The NDA Problem: How to Market What You Can’t Show in ManufacturingThe NDA Problem: How to Market What You Can’t Show in Manufacturing

The NDA Problem: How to Market What You Can’t Show in Manufacturing 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 Perry. Carman, how are you doing, sir? 

Carman Pirie: All is well on my end. And you, 

Jeff White: I’m doing great. Thanks. 

Carman Pirie: Nice. You haven’t gone through any major software updates with your computer or anything of that nature? It may have delayed the start of the podcast or anything. 

Jeff White: No, no. And thankfully all has worked out perfectly for us. 

Carman Pirie: Okay, good.

Jeff White: Yeah. In terms of technology. 

Carman Pirie: No, but it is good to have a computer back up and running and to be chatting with you today. 

Jeff White: Yeah, and I really like this topic. You know, we’ve covered a number of personal journeys over the last five or six years, you know, of people how they’ve learned their craft, and I really enjoy these conversations. 

Carman Pirie: And I must say it’s never been a straight line. 

Jeff White: No. 

Carman Pirie: Like I’ve never, we’ve never interviewed the person that said, oh, I went to university for this exact thing. You know, I’m doing this exact thing and this exact thing. Awesome. That person doesn’t exist, but I suppose if we find them, we should have them on the show 

Jeff White: That’s not true. I called my career in grade 10 and followed through, like basically. I only chose one thing. I’m not good at anything else.

Carman Pirie: He’s lying, ladies and gentlemen, because he went to design school, but he does not design something right now. He actually owns a company, so he just is willfully ignorant to his success. 

Jeff White: Okay, fine. 

Carman Pirie: Well, I am excited for today’s conversation as well, Jeff. I am always fascinated at how talent arrives in this space. And, frankly, I just think the world of manufacturing needs more marketing talent. So anything we can do to maybe illuminate some paths towards it the better. 

Jeff White: Yeah. Fantastic. So joining us today is Alex Dove. Alex is the Senior marketing and communication specialist at August Electronics. Welcome to The Kula Ring, Alex. 

Alex Dove: Thank you so much for having me.

Carman Pirie: Alex. It is wonderful to have you on the show. I’m not trying to poke fun at Jeff, but I just love the way he just said electronics there, like electronics. It was a really good enunciation, I mean, which one do you guys prefer?

Alex Dove: I actually, I’m open to both. I think actually he might be onto something with that because Alec Tronics kind of suggests Alex, so maybe that’s my next angle. 

Carman Pirie: Yeah, there you go. 

Jeff White: The path zigs. 

Carman Pirie: I don’t know, it was interesting. I thought that Jeff had a really good brand voice at that moment. I think maybe Alex will hire you to do some podcasting for… 

Alex Dove: as long as you’re saying the August electronics name. I’m happy to hear it in any way. 

Jeff White: I can always take up smoking and make it even deeper. 

Carman Pirie: Yeah, it’s not as popular in 2026, but I do encourage it for better voices. Alex, look it’s wonderful to have you on the show. Thank you for your indulgence in our meaningless banter as we get under way here. I want to learn more about August and how Alex ended up at August. So please tell us a little bit about the firm first. What do y’all do out there? 

Alex Dove: Absolutely. So August Electronics is a contract electronics manufacturer. So our core competency is any type of electronics manufacturing from printed circuit board assembly, all the way up to mechanical and box build assembly. Within that, we get to work with various companies, various industries, and get to be kind of key to their business function. If you’re building a company’s product, their success is contingent on your ability to be stable and deliver on what you’re promising. 

Carman Pirie: Yeah, absolutely. 

Jeff White: Are you folks more on the production side or on the prototyping side?

Alex Dove: Definitely more on the production side. We’ve had a lot of shifts in our business that have opened up a lot of new doors for us. But at August headquarters, we are low to mid volume manufacturing focused. 

Carman Pirie: Really cool. And Alex, how did you, how long have you been there? 

Alex Dove: I’ve been with August, coming up on four years now. My journey to August was a little bit different than I think a lot of people would expect. I’ve had a strong background in sales. I’ve been in some form of manufacturing since the start of my career including textiles. Including furniture manufacturing, including drapery manufacturing. So I’ve always been in a manufacturing space on the sales side, I’ve dabbled in everything. I’ve done commission sales, I’ve done, you know, inside, outside sales. But when I was coming to August, I was really looking for a culture fit. And finding August their entire marketing at that time was partnership focused and coming into the facility and getting to meet people and connect with people, I could see that it was a serious value that the organization had. I was initially onboarded at August as a business development coordinator, and at that time they were kind of working with an outside marketing firm, but there was no real action being taken. So I just shot my shot. I said, can I take this on? Can I try? And the CEO Tanya, who’s just an amazing woman to work for, said, yeah, give it a go.

