Curt Anderson  00:00

Right? Damon, good morning. Good morning to you. Good afternoon. Everybody else. How are you? I’m doing great and ready to go. Curt, alright, let’s rock and roll. So hey, we’re, we’re talking men, dude, like, you know, I get a little, I get a little choked up when I introduce this one person, you know, not just you, Damon, but you know, the other person is dangerous, right? So and, and I’m getting double choked up because Matthew’s here today, but Kris Harrington’s in the house. Kris, happy Monday. How are you?

Kristina Harrington  00:27

Oh, it’s always so good to be with you guys. Thanks for having me again on the show. It’s so great to be here with both of you and Matthew, and this is going to be fun,

Curt Anderson  00:36

man, I don’t like David. We gotta talk to Kris because, like, she needs to be a better judge of character coming on the show, as much as you know. Alright, so we need to work on that. So Matthew shanela is in the house. Matthew, how are you? Dude? What’s going on? I’m doing good.

Matthew Sciannella  00:50

Curt, thanks so much for having me on. I’m excited to dish a little. I know we’re like previewing our Industrial Marketing Summit panel. So I’m excited to go to do this. I talk about creating a friction, free buying experience all the time with clients. So definitely a well, a well worn path for me. So

Curt Anderson  01:11

that is awesome. And hey, we’ve got, hey, let’s do, let’s do a little musical chairs. How about, you know, I’m going to, I’m throwing Kris in the middle. We got Nelson in the house. We got Matthew here, Damon. We got the whole the whole gang is here. Nice, happy Monday. How are you

Nelson Bruton  01:24

doing? Hey, doing outstanding. Happy Monday. Happy

Curt Anderson  01:26

Monday. Alright, so let’s go around the horn. Kris, you’ve been on the show a few times. You know the routine, right? So I’m going to ask a question. You know what? I’m going to play Jeopardy, Kris, I’m going to play a little Jeopardy. So I’m going to give the answer. And so then, okay, so if I say grandma Milwaukee and grandma to the north. What question? So? What so, so, and I’m going to come to Matthew because Matthew Nelson, if I say Nelson Bruton the third, because you’re the fourth. But if I say the answer is Nelson Breton the third. Do you know what the question is?

Nelson Bruton  01:59

No, you know what the question is, right?

Curt Anderson  02:03

I know what it is. So, Matthew, I’m coming after the question. I’ve already, I’ve already asked these guys, Kris, what is it? Who

Kristina Harrington  02:10

are your favorite people, or your who’s your favorite person

Curt Anderson  02:14

when you’re a little Matthew, when you’re a little guy growing up, little guy growing up. Who was your hero? Who did you look up to when I’ve asked Chris Harrington that it is grandma Milwaukee and grandma to the north? When I asked Nelson Bruton the fourth, he said it was Nelson Breton the third. So Matthew, my question to you is, when you’re a little guy growing up, who was your hero? It

Matthew Sciannella  02:36

was my great grandmother. Antoinette, Sarah, great grandmother. Great Grandmother. Yeah, she lived until I was 21 years old. Wow, wow. 96 so that that’s my hero, the kindest, nicest person, the first generation of my family to immigrate to the US from Italy. That’s my favorite. Very cool.

02:57

Alright, dude, you gotta

Curt Anderson  02:59

sign your dying to know give us a little little insight on Antoinette.

Matthew Sciannella  03:02

Oh, well, first off, she goes. She went by eta, by the way, so I’ll call her Etta. So she came from the she came from the she came from Italy, from, which is where, where my family is from, in Italy. And she came, she met my, my great grandfather, who also immigrated from Italy. Armagh. Great grandfather was a prolific musician. He was a trombonist and a baritone player and a conductor for the New Orleans, Indianapolis and eventually National Symphony Orchestra. He actually has a caricature comic of him that was featured in The Washington Post in the early 1970s he did not speak any English until his late teens, and basically was a self taught musician, and that’s how we ended up making a living in the US. My great grandmother was a prolific oil painter. I own about 11 of her paintings in my house. So yeah, those are my two favorite people in the world. They both live till the mid till till their mid 90s. I actually delivered the wrote and delivered the eulogy at my great grandfather’s funeral.

Curt Anderson  04:08

Man Nelson, tell me you’re not ready to shed a tear on that one. Dude, yeah. Awesome. What was, what was your what’s your grandfather’s name? Matthew Armand, alright. Great. Did you So question for you, did you inherit any this creative, artistic, musical?

Matthew Sciannella  04:24

Yeah, I played, I played. I played trombone for for a very long time. Still know my scales. Awesome.

Curt Anderson  04:30

Alright. Well, alright, man, I just, I love that question. Love the answers. Alright, let’s go around the horn. We’re going to do intros so I’ve got Kris Harrington in the house. Guys, happy Monday. Drop us a note. Let us know that you’re out there. Also connect with these wonderful human beings on LinkedIn. Check out their websites. Tons of information going on here. I have the honor and blessing I’m going to share the stage with these, this crew on Friday at the industrial marketing Summit. And we’re going to be talking about frictionless buying experiences. Kris. CEO extraordinary, co founder of Gen Alpha technologies. Give us a little insight. Who is Gen Alpha? How are you making the world a better place?

Kristina Harrington  05:07

Yeah. So we are in E commerce, software provider for equipment, machinery and parts manufacturers and distributors. So very unique niche. We niche down till it hurts, taking Curt Anderson’s advice, and this is the group that we specifically target to support them in reducing their friction with their customers. Love

Curt Anderson  05:34

it, alright, and we’re going to dive deep, Kris. Great background. Again. You repeat a fender on our show. Dear close friend. Can’t wait to be on stage with you this week. Nelson, let’s get you in the party here, my friend coming to us from great State of Florida, share a little bit about manufacturing chats. Who? What is manufacturing? Manufacturing chats, and how are you making the world a better place?

