Webinar slides and script for presentation to members of the American Ceramics Society on November 20, 2019. Recorded version can be watched at http://bit.ly/2XQBvsC

1. Hello and thanks for joining us on this webinar for members of The American
Ceramic Society about growing your manufacturing business with modern marketing
and sales, based on over 250 marketing and sales books.
My goal for this webinar is to provide you with some of the most important concepts
and ideas about modern marketing and sales to help you successfully leverage them
to grow your business.
The things I’m going to talk about include concepts where a lot of companies are
wildly successful and/or where companies are struggling as it relates to modern
marketing and sales.
We’re going to talk more about key strategies than specific tactics because the
strategies will apply to nearly every business, now and for the foreseeable future.
Tactics, on the other hand, come and go more quickly and won’t apply equally to
every company’s situation.
But most importantly, if you have the right strategies in place, the best tactics reveal
themselves much more easily.
But if you have any questions about tactics you’re considering I’m happy to answer
them in the Q&A period after my prepared remarks.
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3. My name is Douglas Burdett and my day job is running a marketing agency called
Artillery and our focus is manufacturers and industrial companies who are serious
about growing. I’ve been in the agency business for over 30 years.
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4. On a personal note, about 10 years ago, in lieu of a mid-life crisis, I started performing
standup comedy. I’m all better now, thanks - and I no longer perform standup comedy
but I do channel some of that into my public speaking and my podcast. If you met my
wife, she would counsel you not to laugh at my jokes because it only encourages me.
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5. For the last 5 years, I’ve been the host of The Marketing Book Podcast where each
week I publish an interview with the author of a new marketing or sales book. I
recently passed the 250 episode milestone and I’ve read every single book featured
on the show.
And no, when I started the podcast I didn’t realize I was going to need to read each
book, and yes, that’s really cut into my Scotch drinking.
Anyway, the podcast now has listeners in over 150 countries, over a million
downloads and has been named by LinkedIn and Forbes as one of the top marketing
and sales podcasts.
But enough about me. Let’s talk about my friend Frank.
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6. Frank and I were buddies in college, where he studied electrical engineering. He’s had
a successful career and not too long ago he called me and told me that he’d become
the president of a manufacturing company.
And he wanted to ask me about marketing. Basically, he wanted to know what was
really important, what his company should focus on. He said something an electrical
engineer would say, “Doug, separate the signal from the noise for me.”
I explained to him a lot of what I’m about to share with you and he really appreciated
it and felt like marketing wasn’t so confusing and overwhelming and that he felt like
he had a better handle on it.
So if you’re feeling overwhelmed by modern marketing and sales, you’re not alone
and I hope that I can separate the signal from the noise for you, because if you’re new
to this or have suddenly been thrust into a marketing or sales role it can be
confusing.
I loved being able to help Frank and get him pointed in the right direction and I hope I
can do the same for you.
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8. OK, get ready to type into your chat pane because I’m going to be asking you some
questions.
The most important thing that has happened in the world of marketing and sales is
that the way your customers buy has changed. And that is what many companies are
struggling with.
Let me give you an example.
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9. When I was a kid and my dad wanted to buy a car, where was the first place he would
go to get information? Type that into your chat pane.
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10. > The car dealership.
Why did he have to go to the car dealership?
> Only place to get information
This is what Daniel Pink in his book To Sell is Human refers to as “information
asymmetry.” The buyer wanted information and the seller had it. And the seller used
that information as leverage to guide (or strong arm) the buyer toward a purchase.
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11. Fast forward to a couple of years ago when my wife wanted to buy a car – where was
the absolute last place she went to get information?
> The car dealership.
Where do you suppose she got her information?
> The internet.
Why did she go to the internet instead of the seller
> She wanted more objective, trusted information
Back to Daniel Pinks’s book “To Sell is Human” - We are now in an era of what he calls
Information Symmetry where everyone has access to the same information.