So we started off with some LinkedIn posts and we started kind of dabbling with some web content and eventually. It came to a point where I was like, I really want to drive this, and I understood coming to August, relationships urgency and revenue pressure, but I knew virtually nothing about electronics manufacturing and just being able to run with the culture and the people gave me everything I needed in my marketing toolkit to get started.

Carman Pirie: And you know, was that, coming forth with that recommendation say, Hey, can I lean into this? Was it really just born out of frustration that what you were seeing happening wasn’t really happening fast enough, or wasn’t as sales focused as you desired in the other, in your other role? 

Alex Dove: Well, I think like coming from a sales position, there has to be something driving sales to sales. Like, in most cases, you’re not getting customers based on no action. There are several layers of action that happen before you actually acquire a customer. So focusing on those things is equally as important to sales, but definitely uses a different muscle. 

Jeff White: You mentioned earlier that you were involved in both inside and outside sales. Which one do you think most influences what you do as a marketer now? 

Alex Dove: That is such a great question. I think there are two key things that I wanna address in my answer. One being relationship building, which is a hundred percent credit of being an outside salesperson. Building those relationships, keeping communication open. All of those things are so integral to outside sales, whereas inside sales. In my experience it has been a little bit more data driven, a little bit more simple, if you will. A lot of times it’s just a different program and a different mechanism. A lot of the times the leads come to you, the people come straight to you, whether they’re at a brick and mortar or if they’re coming through a connection. It’s just, it’s different. I think the skills that I use the most now. Would be in large part to both because I think that I equally use my data skills as well as my relationship skills to build a really successful marketing team. 

Carman Pirie: It’s interesting for me to consider the way that you’ve framed that, because, I was thinking, you know, in marketing you work, you know, enhancing, developing, growing relationships. And certainly you have to do that personally in order to enable the work, but you’re driving a relationship with the brand. And therefore you’re kind of doing it in a bit of a, a more abstract way. So I thought where your answer was gonna go is that maybe you leaned a little bit more on the inside sales side of the house simply because it has a little bit more distance to the customer, doesn’t it than the outside. 

Alex Dove: For sure. It definitely does. I mean, overall sales is very like reactive, target driven, immediate gratification. The biggest difference with marketing is that it’s a bit more strategic, long game and no recognition a lot of the time.

Jeff White: We just like to recognize you now, Alex, for doing some great work. 

Alex Dove: Thank you so much. 

Jeff White: Yeah.

Carman Pirie: That’s an interesting point though. I mean. You know being the number one salesperson in an organization usually comes with some pretty good immediate recognition. Maybe not so much so on the marketers that are playing the longer game.

Alex Dove: Yeah. I have to agree. But like, marketing is so key and functional to sales. It’s positioning, it’s alignment, and it’s clarity for that team, right. To know what we’re driving and where we’re going. 

Carman Pirie: I think it’s easy for somebody coming from sales to look at marketing and say, there’s a bunch of stuff that a bunch of marketers just don’t understand about my day-to-day reality and what actually moves a business forward. And nothing happens until someone sells something, I’m fond of saying. But what about in reverse? What do you think, now that you’ve been in the marketing role for a while, what do you think it is that sales misses about marketing? What do they not understand? 

Alex Dove: That is a great question. I think from a marketing angle, you really have to understand the objections, the buying psychology, what prospects actually care about. So you’re looking at a group of people versus one person that you’re positioning yourself with to get the sale, to get, you know, the next steps of becoming a customer, becoming a partner. You’re not trying to impress. You’re trying to understand people’s pain and drive the relationship from that drive, the awareness through that.

Carman Pirie: The connections that marketing needs to make and the objections that they need to address are just broader and happening more all at once than in a sales situation where you’re dealing with them one at a time.

Alex Dove: Yeah, absolutely. And I mean, you have to let go of short-term wins for that long-term brand equity, right? And learning different systems using multiple applications. Getting comfortable on being measured on influence instead of revenue are all key. 

Jeff White: That’s an interesting one because I think there are probably some marketers listening who are getting judged on revenue generated as well, and trying to create that more direct level of attribution, however fuzzy that might actually be. Do you think that panacea is not achievable to be able to connect the marketing all the way through to the sales close. 

Alex Dove: I think in my world it’s key. And I always feel at August that marketing drives a lot of sales. Like we are responsible for revenue in some capacity. It’s not up to me to measure it. I can bring in all of the business possible. I can bring in 15 top quality leads a day. And if it’s not, if they’re not converting them, it’s neither here nor there, right? So how am I driving revenue without being measured on it, is kind of the way that I think about it.

