Navigating the Gray Area Between Sales and MarketingNavigating the Gray Area Between Sales and Marketing

Navigating the Gray Area Between Sales and Marketing 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 you doing, sir? 

Carman Pirie: Look, thrilled to be joining you for another episode of The Kula Ring. Glad to be here. How are you doing?

Jeff White: I’m doing great. Yeah, I’m doing great. And I’m excited to delve into today’s topic because I think it’s one that more and more marketers are finding is being foisted on them, I guess you could say, in a lot of ways. It’s something that more and more people are dealing with, and I think our guest has a unique perspective.

Carman Pirie: Yeah. Yeah. It’s easy to talk about the way the world of marketing changes. Things of that sort through the lens of tactics or technology advancements or what have you. But this is more about how the role is changing from an expectations perspective and almost a skillset, or I don’t know, a nuanced perspective in some way.

And yeah, I don’t wanna give it all away. I think it’s gonna be an interesting chat. 

Jeff White: Yeah. No, me as well. So joining us today is Phil Harris. Phil is the Director of Marketing at Paulo. Welcome to The Kula Ring, Phil. 

Phil Harris: Thank you, guys. It’s good to be here. Thanks for having me, 

Carman Pirie: Phil, thank you for joining us, and I wonder, could you maybe start by letting us know a little bit about Paulo? What do y’all do over at Paulo? 

Phil Harris: Paulo is a privately held heat-treating company. We call it thermal processing, a little marketing lingo there. But heat treating is at the core of what we do. We do some value-added services as well, but essentially, people who make metal parts manufacturers out there ship their parts to us. We heat ’em up and cool ’em down in a specific way to make ’em stronger, softer, and perform better in the field. We ship ’em back, and so we’re a part of the supply chain that, unless you’ve watched Forged in Fire or something like that, you might not be aware even exists, but it’s a little bit more complicated than that.

We have five locations in the US and one down in Mexico. About 500 employees, and we’ve been around since 1943. 

Jeff White: Interesting. You call it thermal treatment or what have you. I noticed as I was going through the website, there were all these words that seemed like they weren’t words that you had maybe made up, like nitriding and things like that, and I was like no, they’re actually words and they are processes that I just didn’t understand. I do know about heat treating, but I didn’t know about a lot of those. 

Carman Pirie: To be fair, I like the way Phil explained it because frankly it took a fairly complicated thing and simplified it. Yeah, absolutely. Not a lot of marketers can land on that quite that way. Phil, when we chatted about doing this show, the thing that really stood out is that you seem to be encountering or part of just what you’ve seen in, in your career. And just so I’m clear, how long have you been with Paulo? 

Phil Harris: About nine and a half years at this point. 

Carman Pirie: Yeah. So it’s a, it’s a good run. And so you’ve seen a lot of change and evolution in that.

And we’re talking about how part of that change is, has been the blurring of the lines, if you will, between marketing and sales and all of that, of all of what that means. So I don’t wanna put too many words in your mouth, so maybe I’ll stop and ask you what does it mean, like, when you talk about the blurring of lines between marketing and sales or that kind of marketing facing new sales driven pressures.Let’s unpack that a bit. What are you seeing? 

Phil Harris: Yeah, we call it the gray area. So we put a flag in the ground and said when we’re in these discussions, that’s where we know where we are. So nobody gets frustrated one side or the other. And all this being said, I get along great with our sales team. It wouldn’t be possible if I didn’t. I think what’s happened in my view is, salespeople have more and more stuff that they’re trying to do. They get dragged into the operations side of things. And so there’s a string pulling both ends. More time prospecting, more time, qualifying more time on the phone, on the road but then also trying to walk jobs all the way, to the bank, so to speak.

And I think part of that, part of what’s happened, is that there’s time pressure. And so they want the leads to be better, so they have to spend less time upfront. I want the leads to be as good as they can be, too. And I think the other thing is, the other force at play here is revenue is important to everybody.

And as marketers, I think we all want to be judged on revenue. We can. ’cause that’s what we’re after too. And it’s really a team effort. But where one, where the handoff happens, I think is where this trouble comes up. Is it just that you’re 

Jeff White: Seeing that marker of when you would traditionally have handed over a lead is far later than you were used to?

