Chart Industries: Judson Voss, on What Inbound Marketing Is

IndustrialSage

Judson Voss of Chart Industries joins us to discuss a big buzzword in today’s digital, industrial, and B2B marketing space: inbound marketing.

Danny:

Welcome to this episode of IndustrialSage. We’ve got a familiar guest here. We have Judson Voss from Chart Industries, and today he’s going to be talking about really the power of inbound and how Chart uses it. And it’s a really exciting thing. So for those who don’t know you, Judson, or haven’t heard some of the earlier episodes because he was on quite a few at the beginning, tell us a little bit about yourself, who you are, Chart, all that good stuff.

Judson:

Sure. So with Chart Industries, I’m the digital marketing manager. That means most things.

Danny:

You do print brochures.

Judson:

I do brochures. I clean the restrooms most days. It just depends on what’s going on. I drink a lot of coffee for the most part.

Danny:

Yes, there you go.

Judson:

Yeah, there you go. So that’s my role there and title. What I do is take the strategy of what we’re trying to do and creating revenue and boiling that down to engagement with customers through the digital platform, which is 90% of what the world is today, anyways.

Danny:

Exactly, and that’s awesome. That’s very much what we’re going to be talking about today is really this thing, inbound marketing, digital marketing. What is that? From your standpoint, what would you define that as? What is it?

Judson:

What is inbound marketing?

Danny:

What is inbound marketing?

Judson:

To me, regardless of whether you’re looking at digital, analog, whatever it is, inbound is trying to figure out a way to get people to find you and to come into what we call this proverbial funnel, to have a way to interact with you. But nowadays, it’s really coming to a website, coming to some digital property somewhere, social media, whatever it is to get more information about your brand, about your product, about how you operate, all that kind of stuff.

Danny:

Yeah, and it makes sense. And it’s important these days because there’s been a lot of shift in the industry. I’m curious; how long has Chart actually been using some sort of inbound marketing for, and what was that tipping point where they said, we need to go into this and start moving in this direction?

Judson:

From a digital perspective, probably for the last five years, something like that. The tipping point that that’s my background, so that’s what we were going to do.

Danny:

There you go.

Judson:

But the reality is, that’s where the world is today. Looking at a very big picture view of manufacturing or really just old-school organizations–I’m not saying that in a bad way–companies that have been around for 70 years and have been successful. There’s no shame in being that company. They’ve operated in different ways. Some have latched onto the changes, and to some it’s something new. And it’s just a matter of understanding how your buyers operate, how people come to you, and how they find stuff. You’re talking about a tipping point, I remember I was actually out at a brewery talking to some folks, guys in their late 20s, early 30s that own this brewery, really smart business guys too, by the way. And I was talking to them about a product, and we’re setting them up to be, our company as a go-to that would show off our product and understand the technical pieces and be our voice in that industry. And I just said, off the cuff, I said, “You guys were sold by us. What was that experience, and what things could we improve on?” And they said, “Well, first of all, your video and the way you draw people into your site, from our perspective, really sucks.”

Danny:

Aw, thanks.

Judson:

I said, hey, there’s something. Maybe if I dig deeper, there’s something I could look at there.

Danny:

Hey, it’s good feedback, but that’s pretty funny. So why did they become customers? I’m curious, if your videos sucked, or whatever.

Judson:

Because there’s only a couple of companies in the world that make that specific product, and they came back and said, “It was really hard to find information about your product and you guys, but when you finally came out and visited with us, we just liked the way you did business more than the other companies. And that’s why they picked it. And there’s a balance there, too. There’s this incoming lead, never hearing of you, needing to warm up the lead part, which is getting to know your business. And then the other part is your people and your business. And I think that should be a piece of your incoming funnel is getting to know those folks, unless they’re just not fun to hang out with. Otherwise, it is an important key is that you are bringing them in to learn more about you, not just to go through this funnel and sell them and hit the bottom.

