Digital marketing, email, social media, and COVID-19 are propelling sales and marketing into a new era.  If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it won’t work, because in today’s digital age there is more at stake. Construction is primed for a change and a transformation with how it sells.

When a handshake and a beer used to take care of business growth, what happens now that COVID-19 is changing construction relationships?  What does this new digital world look like for construction sales and marketing teams?  In this presentation Kyle discusses:

1. What are the top challenges faced by construction sales and marketing teams today?
2. How to innovate a traditionally fields sales-driven business
3. Ways to use digital marketing to grow and expand construction businesses.
4. Using social media for impact.

TRANSCRIPT

Kyle Hamer: (00:00)
Hey, thanks for having me Larry and welcome to everybody today. You know, I, I think I might’ve missed the memo about this being about communications. Apparently this is some part of, uh, sales marketing, and kind of the future of what’s going on. So a little bit about me. Uh, I, I appreciate the intro, but, uh, I would be remiss not to share some of the things I’m really passionate about. Um, Hey, marketing group was founded after my time at on-center constructing, that came to an end. Uh, I’ve spent about five years in the construction industry. And when I look back across my, my career, what I’ve found is it’s really simple to, to define who I am. I’m a sales guy, turned marketer, cause I was passionately curious about technology and making life easier. People are like, what does that mean? Well, that means in today’s day and age, I’m figuring out how we, um, we solve some of the challenges that companies like yours are going through right now.

Kyle Hamer: (00:53)
Now I would be remissed and I talk about some of the fun things that I’ve been doing. As you can see over here, this is my family pre COVID and you’re right, Larry. I didn’t get a chance to get on my bike much while we’ve been, uh, we’ve been locked down. And I think somebody I talked to the other day said it best you can lock us down, but you can’t lock us up. And, um, you know, we’ve kind of got that, that fun adventurous spirit as a family. And we’re looking forward to getting back out, being active. So if I’m not doing those things outdoors, I’m recording a podcast or I’m helping organizations as a fractional CMO, but that leads us to some of the things that I’m seeing on a regular basis. What I’m seeing on a regular basis here is that there’s these, these monumental challenges that organizations are facing as it relates to the day to day business and construction has historically been a laggard.

Kyle Hamer: (01:44)
I mean like it’s, it’s, there’s no secret to that. Construction is not an early adopter of many things, right? It’s like, Hey we’re and we’ll talk about it here in a minute. But when it comes to things that are relevant to this committee, as I thought about it, um, to me, I think there are really four main things that are going to be happening in the coming months and years that are going to force marketers and communicators. And in construction industry leaders to behave differently. There were no we’re no strangers to change in market dynamics, right? It wasn’t that long ago that we just pulled out of the great recession. We’ve seen some of the biggest years in growth, but those, those years of growth have been a bit stymied by being able to find and retain talent. Another key issue is as well. How do I communicate across multiple channels, age groups, job sites, what do I do there?

Kyle Hamer: (02:35)
And then ultimately, how do we embrace this technology revolution? I’ve got an organization that believes this very firmly cogs was probably said it best. And I think I go back to the childhood side of me where it says, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. Cause that’s my dad. My dad was a contractor and it was, he was a contractor and he’s the type of guy he’s like, look, don’t tell me 35 new innovative ways to solve a problem pile. Just do it the way that I told you to do it. The challenge with that is, Hey, if we only did that, we’d still be riding a horse and buggy to job sites. So thinking differently and in embracing change is really, really important. You’re like, okay, I’ve heard a thousand people talk about this or that. I get it. But really digital transformation is incredibly important for organizations.

Kyle Hamer: (03:28)
Why is it important? Because what happened in things that you’ve done in the past? It’s not really new techniques and new things you’re coming up with. It’s a change in where you’re having conversations and where you’re doing things, not necessarily how, but I think that’s really one of the things that that organizations oftentimes struggle with is they think, well, I, for me to embrace digital or for me to think about the future, I’ve got to go through this huge transformation. Sometimes it’s really not a transformation. It’s just a change in channel. And so for setting to make sure that the field is completely level here, digital marketing can be mean a lot of things to a lot of different people. And fundamentally, I thought, well, you know, let’s go ask mr. Google what he says so that we’re all on the same page. And digital marketing is really utilizing the internet and your different elements that connect to the internet, to market, to advertise, to drive revenue and sales.

