Ed Marsh with Ed Marsh Consulting

00:04

Welcome to the Industrial Talk Podcast with Scott. MacKenzie. Scott is a passionate industry professional, dedicated to transferring cutting edge industry focused innovations and trends while highlighting the men and women who keep the world moving. So put on your hard hat, grab your work boots and let's go. All right, industrial professional. Thank you very much for joining Industrial Talk and your continued support of this ever expanding ecosystem that celebrates you, you industrial Pro. You're bold, you're brave, you dare greatly, you innovate, you collaborate, you call you just solving problems each and every day. That's why we celebrate you on Industrial Talk, if you can hear in the background the buzzy buzz, buzz, buzz. We're at fab tech. It's in Orlando, Florida, and it is a, again, a collection of incredible companies that are really here to make you a success. We're also brought to you by PMA, that is the precision metal forming Association. Go out to pma.org and find out more. He's been in the hot seat a couple of times. He's ready to bring the energy because, you know, it's the afternoon and he's gonna bring energy.

01:14

Let's get cracking. Mr. Energy,

01:17

you having a good conference? Absolutely, when'd you get in? I came in this morning. Oh, yeah, yeah,

01:25

shoot, but I didn't get the message until just now that I'm supposed to have hard hat and work with yeah, see right now. Oh, before we get on, get going here. Let me change the right here. This is, this is, Ed,

01:40

sure. There it is Ed marshes right there. That's how famous he is right there. He has a little hand out here that is pretty spectacular bronze. It has Ed Marsh on it. And it has, it has girth to it feels good in hand. Well. And as a guest on the industrial growth Institute podcast, yeah, I'm pleased to present it to you, Scott, yeah. Well, thank you very much. Appreciate it. I think, I think when we spoke, when you were on my podcast, you were actually sitting in the lobby in the Orlando Convention Center then too. What's that really? Yeah, I think must be a regular stop for you. Here it is Orlando.

02:17

A lot of people do Yeah. I'm trying to remember that that's exactly correct. We back in March or something, yes,

02:26

yeah, yeah. I think it was distributed anyway, talking, talking distributive energy stuff. Well, I like this. So you're here at FABTECH.

02:39

You are a master at,

02:43

if there's anything

02:45

expanding in revenue growth, the thought behind that you truly are passionate about manufacturers.

02:53

Give us a little background on who Ed is, outside of the fact that you're you're a badass when it comes to this stuff. All right. Well, now you set me up to fail with that introduction. Just want to make sure that you bring the energy the energy.

03:04

So came out of the army and went into business. Loved the army, but wanted to stay married and wanted to learn how to sell, and ended up in the packaging machinery business, and then other machines and kind of my career followed the twists and turns like everybody does over the years, and about probably seven or eight years ago, set up a consulting business to help industrial manufacturers, mostly capital equipment companies, kind of lower middle, middle market, 50 to two, $50 million figure out how to sell more. Because the thing that I know, almost without exception, you talk to them, they've spent years working on the back end of the business. They've got well documented process for this. They've got quality procedures. They've got all of this stuff mapped out in great detail. They know exactly what they're doing every day of the week, third shift, middle of night, everything. And then you compare that to the way they do their marketing and sales, yeah, it's a sharp contrast, because the marketing and sales site just tends to be this ad hoc collection of, well, let's try something Tuesday, or let's try something Friday. I mean, we'll go to a different trade show this year, and hope it all works. And so if we can bring that mindset, you know, that rigor, that process engineering, continuous improvement, mindset that they have from the back end of the business and apply to the front end, then they've got a great opportunity. So that's what I help them do. I like that. I like that a lot, because you're absolutely spot on. What are we talking about today? We you mentioned something in our conversation, pre we were what? Pre meeting it, I guess, for lack of a better term has he wanders on by and says hello, and we needed to get this down into a podcast. Do a podcast. It's just that simple,

04:41

take us through what you're talking about. That really piqued my interest. Yeah, so more and more, and I think you're a great representation of this, more and more, the content that works is what I call edutainment. It's content that people can consume passively and or get by scrolling because you.

