Mets Kramer and Ron are joined by Stephanie Smith for a Candid Conversation on Marketing in the Digital Age

Sure, sure, sure. Thank you guys very much for having me today. As Matt said, I am with Newman Tractor. I've been with the company for a little over a year now. And I am the VP of marketing here. Prior to coming to Newman, I was in the produce industry, a very similar industry in that digital change. It shakes people up quite a bit and helped other small family-owned businesses prior to that get acquainted with marketing, get them understanding what these foundations could really do for their business, and then just kind of took it from there and landed this great opportunity to be here today with you guys, but also to be with Newman Tractor as well.

Absolutely. Absolutely. And everybody's got their own definition of what marketing actually is. If you did a poll of everyone that works at Newman Tractor, even though they had an idea of what marketing was from Justin Newman being in my seat prior to me, they would say it's videos, they would say it's making pretty pictures, or they would say it's creating flyers. But it goes beyond that. Really, what marketing does is it's sales enablement and it is learning your customer inside and out so that you can help create opportunities to bring them in to do business with you. And you can do that in a lot of different ways. We're talking today specifically about the digital presence and what that looks like. It's not just your website. You have to couple your website with many other things. It's your digital footprint. It is your social sites. It's your Google ads.

It's so much more under the surface that nobody even knows about because it's working behind the scenes instead of in front of the scenes. All that other stuff that we just talked about, that's what people know of marketing because that's what they see. But we have to go deeper. We have to... Find out what our customers like. We have to find out how they want to do business. And then we have to treat them how they want to be treated, not how we want to treat people, right? Meet them where they're at and bring them in.

It's been such an amazing journey because he's relying on me to establish those marching orders. They knew what they knew of marketing and digital through the work that Justin Newman had done. And we are. going through our own set of changes and that we are getting ready to go through succession planning. We have a generational shift that's happening here at Newman Tractor. And so everybody's moved on to their next role, which led the opportunity for me to be here. And when I came in with the experience that I came in, not to necessarily talk about me, but just to talk about the power of what others are doing and bring that into the organization and say, we really need to be thinking about this. We were already thinking about things that other people in the industry aren't thinking of. Let's take it a step further.

Let's integrate a CRM system with all of the work that we're doing behind the scenes to really capture what's going on with our customers and then use that to fuel our sales team. Because our customers no longer need us to be a walking brochure. They don't want our sales guys coming in with a handout and saying, hey, guys, look at this new. product that I have to offer you, they're going to look at you and say, yeah, I already know about it because I already did the research. I already made my decision on that. But by changing the way that you interact with your customers and how you arm your sales team with different sales tools like video and really not necessarily creating what I would call traditional marketing materials, but a new way for people to find you and decide whether or not.

they like you enough to want to do business with you is really what we're all about right now, because there's so many different changes that are happening within our industry in terms of how people want to do business. COVID did a lot for us too, in terms of digital landscapes, right? It's the Amazon effect. Everybody wants to be able to find what they need online when they're looking for it. And if you couple what the customer is looking for and what you're doing in terms of your digital presence by showing up where they're hanging out digitally, they're going to find you a lot faster than if you just have a website or if you just have a brochure or if you just have your sales team showing up on the job site saying, this is what we have to offer.

Sure. How you're tracking your customer engagement. So it's a customer relationship management tool. There's all kinds of different ones out on the market. We chose the one that we did because it's got strong marketing functionality and it's got strong sales functionality as well.

We chose HubSpot.

We use eEmphasis for ERP.

They do integrate. We had to write our own API connection for that.

salesperson? Yeah. Not always, because we're changing the way that they have to look at how they service the customer. Some of the stuff that we're creating right now is a little foreign, right? We're creating templates within the CRM system so that they can now have something armed and ready to send out to the customer whenever.

Well, we have a pretty wide range from 21 all the way up to 64. I would say primarily we're right in the middle. We're in the sweet spot. We're late 30s.