Nelson Bruton  05:53

Absolutely so for the past 20 years, we’ve been working with industrial companies manufacturers and helping them engage their website visitors. We offer a human live chat experience on their websites. You know, if they’re already doing marketing and driving traffic, then you know, it’s all about catering to people’s preferences. And a lot of people nowadays prefer chat as their communication option. So that’s what we’ve been doing for 20 years, and can’t wait to join the stage with you all on Friday and talk more in detail about all this awesome

Curt Anderson  06:24

love it, Matthew, let’s come over to you, my friend. And what a great man. If you guys miss it, you need to go back and catch who his heroes are. Absolutely love that story. Refined labs. Please share with us what is refined labs. How are you and your team making the

Matthew Sciannella  06:37

world a better place? Yeah, so refine Labs is a B to B. Demand gen agency for mid sized SaaS companies, we run mostly a lot of advertising strategies for our clients, but we also do a lot of work around conversion rate optimization, messaging, positioning, helping improve the website experience as well. In order to kind of facilitate the effectiveness of your advertising actually going through a bit of a metamorphosis. As well. As a company, we’re starting to get a little bit more into incrementality testing and things like that with our clients that are more the deep sea space, prior to working four or five labs. Because I’m sure everyone’s wondering, what is this guy doing here, if he works in software? I worked I worked in for my first five years. I worked for six years of my career in construction as a marketing manager, and then for five years for a mid market multinational welding OEM called Ava core benzo or I was a North American Marketing Director, and then where we sold handheld and robotic welding, periphery is also also laser optics, working with a lot of tier one automotive manufacturers as well as heavy equipment industrial we had big clients like for Tesla General Motors, John Deere. We worked with all those guys, significant, very closely. And then after that, I worked for gorilla 76 who’s one of the CO hosts of the industrial marketing Summit. So Joe and John were so kind as to invite me to to the show or to the to the event. And yeah, was their strategy director at gorilla for almost two years before moving on to refine lab. So that’s basically my professional experience there, in a nutshell.

Curt Anderson  08:09

Oh, that’s awesome. And so, so, and you filled in some blanks because I didn’t, I didn’t realize that refined labs that you focus exclusively on SAS companies. Yeah,

Matthew Sciannella  08:17

I do have one client in the medical device space that we work with. So I’m a little bit so I have a couple of one or two class here or there that I do work in hard goods with, but for the most part, it is software. Yes, yep.

Curt Anderson  08:28

And gorilla 76 alumni, so that is absolutely wonderful. So Kris, what you know? Everybody that’s catching us today, they have to come to Austin, right? They have to be there. So we don’t want to give, like, too much away of our secret sauce today. So what we decided Damon as a panel. We’re just going to talk sports. We’re just going to talk about Kris What do you want to talk a little hoops today? I’m just kidding. So let’s we, won’t we again. We won’t give away secret sauce, but I consider you the digital self serve expert extraordinaire. Let’s just kind of scratch the surface a little bit. When you say frictionless, what are some things that you see that people could be doing better or improving on? What are some thoughts here?

Kristina Harrington  09:09

Well, you know, the first thing that comes to mind is a bit of research that McKinsey has done in the past, and that is related to, you know, when buyers buy, they call it the rule of thirds, right? So they want remote interaction, they want self service interaction, and they want in person interaction. And their advice to people is that you need to be doing that in thirds, a third, a third, a third. And, you know, I think that what I found is that most organizations do not look at their buyer journey to uncover where there are challenges. And I think that’s the biggest thing that ends up. Using friction is they simply don’t even step into their their buyers shoes, and which is very easy for us today, because most organizations have a customer service department. They have a technical service department, right? They have sales teams, and these people are having interactions with their customers. And you know, customers want first an online self service option for doing business with companies. That’s That’s a rule of the third so what we’re missing for many organizations today is even having the availability of that channel online. So, you know, just to really, basically summarize McKinsey saying, This is what people want. This is what they’re doing. And we have a big portion of manufacturers and distributors out there who aren’t even offering 1/3 of what the way in which people want to do business. And we all know that the younger buyer has stepped into a role at a significant number. It’s something like more than 60% of all purchasers today in the B to B space are millennials or younger and they are walking around with smartphones, and they are bringing these smartphones into their workplace, and they want an easy way to do business with you. And if, if we’re not using this, you know, if we don’t have good website practices, we don’t have online self service, we’re missing opportunities to either attract new customers or service our customers that we’re doing business with today. So that would just be an overall view of kind of what’s going on, especially in the space that I serve, no

Curt Anderson  11:56

longer a nice to have. It is an absolute must to have. So now, Matthew, I’m going to go out of order because I threw the hero question at you. So I know Damon out, if you knew this, how our batting order for Friday is, we’re going by hair. So we’re going by you know, that’s why I’m the moderator. Yeah, I, you know, I shouldn’t even be on stage, especially, like, Look at Matthew, look at the head of hair and that guy, yeah, all right, so Nelson, I’m good. So we’re going a little out of order today. Nelson, let’s go here again. I don’t want to ruin any secret sauce for Friday. You, I, dude, totally admire you. You are like a fierce networker. Had to honor privilege meeting you in person last year at the IMS. Like, dude, you are, like, all over the place, and you are so passionate about the solution that you deliver. I’m gonna I’m hitting you with this, talk to me as an entrepreneur a little bit what you know, you’re an agency converted into, you know, you brought your you created your own proprietary solution. Talk a little bit like, why are you so passionate about manufacturing chats and the solution that you provide?