05:00

So 10 years ago, you could write a blog post. Google would pick it up. People would search it, they'd take the time. They'd read it, they'd rub their chin, they think about it, and they don't do that anymore, maybe when they're getting ready to buy, but certainly not beforehand. And so from an awareness, a pre awareness context, the hardest job salespeople have now is getting the first meeting. And how do you get the first meeting? Well, you've got to have something worth talking about from their perspective, and you have to build trust. You can't build trust on a cold call. Cold Calls are important. They still work, but there has to be trust before that. And so that's the job of this edutainment content that can be passively consumed, so video and audio, scrollable, social stuff, things that people can do when they're walking the dog or working out or doing laundry or sitting in the car, whatever the case may be, because they don't interrupt their day to read articles anymore. So that means, like I said, podcasts and videos. So, so if that's the context of edutainment, then we also have to adjust the kinds of topics we're talking about, because to write the same crap or to talk on video about the same crap you've written about for years, about, you know how many millimeters or meters per minute, or the durometer of your rubber, or the, you know, the number of dimensions of whatever you're doing. But it doesn't matter anymore. Nobody cares about that. They don't care about what you make or what you do or how you do it. They care about the impact on their business. So what that brings us to is, if you're going to create this content that can be passively consumed in a pre awareness buying stage, so you can create trust and help your sales team set up meetings, you have to be talking about other topics that are important to them, but topics they don't even know should be important to them. So what I'm calling it is cool content, K, U, U, U, L, and what, what that stands for is known unknowns and unknown unknowns, learning. Content, cool content. So that means, instead of talking about you, instead of talking about the crap that they you know, there's this classic question, what keeps you up at night? That's such an inane question these days, but they know the things that they're worried about, what what they want to know is the things that they should be worried about, or that they should begin to think about, because it would help them improve their business, improve the outcomes, make them a more well rounded and and and more effective business leader and manager and industry innovator and all those kinds of things. So that means, well, outside of what you do. You know, whatever you make great good for you get out of bed and be excited about in the morning. But nobody else is, yeah, right. They're excited about working less overtime. They're excited about having holidays at home with their family. They're excited about not looking at the PnL, you know, with dread every month when it comes around. And so how can you find topics and build a faculty of industry experts, where you're the conduit by which this information gets shared. So it's it's what you've been doing for years, and you try to help companies understand how to do it. How do you I didn't mean to interrupt, but I did interrupt, so I'm sorry for interrupt,

07:59

jumping at the bit here, chomping at it.

08:02

No, how do you deal with, let's say, take that manufacturer, take that individual, take that company who is worried about all of the things that they have to worry about. It's, you know, it's endless, quite frankly, and then be able to sort of shift that focus in in a way that

08:19

begins to to

08:22

go down that cool route. How do you how do you get companies to realize that that's important and not as something like here's just another thing. Well, companies are like everything else in nature. They follow a bell curve, and so only the second and third standard deviation are actually going to figure that out, maybe a little bit of the first standard deviation. But, I mean, it's not something that most companies are going to get. Most companies are going to persist in doing the doing things the way they've done them. So, so I don't think that it's, you know, the challenge isn't so much to get companies to understand it. The challenge is to identify the leaders of those companies that are open to it, and they're the ones that can be really excited about undertaking something like that. Yeah, but see, that's, that's a great point, because once again, the success of these, these initiatives, has to be driven by the top. Oh, without a doubt. You know, it's it. These are not bottom up type of initiatives. This is top down completely, that that recognize the necessity to be able to do this for the for the business. And I think it's even interesting to say, Okay, let's define the top I mean, you took a company public on the NASDAQ. So you understand executive leadership, you understand the role of CEO versus the president. You understand the role of the board of directors. I believe the role of the board of directors is evolving, or should evolve, with superb companies. Clearly, the board, you know, the old nose and fingers out the board are not the operators. The board should not begin interfering with the executive management team. However, if the board doesn't have basic, fundamental, contemporary understanding of sales and marketing, I don't believe they can provide proper oversight and governance. And so I would say, you know, of course, the board is not going to set the topics for a.

