Sales v. marketing

I was out at an event last night for a non-profit organization where I am a board member, and they had a keynote speaker who was very much of the motivational variety. I'm too cynical to really get into such things, and I find all the ranting without any substance boring. This was a guy that should have had some interesting things to say (if his background was accurate), but instead we got a bunch of rah-rah about how important our cause is and how we all need to buy in and help out. Well, duh. Most people in the room were volunteers, so we wouldn't be out at this thing if we didn't believe in the cause.

All that was pretty much as expected. What was more disconcerting was this guy's frequent disparaging of "big marketing campaigns." The group putting on the event is involved in reorganizing child and family social services, bringing the disparate providers together into a few neighborhood centers where families can access a number of different services in one place. It is a huge initiative, involving three levels of government, private and non-profit service providers...over 100 organizations in all. We were told, over and over, that the effort to do this must be "relational," which is apparently a word he has coined to mean based on face-to-face contact and individual relationships. What we definitely do not need, apparently, is some big marketing campaign. Don't make the mistake of relying on some big marketing campaign. His voice dripped with derision just saying the words.

So a huge project involving dozens of disparate actors and relying on public involvement and support is highly unsuited for a big marketing campaign? What are you going to do, have lunch with every single person involved every time there is something to say to the group? Are you going to generate awareness and brand the project and achieve buy-in by becoming each person's best friend? Give me a break. A big marketing campaign is exactly what this project will need, and all this buffoon was doing was tapping some knee-jerk reaction against marketing that exists in the minds of non-profit do-gooders who equate it with manipulation, dishonesty and (gasp!) profit-driven capitalism.

Guess what, there is a reason why people use marketing when they want to make money. Because it works.

This isn't the first time I've heard the derision against marketing and advertising from Mr. Charisma speakers like this guy. They are salesmen who make their living scamming people into parting with money in return for very little value. Of course they don't believe in putting a message out to the masses. If the masses ever got a look at their message they might start talking about it and comparing notes...and its flaws would soon be revealed and talked about as well. Better to get people one-on-one or in small groups where you can browbeat them into signing before they have a chance to cool off.

Don't get me wrong, I have great respect for what salesmen do. I should, I was one for 10 years. Someone who can stand up in front of another person and get that person to buy into his point has a powerful, valuable skill. However, there is just no way that person can be in more than one place at one time, no matter how godlike his ego has become. Creating demand across a market is the purview of marketing and advertising. Fulfilling that demand in one-to-one conversations is what sales is all about. There is no reason for one to hack on the other, in fact, each should be the others' biggest supporter.

The dark truth, however, is that most salesmen see themselves as in competition with marketers for scarce company resources. Every dollar the boss pays to an advertising agency is a dollar he isn't given as commission, and every success of the advertising agency counts as a point in an argument against his existence. If people just start calling in their orders, who needs a big, fancy salesman taking a big slice of the profits? That's why salesmen always insist the company is doomed without the relationships they hold, even as some of the biggest and most profitable companies on earth use pimply teenagers to sell their goods and huge, multi-million dollar marketing campaigns to generate demand. Companies that work in the reverse manner tend to be smaller, poorer and not growing.

Benefits please

So I'm trying to sell a machine without just presenting a dry set of specifications that are superficially indistinguishable from everyone else's. I want to stand out in the market. I want people to have a clear idea about my product that makes it different.

You can get there with features: "We have the most RPM." The problem, of course, is that this territory is too easy for others to move into. Every machine builder is getting its core components from the same few global suppliers, which means you almost never have an actual technological advantage. You might make design tweaks that allow you to make a claim of technological superiority, but, if you are successful, it is easy for others to make the same tweaks and quickly say "Me, too."

The machine builder's real strength is in his design creativity and his ability to understand manufacturing problems and make equipment that pulls together a million variables to present the best solution to those problems. It is almost impossible to quantify those elements by simply naming the features. You can say you are all about providing solutions, but what does that mean, exactly? That your machine is infinitely customizable? Now you are a special machine builder and not a brand name machine tool manufacturer. Different businesses, very different price points, and your customer knows it. What you want to say is that you have come up with a superior solution to a general category of manufacturing challenges. That solution is contained in the features of the machine, but is greater than the sum of its parts. If an engineer reads all your specs, goes into a sensory deprivation tank and meditates on the interplay of your design elements, he may arrive at a place where he can agree that your design is the most elegant and functional. But what are the chances he's going to do that?

