From Trade Shows to Micro Events: How Deep Trekker Builds Demand Through ExperienceFrom Trade Shows to Micro Events: How Deep Trekker Builds Demand Through Experience

From Trade Shows to Micro Events: How Deep Trekker Builds Demand Through Experience 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’m doing well, and I’m certainly excited for another great show here.

Jeff White: I am too. We’ve got robots, so that’s cool.

Carman Pirie: What people need to know is that we tried to kick the show off about two minutes ago and got stuck on robots then my microphone dropped off. I don’t know what it all meant, but here we are again and we’re still bringing up robots. 

Jeff White: I think your microphone was offended by my use of the word. 

Carman Pirie: Could have been.

Jeff White: Yeah. 

Carman Pirie: Yeah. 

Jeff White: You never know. But anyway we’re going to do a lot more than that. Some actual marketing topics. 

Carman Pirie: Yeah. I think this is a really interesting story of just an evolution of a marketing strategy and the go-to market approach, and it was just a really cool company.

Jeff White: Yeah. Let’s hit it. Let’s get into it. So joining us today is Cody Warner. Cody is a Commercial Vice President and Board Member at DeepTrekker. Welcome to The Kula Ring, Cody. 

Cody Warner: Thank you very much for having me.

Carman Pirie: Cody. It is wonderful to have you on the show. I thank you for having a temporary lapse in judgment and saying yes to being a guest, especially given the recent audio issues. 

Cody Warner: All this robot talk. I’m getting a little nervous here.

Carman Pirie: Right? Yeah. I don’t know, but yeah, Cody, I’d love to know more about you and how you ended up at Deep Trekker. I’d love to know more about Deep Trekker. I’m gonna let you decide what order you want to tackle those. 

Cody Warner: I’ll start with me. I started at the company 11 years ago when it was a startup. I had no business being in the world of robots at all. I was actually managing a restaurant where the founders were regulars and I ended up convincing ’em to buy some pecan pie. So they thought that was enough to be able to sell robots in the future. So they made me the first sales hire and fast forward 11 years later we’ve sold the company and we’ve grown 30x and we’re dealing with much more sophisticated applications now than we were 11 years ago. But still having lots of fun in the process. 

Jeff White: What a fun origin story too. Restaurants, you can learn so much in that business. 

Carman Pirie: But selling pecan pie is not difficult. That is my favorite type of pie. 

Cody Warner: Yeah. Just have a good product. That’s the key to being good at sales. 

Jeff White: Yeah. I think it’s the When Harry Met Sally thing, just been influencing it all these years.

Carman Pirie: So Deep Trekker, what do y’all do? We know what you do, but please tell our audience. 

Cody Warner: yeah, of course. The company manufactures underwater ROVs or robots that are remotely operated vehicles. Picture a device that swims through the water with tools and sensors and cameras. It can go and complete some tasks underwater for you rather than sending a diver. It’s almost always a more efficient, safer, cheaper way to be able to go and carry out those missions. Those missions can include anything from the Navy’s using them for going and finding underwater mines and disrupting them to police and fire teams. Going and searching for drowning victims to rich yachties who just want to go and hunt for treasure. 

Carman Pirie: And also would there be like oil and gas applications, things of that nature or platforms, whatnot? 

Cody Warner: Yeah, you can imagine any sort of structure that you want to get regular inspections on and ROVs is going to be the right tool to be able to send out there.

Carman Pirie: Yeah, absolutely. 

Jeff White: It’s an interesting mix to sell into, and a typical B2B marketer might have certain avenues, but they may not always be open to somebody who’s more kind of B2G or defense type sales. How do you go about it? What’s your thinking there?

Cody Warner: Yeah, it’s really like running 10 separate small companies within the company. ’cause you’re going after completely different personas. Your messaging needs to change. So when you think about just high level brand strategy, it’s a little bit of a conflict. You have to decide where your main priorities are, what’s most important.

You want to try and hit a broad audience, but we all know that good marketing is being as segmented and focused as possible. There’s a little bit of push and pull that happens, and so it comes down to being well organized in your strategy, and then maybe a little more chaotic in your execution.

