Latest / Sales Pipeline Radio / The Broken Contact Form Nobody Fixed: A Lesson in Manufacturing Marketing

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The Broken Contact Form Nobody Fixed: A Lesson in Manufacturing Marketing · Sales Pipeline Radio

• 0:16
  Matt Heinz: All right, we are back live on the show floor at
• 0:19
  Forrester B2B Summit here at the marketplace next to the Big Boot.
• 0:22
  Rob, the Big Boot we continue to make stories up of.
• 0:26
  There was a rumor that it was here before the conference center, and they
• 0:30
  built the conference center around it.
• 0:31
  It's an ancient boot.
• 0:32
  Rob Woods: I'm waiting for something to pop out, like a John Wayne impersonator
• 0:35
  — Matt Heinz: like a rabbit coming out of a hat.
• 0:36
  Rob Woods: At a recent Vegas conference, our company had a trade
• 0:41
  show, there was a Michael Jackson impersonator walking around, and I kid
• 0:46
  you not, it looked just like Michael Jackson, and he would never smile.
• 0:49
  He never broke character.
• 0:50
  So I'm hoping John Wayne might pop out of there.
• 0:53
  Matt Heinz: That would be — the only thing better than that would
• 0:54
  be, like, someone with a saxophone.
• 0:55
  Rob Woods: Oh, that would be cool.
• 0:56
  Matt Heinz: And they should just be playing — during the reception
• 0:58
  later, they should have music, and then at the appropriate time, live
• 1:01
  saxophone out of the Big Boot.
• 1:03
  That'd be great.
• 1:04
  Rob Woods: That would be cool.
• 1:04
  Matt Heinz: All right, if Forrester, if you're listening next year,
• 1:06
  there's always an opportunity to raise the game with the Big Boot.
• 1:10
  Joining us on this episode of Sales Pipeline Radio on the show floor here
• 1:13
  at Forrester, Rob Woods, chief marketing officer of Jensen Infrastructure now.
• 1:17
  We're gonna talk about the brand change here in a minute.
• 1:21
  There's so many areas we can go on this.
• 1:23
  I would say
• 1:26
  — if I had to sort of put into a breakout session at this conference — someone with
• 1:31
  roots in semiconductor MarTech that cur—
• 1:36
  Rob Woods: Which, by the way, have you seen their stock in the last two weeks?
• 1:39
  Matt Heinz: Good?
• 1:40
  Rob Woods: Unbelievable.
• 1:41
  Matt Heinz: Yeah, despite supply chain, Intel — issues.
• 1:43
  It's amazing.
• 1:44
  Rob Woods: Yeah.
• 1:45
  Matt Heinz: So you've got semiconductor MarTech experience combined with
• 1:48
  concrete product manufacturing.
• 1:51
  I would venture to say you're a one in one.
• 1:54
  Rob Woods: One in a million.
• 1:55
  Matt Heinz: One in a million — well, that's too small.
• 1:56
  That's what my—
• 1:57
  Rob Woods: —mom would tell me.
• 1:58
  Matt Heinz: Well, they broke the mold, Rob, when they made… I mean,
• 2:02
  there's a lot of directions you can go.
• 2:03
  How does an Intel marketing executive end up in manufacturing?
• 2:08
  Rob Woods: Yeah, it's a good question.
• 2:12
  Similar to you, a lot of my background is not just MarTech, it's actually
• 2:16
  rooted in what used to be called demand gen — Eloqua, Salesforce, the
• 2:24
  early days of actually doing nurture.
• 2:27
  The job before Intel, I worked at another manufacturing company
• 2:30
  that made eyewash stations—
• 2:32
  —of all things.
• 2:34
  And it was around that time that I kinda got the love and chops for
• 2:40
  how I can leverage technology to really grow a business in a way
• 2:45
  that they'd never seen before.
• 2:46
  That was a 100-year-old company, never had used Salesforce before.
• 2:51
  And I really started loving the data side of marketing, as well as the ability to
• 2:57
  use that to provide content just in time to when a buyer needs to hear about it.
• 3:03
  So, at Intel, that was really my main focus — focusing on demand response,
• 3:09
  so not just standing up platforms, but standing up the people to follow up.
• 3:15
  One of the craziest stories at Intel — when I got there back in, like, 2016,
• 3:23
  2017, I had learned from the grapevine that the contact sales form on intel.com
• 3:29
  had not been working for years.
• 3:32
  Matt Heinz: For years?
• 3:33
  Rob Woods: Wow — so it was there.
• 3:34
  Matt Heinz: Okay.
• 3:34
  Rob Woods: And nobody was caring about it.