The solution is to talk about the benefits of your design directly. Machinery manufacturers try to do this, of course, but here is where their courage fails them. Because they are engineers themselves, they hate vagueness. They fear that unless they back up their benefit claims with a raft of technical data, no one will believe them. This is true, to a point. The technical data has to be there, somewhere. Preferably in a box on the back page of the brochure. What you need to understand is, the brochure (or ad, or trade show sign) is never going to accomplish the whole selling process itself. It is there to create demand. It is there to build your brand. These are capital equipment purchases. At some point, the engineers are going to get a complete specification for your machine and spend hours poring over every detail. The marketing communication is there to get you to that point, not to take them past it. You have to have the courage to say "My product is the best," without going into an immediate song and dance about why.

The next area of great fear for machinery builders is making specific claims about the actual production capabilities of their equipment. There are good reasons for this. Just because you build a great machine does not mean the customer will use it properly, and just because he doesn't use it properly doesn't mean he won't sue you if it doesn't do what you said it would. U.S. machinery marketers have to be exceedingly careful in this area because everything is so litigious there. And Canadian distributors tend to rely on marketing communications material prepared for the U.S. market. But here in Canada, lawsuits are almost never worth the time and expense. Going to court over over competing, subjective interpretations of productivity claims in a machinery ad is just about always going to cost the end user more than he gets awarded, and he stands a good chance of losing outright. Of course, he can tell his friends you suck, and you will probably have to try to make him happy somehow, but if your message is getting your machinery out there and most people are using it properly and obtaining the benefits you claim, he will quickly become a voice in the wilderness. Canadian machinery distributors often miss this opportunity to be more aggressive in their claims than their U.S. counterparts. What if the ad headline said, "The SUX 2000 will make 45,000 widgits per shift." (Where 45,000 is, obviously, a high number the competition can't beat.) How could any engineer making widgits deny this message? What vector does he have for ignoring or discounting it outright? If he has any budget for equipment, doesn't he have to at least engage you in conversation?

Another overlooked way to talk about benefits is to go to secondary or tertiary benefits. Why does the company want faster equipment? To save time and make more money, of course. How about, "This machine will save you time no matter what production method you are using now"? Time saving messages are not uncommon, but they are often buried under a pile of blather about the marvelous technological features. But why not go even farther? What could your company do with more time and money? What could you do? How about a guy on a boat with beautiful women on it sailing past his competitor who is sweating over a broken machine? Cheesy, I know, but you get my point. You want your customer to have a specific feeling about your product. If you can become the product that might give him the life he wants, you are in the driver's seat.

Internet marketing

When I was at the magazines, I'd often accompany our sales guys as they worked the floor at trade shows. We'd meet up with marketing directors from the various suppliers exhibiting and go into our song and dance about the magazine and its audience and its circulation. Eventually the discussion would wind around to our sales guy asking about the customer's plan for marketing in the upcoming period. Answers varied, but one thing I heard all the time was, "We are really only interested in online right now." I used to shove my hand in my pocket to prevent it from spontaneously darting out and smacking the supposed marketing expert in the forehead.

Marketing is the process of creating demand for your product. It means reaching out to people who haven't heard about it, or don't have all the information about it, or have the wrong impression about it, and giving them messages that will cause them to want it. It is different from sales, in that sales is about fulfilling demand. In its pure form, sales is only concerned with negotiating the transaction. Sales only happens once the customer has contacted you and expressed an interest in your product. Marketing is concerned with finding the customers and getting them to that point.

When it comes to sales, the internet is a fantastic tool. Once a customer knows he wants your product, there is no easier or cheaper way to meet his demand than to have him browse your website, get your pricing (without any ability to haggle), place his order and pay to have you ship it to him. From a sales perspective, a good website beats everything about a physical store except for the instant gratification element, which is actually pretty important. In my opinion, the only reason there are still physical stores selling things that could be shipped is because people do not want to wait to receive something they have paid for. I guess some people enjoy the activity of browsing in a store, so there is that element as well.