Kyle Hamer: (04:29)
Now, gosh, that seems pretty obvious. But if you think about where it started, we started with just website, right? Digital marketing was you got to have a website it’s important to have a website. And then there are some contractors. There are some, there are some suppliers, there are some manufacturers you go visit their website and you’re like, well, you haven’t updated it since 1986. Um, that’s okay. But as, as you’re going through this transformation, as we’re starting to think about the future, the reality is is that your buyer and the people around you are changing. There’s more ways to be communicated and to educate yourself than ever before. And so if we continue looking at things that we’ve always done historically, with the same level of thinking, we’re kind of expecting this. You can’t expect different results. The thought process of what got me here will not get you.

Kyle Hamer: (05:19)
There is 100% where we sit today in the construction industry, as it relates to sales, marketing, and communication. Now, what this does is this creates a ripe environment for innovation. And I have a, I have a short little video that I was going to share, but the audio is not working. I’m going to, I’m just going to show you what you could see here is this is a, is the insight of a marketing organization, as it starts innovating, try thinking about how do I launch a website? How do I brainstorm these things? And if we just watch, you can see that it’s very, very, very clear what the, what the thought process is for most organizations. Let’s give it just a minute here.

Kyle Hamer: (06:04)
Boom, Facebook, right? Oh, that’s, that’s super easy. Oh wait. No, no. We can make it better. How many times you’ve been in an innovation meeting or a communications meeting where it starts and it ends with some, some level of social media. It ends up being something we want to go viral as something that we want to have happen in a way where innovation is really stifled, because we’re only thinking about executing what other people are doing. So what I want to talk to you about is, okay, we’ve got an opportunity to innovate inside of how we communicate, how we sell, how we market. What does it mean for each of these particular challenges? When we look at the change in market dynamics, nothing has forced our hand to look at differently than our best friend coronavirus, right? People are now at home, they’re working remotely.

Kyle Hamer: (06:55)
They’re having a hard time getting back into society or, or, or having the same level of networking. That impact has actually not only affected marketing teams, but your sales team. And so one of the areas that’s right for innovation is it relates to, uh, as it relates to construction, as it relates to the way you do business is this thought of, Oh my goodness, aligning sales and marketing and bringing those teams together jointly, right? It’s no longer, Oh, my sales guys go out and have dinner and they’re there in the field. They meet somebody at a trade show and we’re able to go sell and move more product. Or, Hey, we took somebody to go out and go do golf while there’s been more golf played in the last six months than there has probably been in the last six years. The reality is that the change in market dynamic has, has shifted how your buyers and how your salespeople can engage.

Kyle Hamer: (07:53)
Where’s the information that I want. Where’s the information that I needed. How do I get it? And so the way you bring those teams together, and the reason why I think this is really the future of sales, is it marketing is oftentimes only seen as advertising. Hey, what’s that message. What’s that cool trade show it’s seen as the arts and crafts in sales is seen as the, the relationship and the, um, the good old boy network, the folks that bring them across the finish line and, and pay everybody’s bills. And while some of that is still very, very true. We’re moving into an age based on the demographic of, of folks coming in from a talent standpoint, the accessibility of information to where marketing is now sharing more and more of the responsibility of helping sales deliver revenue. The future of sales and marketing is really these, this idea of a team driving revenue.

Kyle Hamer: (08:47)
So you’ve got to start in getting your, your marketing objectives and your sales objectives, your sales photos, getting those aligned so that they’re pulling on the boat and moving the same way. One of the reasons that this is, this is an area that’s right for innovation is because field sales, which has historically been doing, um, w which is the way most construction or manufacturing companies have moved their products by doing it face to face on the road, traveling, you know, limited time for training, they’re just working off a product slip. It’s almost 100%, um, education-based or, um, relationship-based excuse me, they’re being forced to do things and develop skills they never had to do before. What was the last time your field sales rep did a cold call was the last time he did a hundred. When was the last time that your marketing team had to drive inbound leads of people for your sales team to call that are interested in your product?