Phil Harris: Yeah. I think the desire is that, that the leads be, not just qualified prospects, but ready to buy with budget and and I think. Maybe there’s this missing role and that’s, essentially what like an SDR type role would be that does that pre-qualification.

But at least the way that, that we run things, you know, we’re a pretty lean team and so a lot of that stuff we try to do through technology there’s always one more thing you can add to a form on a website to, to better qualify those leads, right? So anyway, I think that’s the tension in a nutshell.

Carman Pirie: And I just I don’t want to get too far from the gray area point folks actually, when you’re, when you know, you’re having a conversation that’s in that gray area, you name it. So that people have basically are more successful in navigating that dialogue. Yeah, I think 

Phil Harris: We, some self reflection and talking to each other about, being frustrated.

We realize that’s it. It’s. At the root of it, it’s a, is it your job or is it mine? And it doesn’t matter. But if it is my job, I really wanna know and I want to own it. And I think that’s, the other big thing that comes up here is, degree of ownership of, which part of the process because like I, I hate failing at stuff.

And so if I’m gonna own a part of it, I really want to be good at it and I want control of it. That’s just a personal part of me. 

Carman Pirie: Yeah, but that’s a great tip though. Phil, I just don’t want to just gloss over just because it, it opens the door to real dialogue then. Yeah. Yeah.

And how many times have I seen marketing and sales organizations having that conversation? Without that clarity, I. And it bubbled boils frustration, you can just see it happening in the room. So that’s really cool advice. I wonder when we talk about how, there’s a desire for the leads to be nurtured more before they’re handed over to sales, and maybe that would’ve been a role for an SDR.

I also think that’s an important point because. A lot of this kind of playbook has been written, and we beat this drum a lot by SaaS marketers and SaaS go to market teams. And they all, for the most part have inside sales organizations with SDRs in that world that you mentioned, but that is not often the world of of manufacturers.

So that kind of lack of the SDR role really does play into this tension, doesn’t it? 

Phil Harris: I think so, and I think it’s amplified by the voices, the sales voices that you see on social media. Because a lot of this, content on LinkedIn is SaaS sales and marketing driven, and it’s reliant on this infrastructure that, as you mentioned, doesn’t exist in small to medium sized businesses.

Jeff White: Was there. An inflection point that you remember in your near decade at Paulo where it started to shift and you were getting more pushback on, we, we need additional detail. These people need to be better qualified. Was there a point that you noticed and can you align that with anything I.

Phil Harris: I can a couple website revisions ago and a couple CRMs ago and all of that. But I can remember sitting in a room and looking through a huge list of marketing qualified leads that younger me had pushed over to the sales team through some assignment rules with a little bit of lead scoring and thought I was doing a pretty good job.

And the feedback that we got was just that they were junk. And I’m sure some of ’em weren’t. I’m sure a lot of them were. But just because somebody fills out a form for a white paper or, signs up to, to do a webinar or whatever it might be, doesn’t mean that they’re ready to talk to a salesperson.

And so I remember having this knock down, drag out conversation and I said, if we’re gonna move the goalposts, so to speak, if you’re gonna move my cheese then let’s, just, let’s just put it somewhere that we’re really happy with, that you guys are really happy with. And what I suggested was that we move this barrier way far, a form that says I want to talk to a salesperson, or I want to quote if that’s not good enough, then I’m, there’s no more I can do than that. And we said, until they get to that point, sales isn’t gonna see ’em.

They’re not gonna show up in the CRM, they’re just gonna live in my part of it. And I think that’s what was like the seismic change. And I said, Hey if we get to the point where you don’t have enough leads. I can turn the faucet back on. They’re not gonna be, you don’t think they’re the best leads.

But that’s where we ended up. And I think so that’s probably the most pivotal moment that I can remember. Did that, 

Jeff White: Have you refined how you’re going about that enough now that it’s did that result in fewer leads going to sales and it’s taken a while to build that back up?

Or is it no. Now we know what our in respective jobs are and we’re just gonna keep pushing forward or has it like iterated and continue to change. 

Phil Harris: I’ll say that it’s iterated and changed, but that baseline is still true. So I still feel like I’ve got the really high barrier to, to pushing those leads over to sales. I’ll say the quality’s phenomenal. The win rate on them is great. And they’re happy to see ’em. Where I try to push the boundaries is with new campaigns or new techniques and say, why don’t you guys take a look at these a little bit early? And if they’re not okay, then we’ll scale ’em back and play by the normal rules.