Carman Pirie: I wanna understand where you drew the line a little bit further there, because I know that you’ve had a fair bit of success with digital thought leadership in the past. I’m not sure it’s a main focus of the go-to-market strategy today.I guess where have you drawn that line to say, this is broad enough that we can put it out as digital thought leadership for the company overall versus something that’s niche enough to have more meaning or impact, how do you describe that balance? 

Cody Warner: Yeah. I think that the key for the concept of thought leadership comes down to content creation and creating something that people get value from. And that’s where you have to be hyper-focused. That’s where you have to tell a very specific story. So we really hunt for our customer’s voices.

As part of that. We aim to do at least a few case studies per month. So we’re putting out articles where we’re getting, not just what are the thoughts and opinions of our customers, but what’s the actual results they’re pulling off those robots. What’s the footage they’re getting, what’s the data they’re getting and then putting together. White papers or case studies to support that. 

Carman Pirie: So you’re saying that digital thought leadership has been a little bit more micro-focused? 

Cody Warner: Yeah. 

Carman Pirie: You haven’t just risen up to a brand level that it’s been more application centric. 

Cody Warner: Yeah. Extra focus. 

Carman Pirie: I know that you’re still doing that, but I know that there’s also been a bit of an evolution through trade shows to what you’re now terming a Micro Event strategy.

I’d love to unpack that transition and kind of what you… I guess first off, what were you experiencing in trade shows? I’m sure you’re still doing them, but how are you approaching trade shows now that you are beginning to invest more in micro events? Are you scaling back your trade show presence? What part does that still play in the mix? 

Cody Warner: Yeah, so when we started as a startup, we were going to trade shows and very much a hustler state of mind. And we would bring a water tank to every show and we’d have a robot on display swimming around. And our goal was to get credit cards off the floor.

At that time, we were very much trying to move products right there and then. And at that stage as a company, no one knows who you are. You have no brand awareness. You’re still trying to figure out where you fit in the world as well. You think you have an idea of where to sell, but you really don’t know until people start paying for it. At that point, the tank was really special. It drew a lot of attention. It was critical to our growth. Those water tanks and going and doing dozens of shows a year were immensely important. Now, fast forward to today, because our customers have changed. They’re more sophisticated. They know ROVs exist now. We’re not breaking in as a new technology anymore. We’re now breaking into. Okay, I know that these things exist, but I need them to have X amount of capability. So to demonstrate that, having something swimming around in a tank is almost a little more gimmicky now as opposed to when it was a great way to experience the product in early days.

So we’ve shifted our focus to one, scaling back a bit of the trade show side, but then trying to recreate real world environments and create an event around that real world execution. So really making sure that people get an experience too, I get to drive this robot in the same way that I would if I bought this. So I can walk out of there knowing, okay, this is the right thing for me. Just like a test drive on a car. 

Jeff White: And those water tanks must have been awfully expensive to ship around and fill and you probably would’ve had to have a brown m and m rider on that thing just to make sure that they were considering the weight that you were gonna be applying to the convention show floor.

Cody Warner: Oh yeah. And some places would get terrified when they would have that show up. And I had a couple even break at shows. 

Jeff White: Oh boy. You weren’t invited back. 

Carman Pirie: The early days of the company with the, one of the largest line items in the entire annual budget is water tank transportation. That’s fantastic.

Cody Warner: Yeah. But it was also sneaky good ’cause you could put all your trade show stuff in the tank when you shipped it, so you know, it was smart.

Carman Pirie: That made it lighter. 

Cody Warner: Yeah. 

Jeff White: Yeah. It’s not like shipping ROVs around the world is particularly inexpensive anyways. 

Carman Pirie: Yeah. You’ve already had to deal with some logistical challenges along the way, so I think I understand, but micro events are… academically, they’re smaller events, but, in your world what do you consider a micro event? 