• 3:38
  Matt Heinz: Wow.
• 3:38
  Rob Woods: And so I raised the white flag and said, "Hey, CMO,
• 3:42
  this form literally goes nowhere.
• 3:45
  There's no process, there's no people, there's nothing behind it." So, literally
• 3:49
  12 months of advocating with the different leaders of the regions, and eventually
• 3:54
  the CMO — I think I got, like, a million bucks to stand up a demand response
• 3:59
  team, managed that team globally, got Eloqua and Salesforce connected.
• 4:04
  Like, step one of any nurture, any lifecycle marketing, is
• 4:09
  getting the plumbing set up.
• 4:11
  So I care deeply about the plumbing side of it.
• 4:15
  Fast-forward to Jensen — I knew the founder's son for probably about 10
• 4:22
  years, so it wasn't kind of a fluke thing.
• 4:25
  Back at that first job, ironically, he was at a SiriusDecisions conference.
• 4:30
  I ran into him, and we started talking about how I'm using Eloqua to automate
• 4:35
  quote follow-up and opportunity follow-up.
• 4:37
  He's like, "You're doing what?" And I'm like, "Yeah, I'm getting about
• 4:41
  10 to 20% conversion rates on—"
• 4:43
  Matt Heinz: Wow.
• 4:43
  Rob Woods: "—on free. This is like free 99." So that's how I kinda got
• 4:48
  into the conversation with our founder.
• 4:51
  They were looking for somebody who'd head up marketing — they'd never
• 4:54
  had a head of marketing before, and that's how I kinda got there today.
• 4:57
  So some of the first things I've actually done at Jensen is similar to Intel.
• 5:03
  We had a situation on the website where the form went to
• 5:07
  a Trello board set up by IT.
• 5:11
  And I started asking questions — I said, "Who has access to this Trello
• 5:16
  board? And how many salespeople are actually following up with people?" And
• 5:21
  to put it into kinda quantity terms, we're talking about 300 to 400 MQLs a
• 5:27
  month — real people raising their hand.
• 5:30
  Matt Heinz: Actual MQLs?
• 5:33
  Rob Woods: MQLs.
• 5:33
  Again, I raised the fire drill on this.
• 5:36
  I got alignment with the CEO and the head of sales and said, "This is
• 5:39
  not working — we've gotta get basic marketing automation set up, we need
• 5:43
  basic Salesforce, we need a couple SDRs." And for the leads we were tracking,
• 5:50
  we got them down from, like, 14 days down to about an hour now, first touch.
• 5:55
  So that's been really a lot of my background — focused on the plumbing,
• 6:01
  the technology side of marketing, and I also love the creative
• 6:04
  side, and we can talk about the rebrand here in a minute, if you—
• 6:07
  Matt Heinz: Yeah, no, we'll definitely get into that.
• 6:08
  I love that in both of those scenarios — very different markets — the commonality
• 6:14
  of getting the foundations right, right?
• 6:16
  Which is the plumbing of how the operations works.
• 6:19
  Rob Woods: Yeah.
• 6:19
  Matt Heinz: It's also who are we selling to, why are we selling to
• 6:22
  this subset of the market, who are the people we need to be talking to.
• 6:25
  You mentioned, just in the first half day of this conference, you
• 6:28
  met some folks here that are sort of not in concrete manufacturing—
• 6:32
  Rob Woods: Precast concrete—
• 6:34
  Matt Heinz: —manufacturing, precast concrete.
• 6:35
  Rob Woods: Yeah.
• 6:36
  Matt Heinz: But, you know what I mean — we're increasingly seeing
• 6:38
  more work from manufacturing, from industrial companies, that it's quite
• 6:43
  refreshing to see them lean into a more modern marketing approach.
• 6:46
  Rob Woods: Yeah.
• 6:46
  Matt Heinz: Right?
• 6:46
  Where it's not just a sales-driven — you know, culture — and marketing
• 6:50
  just as arts and crafts and pretty decks, but really creating that
• 6:53
  infrastructure to drive sustainable, predictable growth in a modern way.
• 6:58
  Rob Woods: Yeah.
• 6:59
  So earlier today at the Sirius conf— Forrester conference—
• 7:03
  Matt Heinz: Ooh.
• 7:04
  Oh, Freudian slip.
• 7:06
  Rob Woods: I was talking to Matt earlier.
• 7:07
  I met a guy who is in a similar world to me, in that he is trying to
• 7:15
  really get these older manufacturing companies up to a kind of modern
• 7:20
  marketing type of approach.