Carman Pirie: I wonder if like, because of course, if the sales folks don’t close, can’t close that business then you know, it’s easy to see how marketing could be faulted for that. They say, well, the quality of the leads weren’t as good as they used to be. I find that’s always a, it’s bizarre, there’s never a real kind of end, end destination to that argument. It seems very circular to me either, okay, well we didn’t close it ’cause the leads aren’t great and the leads aren’t great because of this, and then you go and actually look at the leads and they’re better than the five previous ones that closed. And now it’s all because of our price and we’re just being priced and asked to charge too much and our competitors are dropping. There just seems to be always something, I guess, but at the same time. Shouldn’t the ultimate destination be a unified set of KPIs where you and sales are being jointly measured on your ability to generate revenue? 

Alex Dove: Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. And I think that you touched on something important in what you just said, which is that marketing has to drive qualified leads, period. So if the leads aren’t qualified, for sure, they’re not going to convert. But if we don’t set up our sales teams for success, then the owners should absolutely be on marketing, and it should absolutely be a team who is conquering these sales and these initiatives. 

Jeff White: One of the things that we talked about, Alex, in our initial conversation was this notion that August is really a broad manufacturer. You don’t necessarily have a specific niche that you serve. You’re more kind of horizontally aligned. How does that change how you think about the marketing that you’re undertaking there? 

Alex Dove: I think. I have to focus a lot more on service than maybe some other companies would. So if you’re targeting various different industries that all use circuit boards, how do you adequately market circuit boards to all of those industries? And it is tiresome and it is a lot of work. We’ve been very fortunate to work with so many different industries. We’re in Alberta, in Canada, so a lot of our product is oil and gas and energy based. So we do have a lot of industrial equipment and technology that we work on, but we’ve also done lots of handheld wearables, medical devices, so I wish I had a great answer for how to market and serve all of those industries. I don’t have a great one. What August has done really well is selling partnerships. Manufacturing is really challenging. There’s lots of hurdles. There’s challenges all the time. When you’re sourcing a printed circuit board, you have hundreds of components that go on that circuit board, and they’re almost always coming from very far away, generally from Asia. So, getting all of those parts in, getting an assembly built, all of it, takes a lot of time and a lot of components and a lot of different people from the company to engage in that process. And so when it comes to it, there are hard conversations. There are lots of difficult things that you have to go through.

Whether you’re on the August side or a client side, there’s lots of talks, lots of challenging moments that you have to spend together. Having that partnership makes it so much easier to keep those lines of communication open. So instead of marketing electronics, I’ve marketed partnerships.

Carman Pirie: This is going to, I mean, I think they asked, one of the challenges I find with marketing service or marketing partnership is, it can sometimes be hard to make it sound distinctive. ‘Cause, nobody comes to the market saying they offer bad service, right? So like, if you’re jumping up and down saying, well, we have really good service though, and really good people, like, nobody says, well, our people are generally idiots and they won’t answer the phone.

So, sometimes it feels like there needs to be  some strength, like the proof points and the requirement to have proof points is almost even stronger when you’re going to market in that way. Is there anything that jumps out to you as a tool that you have in the bag that you say, this is something I find really, really useful when I’m trying to prove that service promise when I’m trying to prove that partnership promise.

Alex Dove: Yes. I would say hands down in our space that videos and photos go the longest by far. I could put forth 17 white papers on different use cases for our services, and it would never get as far as a video of our fantastic equipment that we have in-house here, and being able to show that. Promise and show the investment that our company has made in these lines, these SMT equipment, all of the various devices that we use to assemble electronics in-house. That goes a long way, a lot further than any other literature I could put together ever would. 

Carman Pirie: It certainly showcases the capabilities. And do you extend that to the actual service delivery and kind of service level commitments as well versus what our production capabilities are, but the fact that we’ll actually work through you, with you through those difficult challenges?

Alex Dove: Absolutely. It’s really important and we are. Gung-ho about communication at August, we share everything. There are no secrets. We have designed very specific systems to be able to communicate the information that our clients are looking for on a daily basis from our team. And then my job is to make sure that those different reports, white papers, whatever it may be, PowerPoint presentations, are reflective of our brand and get us to a place where we’re communicating in partnership language.

Jeff White: One of the things I think that’s really interesting about marketing, the kind of contract manufacturing that August does. And, we’ve been lucky enough at Kula to work with some contract manufacturers over the years and have a bit of experience with this, but you can rarely show what you make.

So you can often only talk about the capabilities. And you can’t always kind of show the result. We know B2B. Case studies are often really important at kind of helping close the sale. How are you navigating that, if you are perhaps unable to show previous examples of products that you’ve made?

Alex Dove: I struggle with this a lot and a lot of the times when our leadership team, we sit down and we look at different marketing initiatives we should pursue. Something that always comes up is some sort of catalog or some sort of representation of all of the stuff we’ve built so far. But of course, just like you said, we are bound by NDA by all of our customers and we take that NDA very seriously.