Cody Warner: Anything under a hundred people. But really the core thing is that it’s a bunch of similar minded individuals, so it’s people from the same industry who work on the same problem. We’re all together. It’s easy to be able to have conversations across from one another, learn from each other. But then from a marketing angle the sneaky side is, yeah, there’s some mix of potential customers, current customers. We can have our current customers tell potential customers how great we are without us being the ones, who are a little biased, telling them.

Carman Pirie: And there are always events that you are putting on, like you are always the host. 

Cody Warner: Yeah. And it can be as simple as we will arrange a demonstration and then have current customers come and join as a co-host. Or it can be much more organized where we’re putting on the food, getting to a proper venue and having presentations and things.

Jeff White: Walk us through sort of the logistics of how you get folks to that event. Just in terms of, are you doing them to very specific personas? You’ve mentioned how, you’re obviously selling into very unique things, so are you doing these across all of the different industries you serve?

Cody Warner: The plan is to expand to more industries, but as of right now, we’re really heavily targeting the search and recovery police and fire groups. And the way we reach those is that we have a combination of our existing database. We’re using social media. We make content from each of our events. We interviewed the previous attendees and we’ve been generating some short videos, longer form, and putting those on social as well. And then we have our outbound team that reaches out to anyone within the radius of the event and is driving traffic to that event as well. 

Carman Pirie: One of the things that’s clearly powering a strategy like that is you’re serving a community that wants to help each other and is very interested in evolving that connectivity and you can be a part of that connective tissue. My mind’s spinning as to how applicable it is to target groups that maybe don’t fit that same description.

Cody Warner: I think that you’re right that you’re not between police forces. They’re maybe not competing customers per se, but they do like the opportunity to show off to one another. So it is a great way to be able to have them, show them their latest toys and things. I think when you look at other industries, typically if you’re dealing with larger enterprise size companies. The experts that perform the actual work in the field are less likely to be true competitors of one another from the sense that they wouldn’t wanna learn the same material.

They’d want to keep an eye on each other. So they want to be in the same place from this type of material. They might not be as forthcoming about what their future plans are, but they wanna be in the same place. 

Carman Pirie: I really like that you’ve really given me a lot to think about there.

You’re quite right. Especially, yeah. As you, don’t think about it as… for instance, if we were talking about something for the targeted industrial automation category my goodness, they’re all competitors against each other. All these industrial automation companies you’re quite right. But at the same time, you go that layer down as you just said, and those folks see more in common with each other than they probably see each other as competitors in many cases. 

Cody Warner: Yeah, I could imagine that in industrial automation, if I’m focused on machine vision and counting items for a plant, that I’d want to talk to my competitor’s guy. ‘Cause I’m not really actually paid to beat him necessarily. I’m paid to do a good job at Machine Vision 

Carman Pirie: Yeah. Yeah. All right, Jeff. I’ve got everything I need outta this podcast. We can end it now. 

Jeff White: You thinking just about calling up our industrial automation clients?

Carman Pirie: This isn’t about, this isn’t about the audience. This is about what I can get. 

Jeff White: It’s so true, Cody. 

Carman Pirie: But it’s just, it’s a fantastic insight. And I thank Cody for bringing it because on the surface I’m sitting here thinking, yeah, but it’s easier ’cause they’re like first responders and people in that space or whatever, there’s a brotherhood there and it’s different. But I appreciate the challenge. How different is it? Maybe not that much, as much as you think. 

Cody Warner: One thing also is just on the budget comparison. If you’re a marketing leader and you’re looking at it from the standpoint of I have my 15,000. 20,000. 100,000, whatever you spend on a trade show, you can probably make a micro event that’ll cost about the same, but you’re gonna have so much more control over the experience and you’re gonna have a much better time converting those few customers you were gonna try to convert with the trade show anyway.

Carman Pirie: Yeah, that prospect attendee to closed won ratio goes up quite a lot in these micro events versus something larger, clearly. 

Cody Warner: Trade shows. You’re essentially just hoping, going and hoping 

Jeff White: On that front, on the more kind of defense oriented versions. How do you approach that market in a different way? Because certainly, their procurement is different and, where they hang out is certainly different. They’re not all in the same places as law enforcement and fire. How do you go about that and what’s worked for you in the past at Deep Trekker?

