Pete Mansel with Accruent

SUMMARY KEYWORDS

industrial professionals, sales trends, global sales, integrated solutions, change management, ROI focus, customer relationships, digital transformation, cloud adoption, AI applications, predictive maintenance, multi-generational workforce, technology integration, customer success, future trends

00:00

Scott, 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 Well,

00:21

hello there, industrial professionals. Thank you very much for joining Industrial Talk, and thank you for your continued support of this platform that celebrates you, you industrial professionals, because you're bold, brave, you dare greatly, you innovate, you collaborate, you are on a on a daily basis, solving problems, making the world a better place. That's why this platform is for you, industrial professionals. We are on site accrued Insights. Is the event we are in San Antonio, Texas. It it's a cool place, and I'm looking right down. If you see me on the camera, I'm looking right down. And I'm seeing a bunch of people having a good time this morning. So anyway, we have in the hot seat, Pete Mansel, Chief Sales Officer, with crew, and we're going to be talking about, well, sales, what are the trends, all of that good stuff. Let's get cracking. Stay one, having a good conference. Dude, did you go to you went to that thing last night? Right? We

01:24

did great conference. Great to see everybody joining, wasn't it? Yep, employees, customers, everybody getting together. It's been a year since a lot of people have seen each other in person. Seems busier, very busy.

01:36

I like it. Got a lot of energy, indeed. Yeah. So yeah, the food was good too. Like that

01:44

beat it. Well, San Antonio's finest, that's true.

01:48

Very good. All right. For the listeners out there, Pete, just give us a little background on who you are, sure.

01:53

Pete Mansel, I lead the global sales organization here at Accruent, joined about six years ago and have really been part of transformation throughout the years and making us an enterprise software company. So it's been great to work with all the teams across the

02:08

globe. Well, you summed that up real quick, and I was hoping you could stretch it out a little longer. This is a podcast. It's not a race, yeah, you bet. All right, what does that mean when you start talking about global Sure,

02:23

a little bit more. Yeah, you bet. So we have teams the lion Sure, the teams are here in North America, but we do have them across Europe, as well as Latin America and the Australia, New Zealand market more recently. So with that, a lot of collaboration required across the globe, working through all the time zone issues, but really unifying the team, similar to how we try to unify the built environment for our customers, we got to do a lot of unifying of the teams across the globe. So we're all rowing in the same direction. But when you look across the accruing portfolio of solutions, whether it's our asset management solutions or some on the other side of the portfolio, in the workplace, just just a vast array of offerings that we can take to market different parts of the world. But

03:08

it's my understanding from a strategic perspective. You're really trying to bring them all together as a comprehensive solution, so that, if I'm Scott manufacturer, I can just come up and say, I have my challenges and problems I and I need. I don't. I don't want to just have another technology to fit on my other tech. I want something more efficient, right? How do you how do you keep your teams adapted? And that's dynamic, yeah. Well,

03:37

you know, many of our clients to your point, they're not looking for point solutions anymore. No, right? They want, they want integrated suites where possible. They would like to reduce the number of vendors they do business with so they can drive greater efficiencies across our operations. And really, we view it as connected workflows. That's what they need. And from our perspective, what we want to do is bring the technologies together that in and of their own could be considered best of breed offerings. We don't want them to feel like, well, I've got to go to four different vendors to get what we really need. We said, Hey, let's let's work and innovate on each of the respective solutions, but then do the integration work for them so that they just get more of a common look and feel integrated platform that allows them, whether bridging the gap between maintenance, engineering, operations, we help them do that.

04:31

It seems like a lot of change management. If I came in, if I was an executive, and I said, Hey, I do. I want this connected solution that's going to require a lot of change management within my organization, on on how workflows are being developed, whatever it might be sure, does your organization sort of help me with that journey?

04:51

We absolutely do. And I would say it's not similar to you know, if a client were to put in an ERP system that that could be super COVID. Comprehensive. What we try to do is understand where the customer's pain points today, but we lay out a vision for them of where we can take them as they integrate and add on more offerings to the platform. And then at the end of the day, it really becomes, let's work on a project plan together, collaborate on the phases in which you know the higher priority items are attacked first and and then roll through the next series of of opportunities with them to improve their business. So we really want to be on a journey with them, versus just, you know, hey, here's a project, and then move on to the next.

05:35

But I want an ROI. Sure. I want I want results. I'm not just opening up my checkbook? Yeah, I want how do you and your team ensures that happening?

