Decoding Marketing Mastery: Uniting Strategy, Culture, and Innovation with Stephanie Smith

Marketing is very little understood, isn't it?

You know, a lot of people in my generation, it's trade shows, it's brochures, it's stuff like that. And prior to us recording, we were talking about the touch points and the relationships. Maybe you can, and you're a very young looking woman for the years of experience you've had. So talk to us a little bit about where we've come from and where we are now relative to relationship marketing.

That's, I think, the biggest change. The word loyalty has disappeared. It's kind of, what are you going to do for me now? Not what you've done for me, but what are you going to do for me now? And it's a little distressing. If we look at best-in-class performance, Stephanie, on share of market, and we start at the equipment, and we'll just go generic, we'll kick out the really big stuff, and we'll kick out the really little stuff like lawnmowers. But in the middle, best-in-class equipment market share, whether this is washing machines in your house, cars, tractors, whatever, best in class will be around 40%. Then if we move over to parts that go to that equipment, best in class is down to around 40%. If we go to service, best in class drops down to about 20%. So in every single aspect, we are not the dominant player, no matter what your brand is. And that's the best. And there's only one of them. Those positions change.

It wasn't that long ago General Motors was the largest car company in the world. They're not even in the top three anymore. It used to be if you had a leading position, you brought out a new product, you had 20,30 years that you could run with that before you had to really upgrade it. Now it's maybe 15 to 30 months. And I don't think those of us, and that includes me, really understand. How do you market? Marketing and sales, it should be one. The salesman, he or she is the relationship driver. That's another thing that's changing. Women are much more involved in our industry, which has been chauvinistic as hell for so long. But that's why what you're doing now, I find so wonderful. Because we are in such need. And there aren't very many people that are doing what you're doing.

Oh, you've earned that. Really. I

You mentioned, you used a magic word to me, algorithm. One of the things that we have that nobody really pays attention to is data. We have data on everything, on everybody going back forever. And nobody uses it, or at least very few. Let me change that. And those algorithms, you know, it's really interesting. The size of the transaction in the parts business determines the time distance to the next one. As the time of transactions increases, the level of trust that the customer has with the dealer increases, or excuse me, goes the other way, distrust. And we're not geared that way. We've never been geared that way. For instance, and stupid little illustration, then I'll let you drive, but... Why don't we have salespeople that cover customers that don't have any of our equipment? You know, why do we let that competitor go off free? How did we get ourselves in the position that we only do 5% of the maintenance on a machine?

I mean, these things are wild, and it's true with everybody. And until you arrive, there's very few people that are paying any attention to that, including the manufacturers. This is going to be a real uphill struggle to get. We're too invested in the status quo.

You're saying that's not the way we do it here or that we're comfortable doing this. All of those things are true. And it's amazing the people that come in as new employees. We've had the last two podcasts, and this one kind of tops it. We've been focusing on employees. My granddaughter calls it quiet quitting. She's 22. You know, that term is this generation. There's all kinds of little acronyms and terms that come forward. But what that is, is somebody, an employee is only going to do as much work as they need to do to keep their job so that they can get out of there and go enjoy the life that they want to have. And I was hired on a contract for a year to fix something. So it was a specific entry and exit. And I'm still trying to figure out what I want to do. Most people don't get the opportunity to do that, to think about it.

So the first in this series of podcasts, if you will, was with Kurt Pease, who worked with John Deere for years and then a John Deere dealer in his latter years. And we're talking about rewards for employees such that they feel. that they're part of something. Because that loyalty issue we talked about is not just with customers, it's also with employees. And then we follow that up with Ron Wilson, who was a vice president of product support for a Caterpillar dealer for most of his career. And he's really out there, even though he's in my age block. And we had a discussion about tool belts. So all of a sudden, the jobs and the people that we employ are doing... jobs across multiple industries now. So the employees have a choice of doing whatever it is they want to do, but they can do it across a broader swath of the workforce. And so now you come along, we need to have the loyalty for the employee.