Danny:

Right, yeah. And I think that’s a really important point because I think there’s a lot of push-back that we hear every single day. And it’s like, well, that works in other industries, but we’re very relationship-driven. And it’s like, well, yeah, but every business is relationship-driven. And I think there’s a misunderstanding that it’s not to replace those relationships at all. I think it’s really to enhance it, to really augment it. You said something really key there. You said these guys were a little bit younger, in their 20s or whatever. And they thought, aw this is–have you guys been seeing a little bit more of that over the last few years?

Judson:

Yeah, and it only makes sense because if you think about it this way, Chart’s products, but a lot of manufacturing companies, they’re not selling to other companies. They’re selling to engineers. And most of the engineers that are seeking out new products as a part of their business are not the guys that have been around for 60 years that are working in the engineering manager, director’s role. It’s the younger guys, younger girls, that are in those roles that are coming into the business now. And they’re the ones that they’re sending out to seek these products. So just naturally, it’s going to be a younger crowd. I think it probably was all the time. It’s just that before we had the digital piece, we couldn’t figure out who those people were. So yeah, definitely it’s just a matter of the business, especially in a manufacturing industrial side. You are going to be talking to the younger folks at the company.

Danny:

Yeah. I think also, too, there’s a little bit of a misconception there, too that we always need to be talking to the CEO. And the reality of it is, there’s several different people. These decisions aren’t necessarily going to be made by one person. There’s an interesting stat, actually, that Google came out with in 2015 which says that–and this was, what, three years ago, three and a half, depending on when in 2015–that B2B buyers are, nearly 50% of them are millennial. Very scary stat, right? That’s what they would say. But the important lesson there, and you pointed it out, is that those young men and women are going to be making those decisions. The way that they buy is dramatically different than the way that things used to be purchased 20, 30 years ago.

And it’s critically important to understand that and realize, because it reminds me of business models that just did not pivot. You always think of the Blockbuster and Netflix. Netflix came in, complete underdog, and completely upset the big boy. And I think it’s something like, they had, I think they were valued at, Blockbuster, the highest point was $8 billion. Netflix, I think, is 60 or 70 or 80 billion in terms of their valuation. That is obscene. But it happened slowly. It wasn’t like this overnight thing, and Blockbuster didn’t necessarily recognize, or they failed to recognize it, and it was too late. I hear this constantly from manufacturers, like, jeez, things aren’t working the way they used to, or tradeshow attendance is low. Now we’ve got all these competitors that are popping up. They’re doing all this stuff, and we don’t really necessarily understand it. So anyways, yeah, just to add onto that point.

Judson:

Yeah, I agree. And speaking to that, and I can’t remember the stat; it came from Joe Pelosi’s stuff, the inbound marketing stuff.

Danny:

Content marketing is, too.

Judson:

Yeah, content marketing is, too. I think it’s 90-something percent of B2B buyers today, the first touch is through your website or some digital property. It may not be your website; it may be something, an asset somewhere else digitally that they find you. And that’s just the buyer’s journey today. The main entry point is not going to be some of the things we’ve seen in the past. It’s going to be through a website, through a webinar, through a landing page. Something, somewhere is how they’re getting to you. And even digitally, in the trade, as an industrial area, pass their trade publications. Usually it’s not through the printed material anymore. It’s usually online, through an ad, through an article, something like that that they’re finding out about you, especially videos at a tradeshow and they learn more about you. But it’s not the tradeshow; it’s the video on the website. So the reality of it is, if you’re not well-positioned there, then you’re not well-positioned with 90-something percent of your potential buyers.

Danny:

Right, exactly. And I think that is, that’s the critical point there in that piece there. That has shifted. You just have to think about when you buy something, whether it’s a B2B purchase or a B2C purchase, what do you do? Do you go to the yellow pages, naturally, and you open–We go into this thing called “the Google.” You Google it, right? And it’s the same exact thing, whether you’re an engineer in a craft brewery looking for a mixing tank or whatever. Case in point.

