Joe Sullivan’s Post

After one whole year in the making, we're SUPER excited to finally unveil Industrial Marketing Collective. Here's the scoop... For years we've heard first hand from one industrial marketer after another that they often feel isolated in their job roles. B2B manufacturers tend to be sales-driven organizations with small marketing teams (if there's a marketing team at all!). It's a tough job. And often, there's no one to lean on for advice or ideas. So... In 2020, bit by bit, we started building a community that brings together manufacturing professionals with "marketing" in their respective jobs titles. We've been hosting live events for this group twice per month for more than three years, and alongside those events we've been facilitating an active forum for industrial marketers on Slack. But we weren't stopping there! Last week, we officially launched Industrial Marketing Collective – a true digital community platform to pull it all together. And we've layered a heck of a lot more on top of everything we've already been doing. Here's what's included at no cost for everyone who registers: ✅ Industrial Marketing Live Our twice/month live event series where 50-100 manufacturing marketers show up regularly ✅ Slack Group A highly engaged forum of 200+ manufacturing marketing professionals who are regularly facilitating discussions and collaborating with each other to solve marketing challenges, strategize and flesh out ideas ✅ Weekly Email Digest A weekly email roundup of discussions and other activity from inside this community We've also created a Pro membership (at $99/month or $999/year, starting with a free seven-day trial) that opens up access to the following: ✅ Comprehensive Training Course Over 10 hours of meticulously constructed video training content (57 videos across 11 lessons), organized into a course titled "Building and Scaling a Revenue-Focused Industrial Marketing Program" ✅ Office Hours Weekly ask-me-anything sessions with members of our industrial marketing team ✅ Tools & Templates The exact set of templates, playbooks, calculators and tools we use for our manufacturing clients ✅ Mini Lessons & Expert Advice An ever-expanding library of tactically-driven content, focused on topics that include positioning and messaging, creating video content, developing case studies, managing ad campaigns in LinkedIn, Facebook and Google, measuring and reporting and lots more If you’re a B2B marketer in manufacturing, this community was made for YOU. Consider getting in there to at least see what we're doing. Or if someone else inside your company is the one responsible for marketing, I encourage you to pass this along! Find a link to the website in the comments. You can request access there. #industrialmarketing #manufacturing

Just shy of four years ago, I made the decision to launch a podcast. And since that day, for 200 consecutive weeks without missing a single Tuesday morning, I've published interviews with manufacturing leaders (and professionals influencing manufacturing leaders) about the things that matter most to them. In this milestone episode, I've compiled sound bites from 21 of those 200 episodes (and referenced many others as well). I've organized what I've heard and summarized what I've learned around seven central themes. They are: 1. Supply chain 2. Labor 3. The next generation 4. Automation 5. Digitization and industry 4.0 6. Sustainability 7. Leadership I wanted to say THANK YOU to all of you who have been loyal fans and supporters of this show as it's grown from obscurity to well over 1000 weekly listeners. These first 200 episodes have been an incredibly rewarding body of work to have produced. And I have no intention of stopping anytime soon! In the comments, you'll find a link to the episode, titled "7 Central Themes from 200 Episodes of The Manufacturing Executive", along with the leaders I've referenced (or whose sound bites are sampled). #manufacturing #leadership

"People don't go to LinkedIn to buy CapEx equipment, so why would we run LinkedIn ads?" "Our manufacturing audience isn't on Facebook." "Influencer marketing? Isn't that for B2C?" These comments (that I hear all the time) have one thing in common: Business leaders dismissing a platform, channel, strategy or tactic because it doesn't SOUND right. So what do they do instead? 💰 Keep spamming "leads" from Zoominfo who have no buying intent 💰 Keep shipping equipment the size of my house to trade shows that produce a handful of business cards 💰 Keep running print ads in trade journals that collect dust on coffee tables It's time to change direction. Your prospects are out there in the digital space consuming information every day and you have tools at your fingertips that let you: 👉 Target them by job title, company, geography, industry group membership, interests, etc 👉 Deliver messaging that speaks directly to the issues they have right now and goals they're trying to achieve right now 👉 Establish awareness for your brand and earn their trust long before they even experience one of those issues or realize one of those goals matters to them 👉 Change their perspective entirely about how something can or should be done 👉 Give your sales team leads that are ready to close because all of the above have already happened! The B2B buying process has completely changed over the past decade. Let's stop resisting it and get smarter about how we go to market. #industrialmarketing #b2bsales #demandgeneration