Because of the dramatically different way people buy now, sales and marketing have
been forced to change.
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12. Jamie Shanks, author of SPEAR Selling: The ultimate Account-Based Sales guide for
the modern digital sales professional wrote that “Your buyer has evolved more in the
last ten years than in the previous hundred years.”
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13. And in an Adobe study “Digital Distress: What Keeps Marketers Up at Night,” 76% of
marketers think that marketing has changed more in the past 2 years than in the
previous 50.
So let’s look at some numbers to illustrate the changing way that your customers are
buying:
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14. Many of you may have heard of the landmark study a few years back from
CEB/Gartner about how in a B2B buying situation, the buyers are AT MINIMUM 57%
through their purchase process before first reaching out to the seller. Forrester puts
that number as high as 90%. It varies by industry and product, of course.
Here are a few other things to keep in mind:
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19. And if, like many manufacturers, you’re marketing and selling to engineers, my friends
at Trew Marketing (in conjunction with IEEE/GlobalSpec) in their Smart Marketing for
Engineers study revealed that for the majority of engineers, nearly 60% of their
buying process happens before they speak to a potential vendor.
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20. What are the primary places they’re getting their information from?
Search engines and vendor websites.
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21. But let’s step back for a moment and talk about marketing.
I hear from a lot of manufacturers, many of whom have declining sales or who are
serious about growing, who claim that they've never done any “marketing” before.
But they actually have. Let me explain.
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22. In 1960, marketing professor E. Jerome McCarthy introduced the concept of the Four Ps marketing
mix in his book Basic Marketing: A Managerial Approach.
The four Ps of marketing are
Product – This refers to the features, benefits, and the unique value proposition of the good or
service.
Price – This is how much the customer pays and how they pay.
Place – this is how you reach your customer. Where can I get your product? Are you selling online or
in stores? Do the purchasers buy at trade shows, do you have an inside sales team? Are you selling
through channels?
Promotion – This is how you are telling your customers about your product.
The truth is most companies associate marketing with just the last P, promotion, when in fact any
decisions related to your product, its pricing and its distribution are also a part of marketing.
So you can see how marketing, which involves everything related to your product, your pricing, its
distribution and promotion is central to the operations and growth of any company.
Even if your company doesn’t have a marketing department or you’re not paying to promote your
products and services, your company is making marketing decisions every day.
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23. And that’s why Hewlett-Packard co-founder David Packard famously said that
“marketing is too important to be left to the marketing department.”
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24. Let’s talk about the one thing business owners managers want more than anything
else – growth.
Now what I’m about to tell you might surprise you coming from a marketing guy, but
growth doesn’t happen by simply doing more of the marketing and sales tactics that
you’re currently doing.
In nearly all cases, manufacturers grow by adopting the right strategies. And when
they do that, their marketing and sales efforts are exponentially more effective.
In order to grow strategically (vs. opportunistically), you’ll be much more successful
with the right growth strategies at the right time.
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25. In Tiffani Bova’s book Growth IQ, she lays out the 10 ways that companies grow.
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26. Now, we’re not going to go through each of these in depth here, but I do want to talk
about the first 2 strategies in her book.
Customer Experience. Some of the fastest, most innovative companies are focusing
on how to engineer a better experience for their customers.
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27. In Nicholas Webb’s book “What Customers Crave” he cites a study that 70% of
Americans are willing to pay more to get a better customer experience.
Think about how Disney or your favorite restaurant keeps you coming back and telling
others about it. That doesn’t happen by accident. Successful companies are focused
on engineering increasingly better experiences for their customers.
How do you go about engineering a better customer experience?
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28. In Roger Dooley’s book “FRICTION—The Untapped Force That Can Be Your Most
Powerful Advantage” he demonstrates how constantly looking for any sign of friction
that your customers are having buying from you or your competitors can have an
enormous impact on the growth of your company.
