 I'm not going to tell you immediately that you're going to blow up your revenue and to axe everything. Welcome to the Smarter Building Materials Marketing Podcast, helping you find better ways to grow leads, sales, and outperform your competition. All right, everybody. Welcome to Smarter Building Materials Marketing, where we believe your online presence should be your best salesperson. I am Zach Williams, alongside my co-host, Beth Papiglav, and we have an awesome show lined up for you today. We're going to kick things off. By having me ask Beth a question that she gets asked or responded to often by talking to manufacturers. And I'm going to preface this by saying I didn't believe her when she said she gets this question or gets this response from people. So I think it's actually going to be a really good episode. Are you cool with this, Beth? If I just kind of tee us up. I'm desperate to know what's about to happen. So yeah, let's do it. So, Beth, we were talking prepping for the show and you're saying, you know, one question you get when you're talking to manufacturers or one response you get, you're saying, hey, what do you do for marketing? And the response is, well, I don't need marketing, right? Oh yeah. Is that true? Yeah. Oh, it's very true. Absolutely. Like, is that for real? Yeah, absolutely. I've heard that, yeah, hundreds of times throughout my career here. That like is a little baffling to me in the current state of the industry and just the market as a whole. Can you help me understand like what is going through somebody's mind in that moment where they're like, oh yeah, I don't need marketing. Like we're just a purely sales driven organization. Marketing doesn't matter. I have people ask that to me. And I think it's a fair question because what I hear when they say that is like, hey, we're a successful company and we don't currently invest in marketing. It's hard to feel like I should take money from my bottom line and put that towards something that I don't necessarily know if I need. I don't know if I believe in. I also think it's fair to say, I don't know what I would get. You know, if you feel when things are good, it's hard to feel like you need to solve for how to grow if you're already growing. I think what's not being talked about in that moment or isn't on the table in that moment is, well, we're an industry that hasn't marketed as a whole. So you could say that is true for everyone. Into a certain degree, like marketing is deprioritized in our industry, but it's a logical fallacy, meaning one, we probably need to unpack what you think marketing means because it's not just printing more brochures or, you know, doing more billboards or something like that. Like you're right. You probably don't need to have just more collateral. That's not, that's not marketing. The feedback that I usually have for people in that scenario is you're right. You probably will not feel the effects of not having marketing maybe for the next five years. To think that your company doesn't have to answer the questions that consumers have about your product in the places that they spend the most time doesn't make a lot of sense in the long term. And there's a good number of too big to fail companies that absolutely did fail because of that exact issue. So Berkshire Hathaway is Warren Buffett's business, right? Have you seen his website before? No, that I haven't seen. So I just Googled, what is Warren Buffett's net worth? His net worth is one hundred and eleven billion dollars. This isn't real. Is this his website? This isn't broken. This is his website. I encourage you to check this out. So this website hasn't changed since 1994 when the internet was invented. It's literally just a text HTML website with a list of like annual meeting notes and things like that from their shareholder meetings. Now I bring this up because Warren Buffett's doing pretty well and you can make an argument that he's not marketing. But if you go watch Warren Buffett in an interview or you see him do something like in any kind of public setting, he is whether you know it or not. He's repping the products that he's investing in. Go Google Warren Buffett and you'll likely see him by Coke or by McDonald's, which by the way, he owns a significant amount of shares in. I'm using this as a point to say that you know, you are marketing whether or not you know it. So saying you don't need marketing is like saying, saying I don't need air. It's like, no, of course you need air. You are breathing. You just don't know the level of quality that you have. You are marketing whether or not you know it. It's just your viewpoint on how you're leveraging it. And you're probably confusing marketing with advertising. People are marketing whether or not they know it or not. You're sending a signal to the market, right? Your product, the way it's positioned is marketing. It's pricing as a part of marketing. How you're selling it is a part of marketing. What you're saying is that I don't need content or I don't need social or I don't need ads to drive demand for my product. And that might be very true. But I think the argument against that is historically, if we look at how products are marketed, found and sold, the amount of information available to the purchaser or to the buyer is increasing rapidly. And the ability for other companies to disrupt proven set and place markets is also increasing with the amount of technology at play. And so, yes, you might have a great mode because you have a good distributor network and a dealer network. You owe 90% of market share, which there are manufacturers. I know they do that. But I would argue that by not marketing, because you cannot measure it as well as you can sales, you are missing out on an opportunity to build your mode further, increase the ability to own your product in the mind of your audience and launch potentially new products from there. Peter Drucker once said, who's like the father of modern business strategy, he said there's only two things that create value in a business. One is technology and one is marketing. And this was said by a guy who came up in the 40s and 50s, you know, where marketing was very different. I tend to agree with him here is that you are marketing, whether or not you know it and part of your marketing is, is placement and that you own all the placement and it's perfectly fine. But the ability to get in front of your audience and create a new narrative reinforces why they're buying. It reinforces your position ensures that you are keeping your competitors at bay. I agree. I think