In some cases, yes. I honestly think through our experience and what I've experienced at other organizations, again, very similar in the produce industry that. It was the same type of demographics, right? It was very much male dominated. It was very much 55 to 65 guys that were running the show. I think as long as you have a strong leadership team who is willing to implement change and to try new things, then that filters out throughout the rest of the organization. And these guys who you would expect because they're older or not necessarily as tech savvy as somebody who may have grown up with technology, they're willing. And they're actually embracing it in a way that maybe some of the younger guys weren't, you weren't expecting that they'd give you any pushback.

Absolutely.

Well, it does. And I think in some cases, and again, this isn't necessarily something that is special just to our industry. I've experienced it in other industries.

The sales guy is very protective. of his relationships and rightfully so. You know, I think we're a little special here at Newman Tractor. Well, we all want to think that we're special, but, you know, we're lucky at Newman Tractor because you mentioned that the sales guys, they have a different outlook in terms of what their relationship with the customer. needs to be and how that translates back to the rest of the organization. In some cases, they feel like they operate independent of the organization. We don't really have that at Newman, especially right now because of what we're trying to do. And hey, by the way, you can't have sales as a silo and marketing as a silo anymore. You have to be working in tandem to make sure that you're creating. a very cohesive customer experience. And so you talk about sales enablement and you talk about these changes that are happening for them. It's not just with the brochures.

It's literally how leads actually come to us. And we talk about, yeah, and we talk about data, right? And that's brought it up just a second ago. There is so much data at our fingertips. In some cases, sorry, you don't even have to have a CRM. There's so much data between Google Analytics, between what you're seeing from your website, social listening, listening to what your customers are saying through their own social feeds. That's where you're able to really meet them where they're at. And so what we're trying to do is take all that information and then package it up based on what we're hearing from our customers in each of these territories that we serve. And then give it to them in a way that they want to do business with us. And when I say in a way that they want to do business with us, the way that people have migrated over the last few years is people sell to people. That's always been a thing, regardless of whether you're in B2B or B2C.

But you have to either relate with the person, the salesperson, or you have to relate with the organization's why. Can my why. Yep. be canned into this why. And if it can, I'm sold. I'm a loyalist. I'm now with this company for the rest of my life.

Yes. Well, there's actually three of us in our marketing department here at Newman Tractor. And we, we all have, yes, we have three. We have three. Yes.

So we all have our own set of responsibilities in terms of social listening. If you look at Liz, her dedicated platform is YouTube. She's our videographer. She's our storyteller. It is her job to be listening to what our customers are saying through YouTube. And then we report that back, whatever we're seeing. The other thing is, too, is...

That's part of it. That's not always the case. It's also just social listening to find out. what our customers are doing in terms of demographics. So let's take it a couple of steps further, right? Then you also have Nicole, who her job is to pay attention to what's going on. And these are just the platforms that we're using right now. The platforms and the algorithms are going to continue to change. So what we're saying today may not be the case six months from now.

So... Sorry, I may be getting way ahead of the conversation.

Okay. Okay. Okay. So in terms of algorithms, right? So everything in terms of social is based off of an algorithm, AI technology. Hold

It's basically... robots who are scanning everything that's going on and then they're prioritizing stuff based off of what they're seeing. It's all happening on the back end of things.

No, great. Great. So the algorithms, well, let's just take Facebook because it's probably the easiest one to talk through. Facebook is going through its own set of transitional change right now. They started as a very niche. social platform that was more dedicated towards college students. You couldn't even have a profile unless you were a college student. That has evolved over the years, right? Now your grandma's there, your 13-year-old kid in some cases are, which is a whole other story. But so you have this wide net of people who are now on Facebook.

Yes, they've experienced some different changes and fluctuations, but yeah, that's about right.

That you could essentially tell about your business just by being there.

Let's keep with the algorithm now. So the algorithm, right? Everything is evolving. Social media is evolving. This platform has been evolving over the years. But the rate in which this change is taking place, especially with Facebook, has just been expedited. They are now introducing Meta, which is a new form of their platform. And what we're experiencing and what we're seeing is the algorithm is prioritizing people based off of the content that you generate, whether or not you can keep people engaged and active in their platform.