Nelson Bruton  12:54

Sure, happy to So, yeah, 22 years ago, we started as a web design firm. Then we added SEO, Pay Per Click, email marketing, you know, all the other digital services to drive traffic to the website. And we learned quickly that, you know, hey, we got to start converting these people at a higher rate that are getting to the website. So we built our live chat infrastructure about 20 years ago, and then we had a nice long run where we were doing kind of a partner program. Of all those solutions companies, we’d be the digital marketing agency on retainer. And about eight years ago, when social media and content creation and content marketing became it went from a nice to have to a necessity. We kind of looked at ourselves and said, you know, we don’t really want to learn a new skill set and add a whole new team of experts to do the content creation, the content strategy, all the video that’s necessary now to really have a robust digital strategy. So instead of expanding our services and becoming a more robust agency, we went the other way. And you know, it really came from, you know, Jim Collins book, Good to Great the hedgehog concept. We asked ourselves, who are our favorite companies, our customers that we like to work with. And the answer over and over was manufacturers, industrial companies, those were our favorite people to work with. And then we said, alright, well, what services do we deliver to them that get the consistent results, that has immediate results, that we have the highest retention rate with in our business, and it was our live chat solution. So we made a decision consciously together, that we’re going to create a new brand called manufacturing chats. We were going to deliver our best service to our best customers and really attack that market. And it was, it was a it was a struggle, it was a pivot, because there was some people on board that weren’t with that. And, you know, a lot of entrepreneurial challenges came along with, you know, making a big shift after, you know, 16, 1516, years. But, you know, looking back now, it was, it was certainly worth it, because we have a more streamlined business. We’re working with all of our favorite types of customers in the manufacturing and industrial space. And, yeah, that’s, that’s the entrepreneurial story about manufacturing chats,

Curt Anderson  14:59

dude. I. I, I tell you, such a gutsy move, man, a lot of sleepless nights or, like, how was that trend? You can you take yourself back? Like, how was that there

Nelson Bruton  15:07

was a couple, a couple years of transition where we had to kind of rebound, build systems in place for the new business. But, you know, two years is kind of a short span in the grand scheme of things. Yeah, yeah. Good for

Curt Anderson  15:19

you. Well, God bless you, man, thank you. Very inspiring. So anybody out there you’re thinking about taking a pivot either with your business and Kris, I’m going to come back to you in a minute, because I want to talk about your corporate career, how you transition as entrepreneurship. Matthew, let’s come your way, my friend, heavy duty, B to B, manufacturing. Why? Why’d you bring your skill set? You could be in health care, you could be in finance. You could be in other industries. Why are you so passionate about the B to B space?

Matthew Sciannella  15:44

Man, I’ve just been so endlessly fascinated about what connects people to products at the end of the day, like Chris was talking a lot about, you know, understanding your buyer’s journey a little bit. And I think one of the things that marketing especially brings to the table in that regard is, like, this incredible amount of curiosity about the people who come and show interest in a company, and figuring out kind of how that happens. Like, I remember one of the first things I did when I worked for the welding company, and I was just so brand new in the B to B space for marketing, and I didn’t know what I didn’t know. And like, within the first two weeks, I surveyed my entire customer list and was like, Hey, why do you guys even buy from us in the first place? Like, I just want to know what, what you value about working with a company like binzel. And I just remember just being floored at some of the responses, figuring out, like, how people found out about us, or what kept them coming back. And, you know, we talk a lot about building a frictionless buying experience. I think a lot of it is understanding, how does your How does your total adjustable market like to buy? And I mean, I think the first way you try to validate that is with is by surveying them and just asking them. They’ll tell you, if you ask them. And then you can kind of build your experience around that, and make and make those adjustments. And it’s a, it’s a fluid and iterative process where you’re always trying to kind of find discovery around that. But I just remember being very fascinated about how what brought people into products. And then I think marketing in a beat in the B to B space is can be a bit of a red headed step child, right? Like, we’re very much kind of a four, like, a four funnel kind of, kind of, kind of business, right? You have sales, you have marketing, you have partnerships, which in the which in manufacturing would include distributors and dealers, and then you have like, events, right? So you have, like, you have these kind of, all these funnels that you sort of look at through it. But in reality, like, marketing should be looking at things from the top line of the business all the way down to the little car bottle land that they’re supposed to own. And so for me, it’s just been this endless learning process of trying to figure out how to do that better, how to look at things through unit economics, conversion rates, like customer position, cost and lifetime value and all those things. And I just, I find myself just endlessly fascinated by it and and consistently trying to make myself uncomfortable, to to kind of reach, reach other levels of my career, my knowledge. Wow. Absolutely

Curt Anderson  18:12

love it. So speaking of the word uncomfortable, Damon, let’s pull Kris back in. So yeah, Kris, let me take you back so you had a illustrious corporate career, I believe, all over the world, and just really crushing it. How did you decide to get so uncomfortable and like, How does somebody go from like this, really, I’m saying cushy, but you could have, like, you could have stayed corporate and had this wonderful career, if I understood correctly. But you take the leap of faith and go into E commerce, which, by E commerce in itself, is creating that frictionless experience. Mm, hmm, what drove you and your team? The founders of Gen Alpha take us through that that your stage kind of like what Nelson just shared when you guys launched Gen Alpha. Yeah,