Kyle Hamer: (09:42)
Think that I think, well, gosh, that’s not a, that’s not something that our business can embrace. That’s, uh, that’s, uh, a different business to business model. That’s never work in construction. Well, the reality is is that when your reps can’t get on the road, they’re not making sales. And even if they are making sales, you’re being impacted by things like job delays starts, starts, are down. They’re continuing to get pushed. We don’t know what that means. That interrupts the supply chain. That supply chain is interrupted across the, across the entire gamut we’re impacted. But if marketing and communications is out there doing their job, they’re there working on the early mini commitments. That sales is just like, Oh, Hey, I’m interested in getting people’s nodding their head. Yes, you’ll find there are new opportunities. And there are people that are looking for the goods services and things that you have today.

Kyle Hamer: (10:37)
Changing your field sales to an inside sales is a huge undertaking because it’s taking that mentality of what got me here is not going to get me there. And now you’ve got to integrate it with marketing, because I’m thinking about what are my scripts saying? What are my emails saying, what are my, what does, what does my website say? Where’s my, where’s my marketing collateral. When was the last time we updated that, that product catalog or that guide, and we may have those things, but is it something that can be digested in an email or is it something where I get an email and you’re like, yeah, on page 342, a third of the way down, you’re looking for product number Oh eight one nine eight three dash seven seven six two. And you’ll find the technical specs when sales moves from the field to inside.

Kyle Hamer: (11:28)
A lot of the work that marketing has to do is shortcutting those conversations, things like catalogs, things like, um, huge price lists and product lists need to be pre digested for your customers and for your sales team to ensure that they’re getting to the information that’s important to them quickly. Now I have an example and I was gonna, I was gonna use, um, our great manufacturing rep from the 1990s to showcase how you can really bungle this. But the reality is, is the movie black sheep, Oh, I’m sorry, not black sheep, Tommy boy, the movie, Tommy boy does a great job of helping show you both what works and doesn’t work when it comes to sales and marketing being aligned. And this right here is a great visual of what happens when sales and marketing is not aligned. Sales is trying to figure out what to say, and they’re setting things on fire, and they’ve got all this energy, but it’s misplaced and marketing’s over there going, Ooh, you probably should do that. That’s not what we want to do.

Kyle Hamer: (12:33)
Communications across those teams are really, really important. And the proof is in the pudding, you can do Google search after Google search, after Google search. But when you look at aligning your sales and your marketing team and going to market as a revenue team, leveraging digital technology, leveraging digital media and marketing strategies, the growth can be exponential. And it doesn’t matter what your industry is in this particular, this particular report, a 208% jump in leads. Now imagine right now that you have 10 people calling in a month interested in product X or product Y and you have 208%. Now you have 30 people. Well, my sales rep doesn’t have to, you go out and I have already doubled demand is what I did before. So my expenses, those are lower and my conversations are higher. It may not lead to revenue right away. But what it does show is that when you have your sales and your marketing teams align that you’re going to see higher win rates and higher customer retention, customer attention to stuff that you guys have been good at the building brand loyalty, keeping that longterm, making sure that people are 100% after writing, inspecting your product really does boil down to making sure these teams, right.

Kyle Hamer: (13:47)
That leads us to our next challenge, right? So, Hey, we’ve got these new innovative things. I got to align the sales in this marketing team. What, what am I going to do? How am I going to find these people? Cause the talent I have today, isn’t the, they’re not the people that, that are maybe necessarily going to be able to do that. Where am I going to find this talent? Well now more than ever marketing community or not marketing communications, company communications, finding and retaining talent, even in a market where there’s a higher unemployment than, than we’ve seen in years. They’re still understanding who I’m working for. We don’t want the Mo the economy to pop back in the next two years. And you hired a bunch of people that, that leave because they didn’t, they didn’t fall in love with your company or your organization.