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29. Another great starting point for engineering a better experience for your customers
as mentioned in Scott McKain’s book “Iconic” is to find out what infuriates your
customers. Do you know the answer to that? Are you afraid to find out? Ask them!
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30. The second strategy in Tiffani Bova’s book is Customer Base Penetration: Sell more
existing products to existing customers.
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31. So, go back to your chat pane and answer this question...
What are two of the sweetest words to your CEOs and CFOs?
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32. REVENUE GROWTH
Three of the sweetest words to them are fast revenue growth.
If I were suddenly in charge of sales or marketing at a manufacturing or industrial
company, before I’d spend a nickel on marketing to get new customers I would ask
the following question: are we selling as much as we possibly can to our existing
customers?
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33. In Nicholas Webb’s book “What Customers Crave” that I mentioned earlier, he
explains that based on several studies, the probability of selling to a new customer is
less than 20%. But the probability of selling to an existing customer can be as high as
60% to 70%. And the sales cycle is generally much, much shorter when selling to an
existing customer.
What are you doing to sell more to your current customers?
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34. Before we leave the topic of Tiffani Bova’s book about growth strategies, I want to
mention something that is important for growing your company. In every one of
those 10 sections in her book about how companies grow, she shows examples of
companies that are succeeding and failing at each strategy.
At the core of each successful execution of a strategy is a company that had the best
understanding of their customers. Period. The companies that fail are consistently the
ones that had the poorest understanding of their customers.
And that is the most important concept for success in marketing and sales.
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36. The most successful companies have the deepest insights into their customers.
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37. In Seth Godin’s latest book “This Is Marketing: You Can't Be Seen Until You Learn to
See,” he writes…
… marketing, the effective kind, is about understanding our customers’ worldview
and desires so we can connect with them. It’s focused on being missed when you’re
gone, on bringing more than people expect to those who trust us. It seeks volunteers,
not victims.
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38. There are three types of companies. Think about which type of company you’re in.
Companies that are focused primarily on themselves, their own products and
operations.
Companies that are focused primarily on their competitors.
Companies that are focused primarily on their customers.
Which kind of company do you think Amazon is?
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39. Legend has it that when Jeff Bezos attends an internal meeting he insists on there
being at least one empty chair in the room. That empty chair represents the
customer. Invariably during meetings he’ll point at the chair to remind people what
their primary focus needs to be.
Bezos has said ”Our number one conviction and idea and philosophy and principle… is
customer obsession, as opposed to competitor obsession.”
And the last time I checked, Jeff Bezos is one of the richest people in the world
In this era of the customer, companies who are focused on and have a deep
understanding of their customers are the most successful.
So how can you help your company to develop a deeper understanding of your
customers in order to give you a competitive edge?
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40. The approach that I’ve seen have the most profitable effect for clients is the concept
of a buyer persona.
As defined in Adele Revella’s bestselling book Buyer Personas: How to Gain Insight
into Your Customer’s Expectations, Align Your Marketing Strategies, and Win More
Business:
...buyer personas are examples or archetypes of real buyers that allow marketers to
craft strategies to promote products and services to the people who might buy them.
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41. At the core of leveraging buyer personas are what the author calls “The 5 Rings of
Insight.” Understand these buyer insights and you’ll have an unfair advantage over
your competition.
Here’s a quick overview of The 5 Rings of Insight:
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42. There have been so many books on The Marketing Book Podcast that explain that the
key to growth is deeply understanding your customers and the friction in their lives,
that I can’t list them all.
The truth is that most companies don’t know as much about their customers as
they’d like to know or that they think they do.
But the linchpin of success for companies is the ability to spend more time with their
customers, observe them and glean insights to help better understand their world.
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43. So I’ve already mentioned that for faster revenue growth, the first priority for
marketing and sales should be on selling more to current and past customers.
