The Kula Ring PodcastThe Kula Ring Podcast

Eve Chen has spent nearly three decades asking how companies turn market opportunity into predictable revenue, and her answer centers on who is actually doing the buying. With Forrester putting the average B2B buying group at 13 internal stakeholders plus nine external influencers, she argues revenue teams need a buyer’s playbook as rigorous as their seller’s playbook. Drawing on a night navigation exercise from her time in the Australian Army Reserve, Eve explains why the map stops working when the terrain changes, and why manufacturers should raise safety and procurement concerns early. The payoff is readiness on both sides of the deal, and forecasts built on evidence instead of gut feel.

Inbolt’s AI vision guidance now steers 200+ robots across 100+ factories at Stellantis, Toyota, Ford, and GM, and Carl Standertskjold runs the entire marketing function alone. He joins Jeff and Carman to talk about what changes when a startup shifts from landing first logos to expanding inside a plant, and how a team of one holds up under it. Carl builds every plan down from the business outcome, leans on an AI-first stack, and still draws a hard line where human judgment and creativity can’t be handed off. The conversation explores the two roles he’s hiring, why systems thinking separates the marketers who thrive, and where real buyers actually spend their time.

Maria Birdwell came to industrial packaging from media and advertising, with no B2B background and no allegiance to how the category has always sold itself. At Franklin Mountain Packaging, a corrugated manufacturer that started up in 2022, she markets a young company against multi-generational competitors by refusing to fight on age or even on machinery. Instead she lets customer requirements drive the conversation and, in a recent pivot she credits directly to macroeconomic uncertainty, leans the whole message toward flexibility. She tells Jeff White and Carman Pirie why she downplays sustainability, why video of machines in action outperforms everything, and why marketing means nothing if operations can’t capture and convert the lead.

Chris Persson sells something buyers never see: polypropylene fiber woven into cars, couches, and carpets. On this episode he unpacks the peculiar challenge of marketing an ingredient brand with a guerrilla-sized budget, and why the sustainability pitch keeps colliding with a price tag. His answer is a reframe he calls “sustainability plus one” — lead with a greener story, then stack innovation, cleanability, and low specific gravity on top so the customer never has to choose good over cheap. Along the way he makes the case that a manufacturer’s deepest competitive moat isn’t its equipment but the decades of intellectual property walking around on its factory floor.

In a category where production outstrips demand and the end customer cares more about how a room looks than whose logo is on the box, Mauricio Inglada makes a counterintuitive case: the brand that matters most is the one you build with your distribution channel. As VP of Sales & Marketing at Del Conca USA, he walks Jeff and Carman through winning at the channel level — earning distributor trust, removing the fears that quietly kill deals (dead inventory, builder callbacks, the homeowner’s permanent regret), and competing against far larger rivals with a small but relentlessly responsive “Navy Sales” team. Along the way: why Pinterest is a secret intent engine and where AI will reshape the buying cycle.

Account-based marketing isn’t new to manufacturers, but the way they have to run it is unlike anyone else’s. In this episode, Demandbase’s Nick Cholakis unpacks the defining tension of industrial ABM: a sales cycle that can stretch past two years, punctuated by a buying window that slams open and shut in weeks. With most research now happening anonymously and offline — increasingly inside LLMs — Nick explains how signal aggregation helps manufacturers spot in-market accounts, why behaviour should override firmographics when tiering, and how to arm distributors and channel partners with the context they need to act before the window closes.