"If I had a runny nose and didn't know what a tissue was, what would I search for?" I just wrapped up a podcast recording this afternoon with Curt Anderson that'll go live in a few weeks and I LOVED that quote. Curt's point: Your customers care about the problems they're trying to solve and the things they're trying to achieve. So instead of using your marketing communications as an information dump about your product's features and benefits, craft your messaging in the context of what matters to THEM: ⚙️ How can you help them reduce downtime? ⚙️ Or optimize throughput? ⚙️ Or improve safety? ⚙️ Or reduce defects? ⚙️ (Or stop their runny nose?) Bravo, Curt. Can't wait until your episode goes live! #industrialmarketing #contentstrategy #marketingstrategy

There's nothing worst than making a big technology investment, just to learn you're not equipped to deploy it. From the many conversations I've had with leaders in the robotics space, this is one of the fears that seems to hold back manufacturers from getting started with automation. What if the robot crashes? What if the system gets stuck? Once my integrator walks out the door, will my people have the skills and documentation to run it? In episode of The Manufacturing Executive Podcast, Malachi Greb, Founder and CEO of Elite Automation , talks about what you need to look for in an integrator so that you'll hit the ground running – with the support your need and without the in-house expert robotics expert that frankly, most manufacturers simply don't have. Find a link to the full conversation in the comments. #automation #robotics #manufacturing

"We can't list pricing on our website. Our products are custom-engineered and cost $100K+." 💰 💰 💰 I'll challenge you on that... No matter what you sell – whether it's a commodity or a big ticket, custom, complex solution, your prospects STILL care about the price. Price sensitivity will vary – I get it. But they still care. So here are some ways to talk about pricing without physically listing $159,999.99. 1. Give a range: If your product usually costs between $50K and $150K, set those expectations. You'll weed out price shoppers who will just waste your sales team's time. And you'll further qualify those who can actually afford your solution. 2. Explain the differences between the $50K and $150 version: Your answers to pricing questions probably often start with "Well, it depends." So explain what changes as your buyer spends more. 3. Compare to the alternative: How's your solution different from what your prospect is used to? When will he or she see a positive ROI? What's the total cost of ownership (TCO)? Maybe they'll pay 50% more for your product now, but it'll last 10 years longer than your competitor's. Let's stop beating around the bush and make it easy for our buyers to buy. Want to see how we do it at our agency? Find a link to our "Process & Pricing" page in the comments. #manufacturing #industrialmarketing #pricing

Reality check for today's business owners, CEOs, sales professionals and marketers: People buy on THEIR terms and timelines. Not ours. We can't control the buyer's journey. But we CAN help them through it. Meet your audience where they are. Be their best resource. Engender confidence in your expertise. And trust that if you do all of this better than your competition, they'll come to you when they're ready. #industrialmarketing #inboundmarketing #b2bsales

Back in 2009, when Jon Franko and I hired our first employee, we decided every hire needed to be better than us at SOMETHING. One by one, we took of our hats and relinquished a little more control. But not being the expert on everything didn't mean we couldn't be effective business leaders. It meant we needed to lead, while TRUSTING the people we hired to do their jobs. In this conversation on The Manufacturing Executive Podcast, Tom Brown dives into the topic of how to lead when YOU are not the resident expert. Find a link to the full episode, titled "Three Pillars of Impact for Manufacturing Leaders" in the comments. #manufacturing #leadership