Kyle Hamer: (14:28)
And so leveraging digital marketing, leveraging digital media to go find and support your employees, support your company. It’s communications externally is very valuable in retaining and attracting young talent. You can see here on this, this particular infographic put together by, Oh, I can’t remember the name of the company. Uh, credibly. I believe that even though everybody’s talking about LinkedIn is the place to go in the construction industry. We know darn good. And well then unless they’re an office employee, it’s highly unlikely that they’re there on LinkedIn and there’s there, but they are on social media. They are paying attention to the companies that are out there working. And so it’s really important that you think about in, in build your external facing communication folks to drive again, inbound people, interesting to interested in working for you. Some successful examples, Simcoe Simcoe on their LinkedIn page has an employee of the month that they highlight this particular employee of the month was this month.

Kyle Hamer: (15:32)
You can see that there’s engagement. There’s 17 people in two comments. So what does this do? This builds, this builds credibility. That when I go and I look at the Simcoe as a company, I can see, Oh, wow, there’s this, isn’t just an old white guys, um, industry. I can see that there’s somebody that’s young, they’re in a professional, a professional place, and they’re commenting. They’re being supportive. This is great. If I’m a young professional, this makes Simcoe very attractive to me, but it’s not just about young professionals. I think sometimes marketing companies and folks can get really stuck in thinking, well, it’s only about, you know, trying to get professional talent in here. But the reality is is that that across organizations, you still need people in the field. You still need people on the floor. You need people who are buying into that family culture.

Kyle Hamer: (16:20)
That’s a part of your business. And one of the companies that I think does a tremendous job, uh, in, in how they, they, they build that family community across the locations is Baker triangle Baker. If you have a five year work anniversary, a 10 year work anniversary, a 30 year work anniversary, they are posting that to social media. And the thing I’d like to, I’d like to just point out a little bit here. This is, if you look at this particular image, this is taken during coronavirus. So they, they made a point to continue supporting the CDC guidelines, doing the, the social distancing, but it was important enough that they didn’t delay that, getting that recognition. So Jose here, didn’t miss out on his 10 year anniversary and the accolade and being called out for it. As a matter of fact, they showcased how important he was by making a point to make this happen.

Kyle Hamer: (17:12)
If you look at the engagement here, this is the part where I think he gets, he gets fun. Bigger triangle may not have the same number of followers or the same number of folks that’s that that Cinco does inside of their, their LinkedIn profile. But because Baker’s using the Facebook channel on Facebook now, the employees and the friends of the employees and their spouses can share that information out and it propagates creating this community awareness. So part of what you’ve got to think about is what’s going on from my channel and what, what am I saying in this channel as it relates to, um, not necessarily a, just a newsfeed, I don’t need post article after article, after article, after article, what is this particular channel saying about my business and how am I providing value? Not just newsfeeds, like a news article after news article, but how am I providing value or, or entertaining people in these, in these areas.

Kyle Hamer: (18:11)
And when I say entertaining, I think this is really, really important because when you think about Wendy’s you think about Walmart, you think about Apple, you see these giant corporations, but the people that are falling in love with these brands, the people that are working for these brands, they’re not working for 80, a hundred thousand dollars a year. Oftentimes they’re working for minimum wage. They’re doing jobs that a lot of other people wouldn’t do. So if I’m doing a job that a lot of the people wouldn’t do, what are some of the things that I can potentially do to fall in love with a brand? Well, if I had to choose based on my personality, if I had to choose what company I wanted to work for, do I want to work for McDonald’s or do I want to work for Wendy’s Wendy’s uses their Twitter account to troll, be snarky, be clever, and create this identity of where a Trinity hip, fast food chain.

