How to Create a New Product Category and Grow DemandHow to Create a New Product Category and Grow Demand

How to Create a New Product Category and Grow Demand Transcript:

Jeff White: Welcome to The Kula Ring, a podcast for manufacturing marketers brought to you by Cooler Partners. My name is Jeff White, and joining me today is Carman Pirie. Carman, how you doing, sir? 

Carman Pirie: I’m doing well. Happy to be here, per normal and you? 

Jeff White: Yeah, doing great. Thanks. 

Carman Pirie: Nice. I look, I’m operating with at least two fewer espresso than normal, which I tend to overcaffeinate, generally speaking. So if I slow down at any point in the broadcast and you just need to take it on over, that’s why.

Jeff White:  Noted, noted. Yeah. It was a little later in the day that we’re getting to… 

Carman Pirie: But the thing is, I was excited for today’s guest, so that had me awake and alive. I didn’t need the espresso. I’m excited to dig into this, and I like when people are… There are sometimes people are playing a different game within a category. Sometimes they know it and sometimes they don’t. I like talking to the marketers who are intentionally heading down the path of trying to play a different game in a category, and frankly, bringing it to life, ABM is exciting for me to talk about too. So that’s all about today’s episode. 

Jeff White: Anything that we can do to talk about account-based strategies is always interesting to me. 

Carman Pirie: Yeah. 

Jeff White: Yeah. So let’s get it underway. So joining us today is Stephanie Nolan. Stephanie is the Vice President, Sales and Marketing at Square Robot. Welcome to The Kula Ring, Stephanie. 

Stephanie Nolan: Hi. Thanks for having me. I’m excited. 

Carman Pirie: We’re excited to have you on. Stephanie, thank you for joining us. First things first, let me understand a little bit more about Square Robot and what y’all are doing. 

Stephanie Nolan: Yeah, so we’re a robotics technology service company. So a lot of words in there, but basically when you get down to it, what our company does is we design and build robots and then take that technology and sell the service of the robot. So not the robot itself, but we’re catering towards multiple industries. What we focus on is, and this is very niche, it’s storage, above-ground storage tank inspections. So for the general public out there, if you think maybe you’re flying into an airport, you look down, you see these big cylindrical storage tanks that are holding your jet fuel.

That’s one example. Tanks that sit at terminals for the transport of fuel oil. That’s another they are a group, the tanks themselves that are regulated. So they have to be inspected. And if you think, let’s think about if something happened, it cracked, it leaked. We have a huge problem. If whatever chemical or whatever product is sitting in there now leaks into either the ground or a stream or a river, we all can think of examples where there’s been a chemical spill or something that we would prefer not to happen, which is why it’s a regulated industry and why our technology, I think, is really making a difference in this industry.

Carman Pirie: And Stephanie, so you guys build the robots and then sell the service for the robots to go into the tanks and do the inspection on the inside? Like they’re submersible? 

Stephanie Nolan: Yes. It’s a, think a little submarine. It’s not that little, but it is a submersible robot. 

Jeff White: That’s really cool. I was gonna ask a bit about, just describe for our listeners, we’ll include a link to your website obviously, so people can go and check it out. But I’m just interested, can you describe a bit about how the robots are designed and what they look like? Obviously, if they’re going into tanks of fuel, they have very stringent requirements about not blowing things up, among other things. But I’d love to know a little bit more about those too.

Carman Pirie: Jeff always uses those technical terms. Yeah. 

Jeff White: Yeah. Don’t blow stuff up. 

