The Accidental B2B Marketer:​​ Uniting a Global Brand with Storytelling and PodcastingThe Accidental B2B Marketer:​​ Uniting a Global Brand with Storytelling and Podcasting

The Accidental B2B Marketer:​​ Uniting a Global Brand with Storytelling and Podcasting 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 every time you ask me that question at the start of the podcast I’m reminded of a guy that I used to work with at a hardware store when I was in high school, and Eric would answer every time he was asked how he was, he’d be very best, any better than there’d be.

Two of me was his kind of standard line, and I don’t know I need to polish on work on my delivery, so I can maybe do that next time. 

Jeff White: I think that would be preferable. 

Carman Pirie: It I will tell you one thing about that guy is if anybody could, if everyone could, was as good as customer service as Eric Till was at the hardware store back when I was in high school the world would be a better place.

But nevertheless, we digress. We’re not here to sell lumber, I don’t think. 

Jeff White: Not that I’m aware of. No. But we are going to be talking about what happens when you fall into a B2B marketing role and truly love it. 

Carman Pirie: Yeah. And what kind of initiatives and you unlock as a 

Jeff White: part of doing that, I think there’s gonna be fun.

Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. So joining us today is Jackie Slat. Jackie is the Director of Marketing Communications at eTech Group. Welcome to the cooler ring, Jackie. 

Jackie Slaght: Yeah, thanks for having me. I’m excited to be here guys. 

Jeff White: Jackie, we are 

Carman Pirie: excited to have you on the show. Thank you for joining us. 

Jackie Slaght: I’d like to know a little bit more about 

Carman Pirie: eTech, if you would off the hop here.

Jackie Slaght: We are one of the largest system integrators in North America. Actually now the globe. Just yesterday, we announced the full integration of our latest acquisition, J ssat Automation. So now we have more than 30 locations a across the globe. Have more than. Let’s see, I think we’re about 750 team members, about 550 or more engineers.

So we’re, we’re growing rapidly and figuring out as we go along. 

Carman Pirie: Very cool. 

Jeff White: Very engineering heavy. Yeah. Yeah. 

Carman Pirie: Yeah. And it’s an exciting time to be in the industrial automation space. And systems integrators are certainly central to that. I wonder Jackie you described yourself in our, pre-call to the show is the accidental B2B marketer. So I guess, tell us a bit about yourself. How did you end up there and what accident caused you to get into b2b? 

Jackie Slaght: Yeah. So I, I am, oh my gosh, out of college now for 18 years. And when I graduated college I really saw myself working in a consumer, consumer facing marketing role? Probably just ’cause of the experience working in high school and being in retail. But I also in college had completed the Disney College program and I really saw myself moving to Orlando to work in Disney World and have all kinds of fun. But graduated college, I worked at a local, waterpark in their marketing department and the waterpark closed down a little unexpectedly. And our parent that the Waterparks parent company retained me and they were, their other job was in commercial real estate construction and development. So that is how I accidentally started marketing to B2B and stayed there for 10 plus years.

Figuring out. Growing up as well. Got married, had some kids, and then joined eTech group almost four years ago now in a marketing role. So yeah, very much not what I had planned to do when I graduated college, but it’s been, fun and challenging in different ways and rewarding.

So that’s why I’m still here. 

Carman Pirie: Yeah. That’s a heck of a bait and switch, isn’t it? Yeah. 

Jeff White: An entire lack of Mickey Mouse at the current job, I’m guessing. 

Jackie Slaght: I know it’s, I try to bring it in with me 

Jeff White: singing Small world on your way into the office. 

Jackie Slaght: Yes. 

Carman Pirie: Look I don’t wanna force too many parallels, but the one thing, especially an organization like Disney is very well known for, is the customer is ba basically a an obsession with customer experience.

And, if that’s the kind of a sensibility that you’re bringing to B2B, that is not a, that is not a bad thing at all.

Jackie Slaght: No, I think sometimes it’s overlooked. And I get, before I completed the Disney College program, I would not say that I was I wasn’t, not a Disney fan, but I think working there gave me a different respect for the level of detail and storytelling they put into everything they designed.

And I’ve tried to carry that into even like a B2B there, it is. There’s still business decisions and you have to reach people on a logical sense, but there is still an emotional storytelling that you can bring to any decision, whether it’s B2B or B2C that, that part of the human doesn’t go away just ’cause you’re in a business setting.

Jeff White: That’s a really nice way to put that. How have you approached that and tried to bring those stories to life? 