05:48

Yeah? No, great question, and it's very much about delivering value across the accrued portfolio. We have defined value propositions for every single one of our our products, and what I mean by that is quantifiable ROI that we could demonstrate based upon the business benefits that the solutions provide. So we work in collaboration with with our customers to really understand costs associated with the way they're doing things today. We focus on the outcomes they're looking for tomorrow, and then we work through an ROI with them and develop the value prop, or the business case. At the end of the day, it needs to be theirs. We can provide some pro formas, and say, similar sized companies get these types of returns. But let's, let's engage and look at your data. And at that point in time, if they're serious, they'll lean in and they'll provide that information to us, and we'll collaborate together refine the business model, because ultimately, we want them to be in a defensible position when they go ask their executive team to fund a project, right? There's always alternative use of capital or ways they can spend money, and we want to help them get their projects secured so they can move forward. So we spend a great deal of time working with them to develop the value prop and one that they feel good about, that we can measure afterwards once that project is complete,

07:11

you talk a lot about your customers, your relationship with the customers, that's really At the heart. Can you share with us, maybe some success stories? Yeah, that might exist, yeah,

07:26

certainly, you know, I think about a, you know, hey, we're here in Texas, so oil and gas certainly an important industry for us. Many of our solutions fit well there, you know, we're working with a large, you know, pipeline company, right? That moves fuel, natural gas as well, all across all across the country, from Canada through down through Texas and across the south. And you know, for them, they've got about four divisions within their company, and they had a need to really centralize, or have a single source of truth where all their engineering documents were stored. Each division was some were using SharePoint. Others were using, you know, competitive or some legacy offerings. And they really were looking to figure out, how do we standardize on a common platform where we do have that single source of truth, because they are naturally they're highly regulated. They need audit trails if something goes wrong in that industry, in particular, really bad things happen. There's safety issues. And we worked with them to say, how do we bring the four divisions together? How do we provide a single platform, even though they'll kind of have their own space within that platform for their specific documentation. They're all in a common, common system now. So training became easier. They're able to pull pull teams together. They can do knowledge sharing and best practices. And overall, we got them to a point where you know everything they do, they integrate it with their maintenance system. And now they've got that single source of truth. So if, if a, if someone wants to work across a plant and fix something within a pipeline, they got access to the drawings, they can quickly pull it up from a work order and, you know, perform the appropriate fix so that they can get, get, get on with things. So yeah, it's been, it's been, it's been very valuable for them. They've been a client for many years, and I'm sure they will be going forward

09:26

as well. That must have, I mean, if did, if they had legacy systems, and they were using some document management system over here and another one over there, and SharePoint over there, and all that good stuff. How long did that consolidation? How long did it take?

09:41

Yeah, we worked with them. And the initial project was probably about a nine month effort based upon bad Well, it was based, you know, call that phase one, what they wanted to accomplish with us. But then from there, I would say it was just change orders that were relevant. It to the next thing they wanted to do. So I believe, when they partnered with us, from the onset, they didn't view it as, hey, we're just going to come in, we're going to implement this and be done. We, you know, they've always said, Hey, we bought more assets, right? We've got to onboard more drawings now from this company that we acquired and bring that in. And they're always looking to find a better way enhance their operation. Look to us for guidance on how we can enable that to happen. And yeah, it's been, it's been a great partnership, and it's one that I think, you know, they'll get to a point where they say, Hey, we're we're good, we're stable, we're in maintain mode. And then they'll look for, you know, the next release of things we're doing, and they'll say, hey, help us implement those new capabilities. Because certainly our company, we're always looking to innovate, to help them stay ahead of the curve, based upon, you know, what's coming out. And

10:49

then they acquire another company. That's right, have to try to bring them back into the fold, and that requires a little effort.

10:55

That's right, very good.

10:57

What do you see? What, outside of all of the stuff that we've been talking about, do you see some certain trends that are taking place in the future? What's going on there? Yeah,

11:06

certainly down. If I look down toward across the globe in general, I'd say first and foremost, we are seeing more and more customers that are looking for more holistic offerings. We all know coming out of the pandemic that there was a need to really fuel digital transformation. And when you're in the industrial sector, we still found a lot of customers that had things on filing cabinets and draws drawers and drawings that they