As a marketing tool, the internet is far less effective. The central problem is the self-directed nature of the user's experience. In old media, the user tuned into a channel and received whatever was being broadcast. He got the commercial you bought whether he wanted it or not and you automatically had at least some part of his attention. In terms of creating demand, this was genius. You could count on thousands of viewers seeing your message every time you ran it, whether they had ever heard of your company or not. All you had to do was attach your message to a source of content that had your desired audience's attention. Some of these same principles are at work on the internet; there are sites with content that attract users who could serve as a potential audience for your message. But internet users are much more focused on consuming only the content they want. There are sharp limitations on how much of a web page can be used for advertising without alienating users, and I think even that advertising is usually ignored as users focus in on finding just the content they want. TV viewers, radio listeners and print readers accept that their content consumption will be completely interrupted for short periods by an advertising message, and most of them don't mind. But interruptions to the flow of content on the internet are viewed as a highly irritating barriers to the use of the medium itself. As a wise man once said, "People often pick up a magazine to look at the ads. No one ever went to a website for the same reason."

So there's the issue. The internet is narrowcasting instead of broadcasting. Even within your target market group, many of the people you need to reach are not where your message is. You can't create demand unless you have eyes looking at your message, and the eyes on the internet are spread out over too many places. On a TV or radio channel, or in a magazine, the content is spread out over a period of time or a number of pages for people to take in sequentially. Audience participation can be measured in terms of time spent, during which time it receives whatever messages the broadcaster wants to give it. Internet participation is measured in terms of hits; people go straight to the content they want, then go somewhere else. A person consuming media the old way will see your message whether they are aware of you or not, which gives you a chance to create demand where there was none, or very little. A person consuming content on the internet will only see your message if he is purposefully looking for it, which means he already has demand for your product. In order for the internet to work for you, the demand has to be created somewhere else, leaving the internet to play its strongest role as a fulfiller of demand.

Beat 'em with marketing

One of the biggest threats industrial suppliers perceive is the flood of products arriving on our shores from China, Taiwan, India, Brazil and various other places with low labour rates and enough technological know-how to make a product North American manufacturers will accept. These imports have been arriving here for a long time now, since the early '90s at least, but many suppliers still seem to be at a loss as to how to compete against them. Quite often, they have simply ceded the low end of the market to the cheap imports and shifted to selling more expensive, higher quality lines.

Analogy time. Just about anyone would agree that McDonald's makes a crappy food product. And it is not really that cheap; you can get a better meal in a Mom-and-Pop diner for less. But McDonald's is everywhere and it's easy. You can do drive-through and you always know exactly what you are going to get. The company keeps itself in front of you all the time with a constant drone of brand messaging. To put it quite simply, McDonald's has demonstrated that you can acheive margins at the lower end of the market with a strong, long-term advertising and promotions strategy.

Industrial suppliers, on the other hand, panic the minute someone beats their price. And well they should, because they have not laid the groundwork to claim there is anything better about them or their products that would justify a higher price. Chinese imports often have a lot of weaknesses. Even if the product is OK, there is often little or no local support if it breaks or you need help using it. I don't want to say the documentation is weak, but you would probably learn more about how to maintain your Chinese product from reading a bubblegum wrapper. China has come along way on the quality and support it offers with its industrial equipment and supplies, but at the same the prices are — you guessed it — rising. Many Chinese manufacturers are outsourcing work these days to even lower-cost countries such as Viet Nam. There is ample fodder here for a marketing campaign aimed at neutralizing the effect of the Chinese price advantage. Manufacturers are willing to spend more on products, but they have to know why they are doing so. They must be shown, convincingly, that the Canadian distributor has a product that is better and better in ways they need it to be better. If that case is not there to be made, time to start looking for another product to sell.