Jackie Slaght: I think one of the things when I said for 10 years I worked in a commercial real estate and construction company. And when I started working there, I had never, I had not completed a single real estate transaction, commercial or residential.

So I was going in completely blind to that world. But, and the same thing when I transitioned to my role at eTech Group, I didn’t know what a system integration meant or what they did, but there is, while I don’t know the technical side, and still I’m not an expert in system integration, I’m not an engineer.

And I was never an expert in construction, commercial construction or commercial real estate. But there’s, you can still tell the story and get the high level this is the result, this is what happens, this is what we can provide. This is the pain point that we can eliminate. And in both the roles that I’ve worked in, we’re looking to work with customers or our clients for a long time.

Like I ideally, we’d want them to want to come back and work with us again. So you do still need to highlight the person because what you’re really trying to say is, you can work with anyone for this job, but you want to work with us. Because we’re, we are technically able to do it, but also you should want to work like who you’re working with that’s going to make the relationship and the project a lot more successful if you can have that open communication and even being able to tell yeah, hey, this isn’t going the way we want it to.

The, these are our ideas to fix it. If you can have that. Base relationship that’s gonna make that conversation a lot easier. 

Carman Pirie: It’s interesting. In B2B, I find that, oftentimes guests, B2B salespeople are interested in cultivating those relationships and, oftentimes in marketing beyond the sales organization, we I don’t know. I think sometimes we, em we choose to emphasize, product features or unique capabilities or unique verticals that we service serve. But you’re talking about. Having more of your marketing bring an emphasis on the people that make the organization tick as a way of cultivating relationships more broadly than sales.

I think that’s really smart. Jackie I’m curious what kind of different marketing tactics does that come to life as you’ve tried to bring the, make the people of the organization, if you will, the hero of your marketing? 

Jackie Slaght: No, that this has been really this has been really exciting and I will say not every.

Engineer wants to be the feature of our marketing. So you gotta find the right people who wanna kind of dive in. But there are those people and they win. Strategizing for eTech Group for this past year. We were looking at okay, we want to highlight our thought leadership.

How can we do this? We’ve had been producing a lot of written pieces for both our website and for third party publications, but we were producing these pieces by conducting interviews with our technical people. Tell us about this project. Tell us what’s, how did this work? What was the result?

And having these really great conversations and. One of our third party agencies that we worked with was like, you guys should do a podcast. And we were like, I don’t know. That’s, there’s probably enough podcasts out there. We don’t need more. And then we thought back, we’re like, wait, we already are, we’re conducting these teams interviews.

We’re talking with people and just turning it into written content. But it’s so much more engaging too. Hear someone talk about it, to hear them get excited about the technology that they’re using, how it’s being implemented and the impact it’s having for our clients. So then we stepped back and we’re like this actually probably is a pretty good idea.

And we’re, we were seeing a decline in people reading our written content. So we were like, let’s dive in. Let’s start a podcast. So that’s been our big. One of our big initiatives for the year is we launched earlier the end of June, the Beyond Tech eTech Group podcast, which we are five episodes in now.

So that’s we’re well on our way. And it has been a fun challenge to, not something I thought I would. End up doing, but here I am.

Carman Pirie: And I appreciate Jackie, that five episodes in, we’re not we’re not, you’re going to be naturally a bit reserved about how much you you brag about it, but I think at the same time, it’s five episodes in you’ve, you’re producing enough that you’ve worked out some kinks and you’ve seen how people are in interacting with. I, one thing outta curiosity that I have as you talk about shifting a bit from doing these interviews for a written output versus for a podcast.

Have you noticed in these first five any kind of differences in the propensity of the employee to share the content? IE if they’re being interviewed for a written piece versus being interviewed on a podcast, there’s one more likely to be shared by the employee than the other. 

Jackie Slaght: Yeah. I would say and I don’t know if it’s.

If it’s totally just because it’s a podcast or if it has to do with the LinkedIn algorithm more or possibly also we are doing a better job in turn of promoting internally. Hey, there’s a new episode that’s out launch, shared on your own podcast. And we’ve been strategic thus far in the episodes that we’ve produced.

There are people who. They’re were already our like superstar content producers that we were leaning on already. So maybe we’ve just trained them better to be like, Hey, we put this out. Make sure you share it on your own LinkedIns and your own with your own networks. We have plans to increase the frequency of our podcast next year.