But I try to test the, those boundaries occasionally. Just to make sure and luckily we’ve been in, in a great cycle here where there more leads is always better, but, things have been good. 

Carman Pirie: There can sometimes be a weird, an unexpected, not weird, but an unexpected positive upside when you get a little bit more pointed in your calls to action.

When you say, look, do you want to talk to a sales person? Are you looking to speak to one of our experts to buy now? A lot of people, I think marketers sometimes fall into this trap of thinking that they have to try to trick people into buying from them. An awful lot of manufacturers sign that.

They make stuff that people need and it’s not necessarily a, a sales isn’t necessarily a bad word. I wonder if you, what was your experience when you started making those adjustments and did you notice that the lead flow leaned into those kind of more bottom of funnel?

Honest, almost calls to action, if you will. 

Phil Harris: I think so. I don’t necessarily have the data to support that, but I think gut feel-wise, I think yes. Heat treating is not optional. You either need it or you don’t. It’s usually on the print, so if you’re making the part, you gotta buy it from somebody or do it yourself.

So we’re not gonna convince somebody to start heat treating something that wasn’t in most cases it’s just a choice of whether they’re buying it from us or buying it from one of our competitors. And so making that as quick and easy as possible. And really leaning into that customer experience a little bit to the extent that we as manufacturers can, because we still need more information to heat treat your parts than to check out on Amazon.

Carman Pirie: It is an interesting point, the idea of trying to reduce friction, like in something like this where you obviously need a lot of detail in order to get it right. Have you 

Jeff White: found that, as a result of trying to get more bottom of funnel ready leads to the sales team, is it all still being done on a single conversion or are there other multiple touches that you’re trying to work on?

Are you still working on bringing in more top of funnel or just problem aware leads that you are then working up to a point where you hand them over? 

Phil Harris: Yeah, that’s a big question. I’ll try to make a small answer. I’m still trying to fill up the top of the funnel.

There’s a part of me that believes in content above almost everything else. The cheapskate in me loves that, especially about heat treating. It’s evergreen. Heat treating hasn’t changed a whole heck of a lot in a very long time. The science behind it. So if we can answer those questions and be a resource for people, I do believe in that line of thinking the thing that we’ve seen success with that, it sounds old and boring is a newsletter. And so driving that kind of, curiosity and those high level top of funnel people and getting them to sign up for the newsletter and then staying in their inbox it, if you buy heat treating it’s a matter of time before you need a new heat treater or you have a new project that your current heat treater can’t handle.

And so being there when the need happens, is super important to us. And so being in their inbox and we’ve managed to keep the open rates really high and the click through rates really high. And we put really aggressive call to actions in every single one of those. And and they convert.

So it’s old school, but, it’s working. 

Carman Pirie: That makes sense to me. People aren’t gonna be in market. It’s the old B2B tail as old as time. Only 5% or so of a target account list is in marketed in any given time. So you have to stay in front of them. But, and you say the cost to action are pretty aggressive in that newsletter.

Are the is there a type of content in that newsletter that you found? That or that at least your hunch is is what’s working and what’s keeping the open rates up. 

Phil Harris: It’s fresh. I think that’s the big one. So it, we’re then responsible for having enough fresh content to populate the newsletter.

And so that kind of prescribes our content calendar to an extent. We recycle stuff some of the greatest hits and all that. But keeping it fresh. Trying to rotate through industries, making sure that it’s not, there’s something in there for everybody to some extent, right? We we serve a lot of end markets, so aerospace, automotive, agriculture, you could pretty much name the whole list.

And and we haven’t segmented the newsletter terribly by industry. I’ve found segmentation by industry to be pretty unreliable and a pretty big data mess. So rather than do that, we try to, just put something in there that’ll be relevant, whether it’s news about us people stuff always goes over well.

Or whether it’s the next latest, greatest article about a heat treating term that sounds like we made it up. 

Jeff White: Don’t tell them that. But I think though, a lot of our listeners can. Take some lessons from that because, I believe you are, you’re a team of one in your organization.