Kyle Hamer: (19:00)
That’s not afraid to communicate in a way that embraces our employees. And so you, if you go and you watch watch, Wendy’s not only do they, you know, did they get a lot of traction across social media on their Twitter, but they, they get traction from their employees. And there’s this sense of pride of, Hey, I work for, I worked for Wendy’s now, am I saying that people are going to be holistically staying at Wendy’s longterm? Because they, you know, because they love their Twitter account, not necessarily, but what Wendy’s has done is figured out how to use Twitter as an attraction model for creating a communication platform of what they want to say, who they want to be. And for your organization, you’ve got to do the same thing. Now, this brings us to communication across, across multiple generations, multiple jobs. And I really think that where we’re at with communication at this point can be summed up in this slide.

Kyle Hamer: (20:00)
I don’t know if you’ve seen it or you’ve heard it or not yet, but I got called a boomer by my kids. Hey, I said something to my, my 16 year old daughter, 15 year old daughter, excuse me. She looked at me and she said, okay, boomer, I didn’t deliver the right message. It wasn’t at the right time. Obviously I was out of touch with whatever she was trying to communicate. Technically, I’m not a boomer. So we’ve got this huge chasm in conversation where both sides have value that they bring to the table. They’re not necessarily listening to each other and, or they’re not necessarily communicating in the right path. So as communicators and marketers, specifically in a digital world, we’ve gotta be really, really intentional in finding where, where the right places are to say the right things, because it’s really not about what we say.

Kyle Hamer: (20:48)
I’m sorry. It’s not only about what we say. It’s also about where you say it. So if you start looking at how people want to be communicated to, I mean, it’s pretty ubiquitous. Everybody gets email on that. That’s great for them. But if you’re spending the majority of your, your advert or your marketing budget annually on print ads, and you’re hoping that the next round of your, uh, your advertising is going to drive in a whole new drove of buyers. Well, it doesn’t take long to look to see, Oh, postal, postal, uh, postal mail here for the 18 to 34 group, less than 30% actually pay attention to it.

Kyle Hamer: (21:25)
And so it’s, it’s really important for you to understand your audience, not only today, but where your audience is going to be in the coming month. And when you think about that, right? It’s like, well, we’ve been communicating and marketing for years. Like the first written word, the 10 commandments carved into stone. And when we came up with a printing press, how can we mass produce these stones that led us to the encyclopedia salesperson, which led us to, you know, everybody in their son, sending you an email in, in saying, Hey, in these challenging times, and, um, this new normal to, Hey, I got to try and get a message. That means everything that I say across in a tweet. And if you think about people that grew up on encyclopedias and vast amount of information in the library, trying to get them to communicate and understand what somebody is saying in a tweet and how that those lineup causes all kinds of challenges.

Kyle Hamer: (22:25)
The challenges really have to do with field offense, age group, and knowing your audience because communication is really more complicated and yet very personal than ever your customers, your audience, your employees, they expect you to understand where they are, what they’re doing, what’s going on with them and talk to them as such. So communication across the job site. Am I, am I, am I pushing out marketing messages? Maybe I had three tons of this particular material and we’re in Denver. How do I get communicated out to the job site that your job’s stalled? And we’ve got to be able to help sales quickly fill or move this order. Otherwise it sits there and we’ve got, we’ve got some costs as it relates to the, to the trucker and these different things. The communication in transformation that’s happening for marketers is you are going to be pulled into talking to your customers in ways that you’ve not necessarily had to do before, because it’s been part of sales has been part of customer.

Kyle Hamer: (23:32)
Service has been part of, um, all of these other channels that now we’re starting to get pulled in together and together and together inside of this space called digital marketing, why the tech companies are doing it. The, um, you look at the, the elections, this, this particular politics is doing it, right. I get a message via SMS from a group, vote. This, I get a person calling on my phone. I got a person sending me an email. I get Facebook ads. It, the interruption in the, the, the disruption of where I’m at or the things I’m thinking about it doesn’t stop. Now. That doesn’t mean that you have to aspire to be those things, but you need to be cognizant for your business about how your buyers are being influenced in other industries because you’re not alone. And that really ultimately leads us to this, this technology revolution, where we are today.