Kristina Harrington  18:53

I think you know, all of us worked in manufacturing, and we sold equipment and parts and we were in the mining industry. The mining industry is really highly profitable for those miners that are operating large pieces of equipment. So the moment a piece of equipment goes down, it needs to get back up and running, because it can cost hundreds of 1000s of dollars every hour that that machine isn’t operational. So we were always trying to improve our process of how do we meet the needs of our customers prior to that machine ever going down, but also, when that machine goes down, how do we make sure that they’re fully supported, and we get them up and running as quickly as possible. And you know, we had this vision inside our manufacturing organization to utilize digital technologies to make that happen. And this was relatively new, when digital was starting to take off, and you could. A paper catalog into an online catalog, and you can make it easy for customers to identify the right parts, because one of the challenges we had was when a piece of equipment left the factory, the information we gave the customer usually became obsolete or outdated by the time that machine went to work because part numbers change, product upgrades take place. There’s obsolescence, and this is true for many companies, and many parts of you know it doesn’t not just an equipment manufacturer. So how could we make sure that when our customers needed information, it was available to them wherever they happen to be, and that really set us off for trying to come up with that solution. We We understood that E commerce and interactive parts manuals could be the way to go, and we stopped to think about as a founding team, could we solve this problem for more companies than just the company we were working in. And we agreed Yes. So we went to work on building our first pilot of our digital commerce site, which included an interactive parts manual, which is really just repurposing engineering bills of materials, ly 3d drawings, and we made it easy, and that when we got our first customer, we folded into the business and and then the business has been growing since then. So, you know, today we’re owned by private equity, but it was really believing in your solution for solving the problem. And when you when you believe it so strongly that this is, in fact, going to be what customers have been waiting for. You just go after it and you put everything behind it, and that’s what we did.

Damon Pistulka  21:56

Yeah, and your solution, we’ve seen it, and if people haven’t seen it before, they definitely need to go look at a Gen Alpha. Because if you’re making equipment, being able to use the visuals like you do with the actual 3d design data, and drill down like you said, if especially, I have to imagine in the mining industry, when you’re building highly customized equipment for each person, right? Because you’re buying a million dollar or $5 million multi million dollar piece of equipment, you get kind of what you need, or what the options you think, but being able to drill down to that as as a customer in the field, looking at that piece, this is broken, being and coming up with that information and be able to get the the order to the distributor, to the manufacturer, wherever it needed to go to get that piece back, whether it be a media need or or a maintenance kind of, you know, prevent a maintenance kind of thing is so huge, because otherwise they have the book that’s, you know, sometimes multiple books, you know, six inch thick books that they’d have to dive through, and how many people is not effective to do that. It just your solution is so cool, and how it does that. Yeah,

Kristina Harrington  23:08

I appreciate that Damon. And really, it comes down to having product information available for customers, so we solve it in that way. But you know, one of the biggest complaints for customers across any industry, any products that you sell, it’s providing the product information when they need it. And and you know, we can all learn from that, even me, as a software you know, an owner of a software company, I need to be better at ensuring our product information is available for customers to buy. So you can use this. You know, when we’re thinking about solving friction problems, it’s, it’s a good lesson for all

Curt Anderson  23:48

of us. Well, thank you, Kris. I’ll tell anybody out there that’s considering their entrepreneurial journey, if you’re looking for little experience, man like, look at what Kris did, look what Nelson’s done. Just, I just absolutely love that’s why we love doing these interviews, week in, week out, with folks, just for the inspiration. Chris Nelson, let’s I’m going to throw a word at you. I’m going to say the word resistance. When there’s folks that you’re dealing with in manufacturing. I’m not even young guy. I’m a Gen Xer. Say there’s some baby boomers out there. When you encounter folks, do do you find resistance? Or what are some of the pushback that you hear, as far as making a digital transformation, whether, when you had your agency with manufacturing chats, what are some of the common culprits that you find with resistance? Yeah, I

Nelson Bruton  24:30

mean, people are generally resistant to change, right? And, you know, the more mature generation, because they’ve had success for a long time, stacked up decades. In most cases, they’re even more so resistant to change because they’re successful already, but they don’t need to, right? There’s not a driving force in most cases. So just a couple that I run into are, you know, we don’t need to add live chat because people call our phone number or they fill out our form, right? And so from my perspective, I have to educate them on, well, you know, people have preferences. And live chat, you know, with real humans, is a preference that some people have that, guess what? Right now, by not offering that, those people that have that preference, they don’t like to call they don’t like to fill out a form, you’re missing opportunities. So it’s an education process of helping them understand, yeah, you may not, you may not have the preference of using that method of communication. That doesn’t mean everybody’s like you. So that’s one resistance. And then when I get a little bit more granular in my conversations with people, a big point of resistance is their their preconceived notion that, oh my gosh, you have a human chat team. You know, it takes us six months to a year to train our people internally on how to get up to speed on our products and services and equipment and machinery, etc. And so I have to kind of break down that resistance by, you know, helping them understand that we’re not trying to create a version of your people for the chat team. Our team is a top level, you know, qualification team, triage team. Our job is simply to acknowledge the visitor, find out who they are, where they are, top level, what they need, and then let them know one of the experts will get back to them. So the script development process is literally under 20 minutes of their time for the implementation initially. So those are the two biggest resistance topics that they come up regularly with my conversations with potential new customers.