11:35

still needed access. Still today, it's happening. It's still there. They

11:39

certainly do, but they certainly also found that the need to move toward digital and maybe a cloud first mindset was really critical. And I think more and more executive teams are pushing their organizations to do that. It's expensive internally, right, with all the IT infrastructure required, and many I was just speaking with a client last week, and they said, We, you know, they've got large chemical company. They've got plants all over the world. They said, We have no business being in the IT business, you know, we want to manufacture chemicals, and if there's cloud infrastructure, we could take advantage of that's what we want to do. We just want to be consumers of an application that's available in the cloud. So we are very much seeing the push to cloud more and more, and we're certainly set up for that with all of our solutions in addition to that, you know, you know, from the regulatory landscape, you know, we see things in particular, some new regulations we do down in business, down in Australia and New Zealand, and based on, you know, data, sovereignty laws and things that need to stay in country. We're having to invest further in cloud infrastructure there, and then also with partners as well, I think, down in when we look across Latin America, a diverse economic landscape down there, and for us, there are markets we can play and compete in, and there's others that you know, we're better off working with partners that are just, you know, more locally connected, more in tune with the way business is done in those countries. But nonetheless, the needs are there, integrating, you know, enterprise asset management systems, looking more for preventative maintenance offerings. Those are all core things that we're hearing about. So when you couple cloud, when you couple the need for integrated platform offerings versus point solutions, all SaaS and looking for quick time to value, those are all things that we think are really further fueling our business.

13:36

But I'm into AI, yeah, so what kind of conversations are you having around that? Yeah, great,

13:42

great point. I'd say we're really looking for the application of AI is on the predictive side, where they're saying, hey, if these are known things, if we have this particular asset and it's got this normal type life expectancy on it and this maintenance schedule associated with it, in the absence of a human who is following, you know, to the T the exact schedule. Can we get more intelligent about how we're doing that? So certainly, internally here at Accruent, we're working a lot to experiment with AI a candidly to how do we disrupt everything we do by leveraging the technology to scale productivity, but then certainly, how do we embed within our products to make it easier for customers? I was speaking with a client the other day, and they they happen to say, look, we still have quite a few consultants that that handle a lot of our work orders in a call center. And they said, we simply want to take the human element out, right? We really, if we've got smart IoT sensors in the plants and we identify the core, core things we want to monitor, let's get them to an aggregator, a centralized point, leverage an AI based rules engine to just take action. In right? We still need to. There's some things. Clearly, you always will need some, some element of the human to look at that. But if we can automate more, that would be more valuable to our business, and probably less less prone to errors, for that matter, as well. But

15:15

it also addresses the the reality in the marketplace, where I'm having difficulty finding skilled technicians, and, you know, people for my business. So that just requires more automation, more technology,

15:31

indeed, and certainly the labor market. We've got, you know, many generations we're spanning, right? We've got many that are retiring, that know how things have always been done in these plants. And then we've got, you know, very digital savvy users that are in the early innings of their career that want new technology. They don't want to, you know, look at the old way of doing things. So digital first, very much matters for them. It's employers need to rethink how they do hiring as well, because they want to attract the talent, right? It's difficult to get they have to pay a premium for it, but there's certain expectation, I think, as workers enter the workforce on just technologies they'll get to work with to do their job. So companies are really having to rethink, how do we bridge, you know, multi generational workforce? How do we ensure the knowledge that we've developed and maintained over the years is readily available to all of them too, versus having to call people out of retirement, right to say, hey, we don't have anybody that remembers how to work on this system. What can you do for us? So, yeah, it's certainly creating an interesting dynamic. I love it. Wish there

16:40

was a fly on the wall with all of these conversations. I just have a humble little podcast. I get to talk to a lot of people. So how do they get a hold of you there? Pete,

16:50

sure would like anybody to hit my LinkedIn profile. Pete Mansel, you also email me. Pete Mansel, at.com look forward to connecting with anybody.

17:02

You're awesome, Pete. Thank you. We really appreciate it. Thank you. You're going to have a busy week

17:08

indeed. Yeah, I'm looking forward to it. You're an OP so it's going to be a great week. Keep people know you all

17:16

right, we're going to wrap it up on the other side. Stay tuned. We're going to have all the contact information for Pete out on Industrial Talk. So fear not reach out to him. That is your call to action in a big way. Thank you very much for joining. We are broadcasting, once again, accrued Insight is the the event we are in San Antonio. You hear the buzz in the background? It's it's just getting started, so stay tuned. We will be right back. Good job.

17:40

You're listening to the Industrial Talk Podcast Network.

17:49

All right. Another great conversation from a crew at Insight, the event, the user conference and Pete was he was firing on all cylinders. If he could fire on all cylinders. He was doing that. That's what Pete was doing. We were talking about AI. We're talking about aggregation. We're talking about how, how the solutions, what they're doing at accruing, is pulling it all together to make to make the organization more efficient, to be able to get that Insights that you need to make those tactical decisions. It's phenomenal. When I was at that event, it is truly around the customer. So find out more accruing Insight. Reach out to Pete too. You need to do that all right. Industrial Talk is here for you. We are building a platform that wants to amplify your voice. You have a podcast. Talk to me. You have something that you want to say. Talk to me. You have technology. Talk to me. It's easy, industrial. Talk.com Just reach out to me and have a conversation. All right, people, be brave. There greatly. Hang out with Pete. Change the world. We're gonna have another great conversation shortly. So stay tuned.