"Vanity metrics." I hate that term. It's a sign of black-and-white thinking around the way you measure marketing impact. Here's what I mean... I often see two extreme schools of thought about how to measure marketing success or failure: 1. ONLY measuring things like impressions, search rankings, traffic and leads 2. ONLY measuring revenue impact Let's start with number one. Many organizations simply don't know HOW to measure the impact of marketing all the way through the funnel. Either their respective teams aren't skilled up to do so, they don't have true CRMs, their sales teams don't feed the right inputs into the CRMs or some barrier (like a dealer/distributor network) is shielding visibility from the end customer. In any of these cases, marketers will typically lean on metrics like rankings in Google, website traffic and leads generated to gauge marketing "success". Now let's talk about the opposite extreme. With the second school of thought (only measuring revenue impact), you have business leaders declaring that impressions, search rankings, traffic and leads are "vanity metrics" and that directly attributable revenue from marketing is the ONLY thing that matters. Both mindsets are flawed. Ultimately, yes, marketing's job in a B2B environment is to drive pipeline that translates to booked revenue. But... Many of the RIGHT decisions simply won't impact revenue until well down the road. And even in many of those cases, you'll struggle to draw a clear, straight line between activity and revenue. And for these reasons, you NEED signals. Here are a few examples: 👉 If you're targeting 50,000 plant engineers in X, Y and Z industries in North America, are you successfully reaching 3% of them or 20% of them with your content? 👉 If you're distributing a two-minute video of one of your technical experts breaking down two ways to approach a common problem your typical customer experiences, are those individuals staying engaged for 90+ seconds or dropping off after 10 seconds? 👉 If you're driving visitors back to a product landing page on your website, are they spending 5 seconds there and bouncing? Or are they consistently scrolling below the fold, spending minutes consuming the information and filling out the RFQ or "Schedule a Consultation" or "Request a Demo" form at an acceptable rate? These are NOT vanity metrics. They're active and meaningful signals that the things you're doing are reaching (and resonating with) the people you need to influence. You'll use all of these signals to drive continuous improvement so you ultimately stay on the path to the business outcomes that matters. When you watch these signals continue to move in the right direction, for most of you, so will revenue impact. #b2bmarketing #industrialmarketing

As episode 200 of The Manufacturing Executive Podcast approaches this spring, I wanted to answer a couple questions I often get: Q) "Wait, you guys have THREE different podcasts? A) Yep! Q) "Why?!" A) Here's the story... Back in spring of 2020, we launched our first show at Gorilla 76 (The Manufacturing Executive) as a resource for, well, manufacturing executives (Owners, Presidents, CEOs, COOs, CFOs, fill-in-the-blank-Os). We set out to cover a wide range of topics that matter to the people in those manufacturing leadership roles, covering everything from industry 4.0 technology to business development to supply chain challenges to labor to automation and robotics. The format of this podcast has always been interview-based (me putting the spotlight on others and letting them share THEIR insights and experiences). As listenership grew from tens to hundreds to well over a thousand every week, we decided to double down on the podcasting medium and we launched The Manufacturing Marketer. Instead of targeting executives, show number two has focused on educating those in marketing roles from the the same types of B2B manufacturing organizations. For 72 straight weeks, our team of strategists, writers and creatives has been sharing our own strategic and tactical knowledge to help industrial marketers help their own companies grow. Finally, about a year ago, my business partner Jon Franko (who leads the people side of our business at Gorilla), leaned into the biggest challenge we've observed across B2B manufacturing over the past few years – labor. Jon launched The Manufacturing Employer podcast for the hiring managers, HR pros and culture builders at industrial companies. So there you have it: Three different types of B2B manufacturing job roles, one podcast designed specifically for each audience. If you or someone at your company might find any of these three shows valuable, I encourage you to take a listen or pass one of them along. And for those of you already listening, we certainly appreciate your support. I've linked to all three shows in the comments. Finally, if you have any interest in leveraging one of our shows for sponsorship opportunities to reach one of those three audiences, please drop me a note. We have many options! #manufacturing #industrialmarketing