If North American suppliers have weak marketing strategies, Chinese marketing in North America is even worse. It is often impossible to get even basic, necessary information about the product from the company, even with direct contact. The language barrier is a problem, as are the low margins themselves which don't allow Chinese suppliers room for a marketing budget. Also, from what I have read and observed, Chinese businessmen tend to place great stock in networking and personal contacts. This makes them less likely to think an impersonal message in a magazine or brochure is going to be effective. This leaves North American suppliers an avenue of attack they can use to protect their margins and prices: superior marketing. Too bad most won't use it.

"Early to bed, early to rise, advertise, advertise advertise"

The title of this post is a quote from Warren Buffett, and industrial suppliers would do well to take heed. When I was selling machine tools (before I got into advertising), I thought advertising didn't work. Advertising was transparent manipulation that could only fool stupid people. Smart people would never rely on such an obviously biased source for information of any kind. I'm smart (I thought) and my clients are smart, so advertising has no role in industrial equipment sales. I guess my model of the world involved me and some friends sitting at the top of a tower in flowing robes and pointy hats looking down with disdain at the drooling masses below.

My bosses were not too far off this position. They knew they were supposed to advertise, according to Accepted Business Practice, but they had severe doubts about its effectiveness. The only justification for advertising they found even partly persuasive was, since everyone is doing it, your company will look weak if it does not. They advertised when they felt they had "extra" money to do so, and it was the first thing on the block as soon as things got tight, which they frequently did. As it happens, this was precisely the opposite of the right thing to do.

When I got into advertising and did some reading on the field, I often ran across the assertion that advertising always works on everyone if it is properly executed. At first I scoffed at the idea that advertising worked on me. Then, one day, I caught myself drooling over an ad for a new video game and clicking on the link. "But that doesn't count," I thought, "because I like video games and want to buy them already." Then the penny dropped. I was in the target market for the video game developer and its well-designed ad campaign had shown me a message I found interesting through a channel I was paying attention to. Most of the advertising I sneered at was not directed at me at all — of course I found it irrelevant and manipulative. I don't buy fabric softener so any message attempting to interest me in a fabric softener is going to utterly fail to persuade me and actively annoy me in the attempt. Most of the advertising I had seen in my life had missed me in this fashion because I was in my early 30s and only recently entering a phase of life where I had any money. The bulk of advertising at that time was still aimed at Baby Boomers; the shift in focus to 18 - 35 was just beginning. I had the wrong idea about advertising. I thought every ad was trying to sell to everyone, therefore an ad failed to the extent that it failed to sell me. Since most ads people see fail to sell them, advertising as an industry must be a scam.

That was just youthful self-centeredness and ignorance of the way advertising really works. But there is a another reason why people, especially industrial suppliers, are skeptical about advertising's effectiveness; there is a great deal of bad advertising out there.

Remember what I said about the ad that worked on me being properly targeted? And delivered through a channel to which I was paying attention? And conveying a compelling message? Industrial advertising usually fails in at least one of these three elements.

The targeting is usually not bad; industrial suppliers know enough to avoid blowing money on ad placements that will not reach their clients, though sometimes I wonder if they could be more creative in finding channels that will reach their clients where their clients aren't expecting it. Could local TV in industry-heavy areas work? Don't know, no one has ever tried it, to my knowledge.

The advertising channels for industrial suppliers are weak in terms of arresting audience attention. I wrote in my last post about the failings of trade media and I don't need to rehash it here. An engineer friend was telling me on the weekend that there is simply nowhere for him to go to get a comprehensive look at all the industrial suppliers out there with details of what they carry. How, in the Information Age, in a sector that probably uses the internet more than anyone, is this possible?

While the channels may be weak, they are there, which brings us to probably the most common downfall of industrial advertising: execution. Industrial advertising is so mind-numbingly boring, it is a miracle anyone is able to pay attention to it long enough to finish producing it. Pictures of the product often dominate the ad — why? You can't tell much about how a piece of machinery or a tool performs from a picture, and every competitor is running attractive-looking pictures, too. The ad often neglects to say why someone might want to buy the product. Claiming you are the biggest and best is just chest-thumping and the advertiser speaking to himself, a message that can become comical when it appears in something less than a full-page ad. Claiming the product is high-quality is an unnecessary step back from the actual benefit. Will it last longer? How much longer? If you can't say, then how can you make the quality claim? An even better question is, why bother? Everyone else is doing it and if you believed everything you read in a trade magazine, every single advertiser has the highest quality in the industry. What if you ran an ad saying, "Our machine will make a million widgets per hour, guaranteed"? Would this attract more or less interest than an ad saying "Our machine is really great"? These are very basic, fundamental principles of ad writing, but they are violated all the time in industrial advertising. Industrial suppliers might as well take the money they spend producing and placing most of their ads and flush it down the toilet for all the good it is doing them.