They have to have the knowledge because the customer has to trust us. And it isn't about buying things necessarily. It's about advice. which means we've got to have a really knowledgeable group of people touching customers. And that's in the written word, that's in the podcast, it's in the blog, it's every aspect of it. We're not ready for that, Stephanie, are we?

Sorry about that.

Let me break in there. Don't lose that train of thought. Marketing is internal as well. Correct. Salary skills, performance reviews, job descriptions, standards of performance. We fail at doing a lot of that, don't we?

One of the things that I did when I started in the consulting world was operations reviews. I would go into a business and kind of give them a checkup from the neck up kind of deal. Have you done any of that where you go in and you mentioned culture, which is, you know, it's a magic world. Let me do a little evolution also. personnel became human relations, became HR. Now it's talent management. And there is a 100% correlation between employee retention and customer retention. And the numbers are rather staggering. And we're seeing much more separation today from people that have been around 10,20,30 years. And a lot of that relates back to what people tell me is called legacy management, command and control, which forget it, it doesn't apply, you know, or if it ever did, you talked about the why, why not? That's why I'm still in the business because I always was put into places, hey, we got a problem there.

Go see if you can find out what it is and fix it. So the starting point for marketing is making people realize that there's a problem that needs fixing. When they're fat, dumb, and happy, they're very comfortable in what they get. They've never made as much money if they own the place. They're way beyond their expectations. And they're really invested in the status quo. They're risk averse. And you need to take them down a diving board, the gangplank. You know, what would you do if you weren't afraid sort of thing, right? Does that make sense in where you're at in the grind marketing collective?

One of the things that I found over my career is there are people within the business. that are hidden diamonds, that know what the heck to do, have the capability to do, but they're really not ever asked or tasked with things. I used to have an exercise that I would sit, this is when I was an employee and had teams. And we'd sit down every six months and I'd have three questions. What do I do that you like that I do and you want me to continue? What do I do that you don't like that I do and you want me to stop? And what do I do that really doesn't make any difference for you? Now, the latter is the easiest one. Anything that didn't make any difference, I've tried to figure out how I could offload that because that would free time up for me. If it was something that I was doing that they wanted me to continue, same thing. I wanted to pass it off to somebody else because obviously this was working. It was when it didn't work. Was it my style?

Was it the task? Was it knowledge? What was it? So all of a sudden, we were able to narrow in a little bit. And then I had a subsidiary exercise that was, we'd get the group together and we'd spend an hour and we'd do this a couple of times depending on where the company was. What about your job would you like to change that would make life easier for you, the employee? And write down three to five things. And then what about your job would you like to change that would make a huge difference for the company? Three to five things. And what are those things that are a real pain in the butt to do? Three to five things. And we take all of those in a whiteboard or a blackboard, whatever the hell it was, we'd get it up so that we had common language because a lot of them were the same. And we would find things that were make your life better, make the company better. And at the same time, we're a pain in the butt.

And I always used to ask the question, how come we haven't fixed it? Because we all know what it is. I think that's a huge. opportunity, like in marketing, selling, relationships, trust, culture. There's some questions you can ask that really expose things that are very, and you probably already do that or some form of it.

It's in their lives, isn't it? It's being part of their lives.

I think you're so right. You know, drowning in data. You know, people that are curious have never had better tools to find the truth. But with all of the noise out there, it's a hard thing to know what is the truth. And caring is critical. You know, in the state of Oklahoma, this is a number of years ago, there was an equal number of divorces as marriages, which bothers me a little bit. as a person, sending the meal, asking about the operation or congratulations on their valedictorian or they passed or they've got a degree or whatever the item is. And you've got to look for them. You've got to find something that you can praise or congratulate or wow. And, you know, you gave me one a couple of years ago, the first time you and I met, we were doing one of these with John Anderson. Ever since then, anybody asks me for anything, I say yes. Confuses the hell out of them. Ron, can you do this? Yep. I'd like to do this. Can you help me? Yep.