Correct. And many of the marketers that we’ve interviewed on the show and that listen to the show are in a similar situation, you segment your email newsletter into 15 different sub-industries and categories, and all of a sudden you need to write 15 articles instead of one that is gonna apply across all of these different places.

Maybe you’d need to. Get better at creating omni content that functions for just about anybody who’s gonna be listening. At least, at some, there’s going to be something for everyone in each issue because otherwise you’re not gonna be able to keep up. 

Phil Harris: Yeah. And I think we’ve fallen into that trap before and realized it and backtracked and so that’s definitely a good lesson learned.

I think while we’re on the topic, the other. We noticed that the open rates were so good that we a, that we asked ourselves if we should double down. I’ve always approached it with I get so many newsletters I read so few of them. Like I had a lot of skepticism coming into it and.

And so we tried it and we added a quarterly roundup of kind of all the best articles from the quarter, and that’s how we increased frequency just a little bit. And again saw open rates stay nice and high. Again, dipping the toe in the water on trial basis but not trying to burn the bridge of trust that we get when we get somebody’s email.

Carman Pirie: Another great tip, Phil, because I think as marketers, we, we maybe tend to be a little bit more cynical about the newsletter. Like we, we, because we maybe receive a lot of them and we’re not opening many. It’s easy to use that self-reference criteria. I think maybe it won’t work, but very often you can get away with doing more.

We’re not our audience. Yeah. Yeah.

Jeff White: Interesting nuance or nugget there as well is just on these, micro experimentations where you’re not trying to, do a giant split test to your list or something. You’re just like, eh, I wonder what happens if we add, a 20% more newsletter sends in a month. And sure enough, people continue to want to.

Pay attention to it. So that makes a lot of sense. And it’s not a heavy lift. 

Carman Pirie: I wonder, Phil, we talk, it’s easy to, I think as on the marketing side, we can imagine all the extra things that marketers need to do. But it’s the same kind of on the sales side as well. Like now there’s social prospecting or they’re expected to connect with people on LinkedIn in addition to calling them, in addition to visiting them.

And have you seen that kind of, have you heard that from the sales team? The inflation that’s happened on their end as well? 

Phil Harris: Absolutely, I think on both ends. How many emails do they have to send before they get a response? I think that number goes up every time I look at it.

And there’s tools to help, but the more people use the tools then the more you still have to send. So I think there’s pressure on them that way. I think social media is another big one, so we’re. Probably the same as a lot of other industrial companies. We’re skeptical and slow to, to ever enter the social media world and our presence is still limited, but we are active on LinkedIn and we do encourage our sales team to, to prospect there as well.

And I think that those, all, those little. Interruptions and drains on their resources. Definitely come into play here. I think the other side of it is educating their cu their customers. So as buyers get younger they’re having to do more consultative sales, which takes longer. More teaching teaching customers, how do you even buy what we’re selling what do we need to know?

What’s important? All of that. Certainly not minimizing it there, there’s definitely more work on the sales side too. 

Jeff White: Has that led to you working with the sales team to, to get even a deeper understanding of what you sell? Is it are they having to become experts at a level that they didn’t previously need to understand?

Phil Harris: I think so our target is is often engineering types. They’re detail oriented, they’re specific, the words mean something in order to have a sales conversation and really get somewhere and build trust with those people. I. It’s important that you understand what you’re selling and what we’re doing to their parts, and there’s a ton of trust involved in heat treatment.

They’re shipping us, tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of material that they’ve spent time and money on. And trusting that we do something that often has zero visual impact on the product it’s impossible to tell whether we’ve done our job or not without testing the parts or believing us.

So I think in order to build the kind of relationship that you need to sell heat treatment specifically, you have to be able to walk the walk a little bit and have some of those nitty gritty conversations. There’s also a hundred ways that it can go sideways if, you know the parts don’t fit in the furnace or we can’t load as many as we think we can.

And those are details that are, you have to know how big the parts are. You have to go touch the parts, feel ’em, look at ’em, think about our baskets and our furnaces. So there, there’s a level of technical know-how there that certainly is more than selling software probably. Not to bash on the SAS guys too much.