10:00

Entertainment conversation. They're not going to go into a cool methodology, but they need to. The board absolutely should be thinking about how we build trust at a pre awareness stage in the buying journey with the broad market. And if the board isn't thinking about that, then they're probably not pushing the executive management.

10:19

And I think it's getting better. I get a sense. I can't really,

10:27

I can't pinpoint it, but I think that there's a lot of companies out here right now that are thinking, I have to do a better job well. And you've been evangelizing this for years,

10:38

yeah, for an eternity.

10:41

Please. Somebody Listen to me how pathetic this is.

10:46

I just want you to be a success wine. But I do. I mean, how many times have we talked about as we look around the trade show booths here and we know, we just know that 70% of the leads that are being harvested never gonna be followed up on, never and the money that goes into these booths for companies to show up, the T and E, taking people out of the field, everything else going on to harvest leads that somebody's going to track in a spreadsheet that no one's ever going to call no it. It's infuriating. And when you start talking about the time and expense. So we treated ourselves to fogo, right? So we did the old Brazilian, and that's gone up in price.

11:27

I was dazzled by the amount of individuals that groups from fab tech going there and having this experience, and all I could think about as a former executive myself.

11:41

What what? What's being No, I can't do it. I can't do it. I don't

11:48

know. So when we start talking about cool, K, U, U, L, right, yep, take us just step by step. What does that mean?

11:58

Well, so, so I'll use an example. I have no idea if this lands with your audience, but I'm going to be speaking at the industrial cleaning trade association meeting coming up in November in Las Vegas, and so I've been thinking about examples that would be appropriate for them. So if you're a company that does building services, you know you you do the janitorial and all of that kind of stuff. You can talk about the chemicals that you use. You can talk about the way you screen your staff and do background checks to make sure. You can talk about the floor buffers and the checklists and all that kind of crap, but that's table stakes. I mean that that's the way a building services company operates. You do all that kind of stuff. You sound like everyone else when you talk about that. But let's back up, and we know that every company is having a hard time finding employees and retaining employees, good employees. So what kinds of benefits, what kinds of topics do, can we reasonably think maybe make a difference in helping them recruit and retain employees? And so maybe on site child care. Except if you create on site child care, what does that mean? How much space do you need? What are the regulatory things? How do you staff it? How do you clean it? What about a nurse and all those kinds of things? Well, how about So this fits somewhere in the known unknowns, or unknown unknowns, in that learning kind of content, cool learning content. How about if we bring in experts, create a faculty that, over the course of a couple videos or podcasts or LinkedIn live, talk about how you go about setting up a an in house childcare facility for a typical manufacturing operation. Now, does that resonate with most manufacturers listening? Who knows, but it's such a different approach to it, and if they're struggling to get employees, and they want to think creatively about how to find and retain great employees, including females from the community. I mean, what a great way to offer an idea to them, which then guess what, if you got a bunch of kids running around, it's not coming out their nose during winter cold season, Yeah, guess what? It's going to need a lot of building services, right? So of course, then you become an expert that's a great resource to make sure that it's properly sanitized and cleaned and meets all the regulations. So you're bringing them really helpful information for their business that ultimately creates, possibly a bit of an opportunity for you on the back end too,

14:16

but that requires a lot of different thinking. Is it doesn't it? Oh, of course, absolutely. But again, that brings us back, if, if, if, second standard deviation, companies are always looking for ways to be unique and to excel, then they're accustomed to thinking different. Yeah, see, I like that.

14:32

How would you, how would you,

14:35

with that mindset, take a company and begin that journey? What? What? What What would you do? What are those steps? It doesn't have to be in depth, but just, just take me through that well. So, so this is a perfect example of what I'm talking about, because I can't cold call an executive of $100 million manufacturing company and say, Hey, have you thought about a podcast about a childcare facility? Yeah,

14:58

it's, it's beautiful.