Curt Anderson  26:30

And how do you So you mentioned word education, one of our favorite words, what, what. And again, whether it’s live chat, maybe it’s other facts, factions of digital What are? How do you help these people overcome these this? Well, one

Nelson Bruton  26:44

of the ways is, I say, look, it’s going to take you less than 20 minutes to do it, and there’s zero cost to do it for an entire month in your company, right? So hopefully you believe marketing is testing. This would be a really easy, no cost test. You get an entire month worth of data, and then once you have the actual results, then then make a decision, yeah. So a 30 day free trial really helps a lot of time people go, Oh, that’s kind of a no brainer. There’s no risk. Doesn’t cost me anything. Yeah? Now the other thing it has to align with one of their objectives, has to be, you know, increasing quote requests for their for their distributors or their reps, right? Because if, if they’re so busy where they can’t keep up with production, because they’re booked out for the next, you know, six to 18 months, which does happen, then we are absolutely not a fit, because we’re going to generate an increase in demand. And if they’re already backed up and, you know, can’t keep up production, we don’t want to make that situation worse. So if they are trying to grow and they do need more quote requests, it’s an immediate 50 to 100% increase. So

Curt Anderson  27:47

nice, awesome. Yeah. Damon, what were you saying? Well,

Damon Pistulka  27:51

I think that, you know, you hit the one thing that I I love talking with people about at the beginning, because, because people look at me and think, I’m one of them, right? They, they the buyers are not like you. I mean, we said honestly, executives said in her office, and they think they’re you, you that that sale, that ship, was gone decades ago, right? You really have to understand what your buyers are doing. And Kris said it well, they’re on their phone. They want to do this when they feel like it. They don’t want to have to wait for anybody. They want to get the information. They want to be able to decide if they’re going to buy it. And being able to transition them even like you’re talking to Nelson, is so important with a live chat kind of situation, it’s like get them to the help, even if it takes a little bit to get the response someone talked to them, yep. That’s a huge thing. Yep, and, and it’s just that removing the friction. But the buyers are not like the executives are usually talking to they are the the 20 something to 30 something person that wants to get this done in their way. Yeah, absolutely. And then just to piggyback on that. You know, in those conversations, when the resistance, I even tell people,

Nelson Bruton  29:07

I prefer a phone call. I like to pick up the phone and call. That’s my communication preference. I don’t even like to use chat, you know what? I mean, yeah, you know, candidly, when I when I tell them that they’re like, Okay, me too, you know? I mean,

Matthew Sciannella  29:18

right? Just think about how much, how much people have been trained to use chat in their day to day workflow. Now you have slack, you have teams, and those have largely replaced email for people as kind of the primary means of disseminating information on in the day to day work. So like people would expect, like to speak to a vendor if they could, in a similar manner, if they can just kind of asynchronously, ask something and then get a get a response asynchronously as well. I mean, it, it saves them time. It gets them done what they need to. You know, taking time to call someone is a, is a pretty is pretty disruptive for part of your day. Everyone is multitasking and chat is and chat lends itself. Very well to having a multicast 100%

Nelson Bruton  30:02

and let me, let me be a little contrarian on earlier part of this discussion as well. About four or five years ago, we saw a massive shift in the more mature audience, where people who are using our chat solution the the age didn’t matter. And what we realized is, you know, grandparents now have grandkids that do FaceTime and text message only, so grandparents got sucked into the digital world. They had to learn how to use these things, right? So much so that a lot of them were pushed into that preference, right because of their grandkids using these new communication technologies, text and FaceTime and all that stuff. Yeah, yeah,

Curt Anderson  30:45

at phenomenal point. So Matthew, we got a couple comments here. So hey, we’ve got Skyler says, Hey, Nelson, we’ve got Diane Byers in the house. She says, life and the way we navigate through it challenges all the time, changes all the time, and those that understand this better, understand their customers. Diane, thank you for the comment again. Guys drop us a note. Let us know you’re out there. Connect with our dear friends on stage here. We’ve got Nelson Bruton, we’ve got Chris Harrington, we’ve got Matthew shanella, and so we are going to be together on Friday at the industrial marketing Summit, talking about how to help your customers create that frictionless buying experience. Matthew, from your perspective, B to B, you’re a B to B, lead gen, extraordinary expert. Anything that you want to piggyback on? Well, you did a little bit on Nelson. But as far as like, social media or marketing, what are some things that you want to share? As far as like, kind of breaking down that resistance,

Matthew Sciannella  31:38

I think part of it is just understanding that, like, however it is, you’re trying to reach your market in whatever channel you are, you should sort of have an understanding of, like, how those channels work. Like, we run a lot of LinkedIn ads with clients, for instance. And you’d be, if you actually looked at the LinkedIn ads data and how much of your spend went towards your phone, went towards the LinkedIn app, as opposed to desktop, you’d be absolutely forward. It’s something like every for every $7 of ad spend you have goes to the web app compared to $1 to the desktop. So when you think about wanting to run like a demo request or something like that, you’re probably better served to actually using like a lead gen form, because people asking people to click through and fill out a form is, you know, something on a mobile experience would be pretty poor. And then the other thing is, like, thinking about how many form fields you want to ask for that will let you do an adequate follow up. So a lot of it is just thinking about, how are people coming to your website? How are people converting what are the conversion paths look like? And then how are you building out, like, your whole follow up experience. And like, you’re going to have a you’re going to have various conversion pads, no matter what, whether you’re using lead gen forms or whether you’re going to use your your desktop form. And like, how’s your automation on the back end? How’s it routing? What’s the follow up process look like? Do you have service level agreements with the sales teams? Do you have a dedicated person to route it to. Are you using a calendar link? Like, there’s all these sorts of like, you almost need to do a whole list of considerations for yourself when you decide when you have a form and like, want to actually consider the follow up experience, just to make it very seamless for your for your buyer. So for me, it’s all about like, mapping that out, understanding where all the pitfalls lie, and then planning against it and like it feels pretty simple, right? You fill out a form and someone’s going to follow up with you, but there’s all this orchestration, depending on the size of your company, that happens on the back end, that if one little thing breaks, you know, you lose it, right? And then you have to do all this sort of like trial and error to get it back. So for me, it’s about just understanding sort of world as pitfalls lie, how easy, how easy you make follow ups look like, and then just how seamless you make actually, when you do can fill out a form like, Okay, now, now I actually want to talk to somebody. How easy a hard do you make? That for me, you know, and the harder you make it, the lesson plan. I’m going to work for you because all those things are suggestive to working with you as a company. I mean, this is, this is a harbinger for your customer service. This is a harbinger for your sales rep. This is a harbinger for everything else about your company. Is like that initial buying experience. It is literally the tip of the spear, touch point of a relationship with your company. Don’t screw it up and make it and make it harder for every other link in your chain, down the down your down your business.