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44. A great model for how best to prioritize your marketing is in Louis Gudema’s book
Bullseye Marketing. In the book, he recommends that rather than going after new
customers first, companies start their marketing and sales efforts focusing on their
current and past customers.
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45. This is the middle of the bullseye.
For the 2nd ring of the bullseye, focus your marketing and sales efforts on new
customers who are ready to buy now.
From a tactical standpoint, that involves arming your sales team with resources that
they can use right now to help prospects who are already engaged with your sales
team but who might need additional information to make their buying decision.
We’re talking about prospects who already know or have found your company.
And that takes us to the 3rd ring of the bullseye.
That final, outer ring in that bullseye approach is for new customers. That’s where
you undertake marketing efforts to connect with prospective customers who might
not know who you are and/or who don’t know what your company does.
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46. In survey after survey, one of the top things companies want from their marketing is
to generate leads. Good leads.
Let’s talk more about generating leads.
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47. In From Impossible To Inevitable: How Hyper-Growth Companies Create Predictable
Revenue Aaron Ross and Jason Lemkin state that “...lead generation is the #1 lever
that drives revenue growth…”
In the book, the authors explain that fast-growing companies have three types of lead
generation activities. A “balanced diet” of lead generation if you will.
They also explain that too many companies rely on just one or maybe two of the
activities. But unless you do all three, you’re going to struggle.
The three types of lead generation activities are seeds, spears and nets.
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48. Here’s what they mean:
Seeds – These leads are created from word-of-mouth, networks and relationships, especially grown
through creating happy customers who refer others.
Spears – Leads generated by targeted outbound prospecting or business development campaigns,
usually working through a targeted list, calling, emailing, or using any technique that helps the
salesperson get an appointment.
Nets – These are leads generated through marketing campaigns, including inbound and content
marketing. This is typically the largest generator of leads but the lead quality will be mixed.
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49. Many, many companies rely on just the seeds. Current and past customers and referrals. And that’s
great, but it’s not as predictable and as a company grows, that well can start to go dryer and represent
an increasingly smaller proportion of leads.
Spears are a proactive approach, not always as much fun but still yield results, and which can become
a more predictable source of leads. And the more that a company does with this, the better they
become at it.
And believe it or not, outbound spearfishing makes your net fishing more effective.
It helps to lend focus to the marketing efforts so that it can zero in on attracting the best type of
prospect rather than using a “spray and pray” approach to marketing. Or as we sometimes hear it
called, “random acts of marketing.”
The fastest-growing companies have a healthy lead generation diet of all three approaches.
I’m now going to explain a few more things that are important to understand about generating leads
with seeds, spears and nets.
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50. You may think that Allan Dib’s book, The 1-Page Marketing Plan: Get New Customers,
Make More Money, And Stand out From The Crowd has a gimmicky name but don’t
be fooled by that. It’s a terrific book and marketing plans need not be more detailed
than the 9 areas that you can summarize on one page.
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51. I won’t go through each of the 9 sections but notice that there are three parts to the
1-page marketing plan:
Before – when prospective customers have never heard of you
During – when they become aware of you until they decide to buy (which could be
much later), and
After – what kind of experience are your customers going to have, how can you sell
more to them and what can you do to get referrals
Take note of that last section, “after.”
Lots of companies don’t include that in their marketing plans. A lot of the marketing
and sales activity tends to stop at that point.
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52. Speaking of referrals, in John Jantsch’s book The Referral Engine: Teaching Your
Business to Market Itself, he notes that in a survey he did, he found that two-thirds of
companies felt that over half their business came by way of referrals, but yet 80%
admitted that they had no system of any kind generate referrals.
In the book he shows how to set up a system to generate predictable referrals for
your business.
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53. In the book I mentioned earlier, Spear Selling by Jamie Shanks he explains that the
single most effective decision a company can make in spear selling is selecting the
right accounts. He also shows how not doing it correctly (or not doing it at all) is the
most disastrous misstep a company can make in trying to grow.