Carman Pirie: They can take it. As we talk about all of these changes and the kind of evolving roles on both sides and even the evolving buyers and evolving sellers, I. Do you see the structure of it all changing in the next little while? Is there are you sitting there thinking, you know what, we’re probably gonna have to bring in lean on technical experts that salespeople bring into these conversations?

’cause pretty soon all of our salespeople are gonna be too young and none of will know anything about it before they start here. I don’t, again, don’t wanna put words in your mouth, but are you seeing any kind of structural shifts on the horizon because of these pressures? So 

Phil Harris: Your example’s interesting ’cause that’s something that we’ve done always is we have a staff of metallurgists that we lean on for that stuff.

So while I say that, salespeople have to have some level of expertise, they’re not metallurgists at the end of the day often. There are people at our industry who have metallurgist salespeople for the double whammy. But that’s what we do, is we bring in the experts when we need ’em.

We bring in the guy that’s gonna run the parts, we bring in the metallurgist to make sure the recipe’s good. And it is a team effort. And that feels a little bit inspired by to go back to the SaaS example, the time where you get on the call with the one person that you scheduled it with, and they’ve got six engineers and three other people in there that you’ve never seen before to help explain what it is that you’re trying to buy.

In terms of other structural changes I think a lot of it is just about speed. So speed of getting back to customer requests, speed of quotes, and minimizing customer service calls. I. To the extent that’s possible. Small business stuff. But I also, run our kind of cu customer service portal product where people can check on their order status and decreasing the number of phone calls for where are my parts, when can I expect them, all that stuff.

And making that self service, I think is probably where the future lies, just as people get stretched more thin doing their jobs. 

Carman Pirie: It pointed to I guess one of the good things too is that, we can maybe thank SaaS for they, they in some ways trained people that as you buy some stuff, there may be some other folks join the conversation.

Maybe there’s gonna be less pressure on the sales person having to know everything anyway if you’re used to buying other things in a more team-based approach, does that make any sense, Jeff? Absolutely. Or maybe, I don’t know, maybe. No, I think it does. Yeah. It’s actually to give the SaaS people at least the odd win since we beat up on them all the time.

Jeff White: Yeah, 

Carman Pirie: it’s 

Jeff White: true. Phil, as you look to the future of this deepening integration between yourself and your sales team, and obviously the, the metallurgists and other professionals at Palo, what. Do you see as the next stage of this for your organization? 

Phil Harris: So I think the next stage, the future thinking about planning for the future and strategy there, I think alignment is key, which is, a worn out word, but I think still a valuable one.

Because. That’s what it takes to get all those people to show up for all those calls, to get, to get things, to move through the processes quickly. Is that level of alignment and in ensuring that, the metallurgist whose job description says nothing about revenue. It might say something about, helping to support customer needs and troubleshooting problems.

But like at the end of the day they’re, they care about revenue ’cause they work for the company, but. They’re not positioned in that way normally, but getting aligned behind a revenue goal and a target and seeing their part in that. And I think a lot of it is about. I see opportunities for us in the future to better use technology to manage the handoffs between these groups of people.

So as we go from sales to marketing that one’s been beat to death and it’s still not perfect. But as we go from sales to metallurgy and engineering and from sales to operations and to, accounting and credits and collections and. All that stuff, right? How do we move a customer through with, like you said earlier the least friction possible?

To me seems like the way to go. And I think there’s a chance that some of the responsibilities shift, but I don’t have a crystal ball, so I don’t know where those will all end up, but it might make sense to move some of these responsibilities around. But in the pursuit of making it easier for the customer.

Carman Pirie: Phil, I, I really look forward to seeing how that shakes out because an awful lot of manufacturers are looking at their customer journey and you’re right. A lot of that, a lot of the focus on that has been more on the early end. What happens is somebody moves through, moves some marketing to sales, but that, that, post-sale transitioning as you get somebody from onboarding using your service or your products for the first time through to being a regular customer, et cetera. That’s a part of the customer journey that I know a lot of people are seeking to or just. Talking about how do we optimize it, how do we give visibility to it and almost bring a a mo more modern digital sensibility to that work.

So I think that’s gonna be really cool to see how you all pull that off. Phil, thank you for joining us today. It’s been wonderful to have you on the show. ‘

Phil Harris: Thanks for the opportunity. I had a good time, so thanks. 

Jeff White: Oh, fantastic. Thank you very much, Phil.