Stephanie Nolan: That’s important as well. We don’t wanna blow anything up. And even though the company is called Square Robot, our robots are not square. If you think of basically like a long tube torpedo, that’s more of what it looks like. They sit between four to five feet. And part of that is because of the design of the robot. What we’re looking to do is so if you think of a storage tank, almost like a house. Everything on the house, the structure, the walls, the roof, everything like that you can see from the outside. So if you need inspections done, all you have to do is walk around it. You can take your inspection from the outside, just like a house, a storage tank. You can only see the floors if you walk inside the house. And that’s what we’re looking to do with storage tanks, is instead of the process of draining the storage tank, releasing emissions, then having people crawl inside. Hot, dangerous environments. We wanna take the robot, put it in instead. So the robot is designed specifically for a tank bottom and tank applications, which is why it is a torpedo shape because there are characteristics that go into that, that allow it to navigate a tank environment better than, there have been past robotics, but better than past robotics, which really were unsuccessful.

Carman Pirie: That’s really cool. And so the way it’s generally been done then is that you would have to drain the tank and then send people in. 

Stephanie Nolan: Yeah, exactly. So confined space entry it’s also time-consuming. I’ve heard from our customers that they can sit anywhere between a few weeks to sometimes up to a year of tank time that’s lost. And if you think of it as our client’s bottom line, having a tank out a service where they’re storing product, selling product that hits their bottom line and that impacts them. Yeah. 

Jeff White: Also adds a ton of risk, I have to think as well. 

Stephanie Nolan: Definitely. And robotics has been tried for this area before.

I think submersibles are new to the market for tank inspections. If you think of, I’m talking about tanks, but if you think of an army tank that has wheels that roll across the ground, that’s what they used in the past. There were a ton of limitations with that, and that’s what I mean when we talk about navigating the tank environment. You couldn’t really get inside the entire tank. You couldn’t get all the areas, so you didn’t have a good understanding of what the tank bottom actually looked like, which is why submersibles have popped up on the scene. Now we’re seeing a real explosion within the market and within the company. There’s that word though. 

Jeff White: Exactly. I don’t wanna go too far without having an opportunity for you to tell our listeners about yourself and how you ended up at Square Robot. 

Stephanie Nolan: Yeah. Before I get there, I wanna put on the record. We have had no explosions. 

Jeff White: Exactly. 

Stephanie Nolan: Even though it keeps coming up. We’ve had no explosions. 

But a little bit about myself. I’ve been in, I would say, the energy industry and sales specific for probably about 12 years now. Before that, I had a background in communications where I was working in public relations, marketing, and advertising. That’s really where my career started. It was based in Houston. And in Houston, we have two big industries. We have oil and gas, and we have healthcare. So I was gonna go one of the two ways. Oil and gas happened to be the fit. I really loved the time of communications working on the crisis side. So you think crisis, public relations, dealing with exactly what I just talked about, chemical spills. I’m gonna say it again. Explosions, things like that. And I realized it was the… It was the impact that I wanted to make, which brought me to the business development side. I think now that I’m at Square Robot, it really is the first company that I’ve worked for where the impact and the opportunity is so huge and it’s so cool to be part of a company where, one, you’re a trailblazer, you’re doing things no other company is doing, but two, you’re making an actual difference to both your environment, so HSE, safety risk, but also your client’s bottom line. So it’s really compelling and I never thought tanks would be my life tanks and robots, but here we are.

Carman Pirie: It’s amazing how many manufacturing, kinda industrial marketers we speak to that will tell us about the category that they work in and the depth of experience that they’ve cultivated. And then end it with what you just said. I never thought that this would be my life, but it’s amazing. And man, as you were describing it to me, it’s incredibly rewarding. Not only is there an environmental component to what you’re doing, an environmental stewardship component, but just the health and safety component as well. And then of course, I’m just able to do this better and with cool technology. I think that’s really interesting. 

Stephanie Nolan: Yeah, I always liken it to the bank scenario, like it’s 2025 now. We don’t need to send people inside a big tank, we can do it better, more efficiently with a robot. I don’t go to the bank anymore to deposit a check. I do it on my phone. So it’s just embracing new technology and the willingness to do that.