In the book he walks you through how to select the right target prospects that will
have the biggest impact on your outbound sales efforts in the shortest amount of
time.
OK, so you’ve identified who the primary people you want to connect with, how do
you get a meeting? It’s getting much more difficult to use the phone and email to get
through, not to mention a response.
Keep in mind that in this era when it’s never been more difficult to connect with
prospects, it’s also never been easier to find out a lot about them using the internet
and thousands of digital tools.
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54. In Stu Heinecke’s books How to Get a Meeting with Anyone: The Untapped Selling
Power of Contact Marketing and Get the Meeting!: An Illustrative Contact Marketing
Playbook he shows hundreds of ways how salespeople are using information about
prospects, as well as innovative approaches and modern technology to reach the
people you want to meet with and get them to want to meet with you. And without
irritating them!
Now let’s talk about nets.
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55. As a former New York City ad man, I die a little inside when I see how advertising has
become a shadow of its former self.
In the good old days we had captive audiences that, more or less, had to pay
attention to our clients’ messages.
That era of easy marketing is dead and gone.
It’s all because of technology: primarily internet and marketing interruption
avoidance technology.
Like with the example I mentioned earlier about how my dad researched buying a car
vs. how my wife researched her car purchase. The internet has enabled everyone
who is buying something to research a lot of it before going to the seller.
And when you combine that with marketing interruption avoidance technology like
caller ID, DVRs, streaming audio and video like Netflix and Spotify, ad blocking
software and email spam filters, it’s getting easier and easier for your customers to
avoid and ignore you.
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56. And people are avoiding you.
In survey after survey, advertising is consistently listed as one of the least trusted
sources of information.
Don’t misunderstand me, advertising has its place on the marketing world. But
studies show that people aggressively avoid it.
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57. Now, rather than interrupting what people are interested in, we have to be what
people are interested in.
Unless you are able to offer something to your prospective customers that is helpful,
educational or entertaining, they are going to ignore you.
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58. Let’s do one last exercise now. Get your chat pane ready.
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59. When you do a Google search, do you click on the results at the top of the page?
> No
Why not?
> Because it’s an ad
Why don’t you want to click on an ad?
> Because they are trying to sell me something
Which links do you click?
> The ones that aren’t ads
So if people like and trust the non-ad links on search engines, how can you get your
site to show up when your customers are searching the internet?
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60. What if I told you that the way to get found on the first page of Google for terms your
customers are searching for is already in the halls of your company?
Does your sales team answer a lot of questions? Do they answer a lot of the same
questions each day? That is gold to be mined!
Manufacturers have a lot of engineers, salespeople and subject matter experts with
deep, deep expertise that is a gold mine of helpful information for your customers.
Don’t hide that light under a bushel!
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61. Teaching is the new pitching.
Your customers don’t want to be marketed or sold to. And they are increasingly
intolerant of it. But they do want to learn how to make a smart purchase and be more
successful.
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62. As Jay Baer says in his book Youtility: Why Smart Marketing Is about Help Not Hype...
The difference between helping and selling is just two letters, but those two letters
make all the difference.
The more customer questions you answer on your website, the more successful you
will be at attracting more traffic to your site, which will generate more interest, trust,
leads and sales.
And what’s more, the helpful, educational information you put on your site, the more
that your sales team can use it in their sales process as they help to move customers
along their buying journey.
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63. One of my favorite examples is in Marcus Sheridan’s book “They Ask You Answer”
where he tells how shifting from promoting his fiberglass pool business to teaching
his customers everything they need to make a smart buying decision turned his
business around and was dubbed by The New York Time as a revolutionary marketing
tactic.
His company is now also becoming one of the largest manufacturers of fiberglass
pools.
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64. Let’s talk briefly about social media.
For at least 10 years now, companies have been fascinated with social media and
have wanted to jump on the bandwagon. It’s like a shiny disco ball that attracts a lot
of attention.