Honestly, it confuses the hell out of them. And if they don't ask me for something over a period of time, I come back, okay, how can I help? Yeah. Because there's so few people that do that, or even more importantly, are capable of doing that. And I think you're opening the door to that very same thing. What would you like? What keeps you awake at night? Let me take that.

And let's focus on that just for a second, because every single tool that we have to measure performance is historical. It's too late. It's done. Very rarely do we have discussions about how do we get back on track. So that stuff that's keeping them awake at night, you know, I've been doing this a long time, so I get a little bit more licensed than somebody who's just starting out. But I say, well, OK, how much you want to pay for me to fix that? You know, you know, I'll take that. You trust me to do it. Will you do what I tell you to do? That's another issue that becomes interesting as hell. You know, I start every class, Stephanie, that I don't do classroom work much anymore. I used to start every class with three definitions. And people don't know me. There's 20,30 people in the room. And I did this when I was teaching university with 100 people in the room. Give me a definition of ignorance. And everybody's, you know, they're nervous.

They don't want to expose themselves. They don't know what I'm expecting. Well, ignorance is not knowing what to do. It's a very simple definition. Cool. The second one is, give me a definition of stupidity. Well, some of them figure it out. They catch on to me quickly. Stupidity is knowing what to do but not doing it and is stupid. And then I give them the third one, which is either Mark Twain or Einstein, depending on the mood, continuing to do what you've always done, expecting different results is insanity. So I tell them there, right? It's in the 10,15 minutes at the beginning of every class. I'm going to give you a choice. I'm going to tell you, you're not going to be stupid. And you're going to know what you need to do. You're not going to be ignorant anymore. So I'm going to leave you the choice of being stupid or insane. Your call. And that scares people. This is work, Stephanie. This is hard work. It's discipline.

And I think that's some of the reason we don't do it.

But then what did I learn? Yeah. One of the best things that ever happened to me, and I tell this to anybody that's interested, I was a swimmer, a competitive swimmer. I was a good competitive swimmer. But what you learn in that discipline and many others, is if I stood on the blocks and there's seven other people there and I finished last, but I beat my best time, I won. This morning, before I get out of bed, I go through a whole bunch of stuff and there was a little clip underneath the picture. And the clip went, there's always somebody who's going to get up earlier than you to get at something. There's always somebody who's going to train harder to do. There's always somebody. That's going to be faster than you. That's going to be smarter than you. There's always somebody that you're going to be chasing. I'm somebody. And that was Steve. That was Steve. Who was an amazing athlete way ahead of his time.

Unfortunately, he died in a car crash, but, and he was the founder, if you will, of Nike. Because Bill Bowman, the guy that made his shoes for him with a waffle iron was the creator of will fill night of Nike. So. This work piece, I think we have, there's so much talent out there now. You know, I look at my daughter, way smarter than me, my grandchildren, it's scary. So if only we open up and say, gee, I don't know, what do you think? And have them be able to say whatever the hell they want without the fear of getting whacked up the side of the head. Oh, that's stupid. You know, you got an F. Congratulations. You know, OK, how do you make that better?

I mean, there's so many positive things we know now. And the next generation of leaders, the 40,50 year olds, they're there. They want to do this. The transition is delayed. But I think we've got the audience that's ready. We just need to open up for it.

We're taking our classes. And if I'm working within a company, we're going to have a Zoom meeting or a Teams meeting after six to 12 people have finished a class and we're going to chat about it for two, three hours. And I still learn from that. They learn from that. We learn to communicate in a different manner because it's two-dimensional now. It's not face-to-face sitting in the bar having a beer, which is the old days. But once you get the synergy of that kind of a group going, and I would imagine that that'd be something on a subscription service that would be good for you to create a bunch of teams, you know, the collective on social media, the collective on... relationship building, the collection on changing culture, you know, whatever they are. And because all of this, there's people that are thirsty for it. And the younger people clearly are. You mentioned the Gen Z. If they're not learning, they're gone.