Judson:

Yeah, the old days of parts and materials in a big catalog like this they’ll ship to you once a year, you look through it as an engineer to find what you were looking for and then call the company up to get more information, that’s gone. People want to be able to Google it online, find the thing, find more details about it, and then when they’re ready to buy, maybe talk to somebody. But they don’t usually want to do it. You and I are the same way, too. Even big purchases. I want to be educated as much as I can before I seek out the actual folks to get the real details, make sure that what I’m thinking is correct for the product.

Danny:

Which I think is another really great point is the fact that, I think there’s some stat they talk about. They say that 80% of buyers, when they contact you, they’ve already made up their mind. They’ve already done all their research. They’ve looked at you; they’ve looked at your competitors, and they’re down that funnel. They know who you are; they’ve looked at your material, good or bad. And then that next one, they actually reach out. They’ve already made that decision, or they’re very close to it. So I think the critical thing is, you mention on there that education piece. Nobody wants to, we don’t want to go to a website–we want to be very anonymous. I don’t want a salesperson calling me and hounding me and doing all this. So what have you guys done in terms of inbound to help facilitate that education, that buyer’s journey?

Judson:

The journey. It varies. Webinars are a big piece. When you’re talking about a fairly expensive, highly technical product, that’s one of the best ways to get there. Two things: they learn about your product, and they learn about you because they get both of those pieces. Hopefully the subject matter expert on that product is the one doing the webinar, so not only do they learn about the technical piece of the product, they learn about the person that they’re going to be dealing with, essentially, the person that helped design the product or get it to market. So both of those pieces are important there. You mentioned before about the CEO, and they’re not going to be the one that’s really buying the product, but they might have an influence. Spend as much time as possible, from an account-based marketing perspective, which is educating each of the different groups in the organization about the company and about the product, really more about the solution. Engineer might be interested in the specs of the product. Everybody else in that company is interested in the ROI. Why are we spending money on this product, and what are we getting out of it? So we try to go across the board that way, so all the different pieces are touched from a digital perspective.

Danny:

Absolutely, so make sure that the content of different areas, you either speak to that person who’s going to be looking. So if you’re talking to a CEO, don’t talk about, oh, here’s all the amazing features and benefits. They don’t care. It’s, operationally, we think that we’re going to be able to reduce some of your costs by 5% or 10%. Oh, okay.

Judson:

Even CEOs, maybe at that level it’s more about this is my company. We’re not a shot in the dark organization. We’ve been around for a whole bunch of years. That might be all they need to know at that level, the CEO, the COO. The CFO, he might want to know other pieces of information.

Danny:

That’s a great point.

Judson:

I always recommend, if you’re marketing to the CFO, don’t care about the product. Care about the payback. Create a calculator, and use that with the CFO because what they want to do is, they want to be able to calculate the payback without doing any work.

Danny:

Yeah, right, exactly.

Just like we all do. So yeah, I always recommend different pieces like that that speaks directly to their organizational structure.

Danny:

Absolutely. The thing is, I feel like it’s really taking those relationships you develop, the way that companies have gone to market in the past, and it’s not really changing the structure of it so much. It’s just changing the medium and the way that it’s communicated and delivered. That’s really it.

Judson:

In my spare time — the other 24 hours of my day — I’ve helped organizations out on that side, the sales enablement piece. And I work with folks sometimes in explaining how to set up their funnel digitally in the first place through software solutions. The first thing I always recommend is, you want a quick win, it’s go out and interview the sales team and understand how they get leads, what they do with those leads, how they decide who’s the important one, who I should call back first, who’s the guy I’m going to ignore, that kind of stuff and totally just copy it. Digitally, just copy that, and do what they do because the company, you’re a billion-dollar company. You’ve been doing something right for a long time.

Danny:

You would think so, yeah.

Judson:

So just copy that digitally. You don’t have to go out and reinvent the world digitally. Just figure out how to support what works already through another format.

Danny:

Exactly, and I think that’s the key answer in that solution to the whole relationship question. It’s like, whoa, what is this? All this new stuff.

Judson:

It’s still there.

Danny:

Nothing’s new under the sun.