• 7:22
  And what's kind of the macro lens of America right now, which is really
• 7:27
  interesting, is you're starting to see a lot of these founder-led, older
• 7:32
  baby boomer GM and owner-type folks retiring out of their manufacturing
• 7:39
  companies or their precast concrete companies, with really nobody to come in.
• 7:45
  So what you're starting to see is a lot of private equity groups starting to swoop
• 7:49
  in and try to deal with these companies.
• 7:53
  And Jensen wasn't as bad as that, but it's a similar type of situation,
• 7:57
  where a lot of times these companies are focused on manufacturing and
• 8:01
  engineering with no real revenue process, no commercial sales system in place.
• 8:08
  It's, "Oh yeah, I know Joe, I went golfing with him last week," or, "Hey,
• 8:12
  what's your forecast next month or next quarter or next year?" It's like,
• 8:16
  "Well, do the same we did last year" — there's no rhyme or reason behind it.
• 8:21
  And so there is ripe opportunity to really drive some frameworks around
• 8:26
  lifecycle stages, project stages, opportunity stages, and really, with a
• 8:31
  foundational backbone in data — which is something my company still struggles with.
• 8:36
  I was mentioning to this gentleman earlier — we were talking about
• 8:42
  accounts and account data.
• 8:44
  Matt Heinz: Yeah.
• 8:44
  Rob Woods: And I was lamenting to him that our current situation is,
• 8:49
  when I ask the sales team, "Can I see your target account list for next
• 8:51
  year?" I get, like, seven Excel files, some Post-it notes put on my desk.
• 8:57
  If I go into Salesforce, it's all over the place — they have random account
• 9:03
  tiers, like unicorn, starfish, rainbow, so nobody really knows what these things are.
• 9:09
  And it's a challenge, you know?
• 9:13
  The data side of this — we haven't talked about AI yet, but for me, in my role, to
• 9:18
  do AI effectively, it still goes back to the foundation of what even 10 years ago
• 9:24
  Eloqua and Salesforce were pushing, which is clean contact, account, opportunity
• 9:30
  data — that's still fundamental.
• 9:32
  It's still fundamental to understand how are we winning, how are we losing.
• 9:37
  I was in another session 10 minutes ago about win-loss analysis — that's
• 9:40
  something we're also trying to operationalize at Jensen.
• 9:45
  And guess what — I have roughly 80% of my opportunities are still
• 9:51
  marked open, and they're a month past close date, two months past close
• 9:56
  date, three months past close date.
• 9:58
  And so we're trying to do win-loss, which is like step two, when in fact
• 10:04
  step one is like, "Hey, sales team, start marking your opportunities as
• 10:07
  closed loss, closed won." It would greatly help what we're trying to do.
• 10:12
  Matt Heinz: Talking on the — or the Forrester — I'm not
• 10:14
  gonna say SiriusDecisions.
• 10:14
  Rob Woods: Don't say that.
• 10:14
  Matt Heinz: The Forrester Salesfor— Dreamforce.
• 10:14
  Where are—
• 10:14
  Rob Woods: —we?
• 10:14
  It's seriously a
• 10:18
  great Forrester conference.
• 10:20
  Matt Heinz: What day is it?
• 10:20
  It is the Forrester B2B Summit.
• 10:22
  We are here live.
• 10:23
  Rob Woods: Careful with your word—
• 10:23
  Matt Heinz: —decisions.
• 10:24
  I am.
• 10:25
  Gosh.
• 10:26
  Ah, good thing this is a live show.
• 10:27
  So the Forrester B2B Summit here on the marketplace floor — I can
• 10:32
  talk right next to this big boot.
• 10:34
  Talking to Rob Woods, he's the CMO at Jensen Infrastructure.
• 10:38
  I mean, it's easy to tell stories about how certain industries are behind,
• 10:44
  from a sales and marketing perspective.
• 10:46
  I remember not too long ago working with an oil spill containment products
• 10:50
  company, and the head of sales says, "I've got a great nurture list." And
• 10:54
  I said, "Show it to me." He went back to his office, brought a shoebox.
• 10:56
  A shoebox, Rob.
• 10:58
  And I don't think that was in the CRM — I'd be willing to bet.
• 11:02
  So it's easy to do that, but now that you've been in this space, there's
• 11:06
  something we can all learn — I mean, you're not at a failing company,
• 11:08
  you're at a very successful, profitable, growing company.
• 11:12
  What could we and should we be learning — not just go-to-market, sales and marketing
• 11:16
  — what makes a successful manufacturing company work that we should emulate?
• 11:20
  Rob Woods: Yeah.
• 11:21
  So I won't say it's priority order, but number one is your brand.