your point of your marketing, whether you know it or not is really valid. I also think it's worth looking at all of the things that you said, Zach, because I think the place where manufacturers and the B2B space can get confused about marketing is when we think about it as we're not packaging something in a way to make it sound fluffy or to make it sound like a thing that it's not or to make it sound ethereal or just have to suddenly target the homeowner. That's something that we hear a lot. I don't target homeowners. And so there's no need for us to market. It's looking at where are you right now? Exactly what you said, Zach, how do you talk to new customers right now? What sales conversations do you have? How have you developed your product roadmap? What do you do to train your customer service teams? Let's reverse engineer how you've come to really key decisions within your organization and why did you do that? Well, it's because what the market wanted. It's how we grew. It's what our competitors were doing. All of those things are now being done online. So we're not telling you to do anything differently. It's just about meeting your customer in a place where they are that they weren't before. One of the manufacturers that asked me this question, Zach, fits the exact profile that you said, we have 90 percent market share. We've had 90 percent market share. We're looking to grow into these additional territories. Why would I market? And why would I invest in ads or marketing? Was there exact question to me? And I was like, yeah, that's really fair. I'm not going to tell you immediately that you're going to blow up your revenue and to X everything. I am telling you, you are wide open for disruption and threat. If I was doing a SWOT analysis of that manufacturer's company, not marketing and having zero digital footprint would be in the threat box, not opportunity threat, because all it takes is for somebody to have $10,000 a month to spend on advertising for 12 months straight. And I can wipe out a significant percentage of your footprint because people are highly influenced by what they see repeatedly. And if I can get ads for Bethpop, Nicola of manufacturing in front of them, they're going to buy from me. Now, not everybody, not right away, but why create opportunity for disruption when you could just close the gate like that? Because if you've got 90 percent market share and you own real estate online and you have great customer loyalty and you've got all these great reviews and an and well, then it's a no brainer. It's exactly the same. You're building a moat. You're either building a moat or you're creating opportunity for disruption. It's unfortunate, but you don't get to choose. Like the company doesn't get to choose how you go to market. You have to meet the demands and the expectations of your customers. That's why you build the products that you do. That's why you have the sales team that you do. That's why you have the customer service experience that you do because you're really good at meeting what customers need. And you're really good at responding to customer demands and customer expectations. This is the exact same thing. It's just giving them the information that they want in the place that they want it. And one of our guests said one time, like, if you're not growing, you're dying. It's adapt or die. And it's not die tomorrow, but it is it is going to eventually be detrimental to the future of any organization B2B or otherwise. You know what this makes me think of is the mattress industry. Which is seeing a lot of disruption over the last. Yeah, great example. Decade. You're like, I don't need to market. I just like get listed in one of those like mattress firm stores. Like someone came in with a good product and they found a way to distribute it, you know, by marketing to the same audience online and it disrupted it. And so you can make an argument. Well, we're established. We have connections with our audience. And I would argue that like that's very good. And there are big time organizations. I know that don't believe in marketing or see the value and because it's hard to measure. But I would also argue that that to your point, Beth, it's less about the gain and more about the threat, you know, in those scenarios where you're like, I do own a large portion of the market. How do I reduce my threat? How do I create my moat to be even bigger? How do I ensure that I'm not disrupted? You said something really important that I think needs to be talked about more and is really the crux of why sales and marketing as operating as a single unit is absolutely pivotal to success in our industry. You mentioned marketing is difficult for manufacturers to get behind sometimes because it's difficult to measure. And that's that's unequivocally true in a lot of scenarios. However, we don't question the benefit of a sales call. You don't question the benefit of shooting a prospect or an existing customer, a text message to check in on them and see how they're doing. We don't consider those to be wasted. We do consider marketing to be difficult to measure. And I think it's because we're not giving it the same pointed conversation and pointed value that we give to sales. Specifically, we let marketing be fluffy sometimes, or we let it be this like cutesy jingle or something that's closer to a headline than it is a hard hitting fact of what are the problems that you solve because those are the conversations that you send your sales team in with. And if your sales and your marketing aren't aligned and you're saving the fluff and like the beauty shots for marketing, you're right, they're not going to have the same impact as your sales guy who's been there for 15 years and knows what he's doing. But if those things have the same weight and have the same laser targeted ability to speak to customer pain, that's when you can start to see and believe in marketing because it's having that same effect as the one more call from your sales person, the one more email. But it has to be that really targeted pointed piece, not just a beauty shot. For our listeners who are struggling to get buy-in with marketing, the question is what is the risk if you don't? So hopefully you found this episode valuable. If you want more content like this, check us out at Venmu.com slash podcast to subscribe. If you enjoyed this episode, we encourage you to go to the podcast store on Apple. Give us a five star review. Tell us what you enjoyed about the episode. Until next time, I'm Zach Williams alongside Beth Omni Glove. Thanks everybody.