Carman Pirie: Absolutely. And as we talk about that, we’ve talked about the way it’s always been done. This is a really interesting dynamic I find for people operating within niche categories is that they often find themselves competing against the way. Things have always been done there. Sometimes that means that they’re selling a service that used to be done as an equipment acquisition, some time ago. Other times, they’re just bringing a completely different solution to the market. And every time that this is happening, there’s always an education component, it seems. And then there’s a bit of a getting over the hump, if you will, of proving yourself and proving that this new technology will work. 

Jeff White: It often means that you’re trying to sell something that nobody knows exists. 

Carman Pirie: So therefore they’re not looking for it, and therefore they’re hard to find. So now we’ll stop putting words in Stephanie’s mouth and we’ll ask her, does that match up to what you’re encountering? 

Stephanie Nolan: Absolutely. From top to bottom, it does. There are two segments. One, people have never heard of us, even though we’re working with major companies and our technology is really revolutionizing the way inspections are done. A lot of the time, the bigger the company, the more siloed they are. So just because one segment of a company knows about us, that doesn’t mean the entire company does. And there’s also what you said, proving yourself. I don’t think that new technology ever goes away. Until you get to the point where you have mass utilization and depending on what you’re selling or depending on what you’re producing, that could take years. And we definitely see that each time. It’s proving yourself over and over, and then it’s one small error happens. It’s backtracking and restarting over to prove yourself again. So we’ve seen that across multiple industries, and it’s been interesting because in the past few years we you finally think small company bandwidth is tight. We’ve finally gotten to the point where we can start looking at what’s making an impact following our metrics from both marketing to sales, like what actually is hitting the bottom line and what messaging is getting people really over that hump. 

Carman Pirie: Now you’ve got me curious. I guess what is, how are you finding that path of trying to break through what are the elements of the educational message that are resonating? Can you help me understand that? 

Stephanie Nolan: It’s really industry specific and I think working, this is really the first company I’ve been at where the sales and marketing team is fully integrated, which is why we have one person leading both. We work so closely together because the messaging for the different industries, even if it’s tweaked slightly, those small tweaks, those nuances change the outcome of a discussion. So it’s working with the past. We started operations in 2019, with the past six years of experience. Taking all of that and having the collaborative sessions on what has made an impact, what’s driven that, and then building your marketing messages based on industry. Because they should be different. We work in oil and gas, and you think downstream is different than midstream. We’ll also work on the utility side. That’s completely different from the power generation side. So, having the different messaging, the collateral behind it, and then breaking it down. Because you said ABM, account-based marketing per account, per logo, per customer. And how that company is actually organized. There are a lot of moving pieces between all of it, because every company’s gonna be a little bit different in who you’re speaking to, but in the end, it’s finding the right person to get the message that’s tailored to them. 

Jeff White: So are you focusing primarily on, you talked about, the specific logos that you’re targeting and things like that? Is your ABM program almost entirely one-to-one, or are you also doing some more, one-to-many or one-to-few? Marketing within that. 

Stephanie Nolan: I would say it’s both. So we do a lot of messaging to industry. Industry as a whole, because the only way, in my opinion, in my experience, to grow a smaller company is volume. You have to have volume, you have to have eyeballs. So we message per industry, but then we also message per account. That’s finding the correct decision makers, the influencers, and messaging specifically to them. That’s also based on where that account sits in the industry. Because a lot of times we find one company, we’ll call ’em an integrated company because they hit multiple industries. You think maybe like a larger oil and gas. They also have a renewable side. They also have a downstream side. They might have a petrochem side. So it’s talking to all the different industries in different ways. For one account, it almost becomes like you have a lot of little babies spreading around. It’s not just one. 

Carman Pirie: That was interesting too, because so often people think about okay, we have a one-to-few or one-to-many campaign that’s industry specific, and then we’re going to get more personalized as we target at the account level. You just flipped it on its head and said, we can actually be targeting people at the account level, and then we need to talk to that account in three or four or five different ways based upon which industry that account is impacting. I don’t know that I’ve encountered that before. 