• 11:31
  So in our space
• 11:36
  — brand equity, or NPS, really what people think about you — it's
• 11:42
  not really a well-known topic.
• 11:45
  We talk about brand in consumer products — Intel is a great brand.
• 11:50
  I learned from — two jobs ago I had a mentor who was the
• 11:54
  head of brand at GM and Toyota.
• 11:56
  So brand was something that was educated in me early on,
• 12:00
  and I became a believer in it.
• 12:04
  What has been working at Jensen is we actually underwent a significant
• 12:10
  rebrand over the last couple years.
• 12:12
  So we initially were called Jensen Precast.
• 12:14
  And the word "precast," for those who don't know, it's a way in which you
• 12:19
  manufacture large concrete products.
• 12:23
  So think about a concrete culvert that goes under a bridge, or underground you
• 12:29
  might have a big utility box where a bunch of wires come in — we're talking about
• 12:33
  8-by-16-foot monstrosities, big things.
• 12:38
  It's a type of manufacturing technique, like knitting or welding.
• 12:43
  So, number one, we had a word in our name which wasn't really depicting who
• 12:49
  we were as a company — that's how we make a lot of our stuff, but we also
• 12:55
  have a metal department, we also work with fiberglass, we also work with
• 12:58
  plastic — those are all materials.
• 13:00
  At the end of the day, what are we here to do?
• 13:03
  What are we trying to service?
• 13:05
  We're trying to build up America's infrastructure,
• 13:08
  which is a much bigger deal.
• 13:09
  When we think of the word "infrastructure," people instantly
• 13:12
  and clearly think, "Oh, okay, I think I know more what this brand
• 13:17
  is focused on." So we've seen some pretty big impact as we've rebranded.
• 13:22
  So it wasn't just new logos and new colors — I think that's been helpful,
• 13:28
  but it's really been a different way in which we have, both from an outbound
• 13:34
  perspective, talked about the company.
• 13:36
  So we're not just this precast products company — we do
• 13:40
  completely custom solutions.
• 13:41
  As a matter of fact, more than half of our revenue comes from custom work,
• 13:48
  which is not the standardized stuff.
• 13:51
  When I would walk out at trade shows — I like to be at the trade shows and just
• 13:55
  talking to customers a lot — and engaging, like, "What do you think about the brand?
• 14:00
  Do you know what we sell? Do you know what our solutions are?" What hurt my heart
• 14:05
  more often than not is people did not know the stuff that we went beyond precast.
• 14:11
  And shame on marketing, but that also is a huge opportunity, right?
• 14:15
  Anything you see as a problem is an opportunity in disguise.
• 14:17
  So some of the things that worked really well for us — number one, really assessing
• 14:24
  your website and, you mentioned earlier, understanding your target market.
• 14:29
  So in our case, we kind of have two number-one target markets:
• 14:34
  it's engineers and contractors.
• 14:36
  And we've done a great job with contractors forever.
• 14:41
  You had mentioned your dad's Caterpillar — in the construction
• 14:44
  industry, it's all relationships, so that contractor world we know well,
• 14:50
  we work with these guys really well.
• 14:52
  Engineers, not so much.
• 14:54
  Matt Heinz: Hmm.
• 14:55
  Rob Woods: Yeah, that's a new thing for us.
• 14:56
  So what does the engineer expect when they hit our website?
• 14:59
  Do they know what we have, what the art of what's possible is?
• 15:02
  So we've had to really reimagine our messaging, reimagine even our tactic mix.
• 15:09
  So this year in particular — and we've used a lot of AI to do
• 15:13
  this — but I've built kind
• 15:18
  of an operating system, quote-unquote, for projects and case studies.
• 15:22
  This is something engineers and contractors eat up all the time.
• 15:27
  Before this was in place, like last year, we would bust out
• 15:30
  maybe one every couple months.
• 15:32
  This year we're on track to do one a week.
• 15:34
  So that's been really helpful at driving — I think we're up, like, 550% on our
• 15:41
  website just from that type of traffic.
• 15:44
  And so for us, brand is not TV commercials — it really is driving home
• 15:50
  all of the elements of really a case study: "Hey, come work with us," the
• 15:54
  art of what's possible, showing them.
• 15:56
  Engineers love to see the type of stuff that's possible.
• 15:59
  Matt Heinz: Well, and I love that difference between
• 16:00
  precast and infrastructure.
• 16:02
  Precast is something you do, and then — you said infrastructure, but
• 16:05
  you said America's infrastructure, and that, you can start to tell such
• 16:09
  a visceral story when you talk about, hey, we've built some of the greatest
• 16:15
  infrastructure in the world, but some of it's deteriorating, and we can be one
• 16:19
  of the heroes to help solve for that.