Right. Or both? It's both. But Facebook will prioritize you based off of the content that you generate. So say I'm showing you something through Facebook. If you engage with it and lots of people are engaging with it and you stay in the platform longer, Facebook says, I like Stephanie. What I'm going to do with Stephanie is I'm going to show her to a lot more people than just the people she knows.

It's tough to say because the algorithms are changing so fast. And that's part of the challenge that we're experiencing, right? Like, yes, we're playing in this space. And we think that we've got it figured out. And based off of the content that we're generating, based off of our customers' engagement, based off of all of the data that we're collecting, and then all of a sudden things go dark for a little bit. Well, why'd they go dark, right? We didn't change anything. And now all of a sudden something's happened. So you really have to be mindful of sometimes. Facebook will throw you a curveball. The algorithm will throw you a curveball to see if you're really, really relevant. And, oh, hey, by the way, it's still a platform. Like their whole goal is to make money. The way they make money is off of selling their ads and also off of keeping people in the platform.

Absolutely. Because you can't stay stagnant with the digital landscape in which we're playing right now. And here's why. Think of Craigslist, especially for our industry. Craigslist was definitely a platform in which a lot of different people would sell inventory on. And then all of a sudden it tanked. It tanked because it became saturated. It tanked because it was no longer relevant. And the reason it became no longer relevant to even our audience is because something else happened. Something new happened. And when something new happens. People want to jump on that ship. And so it's you abandon the ship, you go here. So the thing that my team is constantly looking at and the thing that we have to be looking at is, yes, we have to serve our current customers' needs all day long. And if that means traditional means, absolutely, we want to serve them.

But we also have to recognize that we have a bit of a hybrid mix right now in terms of traditionalist and futurist. And so we play in the space in which we play in right now in terms of creating that nice balance between the two. But we're always looking to what's next, because if you're not, you're going to get left behind because, oh, hey, by the way, those changes that are happening with Facebook right now are also happening in other platforms. We're just talking about one right now.

Absolutely.

Yeah. So if you go back to the conversation that we were having earlier in terms of sales enablement and making this, well, helping bridge the gap in that. that transition for the sales guy, you have to make it easy for them and you have to give them proof case scenarios. And so we had a very seasoned salesperson who I absolutely love. And he says, I don't know about this stuff. Let me show you what the power of this can do. And so I said, hey, send out an email through the platform and let's take a look at what happens. And so in real time, he sent out the email. He was able to see the engagement from the customer come back right away in real time. And then he was able to call the customer as that quote went out and say, hey, do you have any questions? And so that was top of mind for the customer right then and there.

But it was also top of mind for him because he was like, I just closed that deal way faster than I would have if I would have sent him the quote and then waited. to come back to him a week later, or waited to come back to him two days later, whatever the sales cycle was on that particular model. But that right there, that one instant created buy-in for him. And now he is an advocate for what we're doing.

It's because you were top of mind. And Ron, you're speaking my language because it's all about the customer experience, whether it's through digital, whether it's through traditional handwritten notes, or whether it's through a really swanky new customer kit. a box is delivered to them after they bought the machine. Or it's the thought leadership that happens throughout the course of the sales cycle. It's all relevant and it's all important. We're not going to be successful just by having great sales guys. We're not going to be successful just by having great swag or great marketing materials. We have to have it all. It's a very holistic picture. And, oh, hey, by the way, let's go back to the customer, right? Things are changing for the customer. Yes, we're talking about digital landscapes right now and the power of being able to send email blasts that you can then collect the data on that you can then make actionable.