Of course, they have a sense of this, which is why they are skeptical about advertising. But the answer is exactly the opposite of the typical response. Retreating from advertising just leaves the field to companies who understand it. The answer is to actually spend a decent amount of money on ad creative, getting professional help to do so. Yes, I have a dog in this fight, but you can go ask Warren Buffett or any professor at any business school if you don't believe me. Then companies actually have to spend money on a sustained ad campaign, not one placement. Ad spending should go up as sales go down, not the reverse. Ad spending exists to drive demand and create sales; why on Earth would a company take away a sales-generation tool right when it needs sales the most? Spending money that isn't in the bank account is why credit exists. Companies that are afraid to go into debt to reverse a decline in sales will soon be dead from lack of sales anyway. Might as well hang for a pound as a penny.

The war isn't over

When I interviewed for my last job at W.I. Media, the editor, Kerry Knudsen, asked me what I thought of trade magazines. I told him they seemed to be primarily shills for advertisers, with the advertisers controlling most of the editorial content. "Yep," he said. "And that will never, ever happen here." I knew right then that I wanted to work on his magazines, Wood Industry and Coverings.

I owe a great debt of gratitude to Kerry for showing me the right way to do trade magazines and proving to my satisfaction that it is the only way that stands a chance of becoming profitable. Unfortunately, marketers are trying hard to kill print right now out of the mistaken belief that online channels can deliver the same thing for less. I share Kerry's conviction that one of two things will have to happen; either online channels will have to take on many of the characteristics of print (owned by companies with addresses, paying full price for content and charging full price for advertising, subscribing to standards of accuracy and accountability), or we will see a revitalization of interest in print in the not-too-distant future. Even in the first scenario, an online channel that becomes a respected and profitable content provider (still waiting for that one) will likely decide to offer a print edition to deepen its penetration in its market — a perfect reversal of what is going on now. Print as we know it will only truly become irrelevant when electronic document readers become so cheap as to be nearly disposable, which may not be that far off. Even in this case, print will not so much have gone away as morphed into another form. Instead of receiving a new magazine each month, you will simply update the one you have with this month's content.

I wish the Canadian trade media would see the wisdom in keeping a clear separation between editoral and advertising, and I wish Canada's industrial supply marketers would see it, as well. Some do, but most view their task as being to obtain as much "free" (nothing is, it's just a question of who pays) editoral coverage as possible. If they really took the big view, they would have exactly the opposite approach. The role of editorial is to engage the audience and deliver its interested eyes to the advertisers. People sense, instantly, attempts to manipulate them into buying something. Decades of infomercials have trained us well. When people are looking to buy something, they don't mind having to sift through a sandbox full of empty platitudes, half-truths and red herrings to arrive at the message; that is all part of the time-honoured game, established around the same time as the invention of make-up. However, when people are looking to be informed, they intensely resent ulterior motives skewing the information. When they sense the attempted manipulation (and they do), they view the content a very different way, if they keep paying attention at all. Trade magazine editors are often teased that no one reads what they write anyway. This is probably true in many cases, often because the editorial was not written by the editor but instead placed by an advertiser and written by his PR agency. I know people read what I wrote at Wood Industry and Coverings because I got calls every time I made a mistake. Those magazines deliver the eyes of the industry to their pages whether the reader is already shopping for something or not. That's the magic of media, people look and get the advertising message even when they aren't ready to buy. That's why media with respected, engaging content can create demand rather than just fulfill the demand that is already there. And that is why marketers, who are supposed to be creating demand for a living, should want people to read honest, reliable, impartial, informative editorial instead of advertising in disguise.