So I’m starting to think now, it’s the fourth quarter of 2025. What kind of episodes are we going to shoot for to release in 2026? What are we gonna talk about? Thus far they’ve been focused around the services that we were, had bigger campaigns around, so we were producing additional content or possibly doing a webinar.

Had some written pieces. We had other elements that the podcast was just one part of this overall campaign. By increasing the frequency next year, I think we’ll be able to cover a few more of a wider range of topics, I should say. 

Jeff White: And you’re producing an episode a month currently?

Yes, I believe so. I’d like to explore a little bit, the. A bit more tactically about how you’re bringing this to life, because I think, we’re 350 some odd episodes deep on this, so it’s old hat a bit for us in terms of how we produce our podcast. A lot of our listeners have never done this before within a B2B context.

And I, I’m sure there, there are some things that you’ve learned along the way about how you do this and what you’ve figured out about just the mechanics of producing a podcast that I think would be. Pretty interesting to our audience. So how, what have you learned so far and what what’s been pretty interesting to you?

Jackie Slaght: Yeah. So it was when my my boss was like, yeah, let’s do this, Jackie. Let’s launch a podcast. I certainly had a lot to learn ’cause I just, it wasn’t a world that I was a part of. I would say I did quite a bit of research just online. What does it take to start a podcast? I talked to our couple of our agencies that we worked with to lean on them and say what do I need?

What, how should I prepare for this? I, and then just, I don’t know if I’m, I might not be the best example for this ’cause I dunno if I’m the best prepared person, but I was like, all right, let’s just create an account on Spotify and see what we need to create. But ordered, there were a bit of equipment to make sure that we had Mike’s and an account with Spotify, and then what do I need to get it to go to the not just Spotify, but we want it on Amazon, we want it on Apple.

How do I connect all of those. Which I was like, okay, I need an RSS feed. I don’t, I still don’t know what that is, but I got it. And as far as preparing for content, it, it took some, looking at our strategies for the year of we know manufacturing intelligence or business intelligence is important across the manufacturing space.

More and more clients are trying to figure out. How they can optimize the data that they’re getting from all the equipment that they’re running on. We wanna have an episode on that. We wanted to have an episode on front end engineering and design studies and the impact it can have on a project.

So these were campaigns that we were already working around, so that. These are obvious topics that we should cover. It’s our podcast, it’s our content. We can say whatever we want. So then it was, let’s reach out to who are our subject matter experts? Let’s tell ’em what we wanna do. What I’ve, the approach I’ve taken is been like a, let me get the subject idea down and then we’ll develop some questions around it.

Have a prep call with the subject matter experts, make sure they’re comfortable with the questions, make sure I’m not missing anything. And then just making sure they’re comfortable and then we just schedule to record. I also I think the other really good benefit of the podcast is it allows and we want our people to, to shine, but we all, I think the underlying benefit is we can show some personality.

So I. Have added some fun questions into the end of every podcast where we’re asking questions like how would you describe your job to a 5-year-old? This is one of my favorite questions ’cause how I also need it explained like that for me. But it just allows, the amount of clever answers we get is great.

I love that question. For podcast or just for any kind of social post it’s great to make people think, how can I simplify this? And I just think it naturally shows some personality. So that’s how we end every episode is just some random fun questions, which I think just highlight some of the personality behind eTech Group.

Carman Pirie: Kinda like that. It really delivers on your notion of using this as a way of fostering some a deeper level of relationship build with employees. And prospects or customers. It’s obviously, I would be curious, switching the order of operations. Not to provide you counsel on the show here, but I wonder about showing their personality up front versus at the end.

Jackie Slaght: We have talked about that too, and some of the episodes have started with the question and then some have ended and I’m not sure which one is better yet. But I, no I appreciate the guidance ’cause we are, I said definitely still learning and 

Carman Pirie: My mind was just going to where, I can imagine people really getting interested in the person through that kind of cross and that Yeah.

And then. And they’re already interested probably in the subject matter or else they wouldn’t be tuning in to begin with. So that’s interesting. I just I like the fact that that you’re doing this and I love the fact that the engineers are playing ball with you here.

You’re, 

Jackie Slaght: it has been so fun because they, like I said, you get an. A person talking about something they’re passionate about and they just go, they, you’re getting extra information and I’m learning, which is great. I feel like we’re achieving a lot of different things through the episodes where we get to show the technical expertise, the impact that it has had for a lot of clients on whatever topic they’re speaking to.

And then yeah, I said the. The brand recognition is hopefully coming as well, so they’ll think of eTech Group when they’re ready for their next project. 