Cody Warner: Yeah there’s essentially three levels to any defense organization, some as large as the US Navy.  You still really think, I wanna look at it from three angles. There’s your operational requirements, so who are the guys in the field? What are the challenges that they’re facing? If I just focused on them, I could make the perfect product for them, but if they don’t have any sort of buy-in from the rest of the organization, then they will talk all they want about all the tools that they want. Nobody really necessarily takes their budget seriously unless there’s a grander objective that it’s pushing toward. So the grander objective will come from, your admirals, your commander levels. That group decides overall on a strategy, something along the lines of, we need to be more unmanned systems focused or, we have a safety problem and we need to solve that. Those types of objectives you can learn about at the trade shows, conferences, you can learn about that from program offices. You can learn about that through the types of things that you see on their procurement postings.

Overall though, you need to understand what is the grand objective of this navy or of this army or whatever organization you’re targeting. That helps to then dictate what types of procurement routes you can go through, because that’s the third step. So there’s the high level strategy. There’s what the end operators truly want your thing to be. And then the procurement side is really about, what type of budget do I need to attach this to? Is it a true line item in their reoccurring budget, or is there a specific, maybe a dollar amount that you need to sneak under? Or, can I turn this into some sort of operational expense? But there’s a variety of questions to answer, but you won’t find those answers from your end users. So it’s really important to reach out to all three and be open to creative solutions on how you’re gonna get to the end result.

Jeff White: I would imagine too, there’s probably a bit of a desire to help each other in this area. You’re looking to provide equipment or expertise or consulting or what have you, that’s going to improve the overall quality of the experience for that defense organization and they want to see that improved. Do you find that there are any, of those three levels, is procurement particularly the most difficult to deal with? Or do you find it that those challenges lie elsewhere? 

Cody Warner: The most challenging part is the end user and making sure that they actually are convinced. They will hold their cards tight to their chest unless you’re part of the brotherhood. So we really lean on having people either within our organization or partners that we work with that have a close relationship with the end user. And then our job is once we’ve got in and we have their ear that, one, we don’t just try to force a product that we think is great down their face. You’re trying to work with them and be collaborative with them. But yeah, certainly it’s that end user being convinced that it truly will solve their problem is the biggest step to take. 

Carman Pirie: Appreciate that we’re bouncing around a little bit from the micro event strategy, but nevertheless in thinking about that and how people can apply the idea, I guess I want to understand your relative position in the market because I don’t really know this marketplace very well. So are there a lot of players? There’s two or three innovative players? Are you guys just number one with the bullet? Help me understand. 

Cody Warner: Yeah, so there’s quite a few there. ROV manufacturers. We’re all private companies, so we don’t necessarily know exactly the amount that is sold, but we estimate we’re in the top group. In terms of market share, there’s a mixture of the really well established long time veterans of the industry that are at the high end of the price scale when then there’s low cost competitors out of China. And then we like to try to occupy the middle so that we can give you good value. We’re gonna solve your problems. It’s gonna be a good quality product, but we’re also not going to try and gouge you. 

Carman Pirie: How widespread is the micro event strategy within the category? Are you one of the few people really leaning into this, or is it more common?

Cody Warner: I haven’t seen anyone else taking on, running a full training course like this. No. Everybody does the in-person demonstrations of the vehicle. I think we’re the ones that are taking the step forward where it’s easy to throw an ROV in the water just dockside and say, ah, here, have a go. Versus setting up a real life scenario and going and doing a full mission. I think that’s a bit more unique and that’s something that we’re pushing towards. 

Carman Pirie: Yeah. And are there continuing education incentives built into that as well? As part of going through your course do they get some more professional benefits? 

Cody Warner: Yeah, so we have a certification for going through any of our training courses. We’re still relatively young as a company, so the certificate will only carry so much weight though, 

Carman Pirie: yeah. It’s not like they have to have so many of these from a variety of areas within a sector. 

Cody Warner: It’s a great idea though, if we could have, pushed towards making it a more formal accreditation. Yeah. 