15:00

Is this comical, right? On the other hand, if I can get a referral or an introduction and sit down and have a meeting with them, or maybe even invite them on my podcast to talk about some of what they do that might be relevant to the rest of my audience, then I've got the opportunity to over the course of a conversation, maybe over a meal, whatever the case may be, to say, hey, what about this in your business? And how are you how are you doing this? And how are you finding leads? And I hear from most companies, the biggest problem their sales team has is getting in the door with new accounts and getting first meetings. And what are you doing about? Yeah, what are you doing about? And so that conversation then leads to, well, let me ask you, how do you do research? Now you know, how many cold calls do you respond to? How many cold emails do you respond to? What do you do when you're walking the dog? What do you do when you're driving? Oh, I listen to podcasts. What kinds of podcasts you listen to? No, it may be true crime, it may be personal finance, it may be politics, but almost invariably, you find out that sometimes you listen to business stuff. And it's not business stuff in the core of what they do. It's business stuff to expand the horizon to help them think creatively. Well, geez, if you do that, you know, I'm gonna take a wild guess here, maybe your prospects do too,

16:11

yeah,

16:12

and Google's the second biggest search engine in the world, right? Or not? Google, YouTube? Yeah, I was just gonna say I thought it was YouTube. Google is the first but, yeah, but you're absolutely spot on and and just for me personally,

16:28

a day doesn't go by when I'm not, I'm not on YouTube trying to figure out what to do with something. Or how do I, you know, whatever my problem is, I guarantee you it's out on YouTube. Well, I tried to find one on Saturday. I couldn't find, still, wait, really? Yeah, I was trying to figure out how to adjust the cable for the deflector for this big leaf blower I bought a couple years ago that somehow is out of whack now, and I could not find a single resource to help me figure out how to do that. No way, really.

16:57

But you're right. You can find most stuff. I was just gonna say now, now it's, it's incumbent on you to produce that video to figure out the answer. I gotta tell you I was, I was trying to change out my user interface for my dishwasher, and I found it out there. Yep,

17:16

19:09

see what I'm telling you. Listener,

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how do I get a hold of you? How I know how I get a hold of you? I know how others. But how would people get a hold of you? Because they're interested in Cool? Well, you look on YouTube, right? Look for Ed Marsh consulting, M, A, R, S, H, Ed Marsh consultant. That's my website to Ed Marsh consulting, sage. He's a sage. I don't use that often, but now I do for him. That's sweet of you to say sage. All right, listeners, we're gonna have all the contact information for Ed out on Industrial Talk, and look at his other podcast that he has out on Industrial Talk again, he never disappoints. He knows a lot more than I do, big time in a big way. All right, we're broadcasting from FABTECH. It is a wonderful event. You need to you need to put this on your calendar. It is a great event with great solutions floating around and people knowing about the pay.

20:00

All right, we're gonna wrap it up on the other side. Stay tuned. We will be right back. You're listening to the Industrial Talk Podcast Network

20:14

FABTECH.

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What a great event in manufacturing. Here's an event now you can talk to the people. Of course, you can talk to the people. That's what these conferences are all about, that networking opportunity. But the fun part about it is that you get to kick the tires of the innovation that is taking place, the technology that happens there, the manufacturing solutions, it's all there. You can have these great conversations to help you succeed. Industrial Talk is here for you to succeed. Go to that conference. I highly recommend it. It's a big deal. Ed Marsh, speaking of success, he's all about the tactics. He's all about the nuts and bolts of your success. You need to reach out to him. Contact information out on Industrial Talk. Easy peasy. He wants to talk to you. Industrial Talk is here for you. Podcast, story technology. Put it out on Industrial Talk. We want you to succeed as well. Be bold, be brave. Derek, greatly. I say it all the time. Hang out with Ed. Change the world. We're gonna have another great conversation shortly. So stay tuned. You.