Branding

This is one of the weakest elements of the typical manufacturing supplier's marketing strategy. Companies create a logo, pick out a paint colour and call the job done. If they want to get really fancy, they name their product line after some kind of ferocious wildlife (viper, tiger, wolverine). They have a vague idea that their brand can create an impression in the buyer's mind about the product, but they don't really believe it could ever influence someone's buying decision. They are engineers selling to engineers — surely the only thing that matters is the product specs, right? Branding, indeed all marketing, is seen as window dressing designed to attract attention to the product's good points and divert attention away from the weak points. There is a whiff of dishonesty about the whole thing that they would prefer to keep at arms length.

The best illustration I have seen for the power of branding comes from Ken Wong, a professor at the Queen's School of Business in Kingston, Ont. I was at a seminar of his where he held up the remote for his laptop and asked the audience to call out descriptions of the device just based on what they saw.

"It's black."
"It's made of plastic."
"It has buttons."
"It looks electronic."

Then Wong clicked the remote and the Fisher Price logo came up on the screen behind him. "Now," he said, "what if I told you it was made by this company?"

"It's durable."
"It's easy to use."
"It's cheap."
"It's for kids."

Those impressions, those assumptions about the product, were made instantly, by everyone in the room, the moment they saw the logo. Fisher Price had not had to spend an additional cent or print an additional word to communicate those facts; the message was conveyed simply by the sight of its logo. How long, Wong asked, would it take a salesman to convince a client his product possessed those qualities? And how long do salesmen typically get in front of a client?

Branding capitalizes a company's past investments in quality, service and communications, turning them into an asset the company can deploy again and again. Once these investments become capital, they can be used to leverage the acquisition of more capital. The marketer does not have to waste the audience's attention (which is currency, for marketers) reiterating basic facts about the product, he can turn their attention to a message about how the product will benefit them directly, or how it is better than the competition. Brands can and do work this way, but the company must make the initial investment to build the brand.

When equipment and supply manufacturers go back to their customers again and again with a chart full of specs, it is as if they are taking the time and money spent getting the customer's attention the previous times and flushing it down the toilet. Is the customer going to remember what spindle RPM your machine has from one visit to the next? Nope. Will he remember the colour? Maybe. Will he remember if you told him it was the best thing to come out of Germany since the BMW M class? Probably. He might even start thinking about your machine in terms of German engineering, German quality...German price. All's fair in love and branding, and borrowing from the hard work German auto manufacturers have done to build up their brands is just one of the weapons in the brand marketer's arsenal. Having established that brand impression, the next time the customer sees the product, he'll say "Oh yeah, the BMW machine," and move on to hearing more with those assumptions backing up his thought process.

That's an example of borrowing a brand, but a far better approach is to build an original, proprietary brand. This takes work, time and investment and is much more involved than just developing some fancy packaging. It starts with a real examination of what makes the company and product unique. This could be anything; brands have been built around where the product is made, the owner's moustache, catchphrases. The important this is to remember the meaning of the word unique. Saying a product is high quality and low price is a waste of oxygen. It has to be high quality and low price or no one is going to consider buying it at all. Every single competitor is making the same claim. A brand can choose to claim it is the highest quality or lowest price of anyone in the market, but it has to be able to back that up against myriad competitors vying for the same space. Many equipment and supply marketers opt to claim best value for the dollar, but this claim is toothless because it is muddied by so many variables. Value propositions must be clear and unambiguous: if you give me X, you will get Y.

Defining a brand calls for creativity and honest evaluation. It is as much a process of deciding who you are not going to sell to as to whom you are. Equipment and supply marketers often seem terrified of not appearing to be everything to every buyer. The result is bland, homogenous marketing campaigns that drive about as much demand as the Yellow Pages. Mad Men's Don Draper said it best: "Success is related to standing out, not fitting in." Companies should ask themselves why they decided to offer a particular product in the first place. Did it just seem like a good idea at the time? Or is there some real reason why you thought you could sell this thing? If the latter, tell people about it!