Jeff White: If there’s lots of aluminum foil or gold foil on the certificate that will be significantly more valuable. 

Cody Warner: Yeah. With a big chain to put it around your neck.

Carman Pirie: I wonder, Cody, as you seek to expand this kind of micro event strategy we have education as a core focus. Clearly what are the, do you have any other thoughts in mind as to how you see this growing in a year or 18 months ahead? 

Cody Warner: Yeah I think that education’s the core piece. And really it’s about just enhancing that even further with extension to other technologies. Just specifically within a search mission, there’s a few different items. Your average marine unit’s gonna deploy to be able to go and find a drowning victim and become an expert on ROVs and on side scan sonar, which are just two main components of our training. There’s components that can involve aerial drones. There’s other types of sonars, there’s boat pattern type training. There’s definitely routes where we could have more pieces of the full search mission be covered in practical applications, not just the theoretical. 

Jeff White: It sounds like there’s a potential business line there of the different courses and different types of retrieval and utilizing ROVs for that. That’s pretty interesting. 

Carman Pirie: And having other companies that provide other components of it, paying to be part of it. Yeah. 

Jeff White: Cody, what have been some of the unexpected uses of that training or benefits of developing that? 

Cody Warner: I think that it’s made us more professional in our ability to even do those basic demonstrations in other industries. So even though we might not be teaching the same content to every industry. We’ve developed a full team we call ’em the Swiss Army Knives, but they’re the ones now that are going out and visiting all of our industries. And that program has just become so much more evolved and our customers are now really starting to use our equipment in more effective ways, which is then making them produce better case studies, be happier, talk about us more, and drive more sales.

Carman Pirie: It seems like a really nice marketing flywheel that you’ve built there. You’ve painted a picture over the course of this 25 minutes or so of just a really efficient engine that not only delivers the organization leads, but delivers a lot of value to the category. So I congratulate you for that. 

Cody Warner: Thank you. It’s… I think we’re still in the early stages of robots being used widely. So as long as we keep them happy, then they won’t take over too much. 

Jeff White: Just don’t give them weapons. 

Cody Warner: Yes. Let me show you our new disruptor add-on. 

Jeff White: If we begin to talk about lasers. This is just the perfect podcast ever. Robots, lasers, micro events. 

Carman Pirie: Jeff’s thinking somebody say the word mountain biking, somebody say it, cover all the bases.

Cody, look, it’s been a pleasure having you on the show. I wonder any parting bits of advice for somebody, maybe a little bit more junior in their career.

Not to say that we’re all old guys here, but none of us have seen high school recently. And knowing what you know now, I’m just curious what you basically might give somebody just getting started in this space. 

Cody Warner: I think that a lot of marketing advice pushes you to really focus, pushes you to be hyperfocused on measurement. Now there’s a lot of focus on what data I can pull from a marketing standpoint. Making sure that every decision is justified for your spending and budget requirements. I think that the number one thing that I would recommend, if that’s the direction that you’re being pulled, particularly by those outside of marketing, pushing on marketing to do things, is that you can’t forget the value that you provide to your customer in the end. And it’s okay to try some things and not be able to show a perfect exact return from it. That it’s better to have a broad mix. Within your marketing strategy and to try a bunch of things. And I think when I look back at Deep Trekker that we failed a lot of things, but if we had tried to really focus on just one thing, we probably would’ve not made it as a company. That it was our diversity and a little bit of chaos and throwing things in all directions is what led to our success.

Jeff White: Carman’s always called that the light mini fires strategy. And I don’t know if that’s your words or if you got that from somewhere, Carman, but…

Carman Pirie: That’s the good news about stealing something. That’s an idea that is that good. You don’t, after a while of stealing it, you don’t remember if it’s yours or if you stole it.

Cody Warner: I like light mini fires better than planting a bunch of seeds. That used to be the way, I’d say. So fires will be used moving forward, 

Jeff White: especially if lasers cause it. Yeah. 

Carman Pirie: Cody a pleasure. Thanks so much. 

Cody Warner: Thanks for having me.