what you are doing to try to move that needle? It’s not that the needle itself is broken; it’s how you try to move that needle that makes the needle useless. Does that make sense?

Jeff White: Also, if you consider how you are explaining that to people who may not necessarily understand why a follow is good or bad or useful or directionally an improvement. I think there’s a lot of education required there in order to explain how you’re attacking this to the C-suite and to others in the organization who may not have experienced any of this kind of thing before.

Tom Greensall: And I think it always has to be linked back to the overall company goal, right? If your audience isn’t on LinkedIn, then growing your LinkedIn audience absolutely would be a vanity metric. There’s no use in that. If you are solely based in the US and you get a bunch of people from Mexico coming to your website, that’s a vanity metric that’s not helpful. So it has to be linked to what the business is doing. And if you can see that leadership is trying to shift or they’ve got a certain strategy that they’re trying to go in on. You can say, Hey, this is my plan to support you from that through marketing. It’s gonna take time, but these are the stepping stones to get there. Then I think it’s easier for leadership to understand and get on board with that slightly longer journey that you have to go on.

Carman Pirie: Tom, this has been a fascinating conversation. I’ve really enjoyed this. You’re the type of person that I think is looking ahead a bit. So I wonder what, as you look maybe, ’cause the world of marketing’s changing pretty quickly now, and I know that’s cliche to even say, but it seems like it’s changing faster than it had been for a little while. We kinda reached a bit of, almost stagnant for, I think we’re a little bit predictable for a while, and now I think they’re getting less predictable again, as you look at three years out or so. Can you, I wonder what you’d say is what’s something that you’re doing today that you probably won’t be doing then, or something you’re not doing today that you probably will be doing then?

Tom Greensall: Oh, that’s a really good question. I think email campaigns, I can see those going away. And the reason is that I think a lot more people are using AI agents to manage their inboxes, and AI agents are just gonna read out marketing emails. So you’re gonna have to find a different way of reaching people. When you’re collecting information through forms and stuff at the moment, you collect their email and then you put ’em on a mailing list, or you reach out to ’em when you’ve got something to say. I think that’s gonna go away as AI agents become more popular with the general population looking after their inboxes.

Carman Pirie: Wow. That’s fascinating. I hadn’t… I would not have predicted that was going to be a response to all of the marketing kind of new things that have come along. Email marketing has had some remarkable staying power. So yeah, obviously I was just following up.

Jeff White: episode to check in and see how this is going.

Carman Pirie: Yeah. I’m thinking about some campaign metrics I was looking at just earlier this week, and the differences between an email campaign send versus an SMS send. And, the email was still outperforming SMS in that instance. Yeah.

Tom Greensall: I think it all takes time. It is, when you’ve got products like Superhuman and Fixer that go in and do your inbox for you, and you just have to fortify what the AI’s picked out. as more people start using those, I think, I mean, we are still using email campaigns pretty heavily, but I do think that is gonna be the type of AI that really takes off. Across the population, not just in marketing. And that’s gonna impact how well your email campaigns are working.

Carman Pirie: Yeah, that makes sense. Tom, you’ve certainly given me something to think about there, and I think you’ve given our listeners something to think about. I really want to thank you for joining us on the show today. It’s been wonderful to have you on the

Tom Greensall: Yeah, I appreciate you having me. It’s been a really fun conversation.

Jeff White: Yeah. Thanks a lot, Tom.

Tom Greensall:  Thanks, guys.