But, oh, geez, we're now in this world where we get emails all the time. You can't just rely on just the email hitting that person's inbox. You have to couple that with a handwritten note from time to time. Because absolutely. When you talk about the customer experience, it's about making it relevant for them. What's important to them, not what's important to us as the business that they're buying from. It's, hey, I remembered that your daughter had a surgery two months ago. How's she doing? Hey, how is that new machine working on your job site? All of these different things, because in our business, there's years that go by in between sales sometimes. And it's super competitive. If you are not top of mind, if you haven't sent that birthday card, if you haven't sent that thank you note, if you haven't followed up in some capacity, you're not going to be top of mind. And if somebody new has just entered the game.

They're knocking on their door too.

We're just talking about one pathway today. Exactly. It really all boils down to the customer experience and how you treat people. And it's funny because we talk a lot about that here. And we talk a lot about how we can can that and package that up. And the NT brand experience, we're now five locations, which is crazy to think of. But at each location, you should have the exact same experience over and over again. It should not be different. It's the Chick-fil-A. mentality, right? You should not have a different experience, whether you're at Newman Tractor Verona or Newman Tractor Bartow, it's got to be the same. And the way that you make that consistent is you identify your why you identify how you're going to treat people. And then you get people to resonate with your why, because So it's in line with their values and how they want to do business. And oh, hey, by the way, it's because you treated them really, really well over and over again.

Our industry has always been very, very transactional. You take them through the funnel, top to the bottom. See you later. It's got to be an infinite loop where you're constantly bringing them back in, whether it's they bought a machine or they're constantly coming back for different things from your organization because they had a really good experience. And oh, hey, by the way, let's go back to the digital piece of it all. Your reviews online mean more than anything because while you can have a gazillion great reviews, that one bad review may or may not be why somebody does business with you. And you have to be able to outweigh the good with the bad, but you also have to be paying attention to what people are saying. And as connected of an environment we live in, it's very, very easy for somebody to be upset and in the heat of the moment, leave a bad review. And then that stains you for a while.

There's not. But it's all about making disciples of disciples. If you get one to buy in, the next one's going to buy in because then they become influencers. They become advocates of what's happening around them. Because they see value in how it's going to impact them, their job, and their livelihood. And that, I mean, we're all individuals at the end of the day. We all care about what matters to us and simplification for us. No different than our customers. We've got to make it easy for our customers just as much as we've got to make it easy for those that we work with as well.

Yeah. So you bring up a very, very valid point, right? Going back to just the website in general, right? If we would have been talking five years ago, the question wouldn't be, how can I improve my website? The question would have been, why do I really have to have a website? Do I really need to have a website? Yeah, you really need to have a website. Oh, and hey, by the way, you've got to couple that with other things. You've got to couple it with things in terms of how people can find you. And it's not just having a URL where people can, pop that into Google search. They've got to be able to find you other ways, but in finding you, not only do they have to like what they see when they get there, it's got to be functional. It's got to be simple. It's got to be easy to navigate. It's got to be fast. And they have to figure out how to get in contact with you ASAP. And if that's not easy, you've lost them. They're gone.

You've got to be able to answer the questions they have while they're there.

operational efficiency. Is it ever? Absolutely. There's where we're at right now, not just as an industry, but as a whole is this hybrid mix, right, of ability and. of understanding and of understanding of new technology. And so why wouldn't we leverage the technologies that are at our fingertips to help us be more operationally efficient? We still need employees. It just looks different. I had a stint in the tech space where I actually worked for a company that helped build cobots and software that you would put on CNC machines to help with predictive maintenance and to help with some of those transitional changes because the manufacturing space is, again, very similar to our industry in that you have to have the human element. But when you introduced the technology, when you introduced the cobots, it scared people to death because they felt like they were being replaced. We're not replacing.

We're saying let's do things differently and let us turn you out.

So I think I would end with, you have to start with that same mentality of the experience with the salesperson. You have to start somewhere. And you have to show them and make it relevant for them. And once they're understanding and bought into that one concept, then they're willing to take on another concept and another concept and another concept. And all of a sudden, you're stepping closer and closer and closer to the change that you need to take or make, excuse me. So there's lots of opportunity for us as individuals, lots of opportunity for us as organizations. We just have to make the first step.