Carman Pirie: I’m curious how you’re looking at extending this strategy when we think about 30 plus global locations in the rapid growth via m and a. It seems to me that’s going to drive a lot of rapid growth in the marketing apparatus at Tech Group as well.

And and how far you need to, your message needs to reach it, obviously needs has broadened. How are you thinking about taking this strategy and deploying it more broadly as this m and a is unfolding? 

Jackie Slaght: I’m not sure I. As far as like where it can reach or, 

Carman Pirie: yeah. I was wondering even is there, are we looking at multilingual podcasts now when you’re talking about 30 plus countries?

And I appreciate that. Often in industrial automation, people tend to think that the language of business is English, but oh, yeah. But still I’m just, yeah. How are you thinking about. You’re using this type of approach to fuel your global ambitions if you’ll, 

Jackie Slaght: I don’t know that we’ve gotten that far into, we are still mostly North American based.

We do have an office in India and Romania. There’s one in uk and we have some satellite locations in Costa Rica and Singapore. Those locations came to us from our recent AC acquisition of JSA automation. And I will be quite honest in that we are still tr figuring out how we’re going to reach international.

And what we’re going to do. The India office ha and that area have had a couple they had a marketing. Department or person on their staff. So they have had some of their own experience with they did one podcast episode, but it wasn’t part of a, I feel like it was just something they maybe put on YouTube and shared out with clients on their own.

But they’ve had some su success with Google Google Ads, and that’s where their strategy has centered around, which is very interesting because when we ran Google Ads, we had zero success with it, but they had quite a bit of success. So I would say that internally we’re still figuring out what we’re going to do with that.

But I, I think it, at some point, we will have to start thinking like, okay, how do we translate this to multiple languages? How can we reach people? I don’t think we’re there. We haven’t reached that yet. 

Carman Pirie: To be fair, Jackie, that was a, that was an unfair question. You just, you told us at the start of the show that the acquisition was just just underway here, and I’m asking you how you’re integrating it five years on.

That’s not very fair. 

Jackie Slaght: Oh, you’re fine. No, it, they, it is conversations we have started, but they’re they’re not fully baked yet. 

Jeff White: Understood. There’s no Punjabi strategy yet. 

Jackie Slaght: Not yet. 

Jeff White: How how has the reaction been as you’ve released the episodes? Not necessarily with the people who are being featured, but with the business leaders around the globe, what are they on board with it and sharing it as well or offering up their team members, or are they getting excited about it as a vehicle for telling the story of eTech Group?

Jackie Slaght: I definitely think there is some excitement to it there. The episode we, so yesterday we announced the integration of j ssat automation to eTech Group, and we also released an episode on lab automation and industrial robotics for the Beyond Tech podcast, which the lab automation, industrial robotics capability came to us.

Through the JS a acquisition. So it was a great tie in to be able to feature this newer, a newer capability for eTech Group with the subject matter expert who came from JS a automation. This is, this particular capability has gotten a lot of excitement from team members who mostly are focused on in the life science industry.

But it is a appli is a capability that can be used across life sciences, but also food and beverage and CPG anybody who would need a lab can also use this capability. But it’s, I would say mostly right now focused on life sciences. But this capability internally has garnered a lot of excitement from business unit leaders.

So they were. Especially excited about this episode coming out. 

Carman Pirie: It’s fascinating because you’re really just we’re talking about the podcast and I think most people hear a podcast and they think, oh, this is a vehicle for obviously engaging external folks, prospects, customers. But as you’re describing it, it was obviously that.

It is that, but it’s also, it’s just a great vehicle for internal communications. You’re talking about these business leaders. They’re discovering this kind of capability or kind of the nuance of its delivery, et cetera as a result of something that arguably most people think is more external.

I think that’s very cool. 

Jackie Slaght: Yeah. So that’s one of the, I should maybe back up a little bit. eTech group was formed by. Initially it was four integrators coming together to form eTech Group, but they had offices in different regions throughout the United States. So we had one of the legacy brands was based in Boston, another one based in California.

One based in Texas. And they all came together. The. The other of the four original companies was E Technologies. They all came together to become eTech Group, and we’ve since grown with multiple other acquisitions, but because of that, we have people that, that’s how we got the widespread geographic range of our resources because they came from multiple local integrators for different areas.

But because of that, we are still, we are, we’re spread out. It’s hard to get the information out across. It’s not like we’re all in one office where you can just shout down the hall, Hey, guess what? We can do this now. And so there is a huge internal element of education, of internal promotion, of different capabilities and resources that we have available.