Kyle Hamer: (24:26)
And what is happening to construction is your about to actually see a giant leap in technology, how things are done, they’re delivered where the front end of three D printing. And this is going to create some incredible opportunity, not only for the businesses to adapt and succeed, but also gonna create, um, opportunity for organizations to do things that they’ve never done before. And to get caught up. If you look at the, uh, the job starts and the production, as it relates to construction, even in their marketing, in their sales efforts, a lot of the same things we’re doing today to move our products is the same stuff that was being done in the 1960s. There’s not been a ton of evolution or revolution in how we communicate, where we communicate, how we market and how we sell, but it’s happening everywhere else. Right? If you look at the, the mechanized changes of at first, it was like, Hey, we’re going to figure out how to make a steam pump.

Kyle Hamer: (25:27)
And then we figured out how to mass produce cars and electricity in the eighties, we’ve got to introduce to automotive manufacturing with automation. And now, instead of having humans push these giant keyboards, it’s being brought together through the internet, through AI. Well, what does that mean? That means that we’re looking as marketers and salespeople as there’s an evolution happening right. In what we’re using. You might as a, as a marketer in your career, depending on where you’re at, as communicator in your career, you might actually be thinking about writing messages or creating messages on a robot. That’s putting up steel for a high rise, because it’s safer than doing a toolbox talks for your, um, for your teams today. Now that may be, we super futuristic in the way you’re thinking, but the point here is isn’t Oh, you can’t, you know, this isn’t gonna happen, or that’s too crazy to think.

Kyle Hamer: (26:24)
The point is, is that the opportunity here to innovate and to bypass triple bypass, to own a market for the first time in a long time, you’re no longer going to be regionally bound or location bound, or, uh, only related to the market share you have, you have the ability to land and expand and move into other markets because you can customize your, um, your messages to your, to your audience. You can be more precise and direct using things like AI. It’s not all the way there yet, but it will influence what you say, where you say and how you say it now. Okay, great. These are great. Big ideas. Kyle digital marketing is just getting bigger and bigger. Bigger. Of course, you’re going to say that you’re a technical guy. Let’s get practical. Okay. The blocking and tackling of marketing is still really these four base principles.

Kyle Hamer: (27:22)
If you’re going to be good at marketing, if you’re going to be good at sales, you have to have something good to say. So you’ve got to have a product that’s worth a crap. You’ve got to say it well. So your messaging has to be on point. You got to know what your customer’s pains are and how they’re doing things. You got to say it often. So I gotta be seeing more than one time. I can’t just show up and throw up and expect a one call close now. And now more than ever, I got to say it in the right channel. Those channels have historically been newspaper, print magazines, um, sponsorships, um, bid boards, you name it. Those channels are moving to other areas where your customers or your prospective customers can start consuming your, your information, consuming your marketing, educating themselves about what you have to offer passively not, Hey, I want to talk to somebody, but Oh, this is interesting. Let me consume it. Oh, this is interesting. Let me consume it. Oh, this is interesting. Let me educate myself. And they want to educate themselves that way so that when they get to a conversation with your sales team, you’re on equitable footing. So now more than ever these core principles of having something good to say, sing it well, sending it often and saying it to the right channel are incredibly important to your sales process. Because if you’re not saying the right thing, it’s going to lead to a miscommunication and a misalignment.

Kyle Hamer: (28:44)
Marketers are also well you’re, you’re being forced to, to transform, but that transformation is less about market development. One to many, as it is aligning to the new business objectives are your business objectives on customer retention, because that requires a different communication strategy and a plan and how you market tightly different digital execution. Then if I’m going out and I’m trying to build new market, I’m trying to gain new market share. If I’m trying to sell a new product, you’ve also got to transform by cozying up to sales. For many, many, many years, sales was versus marketing and their heads were budding, but that’s, that’s, that’s moving away rapidly. It’s moving away rapidly because you need each other sales enablement is a thing where Hey, marketing has given me exactly what to say. Pre-packaged so that I can continue. The next conversation in my sales process. Technology is here. It’s coming. You need to embrace it. That doesn’t mean that you need to be sending out 10,000 emails to everybody on your list every day. But what it does need to, what it does mean is that you’ve got to look at your data. You’ve got to look at your information. You’ve got to look at your systems. You’ve got to look at how you’re leveraging these things together. So it’s coordinated. Nothing is more uncomfortable for a customer or a prospect to come through and have their, their, uh, their experience be completely disjointed.