If they're not feeling respected or don't feel that the job is worthwhile, they're gone. And it's just a question of how long it's going to take them to find a different place. You know, it used to be that everybody talked about, well, they left because they didn't get paid enough. The statistic has always been they left because the boss didn't treat them well enough. And that treat them well enough today is, you know, I got fired five or six times at the beginning. And the guy that fired me, if he was still alive and he said he was in trouble, I'd just ask him where he was and I'd be on my way. Because he was passionate about what he did. He didn't let you settle for poor performance. And we have that happen every single damn day. A customer that leaves, having an exit interview with employees is pretty common. How about exit interviews with the customers that you've lost? We don't do that. Such a simple thing, for goodness sake.

It's a human thing. What do I do?

Yeah, that's a perfect thing. The illustration I use always on leadership is the conductor of an orchestra. They are clearly some of the best musicians on the planet, but they're the only musician that has their back to the audience, the back to the customers. They are totally dependent not on their skills, but of the skills of the orchestra in front of them. And, you know, just getting the first level supervisor, the first time somebody's a supervisor, other people, a grandson was in the ROTC. He's in the Navy today. And I don't think he's unusual, but he, in his junior year, he was the commander of the ROTC. He dropped out in his senior year because he wanted to take art in different classes. And he said, Poppy, I hate it. I said, why? He said, they don't do what I tell them to do. They don't do what they're supposed to do. How do you get that to change? And this is a 15-year-old kid telling me this. You know, it really is interesting.

How do you get people to do what you want to do when they don't know? Like, I think it was Colin Powell that said, leadership is getting people to follow you over that hill when they don't know what's on the other side. You know, or Eisenhower is known for saying, here's a piece of string. Somebody asked him, what's leadership? And he says, do you see how hard it is to push it across the table? Look how easy it is to pull. And marketing, relationships, culture, it's changing people's perspective, right?

And, you know, I don't think we're taught about that in school anywhere. We're taught to be obedient. This is your multiplication tables. This is cursive writing if these things are even existing anymore. You know? Do it this way. Our parents, don't do that. Look both ways. And then we get out to work and somebody tells us what to do again. So right away, we're conditioned to be obedient, not to be independent, not to think about, not to challenge. And to open it up, that's hard. You know, my granddaughter gave me a book to read. And she's kind of out there too. The Invisible Woman. Women got the vote later than. colored people. Women still have a glass ceiling. Everything about it is changing the status quo. And marketing is just a beautiful tip of the spear to change the whole thing. Are dealers going to be here in 10 years? Are we going to buy directly from the manufacturer? Who's going to do the repairs? Who's going to do trade-in?

Who's going to rent machines? I go in front of a washing machine at my house. And it's an LG or a Samsung or something. And I scan the QR code and then my phone tells me what's wrong with the machine and what to do about it. Hello?

Go for it, babe. We'll publish whatever you want. Excuse

I say guys are babes too, by the way.

Yeah, it's Joel Barker back in the 80s coined a term paradigm, a paradigm being a pathway, a picture, a framework. And looking at other industries, last. year,23, early year, January or February, the president and chairman of Ford announced that they had a new contract for the electric vehicle segment of the car business, that the dealers were not to have any inventory, would all be shipped from a factory, that Ford was going to be able to spec out a car like CarMax or TrueCar or all these other things, and they were going to give a price. And we can give you a trade-in value. We'll deliver a car to your door. You can have a test drive. If you don't like it, send it back. What do you think the dealers that were electric vehicle dealers were thinking was going to be their role down the road?

Exactly. Now, if we look at electric vehicles in the construction space, go to Volvo. Their primary equipment is loaders, excavators, and trucks. They're electrifying everything. What do the equipment manufacturers and the equipment dealers make their money on? It's parts and service. It's not equipment. Well, what's the parts content on an electric vehicle? If we don't look over the fence at other industries, we're really being stupid, ignorant, everything altogether. Because the world is changing so fast. Amazon, Jeff Bezos, I buy a lot of books. I'd have to go to the bookstore. And they never had the books I wanted. Here comes Amazon. They didn't have the books, but the bookstore didn't have the book, but I got a better price. So that's fine. And then a couple of years in, they say, well, pay us $99 a year and we'll ship for free. They're the largest retailer in the world now,20 years later,15 years later, whatever the devil it is.