Social media is a great thing, and it’s great for extending the reach of your brand. If
your buyer personas are on a particular social media platform, you should consider
having a presence there.
Social media can certainly have a place in your marketing mix. But there are a couple
of things I like to remind folks about social media that surprise them.
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65. One is that when you are investing in your company’s social media presence on
various platforms, you are building a house on rented land. The social media
platforms can remove you and they can completely change the rules if it suits their
business model.
For instance, Facebook once showed whatever you posted on your company page to
all or nearly all of the people who liked and followed your company there.
Now, they show what you post there to less than 5% of your fans. Want more of your
fans to see what you post there? You need to pay Facebook for more exposure. It’s
Facebook’s platform and you play by their rules. All social media platforms can do
this.
In terms of extending your message, it’s more helpful to think of social media as a
paid platform rather than the “free” media that many people once knew it as. And it’s
also great for very targeted advertising.
But for customer acquisition, do you know which tactic studies have shown to be 40%
more effective than social media?
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66. Email marketing.
Yep, boring old email marketing. Here’s why: with email addresses, your message gets
to the recipient without having to go through the filters of social media. And the
recipient sees it when they want to see it.
With an email address that you have earned from a prospect, they are giving you
permission to communicate with them and deepen the relationship they have with
you, whether they are a customer or a prospective customer.
But there’s a catch. Your emails have to be helpful, educational or entertaining. They
have to have utility for the recipient. If your email is all about your company and
products, you’ll be banished to the unsubscribe list.
Your emails to your audience must aspire to be so good that if you stopped sending
them, they would be missed.
Fortunately, you don’t have to pick between social media and email marketing. You
can and should use both. But the smart money is on building a strong opt-in list of
email subscribers.
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68. A lot of manufacturers market and sell through channel partners, so before we wrap
up I’d like to share a few ideas about how the most successful companies are
leveraging those channels really well.
In the book Marketing Multiplied: A real-world guide to Channel Marketing for
beginners, practitioners, and executives by Michael Moore and Peter Thomas, they
recommend a 4-step model for growing your sales through a channel: To, With,
Through and For
One of the biggest mistakes manufacturers or any company that sells through a
channel makes is thinking that your channel partners work for you and that they
should do what you want them to do and be as interested in selling your product as
you are.
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69. To-partner channel marketing is mainly about providing the partner the reason to
work with you. It's based, like so much of sales and marketing, on empathy. It's
conveying to the partner what's in it for them. It's giving them a reason to care and to
think about your brand. Successful to-partner marketing is treating your partners like
customers, especially after they become a partner.
With-partner marketing has you and your channel partner shoulder-to-shoulder,
going to market together. For example a seminar were both companies are
presenters, both logos are displayed side-by-side, and both companies drive
attendance. Together, you're selling to the end user.
Through partner marketing is where you give your partners the content and training
for them to deliver your message to the market all on their own.
And for-partner marketing is just how it sounds: you market for your partner. Most
organizations engage in some level of for-partner marketing but many do it
ineffectively. They wait to hear from their partners and respond when their partners
ask for something like content or collateral material. It's a reactive approach. Far
more successful is proactive for-partner marketing
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70. Thanks for the opportunity to present today - I hope that what I’ve covered will help
you to better navigate what can be the overwhelming world of modern marketing
and sales in this era when customers don’t want to be marketed or sold to, but want
to be helped and guided toward the right decision.
If you’re interested in keeping up with the latest ideas to help you succeed in the
quickly-changing world of modern marketing and sales, go to your favorite podcast
app on your smartphone like Apple Podcasts and subscribe for free to The Marketing
Book Podcast.
And if I can recommend any marketing or sales books or other resources for whatever
situation you find yourself in, just connect with me on LinkedIn where we can chat
and I’ll try to get you pointed in the right direction.
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