And, once you have told people, tell them again. And again. People have to see messages over and over, preferably from different sources, before they will absorb them. Building a new brand means shouting the same basic element of the brand over and over until everyone is ready to barf if they hear it again. Then it means toning down the first message gradually while using it to leverage the next shouted message. After shouting that for a while, briefly reinforce the original message, then start phasing in the third message; and so on until the whole brand concept has been communicated. Then a new campaign aimed more directly at driving sales and countering the competition starts, but the branding messages continue as a low-level background hum in the media forever. Have Coke and Microsoft established their brands? Just a bit. Have they stopped promoting and advertising them? Nope.

I think I'll be doing this a lot in the blog, but I have to apologize for offering what will seem to many to be Marketing 101-level comments. I have never, ever, seen an industrial supplier embark on the kind of branding campaign I've outlined above. If there are good reasons for this, I'd love to hear them.

Marketing S.O.S.

I've been working in and around small manufacturers and their suppliers (machinery and tooling dealers, mostly) in southern Ontario for the better part of 15 years now, and I have to say, when it comes to marketing, the whole sector needs help. For many suppliers, their entire strategy for creating demand for their products rests on the notion of relationship selling, executed by putting salesmen in territories and tasking them to knock on as many doors as possible. The salesman may get brochures to give prospects, though often these are supplied by the OEM and may not even be in English. Most, but by no means all, distributors have websites, usually of the most basic and amateurish kind with content that is rarely updated and no measures for search engine optimization at all. Advertising is probably the least-understood and worst-executed part of the marketing plan. Dull, feature-heavy ads are placed sporadically in trade magazines that abuse the intelligence of their readers. The same ads are run over and over with the expectation that each run will cause business to increase. Testing and measuring response is entirely absent. The very concept of branding is alien, or executed through a logo and not much else. One thing industrial suppliers do well is trade shows, though they chafe at the cost and flirt constantly with the idea of staying away. This drives down the prices trade show organizers can command and leaves the channel in the hands of lowest-cost providers, which further devalues the show and ensures exhibitors will be even less satisfied with their return on investment. No successful dealers make all these mistakes, but I have yet to see one that doesn't make at least one of them.

None of this is to say that industrial suppliers are poor businessmen or that they don't know how to make money. On the contrary, sales and marketing executives at industrial suppliers tend to be extremely accomplished relationship sellers in their own right — that's how they got the job. Upper management hopes they will be able to find or train others like themselves, and with a stable of top-drawer relationship salesmen on staff the company will never need to spend a nickel on another marketing channel. 

The problem with this approach is, top-flight salesmen are rare, and they are born, not made. A superior relationship salesman may very well not be a superior trainer of new relationship salesmen. Add in the inevitable attrition all sales forces experience from burnout, poaching and retirements, and it becomes very difficult to maintain a complete crew of excellent salesmen for any long period of time. Most offices have one or two top performers and a group of also-rans.

Even if a supplier manages to pull together a top crew of relationship salesmen, he still has to ask himself if he is getting all the growth he could. Even the best salesman has prospects in his territory he cannot reach for one reason or another. And no salesman can be more than one place at one time, which means there will always be missed opportunities. This is one reason why smart marketers use different channels. A guy who does not want to see salesmen has to be getting his information about suppliers from somewhere. A comprehensive marketing campaign means the marketer has his message in front of that guy, no matter where he looks.

Little of what I have said here would come as a surprise to anyone in the industry. I think the main reason industrial suppliers don't do more marketing in more sophisticated ways is because no one has been able to make a convincing case that investment in a particular channel is highly likely to pay off. One reason for this is the degradation of the channels themselves, as I mentioned above. Another is the atrocious execution when the supplier does finally decide to do some promotion. There is no question that the investment in marketing and good marketing channels has to come before the investor will see benefit, and any investment carries risk. Industrial suppliers should seek out professional marketers with proven track records so they can make those investments at minimum risk and reap the benefits. Suppliers often talk themselves out of marketing investments by theorizing that mediated approaches don't work in their industry. I'm here to say that the history of business teaches us that the right message, delivered through the right medium to the right audience will always work. Industrial suppliers need to put more effort into finding those messages, media and audiences.