Judson:

There’s some cool new stuff from the perspective of how you get the leads in. It’s easier to schlock around at a trade show for four days and stand around at your booth looking at people like, oh, please come talk to me. There’s other ways to do it. Inbound, essentially, going back to the original question, inbound is a digital method to allow people to raise their hand instead of you seeking them out asking if they want your product. And so that’s what all these cool new tools really help you do.

Danny:

And the beautiful thing, and I love about it too–I mean, there’s a lot of things I love about it–is the fact that that thing runs, if you set it up right, 24/7. It’s like having a whole fleet of salespeople that are out there doing trade shows constantly. So while it’s night time here in the United States, if you’re a global company, you’ve got stuff, or what have you. Or somebody here, it’s an engineer, and it’s late at night. They’re trying to figure out this thing, and they come–they’re being educated. Maybe it’s that webinar that is pre-recorded, and it’s there, and that the project manager and engineer had put together. And they’re learning, and they’re developing that relationship. That relationship absolutely is being developed there. They’re being educated, and it’s being automated. That is really the key piece is that we can take what you’ve done but then scale it. And that is very, very exciting.

Judson:

Right, and then taking that information. People will say, I don’t know how to create content. You can probably get your subject matter expert to put a PowerPoint together and record it. That’s one piece of content, but now you can break that into a whole bunch of different things. Now you’ve got, A: you’ve got the slide deck that you can put different places. B: you should be able to go back through and figure out blog posts you can write, articles, just redeveloping what the content says on your website. If people watch the webinar, and they send you an email that says, hey, I saw your webinar, and I thought this was really interesting, put it on your website. It resonates with a customer; put it on your website.

Danny:

Absolutely

Judson:

And so there’s all different ways you could take that content and repurpose it into new uses.

Danny:

So for those who may say, yeah, that sounds like a great idea, why would they want to do it? What does content play in terms of–what’s the why it’s such a big deal in inbound?

Judson:

Well, because it is inbound.

Danny:

Ah, well there you go.

Judson:

The folks at CMI will say that, at least. But it is. There is no inbound. There is the idea and the structure. We talk about old-school and trade shows and stuff, but there is the old-school also of AdWords: “Come to my website, and somehow, you’re going to buy something from me because you see a picture of a product and a product spec under that.” That today is, while it worked five years ago, is old-school today too. We’re just moving faster. So people don’t want to just see the specs on products. They want the story behind it. They want to know what it’s going to do for them, which they’ve always wanted. They’re just asking for it digitally. And so they want to see all those pieces. Well, the content is that. The content is what tells the story, that explains the product. It explains your company. It explains who you are maybe sometimes and ties all that together. But without the content, there is nowhere to land and gather data.

Danny:

Yeah, it’s taking that education and feeding it throughout the journey at the right time. It can’t be just firehosed, everything, all the–And I think that’s the power of having marketing automation systems to be able to help facilitate and do that.

Judson:

In the right format, too. So we’re talking about repurposing. Part of it’s because we’re lazy marketers, and we want to get as much bang for our buck as we can by one piece of content. But the other thing is, everybody learns differently. There is that engineer that is going to sit there and watch an hour-long webinar. Just so you know, that’s not me. I go and sign up for a webinar. I get the replay, and I hope to God that they have a Cliff Notes version that I can read through in about four minutes. So there’s that piece of it, and there’s people that like to read and different ways that they like to consume their content. That’s why video podcasts, audio podcasts, blogs, you say which is the best? And the answer is yes.

Danny:

Yeah, exactly. So wrapping up here, one last question is for the company, the organization that’s saying, this is interesting. We’re thinking about this, and maybe we should do this. What advice would you give to them? Are there any particular key steps? What would you tell them?

Judson:

I could do this for an hour.

Danny:

That’s a whole other episode. Maybe we’ll do, we can do a part two if we need to.