Curt Anderson  34:26

Yeah, I tell you, so such powerful advice. And I think the biggest challenge is, is accepting, like people don’t buy the way that we buy as individuals. You know, like you have to understand. Nelson, I feel like you’re just hitting at home, like we have to buy as our customers buy, not as we want to buy. Kris, let’s go. We’ll go around the horn one more time, because I know, man, this is we don’t want to give away all the secret sauce for Friday. You have to come to the industrial marketing Summit, right? I just, like, nobody, you don’t have a choice. Like, if you’re out there listening this, you have to come to Austin. Come hang out with us, Nelson barbecue. Just tell like, just come to Austin. Um, we’ll buy you barbecue. You gotta listen to our panel. There’s going to be great speakers there. I could go. We’ve had Damon, we probably had a dozen, uh, Megan Dale, we’ve had Joe Wendy. All sorts of the team has been on our show. And so you guys have to check it out. Uh, it’s in Austin, Texas. This week starts on Wednesday. Kris, there’s a little line you mentioned niche down till it hurts. Another one of our favorite lines is, how do we out teach the competition? I’ll tell you. Since you and I became fast friends, I really admire I’m on your email list. I read all your emails every week. You have a podcast. You guys have really stepped up and dedicated yourself as just fierce educators to your customers. What was that pivot? What was that transition like? Just take us there.

Kristina Harrington  35:45

Yeah, you know, it’s interesting, because this isn’t something we immediately recognized when we started our businesses. You know, we thought we build a product and people are going to come and in reality. And I know a lot of people make that mistake. We certainly made it. I can, I can admit to that. You know, what we didn’t understand is how many people make up a buying process first, you know when, when you’re going to sell a product, especially if you’re selling a complex product or something to a complex industry in the B to B space, there are multiple decision makers, which is already meaning you have to be able to really meet the objections of multiple areas in order to really sell your product. And we found that the only way we were going to first get in front of our clients to have the opportunity to talk about how our solution, you know, solves problems for them, is through education. And we had to educate many different areas of the business in order for them to see us as a credit credible company who specializes in helping in in certain areas. So once we realized we needed to educate, that’s really what we set out to do. So we we kind of changed our whole marketing to to be providing education for free, and when, because so much about sales is timing, timing of when, you know when a company in our world right? And this is probably true for others, that there are a number of positive ROI projects that a manufacturing company or distribution company could invest in, and it’s really going to come down to which one is the priority for them right now, and your solution isn’t always going to be the priority. But how can you be touching them enough that when your solution becomes the priority, they know and recognize you as somebody that can support them, and they they immediately think about you. So we had to work hard to become that, so that when timing is right, they think of Gen alpha and our equip 360 solution, and it really has been the focus on education, attending speaking events, doing webinars, going on with great you know panelists like you guys to share our knowledge and our experience, and people resonate with that, and they want to talk to you. And you know, sales is really all about relationships and relationships, and in many ways, right? The human to human relationship, but often, a lot more is happening without them ever talking to me. It’s, it’s them going to our website and downloading information. It’s watching videos and learning it’s, it’s hearing from Curt Anderson say you should contact Jen alpha for this activity, right? So it’s all of that, and when we started investing and turning our time there, we had deeper conversations, and we shortened the sales cycle with our prospective clients, because now they’ve already been watching us. They’ve identified that timing, and now we’re the company that they want to shortlist. We’re one of the companies they want to shortlist.

Matthew Sciannella  39:23

That’s all goes into the concept of, like, dark social, which you can you can call that what it is, but it is a thing. There’s all these non attributable touch points that happen in the buyers journey, things that Google or your analytics platform or even your CRM are just never going to record. And you know, there’s the 95 five rule, right? Like only 5% of your market is in is in market for whatever it is you sell at a given time, and the other 95% are sales cycles away from even considering it. And your primary job when you’re messaging or marketing to that percentage is to simply get your. Self in the consideration set when that time comes, and that means doing all of those value based activities that you mentioned, Chris, so that you know when they decide that they need something like shout out, you’re at the very top of the short list. Because most of the time, like, if you’re not even in that top three vendor shortlist, you’re you’re not even in the consideration set at all. Absolutely no chance of being of being chosen or being Bucha. Yeah. So good.