And the podcast is a great way that we can reach that. There’s also, what we’re learning is that for anything that we send out externally and we put together a plan of this is how we’re gonna put this information out, this is where we’re gonna promote it. We also need to think about all those same steps internally.

Because people are. Busy and are focused on other things. So it’s just the same approach, internal. How can we hit this message multiple ways? How can we get it in front of them in multiple ways to get them engaged and excited? And I think you’re always gonna have people who are naturally onboard right away.

And then we’re gonna have to get the people to gradually, everybody else join and step in line. W with, Hey, get on board with this. Be excited, have fun. 

Carman Pirie: And look for manufacturing marketers who find themselves in an organization that’s undergoing rapid growth via m and a, which is certainly a genre of of manufacturers.

I think the strategy that you’re deploying here is system. I think it’s just a wonderful bit of secret sauce. The idea of, basically I so much so that I would say if you’re a manufacturing marketer, you find yourself in that rapid m and a environment. Steal this playbook take, 

Jackie Slaght: It’s not mine.

It’s from lots of other smarter people too. 

Carman Pirie: Yeah, exactly. But that’s the great thing about stealing is you can steal it multiple times. And, yeah. And start up a podcast where you’re interviewing employees because you’re going to drive that level of internal alignment much faster.

It’s a really interesting strategy of kind of peeling back the curtain and I, and just makes, I like that. It’s it’s both about the work and about the people. It’s a, it’s one of the beautiful parts about this. 

Jackie Slaght: Yeah. It’s been like fun and exciting for me. 

Jeff White: Anytime that you can co-create something with with your team and and have them excited about it and have other internal people get excited about the idea.

And, you mentioned that you’re up to 750 people in the organization is 75% engineers. Obviously they’re not all going to want to be on the show, but you’ve got a pretty unlimited group of potential guests. It’ll take you a while to churn through that. Yes, 

Jackie Slaght: I hope so.

Carman Pirie: Jackie as we bring the show to the close we started by claiming that you were an accidental B2B marketer, but you’ve certainly made made good with that accident. I wonder what’s 

Jackie Slaght: been 

Carman Pirie: the biggest surprise for you? 

Jackie Slaght: I don’t I’m not sure if I’m gonna be answering the question right, but I’ll try.

I think what I’ve learned is to stop overthinking things where. You don’t like, you don’t know what’s gonna happen and you don’t, most of the time I found that I can’t screw up worse than not trying or doing anything. Like I said, I’ve never started a podcast and I was like let’s figure it out.

Let’s do it. The same thing with when we first started hosting webinars. I was like, I don’t know what all these steps are, but we’ll figure it out. And learning from, oh, this didn’t go well. What can we improve upon? So just the constant review. And I learned that I don’t need to be like, stop myself by being afraid of what may happen, but let’s just try it and then grow and learn from it.

I would say. My, I’m, that might be more like career advice than a surprise, but, 

Carman Pirie: I think it’s really solid career advice and and, maybe it is something that B2B marketers can even embrace more than B2C. As you mentioned oftentimes in an organization such as Disney as an example, there’s an obsession on the story that’s being told and therefore.

Maybe fewer people get to tell it in the way that they maybe think that they want, or it’s more, 

Jeff White: In a, can’t necessarily influence it as much as you can here. 

Carman Pirie: But B two, B marketer I think you can take those risks and do some new interesting things and probably a little more open to experiment.

Jackie Slaght: Yeah, that’s what I said. One of the great things when I came on board with eTech Group, it was myself and I came on board to work for my boss and that was just the two of us. So since then we’ve grown and added additional people to the team and it’s been great. But we’ve been able to build this from the ground up, which is one of the rea one of the things that I loved when I was interview viewing for this, I was like, oh, I can really.

Kind of jump right in here and see what we can do. There’s there, there isn’t anything that we have to follow yet. We’re di designing the processes ourselves, which has been, when been a. Challenge, but really rewarding as well. 

Jeff White: I look forward to learning more when you’re up to 50 episodes.

I 

Jackie Slaght: know. It’d be so exciting. I’ll have to invite you guys on. 

Carman Pirie: Look if anything, can tank the show. Oh, I appreciate you sharing your experience with us today, Jackie. It’s been lovely to have you on the show. Thank you so much. 

Jackie Slaght: Yeah, thank you guys for inviting me. This has been super fun for me as well.

Jeff White: Oh, wonderful to have you on the show.