Kyle Hamer: (30:09)
If you’re not thinking about your customer here in step four, if you’re not thinking about how you delight your customer and or your prospect, you’ve lost everything you’ve done up to this point. All the digital marketing doesn’t matter what transformation you’re on. If you’re not worried about the lighting them and making their lives easier, even in your communication, how am I delivering it? What am I delivering it? What am I delivering it with? You’re going to lose. Customers are more and more selfish, self centered, because they can be because we can accommodate them. And construction might have places where there’s a lot of friction. If you think about your entire engagement with your customer, whether it’s your RFP or RFQ, your, your procurement process, there’s all kinds of friction where customers might go, that’s enough. I’m gonna go find somebody else that’s easier to do business with.

Kyle Hamer: (31:00)
And ultimately that boils down to your, you know, the stuff that you’re your customer really is the boss, right? Yes. You’ve got a, you’ve got a, um, a board or wall street, or you have different people that you’ve got to answer to, but you can’t answer those people. If you haven’t focused on your customer too many times, communicators and marketers, think about what am I telling upstream? What am I telling the CEO? What am I telling the VP of sales? What am I telling the board or wall street are all my quarterly earnings or my reports versus how am I actually communicating to my customer? And when you’re turning, you’re talking upstream to your, to your, your board and your bosses, your back is turned to your customer and they’re the people with the money. So just remember at the end of the day, customer is the boss.

Kyle Hamer: (31:49)
My final thought is, is remember that when you’re doing digital marketing and when you’re talking about customers, there’s no magic bullet. This is one of my favorite graphics, because so often times owners and leaders will say, well, you have to, you have to just, you know, everybody should just quit doing marketing that you’re doing today and go directly to e-commerce. Well, when you look at this right there’s billboards, there’s trade shows, there’s radio ads, there’s TV, where the, where the transaction was actually made for this particular person was online. And so some leaders saying, well, obviously you should only be online. The reality is, is that an integrated marketing plan, integrated communications plan focused on your customer. Isn’t going to be only be digital. Isn’t only going to be totally aligned with sales. Isn’t only going to be, you know, and, um, trade shows. All of those things are evolving, but it’s always going to take a little bit of everything in order to pull off success.

Kyle Hamer: (32:51)
That’s the, that’s all I got. I mean, I could get into lots of tips and techniques and lots of other things, but at this point, it’s your time. So what kind of questions do you have? And, and, um, what an additional insight kind of provide. All right, this is Larry back on the line here. Thank you very much, Kyle. It was very interesting. I think that there’s a lot of things that you were talking about that I could actually look and say, okay, well, this is something that we’ve experienced in the last four or five months, or in talking with some of our member companies understand that they’re they’re dealing with. So this is all very helpful. I have a couple of questions already that came in on the question panel, um, on your control panel. So if you do have another question, you can enter that there and we’ll take that. Let’s take the two that we have so far. The first one is, um, are you, are you seeing a lot more dependent or advanced research on a product before a prospect will take a sales call or make a sales decision?

Kyle Hamer: (33:57)
Who can, so you said independent or advanced research before they’ll take a sales call. And the answer to that is yes. Um, it’s, it’s been happening very heavily in tech. A lot of people are pushing out content and what’s happening is, is, uh, specifically in industrial type organizations. We see this in oil and gas. We see this manufacturers that we work with here locally is that customers have been trained that, Hey, if I want to go buy, um, if I want to go buy a specific tool, I can go do research and learn about it for myself. I can be almost educated enough to be at a yes, no crossroads to make a decision now, understand that there are technologies and things that are a lot more complicated than that. But what the, what the, what the challenge now is, is for marketers, instead of thinking about, well, how do I just create a slick and a couple of the high bullets?