Curt Anderson  40:27

Thank you, man. Like, dude, that was like a couple of drop the mic moments, right there, right? Chris, so that was fantastic. So again, like, you know, a lot of you know, for for us more seasoned folks. I think Nelson, did you say more experienced, more seasoned, more mature, right? Play between us old guys, you know, kind of used to doing things the same way. And like, ah, people know, you know, like, how often Damon, do we hear like, you know, people know that we do this. Or people know, like, man, let’s just assume nobody knows a thing. You know what? I mean, let’s assume people are starting at zero. So, yeah,

Damon Pistulka  40:57

and Chris said it, well, I mean, it is you and this, I think what frustrates a lot of B to B marketing executives that are looking at B to B marketing they don’t understand that this is no different than going to a and meeting somebody and walking the walk and taking the months it takes to get somebody to buy from you. I mean, I remember when we were selling molded product to large companies, right? You might work a year to get it, to get a sale, but once you’re in, it’s a pretty good deal, right? It’s it works out, and things happen. And for some reason, some executives think, well, I turn on the marketing and I have customers tomorrow. But this, like you said, Chris first, and then Matthew talked about you’ve got to get into the top of mind list first by creating that content that establishes you as someone they might want to do business with. And then when they get to that point, the 95 five, when they turn into the 5% that is actually in that buying circle, they’re going to have heard of you already, because that’s where they’re going to the people that they’ve heard of

Matthew Sciannella  42:05

100% and they’ll verify you with people that they know. Like, Hey, have you ever heard of Gen alpha? If you work with them before, what do you think they’ll they’re going to do all of their vetting of you way before they ever talk to your salesperson. And your sales person’s job is to just don’t, just just don’t mess it up. Yeah,

Curt Anderson  42:23

right, they’re doing their due diligence. Nelson, let’s come to you, my friend again. Just completely admire what you’ve done. I’m I’m doing, I’m doing a little curve ball, because we’re not going super, super deep on all of our secret sauce for Friday. As an entrepreneur, what do you attribute your long term success, dude, you’ve been going at it for 20 plus years. What do you contribute? And don’t be modest. Don’t be humble. You’re You’re amongst friends. What do you attribute your success at manufacturing chats, absolute,

Nelson Bruton  42:50

relentless follow up, relentless follow up, and relentless and respectful follow up. I always like to say I’m professionally persistent. You know, if you really believe that you have value to bring you’re not going to bother people by reminding them you exist, right? And so consistent follow up, you know, showing up. You know, showing up. You know, when you say you’re going to and, you know, putting follow ups. You know, six months out, when you told somebody you’re going to call them six months later. You know, in a conversation, hey, check it. Check in with me in six months and then do that, you know. So I’d say that relentless follow up has been the key to success,

Curt Anderson  43:26

okay? And then to dovetail on that, how about the product? Obviously, you know, you can be a person of integrity. You can be that persistent, you know, follow up person, but you’ve got to deliver the goods like you’ve really done a master job of creating a great, viable product. You’re constantly testing it, improving it, tweaking it. Talk a little bit about the product side. Yeah.

Nelson Bruton  43:47

I mean, we, we’re not a perfect company by any stretch of the imagination, but, you know, having done this for 20 years, we’re pretty dialed in. We have a solution that is, you know, we can, we can have our chat team trained up and deployed in less than a week and a half for any company, right? So we’re quick to deploy that 30 day free trial. We’re putting our money where our mouth is. We know that, you know, a high percentage of people that we do a test run for, they’re going to convert into customers, and we know that when they’re a customer, we have a 94% retention rate on our customers. So the our solution works, right? So it’s just, you know that say the other, the other component, and we’re, you know, we continue to improve our solution in ways that, you know, improve our client relationships, for example, with with our client feedback. So, you know, we developed the initial chat playbook, the script playbook, and we encourage our customers. Hey, you know, if you see any of these chats that come through, feel free to send the chat to us. Give us feedback if we needed to ask additional questions or answer differently. One of the things recently that we learned that we needed to do is, hey, let’s make sure all the teams hear that, not just the marketing and sales director that. Talking to to implement the test. But like, let’s make sure the parts and service and the technical teams, all the customer service teams, let’s make sure, because they’re going to get the chat conversations distributed to them via email. They’re going to read through the chat transcript. They need to be aware up front before the trial starts. Hey, you’re going to start seeing these chat transcripts come through, if any of them come through to your department where you see an opportunity to improve that script, here’s the email address. You send it to the marketing point of contact at your team, they’re going to send it along to us, and then within 24 to 48 hours, the script playbooks can be updated, and all three shifts of your 24/7 chat team are going to be trained on that new chat experience. So, you know, really communicating, the ease and the responsiveness of making those updates to the to the script, playbook, right?

Curt Anderson  45:49

Communication, man, communication, so absolutely love it. So, alright, let’s, we’re gonna start taking it home. Matthew, my one of, it’s gonna be the second last question. My last my second last question for you, what kind of hair products are you using these things? I’m just kidding. I’m just No, I’m serious.

Matthew Sciannella  46:10

I bought some, I bought something recently, and it seems to hold just fine, man.