I go to Whole Foods to buy groceries. I don't need a credit card. I don't need money. I need my hand. I put it over when I check out. They now have carts that will automatically check you out. You know, this is really a crazy world. Our classes are all done with avatars, artificial intelligence. So it's male, female, different ages, different races. I'll send you some. I don't think you've seen them. It's remarkable. And the first thing somebody asked the customer when they call into a dealership to buy parts is, who are you? Yeah. Whoa.

I put a value on that, Stephanie, because if I bounce around the internet in all kinds of directions, but if I go into a place a second time, and they don't know what I was after the first time, I kind of next because they're not somebody I want to pay attention to.

So I agree with you 100%. What's even scarier is the population of the planet, let's say in the developed world. Before we go too far. So Western Europe and North America, just to take two slices of society. A guy that we pay attention to is a fellow by the name of Ed Gordon, who's got a couple of PhDs, one in economics, one in history. He's working in the education space. And his comment to me is that by 2030,50% of the American workforce will not have skills sufficient to get them a job. The American workforce is about, well, let's make it easy,200 million people. So he's saying to me 100 million. And that's robotics, that's artificial intelligence, that's machine learning, that's all of the technology. And we're so far behind on technology, it's scary. They're 20 years ahead of me, and I'd like to think I'm reasonable. I was on the internet in the early 70s when it wasn't there. What you can find today, convenience, predictive convenience.

We had a package on the internet in 1971 that you would attach to your fridge that would deliver menus for dinner tonight or lunch or breakfast and would take a shopping cart out of your fridge to create the meal. And then based on your input of frequency, whether it's daily, weekly, whatever, here's the shopping list to go to the store and replenish your fridge. That's 50 years ago. We still don't have that. It's starting. There's delivery services now, and that's going to be the convenience issue. Gee, I don't have time to cook. Let's go to the freezer. Boom. And it's 30 minutes. Everything is heading that way. Make it easy for me. I'm lazy. I want to be spending my energy and intellect in other parts of my life where I have more joy. This is something I have to do. I don't want to do it anymore. Do it for me, please. It's the DIY, D-I-F-Y, or where it is. I'm going to do it for you. I'm going to do it with you.

I'm going to do all of these things. And marketeers, look at Disney.

Wow. I mean, we can go forever on so many different directions. But what keeps you awake at night? That's a critical one. How can I have the people involved with touching customers only concentrate on relationships, sensing and knowing when the customer's not happy? Customer service is a difference between expectations and perceptions. And we don't, they belong to the customer. If we don't ask, we will never know. And we rarely ask. What is it about that competitor you like? And whatever they tell you, you didn't do it. Now it's a choice. Do you want to do it or not? You're going to have a hell of a time. And 19 years old is a little different than 20 years later. You've got some staying power now. This is going to work, Stephanie. And there's a lot of people that can use your services. How do we wrap this up in a way that makes some sense and leads people on to one another one?

Yeah, I asked the question, what would you do if you weren't afraid? Because fear of failure is what's holding us back in many cases. And I really appreciate the time, Stephanie. I think this has been wonderful, and I wish you all the best luck. And we're going to put this up in the next day or so, and your blog's going to go up tomorrow night. And I encourage everybody who's listening, and you mentioned people staying on. Our podcasts are long. We've got about 130,140 of them, but we've got 4,000 or 5,000 people that listen all the way through, which is really a testament to people are paying attention to what you're saying. And thank you so much for your time. I appreciate it very much.

So to everybody out there, thank you for listening. We hope you enjoyed this candid conversation and look forward to having you join us again in the very near future. Mahalo. Thank you for listening to our podcast. We appreciate your support. Should you have any thoughts or comments, please don't hesitate to contact us at www. learningwithoutscars. com. The time is now. Mahalo!