There are some cases where customers are open to us showing their product. But beyond that, as our marketing evolves and as people recognize August more and more, I do think that having representation of products we’ve made will become easier because it will also be advantageous to our client partners.

Carman Pirie: I wanna change gears a little bit. Did I hear you correctly earlier when you said that the CEO of the firm was female? 

Alex Dove: She is.

Carman Pirie: I’m kind of, I’m just curious to me that like a female founder in this space or female CEO in the electronics contract manufacturing space, I don’t know how common that is.

Alex Dove: It’s not.

Carman Pirie: So I just wonder. You know, we’ve worked with a number of contract manufacturers in that space actually over the years. And they’ve all been very male-dominant environments. So I’m just curious as a marketer that must open up some interesting opportunities.

Alex Dove: It definitely does. I think for the reasons you said like Tanya is a natural leader and she carries natural ownership in all of her professional relationships, professional duties she has never been shy to be the loudest in the room. Which is polar opposite from my approach. So being able to work underneath her and learn marketing underneath her has definitely had its advantages. I can’t say for sure that it’s because she’s female, but it’s definitely been the gift of my career to be able to work for her. 

Carman Pirie: Yeah. You know, I can imagine that, and I’m just thinking about a number of organizations that I’ve either been affiliated with or we’ve worked with over the years that had strong founder stories and really tried to bring those to market and a couple of instances, the thing that was holding them back.

Quite candidly is that the founders that were being promoted were middle-aged white dudes. And nobody really wanted to hear that story, right? It’s just not something that sells. I’m not trying to like, kind of promote you know, get into the wokeness debate in 2026 here. I just, I do feel like it’s an interesting club in your bag that not everybody would have in, in your space.  

Alex Dove:  I think it’s a really interesting story to tell for sure. It is my journey this year to get her out and about. I want her to be doing talks. I want her to engage with everything. But as a CEO, she’s so busy. I’d be curious how you guys would manage that. How do you deal with a busy CEO who needs to do media stuff?

Jeff White: They keep Carman and I out of the limelight, so that part’s easy. 

Carman Pirie: But there’s very few you know, CEOs that have nothing to do that also have me to get responsibility. So those two things always go hand in hand. It is a good note.

Alex Dove: True enough that. 

Carman Pirie: As we bring this podcast to a close. I wonder what advice you have for folks that might be looking to get into marketing in the manufacturing, industrial space as somebody who’s kind of in some ways gotten into it a little bit by accident. Any tips that you would share? 

Alex Dove: I think what I’m really grateful for is that when I got to August I just talked to everybody and asked a lot of questions, had a lot of operational conversations, which probably didn’t really apply to me at the time, but gave me a lot of the knowledge that I needed to succeed.

And if there’s any advice I could give to anybody, it would be, don’t pretend to know things that you don’t, and ask as many questions as possible. And if I can add one thing to that, it would be that what is true to you and to your business will always shine through. So if what you’re doing is authentic and genuine, it will always resonate with the right people.

Jeff White: I think especially that advice about talking to everybody is just so pivotal to truly understanding. And, you know, even at a marginal level, I work with a lot of manufacturers who make a lot of very complex products. I don’t pretend to understand most of them, and I never will, but that’s okay.

I still want to get deeply ingrained in it by talking to people and discovering and creating those relationships that will kind of fuel the next phase of your own development as a marketer. That’s pretty cool. 

Carman Pirie: And Jeff helps you understand you may not understand exactly the how, what the technical underpinnings of how the product is built. You can’t go out and build it yourself after you talk to the product engineer or what have you. But you can understand the reason behind it. You can understand the thinking that goes into it. You can understand the motivations and the drive behind it to creation. Which helps you as a marketer of course, understand how you position it and how you might sell, what benefit you may choose to highlight.

But you know, humans learn from other humans more than we learn from anything else. And I think that’s just such great advice that Alex has shared. And frankly, Alex, I think your sales background just makes you very well equipped to have those conversations and to be curious in that way.

Alex Dove: Well, I couldn’t agree more, and I think everybody has a bit of a salesperson in them, but not everybody has a bit of a marketer in them. 

Carman Pirie: Is that what you meant by anyone can, but not everyone should. 

Alex Dove: Yes, exactly. 

Carman Pirie: That sounds like you’ve seen somebody try to jump over to the marketing side and fail miserably and they should have never tried it in the first place.

Alex Dove: No, but I hear feedback all the time that leads me to that distinction.

Carman Pirie: I had to pry a little bit. I didn’t know if there was a good explosive story to conclude. This podcast, or…

Alex Dove: Nope, just me.

Carman Pirie: Thanks so much for joining us, Alex. 

Alex Dove: Thank you guys.