Kyle Hamer: (34:49)
It’s how do I educate this person as if they were in person at a trade show, talking about the things that really matters to them, right? If, if you had somebody walk up to this product at a trade show, and you’re like, Hey, I want to show you X, Y, Z, is it solves? This, this, this, and this, the person that’s coming and looking for this, this, this, and this, they’re not looking for your product. They’re not looking for a slick. They’re looking for solve this pain for me, solve this pain for me solve this issue for me. And they like, Oh, you have these three issues. Great. Do you need this product? People are trying to self serve themselves more with sales education. Not because sales guys are greasy or uncomfortable, but it’s just like, it’s more convenient. I don’t have to interrupt my day or schedule certain things. I can, I can educate myself. And then when I’m ready to make a decision, I’m making it with confidence. And I don’t ever feel like somebody convinced me to, you did convince them, but they never had to talk to somebody who I should pull them across the line.

Larry Williams: (35:44)
Very good. I apologize for the background noise, a, you know, one of the side effects of having a home office is that sometimes you get your, the, the neighbor’s lawnmower, hopefully it’s not too bad. Uh, the second question is, are there things, other manufacturers and suppliers doing in digital marketing to drive to me?

Kyle Hamer: (36:06)
So I think this is, this is really, really, uh, interesting and what I say, but I think this is interesting. I have a specific, specific example that I’ve seen going on in the, um, medical supplies, manufacturing space, the, the changes in office regulations, the changes in how doctors let people in how they’re making decisions. It used to be that the doctors would make the decisions because they have the technical aptitude. And now the decisions are being made and moved to, you know, folks that are more in accounting or finance versus somebody that really understands like, and by the way, the parallels here are, Hey, I was selling this particular product, or I needed to distribute this particular product that I’m used to dealing with. Um, without, because Al’s the guy in the field, he’s the foreman or the soup. He understands what’s going on in this particular job site and why this particular product functions there, but it’s not specked out in the, in the, in the planes.

Kyle Hamer: (37:02)
And so Sally comes over and she’s the CFO. And she’s like, Oh, why are you doing that? We can actually make a bit more profit if we choose product B, we’re going with product B. And so what, uh, what we’re seeing in the medical devices, manufacturing space is they’re taking the, remember. I just told you a second ago about, um, you know, pain, one, two, three, four, they’re taking videos just short, two, three minute videos and talking about pain one or pain two. And they’re saying, Hey, if you have this pain, maybe you need this particular product. Hey, if this job sites functioning like this, maybe on your next job site, you ought to consider this or this. And when you think about that in the application for construction, as it relates to architects, as it relates to superintendents or procurement departments, they have these complex things that are always coming at them during the day, the best time to talk to somebody isn’t actually, while they’re in the middle of the, of the, of the pain, it’s the time to educate them is when they’ve slowed down.

Kyle Hamer: (38:01)
And so there’s a, there are a couple of, of partners that we’ve done work with, who they will go out. They will build these campaigns and they’ll run social media posts on Facebook only after hours. So after five o’clock and they’re targeting the office assistant, they’re targeting what you consider lower level folks, they’re targeting those lower level folks because they become an internal champion to the organization in over about a 90 day, 120 day period on their campaigns. They’re seeing revenues shift dramatically seeing orders shift dramatically because now they’re driving inbound with intent. They’re not just filling out a form and call and saying, Hey, tell me about product. You’re looking for. People are calling in and saying, Hey, I’ve got this pain and I know you have this product. Can I schedule more time to understand it? I want to buy this and marketing in these particular situations for these suppliers is driving people that are purchasing right. They’re driving POS not just leads that sales has to close.

Larry Williams: (39:08)
Very interesting. Very interesting. Well, thanks. Um, don’t have any more questions at the moment from the, uh, the audience, but if you do have any additional questions, please feel free to enter them in the question pane. Uh, also Kyle just had up his, um,