Stephanie Nolan: No, I haven’t at my past roles either, but I feel like if you have a good synergy between your sales and marketing team, there’s an understanding and like a really good BDM team, a sales team that is integrated with the company. You get that understanding of how we do need a message and there should always be. And I’ve worked at really large companies and really small companies. There should always be that ongoing discussion happening, and we look at it really month by month, but our larger plan, quarter by quarter of who we’re targeting, what that messaging looks like, what we need to add to the pipeline, so what accounts are we not hitting that have potential? All those aspects. It’s super collaborative, which is why I like my job and I like working with my team. 

Carman Pirie: Yeah, how much are you doing account-based advertising as part of your ABM program or are you, is most of your ABM program a little bit more delivered on the sales side of the equation? 

Stephanie Nolan: I wouldn’t say advertising. We’ve done some advertising, but it’s definitely not account-based. So it would be larger, industry-based. What we look to do is probably more on the marketing side. So you’re thinking specific email campaigns. Also, utilizing social media to make sure we’re hitting the right audiences. And within that, you’re in the right groups, you’re in the right chats, you’re, depending on where you are in the country, you’re in the right regional-specific discussions that are happening. Or maybe it’s very technical that you’re in the technical conversations. So it’s more, I would say on the marketing side, we also try to utilize webinars because life is different from pre-COVID life. Everyone’s online now, just like we’re recording this online now. So utilizing webinars in any way that we can get more eyeballs in front of our messaging is important, and it’s making an impact. 

Jeff White: What sort of tactics are you using at that? I want to dig into the educational piece, the part where people don’t necessarily know that this is the solution yet, and maybe we can carve off an industry and talk about it specifically, or maybe it’s broader than that. But I’d love to know what you’re doing to. Get in front in the messaging that you’re using to people who aren’t aware of robots as a service for this kind of submersible inspection industry. 

Carman Pirie: Kind of to wake them up to the fact that it’s even an option. 

Jeff White: Yeah. 

Stephanie Nolan: Yeah. We have a whole system, and it should work, I’m gonna say like a well-oiled machine, a well-oiled robot. It should work pretty seamlessly, and the results that we’re seeing prove that. It’s a multi-step approach, and like I said, sales and marketing are working together closely. So we have a team that focuses just on building out our connections. So you think prospecting, finding contacts, finding qualified contacts, like who’s actually the right person? At this company of however many thousand, what is the small group we need to be in front of? From there, we take that list. We voted it into our marketing campaigns. So you need that first step of who are you talking to? And a lot of times, small companies’ bandwidth dropped. And I’ve experienced this, especially when I started here. You have one or two people who are in charge of doing everything. They’re in charge of the outreach, they’re in charge of the account management, they’re in charge of working with marketing. They get spread so thin that the first step is not developed. And I think that first step is actually the most critical step because if you don’t have the people that you need to be in front of, you’re not gonna make a difference. It’s not gonna move the needle. So building out those campaign lists and the contacts, we have a small team that’s their job, their total job, it affects both marketing, it affects both outside sales. From there, you can break those contact lists down based on. Industry even based on title, based on company.

We also do regional campaigns, regional specific, so based on region. And taking that to the next step. So what is it? Is it utilizing social media? Is it email campaigns? Is it sometimes we look at actual physical in person, is our team gonna be in the northeast for a month? Should we send people out there and see how many eyeballs we can get by hosting potential customer visits, but we like to think of that in large quantities. So it’s not just going out for one person, ’cause we’re a small team. If we’re gonna go out and travel, we wanna get as many eyeballs as we can. 

Jeff White: I really appreciate how much emphasis you put on the effort involved in building that target account list. Because I think there are a lot of people who think, oh, we just buy Apollo or Demandbase or whatever and put in our criteria and there it is, man. It is. There’s so much more hands-on to that and so much more cleaning and scrubbing and trying to get a list that actually makes sense and is gonna help you target the right organizations in the right way. It’s I think it’s misunderstood by a lot of folks. 