Curt Anderson  46:16

I don’t, you know what, Kris, I don’t know if I can be on I can be on stage with Chris. I can be on stage with Nelson. I don’t know if I can be on stage. You know, Matthew, that might have an issue. We’ll talk about it when we see each other. Okay, how about that? Laura, no, dude, you I would never wear a hat. I’ll wear a hat. I would say so Matthew, as we’re taking things home here, how about, you know, what? Give us a little tidbit. Why do people have to be in Austin. What are they missing out on this week? Well,

Matthew Sciannella  46:44

look, if you work in, if you’re a marketer in the industrial space, you probably work alone on an island or with one person that you’re just sitting there rowing a canoe with, all by yourself. Okay, so I just just real talk. I mean, I was, I mean, I was the only marketing person for a $30 million welding OEM in North America, I remember the feeling of having to rally 24 salespeople around the things I was doing and getting them excited about it, and it’s a hell of a lot of work. So if you’re looking you need peers, and you need network, and you need people who understand your shoes, who you can empathize with your challenges, and a place like this is going to give you that. It’s going to give you people who know as much as you. It’s going to give you people who know more than you. It’s going to give you people who are on your journey right now, and it’s going to give you people who have walked that path, who can help, who can help, like torch for you. So to me, it’s about knowledge transfer at the end of the day, and having people to lean on who can help you get where you need to be. And the reason why I think you need to be there is because you’re probably not going to get a higher concentration of those individuals than you will at the industrial marketing Summit, where you’ll have a lot of like minded people.

Curt Anderson  47:58

Dude, drop the mic. My goodness, like, like, Who, who, I didn’t that wasn’t even prepared. My goodness, that was good.

Matthew Sciannella  48:07

I told you, I’ve done these before. Man,

Curt Anderson  48:09

this ain’t your first rodeo. So I cannot wait for Thursday. Alright, rapid fire, I’m going around. I’m going around the horns one last time. Kris, I might ask you this before, but I’m going around. Rapid Fire, best business advice that you’ve ever received, and you’d love to pass on best business advice that you’ve ever received, and would love to pass on,

Kristina Harrington  48:30

don’t deal in opinions, deal in facts. Everybody has an opinion. Facts are really where you focus your solutions. Out there. Just can’t, yeah, just

Curt Anderson  48:44

the facts. Ma’am, just the facts. Chris, love it. Nelson, best business advice you’ve ever received, and would love to pass along. I

Nelson Bruton  48:51

think a good advice is care, but don’t care too much. Ooh,

48:55

dude, that’s a even

Matthew Sciannella  48:57

that advice for sure. That is, where

Curt Anderson  48:59

were you? Where were you? Like, 20 years ago for that care, but don’t care too much. All right, so, all right, Matthew, I’m coming at you with a different question. So alright,

Matthew Sciannella  49:11

answer to that question.

Curt Anderson  49:13

Alright, let’s that’s your advice. And then I’ve got one last one, and we’re going

Matthew Sciannella  49:16

to close it out. Mine was, if you work in marketing, know your numbers and work in dollars, okay, know, like your cost per lead, your cost per op, your customer acquisition cost, know, your unit economics. Learn how to work in numbers.

Curt Anderson  49:29

My goodness, man, dude, like that was all three of you prices. Thank you. Now I feel like I asked you this before, Chris, I feel like I asked you this, and this is my signature question, so I gotta ask Matthew, because it’s his first rodeo here with us. Matthew, I know you’re in Maryland. Are you a baseball fan? I am, and are you? Are you nationals Orioles? I’m a DC area guy.

Matthew Sciannella  49:51

So I’m, I’m that Redskins, I’m wizards. I’m, yeah, DC, all

Curt Anderson  49:57

about the. Team that you guys won the world when you guys win the World Series, 1819, something

Matthew Sciannella  50:03

like 1919,

Curt Anderson  50:04

okay, so let’s go here. It’s a bottom of the ninth. The nationals are playing the dreaded Mets. Okay, bottom of ninth, there’s a guy on second base, tie score, two outs. Guy in second base. The manager turns on the bench. Says, Hey, chanella, grab your helmet, grab your bat, get up to the plate and hit in the winning run. Okay, you with me? Yeah, two ups. Guy in second. You’re like, you’re like, like, we need, we need you to be the hero. Hit the winning run as you’re walking up to the plate to hitting the winning run. What’s your walk up song?

Matthew Sciannella  50:38

Oh, man, what’s my walk up song? It’s right now. It’s probably squabble up by Kendrick Lamar,

50:47

there we go.

Curt Anderson  50:50

Thank you. Congratulations on playing Nelson. I asked you that one, didn’t I already I did. You

Nelson Bruton  50:54

did, interestingly enough, the night before, I had a softball game and I hit the game winning hole.

Speaker 1  51:00

Yes, I forgot about that. I completely i So I completely forgot you hit the morning home run when I asked you that in June, then

Nelson Bruton  51:08

literally had the experience the night

Curt Anderson  51:10

before. It was pretty awesome. Well, hey, thank you. How about Damon? How about a big round of applause for our panel here today? For absolutely nothing, I completely forgot about that that’s a sterile so All right, guys, do us a favor. Connect with Nelson, connect with Matthew, connect with our dear friend Kris. On LinkedIn. Go to their websites. Check them out. Better yet, why don’t you just come to industrial marketing Summit. You can meet all three of them at one time in Austin, Texas. Damon, your closing thoughts. What do you think?

Damon Pistulka  51:38

Oh, it’s just great to great to be able to talk with you guys again and and really, to be able to see the education about creating a frictionless or or a least a less difficult buying process. Because I’m going to tell you people listening to this, you should go ask someone else to look at your buying process, and they’ll tell you really, how much friction you have, and you’ll be surprised. Yeah,

Curt Anderson  52:01

I I couldn’t agree more. So Alright guys, thank you. Hang out with us for one second. We will see you guys. We’ll see you in Austin this week. If we don’t see you there, I think you can catch it online, right? I think you can go to the industrial marketing digital one. Yep, they have a digital version, so check it out. And they have amazing speakers. So we’ll see you there. Alright guys, have a great week. God bless you, and we will see you soon. See you. Aaron, yeah.