Judson:

To me, for marketers, regardless if your title has digital or not in it or whatever your title is, you need to understand your business and your customers first. Regardless of the digital piece or anything like that, you need to know what you’re selling and why you’re selling it. And why you’re selling it isn’t to get revenue. It’s, why is the customer buying it? So you’ve got to have that baseline in there. But then, when you get to the digital side, you have to be honest with yourself. Say, this is new. This is something we haven’t done before, so we need to figure this out. And just going and telling your resources that you have already, go figure it out, it’s good if they want to take that on. Don’t do that as your main source. I think you’re going to end up flailing around trying to get there. So bringing in an outside resource I think is important if you don’t have it in place. If you’ve got somebody there, they’re the digital marketing king or queen, and they can do it, then great. Go from there. But you’re probably not asking that question if you’ve got that already.

Danny:

Probably not.

Judson:

So for the other 99.8% of us, it’s good to go out and seek out other resources, even if it’s just for consulting purposes and ask people what they think that are outside your organization that maybe have done this before, something like that, or just hiring an agency to come in and to that. I think that’s really important to set that up in the beginning. And then, the other piece is trying to figure out what you’re going to get out of it and what your plans are. There’s two things that I think, personally, that kill digital marketing implementations in organizations. One is, they don’t know what they want to get out of it. Well, I guess I should say there’s three. The other one is, don’t know what you’re doing, and don’t ask for help. But they don’t know what they plan to get out of it, so they just have zero ways to measure it.

And on the back side of that is, they don’t have a way to represent to their boss, the next person up the line, what the ROI is going to be. Because what I see people do is, they come in and they say, we’re going to start a digital marketing plan. And their boss is like, eh. And sooner or later they say, so what do we get out of it? And they’re just like, you don’t understand. Digital marketing is the way of the world today. Well, as a business owner or as a CEO or somebody that’s running a business, the way of the world is great. They want to know what specifics they’re going to get. If they’re putting the money into it, what are they going to get back out of it?

Danny:

Exactly.

Judson:

And I think you have to be able to portray that to them. Otherwise, you will get stuck.

Danny:

Absolutely.

Judson:

We always said, get by, and get sponsorship from the top level in the organization. That’s what you need for whatever project you’re doing. Digital marketing is no different. I think it helps you, too because now you’re like, okay, now I know what I expect to get from it. And now I know what I’m going to measure. And now I know what success is going to look like for me, too. So you cover it all in that—

Danny:

Reporting, analytics, and communicating that back.

Judson:

Yeah, having a strategy, all that.

Danny:

Awesome. Well, Judson, I really appreciate the time. You’ve given us a ton of great information. If anybody had any further questions, they’d like to reach out to you, what’s the best way of contacting you?

Judson:

Best way is to go to my website, probably, judsonvoss.com.

Danny:

Perfect, yeah.

Judson:

I don’t know how I came up with it. One night I was sitting—

Danny:

That’s a tough thing.

Judson:

Yeah, I had to change my name and everything. But that’s probably the easiest way to get me through there.

Danny:

Excellent. Alright, well Judson thanks again so much for the time, as always. I know we’ve seen you here a lot. Hopefully we’ll see you here some more. And thanks again.

Judson:

You betcha.

Danny:

Alright. Okay, so that was great, look, another great episode. Inbound marketing, what is it? Why it’s important, why you need it, I think some really big, key takeaways. I think really the big thing is that recognizing and fully understanding that the buying cycle, the journey has shifted. It’s changed, and people are going to your website first when they want to go learn more about you. And you have to ask yourself a critical question: What are they finding when they go and Google you? A, can you be found? B, once you’re found, do you have the right information? Do you have the right content that educates them, that tells them who you are, about your products, about your services so that when they’re ready to contact you or make that decision and contact who they want to go to, that they have been fully educated on you guys? This is the company that we want to go with. Is that set up? It’s a very key thing. That’s the way that we’re going and the way that we’re going to be doing that here.

So thanks so much for watching this episode. And if you have any questions, please feel free to reach out to IndustrialSage.com/questions. We’d love to answer them for you. Please share this; like this. If you’re listening on iTunes, we’d love a review. And, as always, thanks again. I’m Danny Gonzales, and this is IndustrialSage.

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