• 16:21
  Got just a few more minutes here with Rob — I wanted to talk about the
• 16:24
  culture change and change management side of everything you've done.
• 16:26
  This is an almost 60-year-old company, and I don't care what industry you're in, but
• 16:30
  if you've been around for a while — you mentioned the owner's son — when you've
• 16:33
  been around for a while, when it's a family business, change is hard, right?
• 16:38
  And sometimes there could be sacred cows, even if it's obvious to everyone
• 16:42
  else that, "This name, this brand needs an upgrade." What were some
• 16:46
  of the best practices for you to successfully navigate that brand change?
• 16:50
  Rob Woods: So our company has roughly 14 unique plants — from Missouri westward.
• 17:00
  And each of those plants has a GM with a P&L — little fiefdoms.
• 17:05
  So I work at corporate, and one of the biggest challenges that I've had to
• 17:12
  work with is, within that space, really sitting with the different plants and
• 17:20
  the GMs to better understand what are their challenges, what are their needs,
• 17:24
  and how can we come alongside them.
• 17:28
  It's a very careful balance of tops-down, bottoms-up, situation with these guys.
• 17:34
  Because on the one hand, corporate marketing is at corporate — there's
• 17:37
  no field marketing, so I own all the brand, all the marketing.
• 17:42
  But at the same time, these guys have their plants to run,
• 17:45
  they have their P&Ls to run.
• 17:47
  So it really is, number one, sitting with these guys, better understanding
• 17:50
  their needs, their challenges.
• 17:53
  And really, I would start with partnering with the ones that actually
• 17:58
  have energy to support you, because I think you'll have early adopters,
• 18:04
  folks that actually wanna lean in.
• 18:06
  So one of the challenges we have right now is actually getting sales
• 18:10
  to use Salesforce, to update it, to make status updates with their leads.
• 18:16
  But it's not all the sales team, it's just specific teams — so I
• 18:20
  need to focus my energy on the ones that actually want to lean in.
• 18:24
  Another one is very crisp alignment with my boss, the CEO, and the rest of the ELT
• 18:32
  — making sure that marketing's strategic goals line up with the business goals.
• 18:37
  If we're off doing our own thing, if we're focused on stuff that
• 18:41
  doesn't matter, that's not helpful.
• 18:44
  One of the ways in which we've done that — and I shared with you
• 18:47
  earlier — is really being effective at storytelling to these guys.
• 18:52
  So, know your audience.
• 18:55
  In my case, I've got basically four engineers, and when you talk to engineers
• 18:59
  as a marketing and sales guy, the arts and the creative, fluffy side,
• 19:05
  we can't bring up — we bring up the systematic architecture, like, "This
• 19:09
  is the way it's gotta be" sort of way.
• 19:12
  I actually used a tool called Lovable earlier this year to help
• 19:15
  communicate our new go-to-market strategy that we're proposing for the
• 19:19
  year, and that went over really well.
• 19:22
  Really, really well,
• 19:24
  Matt Heinz: I bet.
• 19:24
  Rob Woods: As a matter of fact, the CEO was, like, enthralled
• 19:26
  with just the platform.
• 19:27
  He's like, "What is this thing?" But it was really cool, because we gave him
• 19:31
  a login — we said, "Hey, we're gonna give you your own instance of this,
• 19:35
  you can mark it up, you can comment on it." So, as good a storyteller as you
• 19:39
  are to your customers, you have to be to your colleagues and to your CEO.
• 19:44
  Matt Heinz: Absolutely.
• 19:45
  I've heard some people refer to that, too, as the marketing of the marketing — that
• 19:48
  we don't always do a very good job of storytelling inside our own organizations.
• 19:51
  And too often we talk about what we're spending versus what we're buying, right?
• 19:58
  And that's in our budgets as well as just how we're spending our time and effort
• 20:01
  to drive value to the organization.
• 20:03
  Well, Rob, I know how serious you are about marketing, and I appreciate
• 20:06
  you making the decision to join us here on Sales Pipeline Radio.
• 20:09
  Rob Woods: Wow.
• 20:10
  Matt Heinz: Yeah, I've been workshopping that in my head while you've been—
• 20:14
  Rob Woods: That's really good—
• 20:14
  Matt Heinz: —answering the last question.
• 20:14
  Thanks again for joining us by the Big Boot, man.
• 20:16
  Rob Woods: Yeah, appreciate it.
• 20:16
  Matt Heinz: All right, we'll see you.