Stephanie Nolan: I agree with that. And based on company, based on account, based on industry, the titles are different. So even if you put in Hey, we want this group, you could be reaching maybe only 25% of who you actually need to be in front of. And then when you think of it as you’re following the process, so that sales and marketing process, ’cause I think of it as one. Because marketing should drive the bottom line as you’re following that process. If you don’t start with a base, understanding that base knowledge, and I would say it’s who you need to be in front of, you can’t track the outcome, so you can’t look at your response rate, you can’t look at your click-through rate. Based on important metrics. You could have a click-through of people who’ve never heard of robots at Square Robot, but we wanna a click-through of people who are targeted audience. From there, you have to track what’s the next step. Is that gonna lead to actual purchase orders, jobs completed and seeing? ’cause it’s different for every company. Seeing what makes the impact that made up a. A big part of our 2024. It’s out of everything that we did, what moved the needle, what hit our bottom line, and that’s what we went into this year focusing on, which is why you hear me say. Email campaigns and webinars ’cause we saw the most success, and that will be different for each company. But that’s where we saw success on the marketing side. 

Carman Pirie: I’ve got a couple of questions here, I think, but we’ll see where it goes. I guess one of the things that you’ve pictured, that you’ve painted as we’ve talked about this, is that, by company and certainly by industry, not only do the titles that you’re selling to changes, but the overall makeup of the buying committee, I’m assuming changes and the people that are influencing these decisions.

Sometimes I find when you’re introducing a new way of doing things, those buying committees get even larger for some reason. There are more people involved in vetting if they’re changing the way they do something in some ways. I wonder if that’s been your experience, and if so, what’s the biggest surprise you’ve seen, as you’ve looked at buying committees, people making a decision. Have you looked around the room and said, I can’t believe that they’re part of this? Why is so and so here?

Stephanie Nolan: What’s surprising to me is not necessarily who’s in the room and who’s influencing the buying, it’s the different messages to the different levels and we found, so you think site level boots on the ground is a completely different message from your corporate, your C-suite, but also a different message from that mid-manager. So maybe they own the whole P and L for one site, and that’s what’s most interesting and what we’ve seen. And what our goal is for all account-based marketing, and as we work towards more business, what our goal is to have a message that is driven top down because there is a huge disconnect between what the site boots on the ground thinks and what corporate thinks. And in terms of our industry, when you think of HSE and the impact of confined space emissions. That’s super important at the corporate level, high level. It’s all over the news. It’s what everyone is thinking top of mind. But when you work your way down the chain on the site level, they’re thinking of their personal budget, how fast they can get something done, and how their goals are different from potentially using a new technology. If it’s new, what if it doesn’t work? How’s that gonna impact their job? So it’s the different conversations at the different levels that have surprised me in how you need to go into it completely. And now we’re breaking it down even more, ’cause you think industry specific, company specific, and then you got your level specific messaging.

Carman Pirie: Yeah. So that makes sense to me. And you would think, oh, my goodness, the people that are close to the action are going to appreciate the robot technology for getting inside these tanks, they may be some of the people that would be asked to go in otherwise. But to your point, they think about it differently. 

Stephanie Nolan: They think about it differently and everyone’s bandwidth to accept new technology is different. I don’t know if it’s generational, but I think my grandparents still aren’t depositing checks into the bank on an app. They don’t trust that, so it’s. It’s where you sit on that technology curve and how willing you are to just jump into something new, even if it’s been proven, even if it has case studies, because it doesn’t matter what everyone else did, it’s gonna impact you differently. 

Jeff White: You find some industries are more open to the new than others?

