John Stamos: Hi, I’m John Stamos with the Alexander Group. I co-lead our industrials practice within the manufacturing and distribution sector.
Kevan Savage: And good afternoon I’m Kevan Savage. I’m a principal at Alexander Group. I lead our marketing practice and very excited to share our discussion together with you all today.
John Stamos: So Kevan, you and I have worked together on a couple of engagements within the industrials sector. And right now what I would say is, and something that you and I have both seen is it’s a pretty exciting time within the space, whether it’s the increased connectivity with the industrial Internet of Things or Factory 4.0, we’ve seen that a lot of these changes are necessitating some new capabilities. Uh, so thinking through them, messaging reimagined, going from general mar-com to drive more strategic enablement, rethinking the digital demand gen, better aligning marketing and product management to the sales team. And finally, the product management evolution from something that’s more engineering led to market driven. For this conversation, let’s focus on marketing. We’ll have a follow up discussion on product management, but maybe just open it up. Would love to get your perspective on specifically the messaging. What are you seeing there specifically?
Kevan Savage: Yeah, it’s a great it’s a great topic. Um, you know, one of the things John and I have been talking a lot about is, is like, how do you move from general mar-com to strategic enablement and actually, more importantly, why? Why are you changing now? There’s two drivers here. One is your buyer expectations, especially if you’re an industrial manufacturer, are fundamentally changing to be digital first like hands down, you need to meet them where they are, right? Two and this is coming from our multiple bodies of research that we’ve run. About three quarters of our industrial firms are increasing their marketing investments across product, digital and demand gen functions. And so what that means is the investment case is already there. And so the question is how do you re-envision that investment in some of your messaging. And so I’ll give you a couple examples that we’re seeing. Traditional mar-com is very non-linear is one thing that we see all the time. And so we will talk to teams in marketing communications, uh, capacities and they’ll say, well, I’m developing sales brochures or, you know, we’re really focused on developing collateral and messaging out to acquire new customers. Well, guess what? These are complex multi-touch environments that you’re working in, complex sales. So the emergence of proper value prop development, persona-based content, digital storytelling, uh, that is really, really critical. And the other point that we’re seeing more and more of is the interface of what you might call product management and marketing communications for unified messaging. So we see very technical messaging coming out of product management. We see very, call it a little bit too much marketing esque messaging coming out of mar-com, but really not value based messaging. And so, you know, the takeaway there is to evolve from that mar-com to more of that strategic enablement in your positioning, you really need to kind of work on your messaging framework across all stages of the buyer journey, and you need to build out that governance model in your organization, in your mar-com team, to really drive that transformation. So a lot in there, John. You know, I know we’ve had a few examples of this with some of our, our clients themselves, but um, anything top of mind to share with the group, you know, as we were kind of revisiting the kind of mar-com and the strategic intent of those teams?
John Stamos: Yeah, I think driving towards the differentiated value drivers is something that I’ve seen as being critically important and having that connectivity between sales, marketing and product management to drive alignment across the commercial functions is critical to ensure you’ve got that consistency in messaging. And something that we, you know, certainly worked with a couple of clients on. So there’s the messaging and then there’s the dissemination of the messaging. Can you talk a little bit about the demand gen function and how that’s evolving?
Kevan Savage: Yeah, absolutely. The reason we’re starting with messaging here is because for industrial manufacturers in particular, it is, I would argue, more complex than some other industries. It is vertically based. It is use-case based. It has complex sales stages involved in those use cases, in those verticals. If you don’t nail your messaging framework, when you think about how you’re going to go run demand generation programs to drive new market entry or expansion in a market, you actually don’t have the right messages and value prop to put across those different areas of focus. Right. And so here’s what we’re seeing. I’ll give you a real kind of practical example. Even simple things like events that have been very traditional and demand generation activities for industrial manufacturing teams. Those need to continue, but you need to anchor in your messaging capabilities into those events themselves and connect it into a better digital experience. So what that means for us is, you know, how do you connect in your messaging? How do you connect in the pre during and post event experience? But then how do you actually enable something like digital lead gen reps, lead routing, and how do you actually modernize, you know, all the demand that you’re creating with some of your messaging and make sure that it’s being fulfilled in a more effective way? So one other point I’ll add is we see ideal customer profiles and the definition of that relevant to demand generation activities and the messaging is where a lot of industrial manufacturers are still very much falling flat. Really not thinking through how to, you know, really activate those value drivers and those needs of their customers and then moving that messaging through that multi-channel strategy.
John Stamos: Yeah. You know, Kevan, what I’ve seen with sort of the traditional means to access customers 20 years ago, trade shows were a way to share new products with customers, to share the details of some of the new technologies. And now there’s just so much more that’s being done in the digital environment where trade shows are still important, they’re still something that’s going to contribute to the halo effect. But if you’re not accessing them across those other means and thinking about the investments and the resources to be able to do that, you’re missing a big opportunity, particularly with, you know, prospects and accessing new accounts and new buyers. So Kevan gets us to the last topic and we touched on it a little bit. It’s the alignment towards sellers and creating that commercial ecosystem. Can you talk about what you’ve seen there?
Kevan Savage: Yeah, absolutely. One area in particular is the rise of field marketing roles. We see that in other industries. We are seeing it more and more in distro and manufacturing. The reason for that is to better align with the selling teams on the go to market execution. So if you have a vertical based strategy or an in-market based strategy, this is no dig on mar-com. Mar-com is extremely important. But the level of depth you need to partner with your sales teams to really drive the messaging and the value props into those verticals or in markets is where we see the natural bridge and the creation of these kind of new competencies and roles around field marketing. The other area that we’re seeing emerge with that is alignment to joint goals and KPI attainment. So field marketing as quota carrying roles, just like your sales teams, right? And as you do that, you start to see different activities get prioritized. And from a kind of field or regional marketing standpoint that historically is hard to scale out in, you know, your traditional marketing communications teams.
John Stamos: Nice. Interesting. So we hit on a couple of topics. One, thinking about the messaging reimagined and what’s needed there. We talked about the digital demand gen element of accessing new buyers and new prospects. And we talked about the interplay and the connectivity we need to have with sales. Kevan, thank you for the conversation. Be sure to stay tuned. We’ll be back for a follow up conversation where we talk about product management. Kevan, thank you.
Kevan Savage: Thank you John. Thank you all for listening in.