Stephanie Nolan: Yeah, I do. But I don’t think it’s based on the industry being willing to adopt technology. I think it’s based on how our service impacts that company. So companies that are… Like tanks are their livelihood. They’re passing product through. They are slower to move because that’s where they’re making their money. And new technology is scary to change the way that they’ve been doing. Now, you have industries where tanks are a part of their process. So if you think airlines, they’re jet fuel tanks, like they’re making money from selling tickets and putting people in the air, jet fuel’s just part of it, like you have to fuel your plane.

They’re more willing to accept that because it’s more digestible. It also makes their lives easier. They don’t have to bring in all the components that go into outer service inspection. They are, I think, looking for a knowledge expert, someone who’s done this hundreds of times, who’s used a robot that can prove results, that’s where case studies and that make a difference. So it depends on how we’re impacting their actual business. 

Carman Pirie: I think this feels like a weird question to ask now ’cause we’re almost backing up to that whole target account list creation thing. But I guess it’s just one of the things that comes up often in categories like this, the regulated nature of the category can sometimes make list creation a little easier, or at least you can find the top level prospects because there’s lists of the companies that are being regulated by the inspectors. Has that been the case for you? Have you used that regulatory piece as your first step into your account?

Stephanie Nolan: I wouldn’t say so. I actually think we’ve utilized databases that track, ’cause the storage tank industry is a whole industry of itself, and there are databases that will track that. It is regulated, but you can’t really just easily pull up, like when their last inspection was. There’s not, those records are held close to the asset owner’s heart, so it’s not like a database where you can look at, but there’s lots of other ways to gather that information, especially now with AI, ChatGPT, you can look at regional specific and have an AI actually calculate how many tanks or whatever you’re looking for is in that area. So we’ve utilized a lot of different avenues to try and get our available market to have that understanding of what it looks like.

Carman Pirie: I don’t about you, Jeff, but I’m just thinking about people make fun of the old school sales guys and they were almost always guys driving around looking for a new smoke stack, basically on the horizon to go sell to. But in this instance you could actually, you can see the tanks when you drive by them, at the very least.

Jeff White: I can see eight of them out of the window of the studio right now. Exactly. We have some prospects for you, Stephanie. 

Stephanie Nolan: Yeah, exactly. Yeah. You can see ’em while you drive, but you can also, a lot of our meetings. When I’m talking with a potential customer, I’m pulling it up on Google Earth, and I’m blowing it up and asking questions about their site, and how it’s run, because we have access to that now, which is really cool.

Carman Pirie: Definitely. I wonder as we bring the show to a close, it seems like an exciting time at Square Robot, and you’re certainly making a lot of changes. What has you most excited for the coming year? What’s the new thing that you’re doing that you’re like, I really wanna see how this works? I’m really curious about this. 

Stephanie Nolan: I could answer that in so many ways because there’s, they we’re doing so many different things. And it’s different for, I think where regionally, where we’re growing technology, where we’re growing personally, I think what I’m most excited for is that this is really my first role where I’m leading both sales and marketing, and it’s been such a pleasure to get back into the marketing side and have it more metric driven, data driven to propel us forward. So I’m most excited about leading a team and seeing the impact that we’re gonna have. Like we have our goal for the year, and I have full confidence that our team can meet and exceed that. But then on the technology side, the robot world never stops. So it’s what is our customer’s need?

Is it working in more temperatures? Is it different kinds of inspections? And having those conversations, facilitating those. Always fun because it’s what’s the cutting edge that we’re looking for. And then you think regionally we’re expanding internationally. We’ve worked in, I think, around 14 different countries at this point, but we do have operations now in both the EU as well as the Middle East.

We’re also looking at ongoing work in South America, Asia, just, it’s just cool to be at the cusp of something that’s growing so quickly and being able to directly quantify the difference that you’re making. 

Carman Pirie: I look forward to watching it. Stephanie, this has been great to have you on the show. Thank you so much. 

Stephanie Nolan: Yeah, this has been wonderful. Thanks guys. 

Jeff White: Great to chat with you.