Full Transcript
[Music] Welcome to the Solspace Podcast. Thanks for listening.
Mitchell: Hey everybody, welcome back to the Solspace Podcast. This is Mitchell Kimbrough with Solspace, coming to you summer of 2024. My guest today is Matt Everson from Astuteo. Matt and I know one another from the Craft CMS community, and we recently did a couple of projects together, kind of partnering up to work together, our two agencies. Matt, welcome to the podcast.
Matt: Thanks Mitchell.
Mitchell: Yeah, thanks for coming on. One of the things that was immediately interesting to me when we reconnected and started talking again was there had been a few years lapse since we did some work together previously. And in that intervening time, I'd taken an interest in trying to get into the vertical market of the industrial manufacturing space, so web development in that space.
Solspace has a handful of clients in that space, and the work is really fun. It's like our favorite type of thing to do. And they really benefit from the sorts of things that we can do for them, moving their marketing and sales process onto the web, sort of streamlining how they gain customers and serve them.
All of these businesses sell complicated, configurable, expensive, high stakes products. It's a great place to bring good web development skills to bear. I was surprised to see that you had already been there.
You beat me there, and you've already been developing in your agency. One of your practice areas is that industrial space. How long have you been working in that space?
How long have you been doing that with some intent, trying to get clients like that in that space?
Matt: 2014 or 2015, we made that switch. I read a book at the time. I think it's Mike Michalowicz.
He has a few good books for small business, but he had a book called The Pumpkin Plan, which was comparing finding your niche in your small business to growing world championship pumpkins. He is a short book, and he has this process in there about figuring out what clients you really love to work with that really makes sense for your business. I read that and went through the process and made a spreadsheet.
The clients, they were just universally... Say we had like 25 clients at the time. We're a small company.
The five or six that were just perfect clients were all in that same vertical or very close.
Mitchell: Same thing with us. We did the exact same thing. We found the same result.
How did that work out? How do you like that vertical market after you went after it the way you did?
Matt: Oh, we love it. At the time when we made the switch, we talked to those clients and ended up moving all to completely retainer-based arrangements with them. We had some success with...
We're flexible on that arrangement now, but as far as our skillset as designer developers and what we can deliver for that type of company, it's this unlimited potential relationship, which I think we still have other clients and other verticals, but it's much harder to figure out the value that we... I like working with companies where we can deliver a ton of value and I get kind of uncomfortable when we're not delivering a ton of value. And so I never have that problem when it comes to manufacturing, industrial type of clients, just because there's so much that we can do to help them.
Mitchell: What are you doing to find those types of clients in that vertical? Are you reaching that market?
Matt: It's a great question. We've tried all sorts of things. I've always liked figuring out ways that we can be more of a magnet to pull those types of companies in versus reaching out to try to convince them that they need us.
We've had clients in Connecticut and California and down South in Chicagoland and Minneapolis. And of course we're based in Madison, Wisconsin. So we have clients in Milwaukee and Madison and other parts of Wisconsin.
We specialize in Craft CMS primarily. Some find us because they have a Craft CMS site and they're not happy with who they're working with, or it got built on that platform and they're trying to figure out a change. Other companies find us because they're looking for...
I honestly don't know. Maybe they're looking for manufacturing website, sorts of search terms, but we've always had the most success when they find us. I wish I had a detailed marketing outbound plan, but I've never quite come up with it.
Mitchell: That's the best client is the one to find you who has that pain and they reach out because they're ready. That's always the win. But I have this been in business 25 years and on a regular basis, it's consistent enough over every two or three, four years.
There's a down cycle, whether it's an extreme economic thing or confluence of clients who are ending their retainers or whatever. I just want to go and turn the tap back on and I'll make the phone ring again. And people have heard me complain about this for years.
And if you're in a vertical market, one of the ideas is that word of mouth is one of your best friends. So those manufacturers supposedly should be talking to each other and encouraging one another to go and find a web developer to do the type of work that we can do to streamline their operation. Have you found that to be the case?
Is it good word of mouth activity there?
Matt: I've seen both sides of that sword. The other one I would add there aside from word of mouth, which is kind of in the same category is that if you do it for long enough, you're meeting enough of these same sorts of people, whether it the CMO, the marketing director, the designer, anyone on a small internal marketing team, those people move around and they tend to stay in their same sort of industry. So if you give that five to 10 years, a lot of those people have shifted around and we've ended up getting some additional business where we've maintained the first client.
Someone on the team has gone somewhere else and then asked if we can do work at the new client. When I say it's a double-edged sword thing, we've also had plenty of instances where we've been contacted by a competitor, like the number one competitor or in the top three of one of our existing clients. And because we work so closely with our clients, those have been situations for better or worse, or I don't know if it's the right decision where we've always reached out to our existing client and asked to see what they think.
And they have always said, we would prefer that you don't work with our top competitor as well. Which is totally fine by us because we wouldn't reach out if those weren't exceptional relationships to begin with. So it goes both ways.
We've turned down really great business just because it's the same exact industry vertical niche product that we're already serving a leader in the industry on.
Mitchell: It feels like one of those good problems. If you're getting leads and there's enough awareness of your brand in a vertical market that you're getting competitors, that's great. I mean, it sucks that you can't say yes to the deal, but it's good that there's awareness you're getting those leads, you're getting that contact.
Matt: Totally agree. And I think that's one of those instances where sometimes it's been because the marketing director went to a competitor. And other times it's been because that competitor is looking at the quality of the work we've produced for their competitor.
And they've reached out because they're like, we want this exact same thing for ourselves.
Mitchell: What I've noticed in this vertical market that's been disappointing is that it's 10 years behind the web. They're really slow to adopt. There's a lot of businesses out there that should be clients right now, but they're satisfied that they have a WordPress brochure website, and they have a sales team that does all the work to sell the products.
And most of these clients that I've encountered are convinced that you can't sell what they sell on the web. It's just too complicated. Nobody's going to buy a five-figure assembly unit or automation system or a six-figure automation system from a website.
It's not true. We've proven it actually works and can be done at scale, but most of them don't believe that's the case. Have you found that there's adoption of web technology or they're slow or what's your experience there?
Matt: You're absolutely right. The vertical is way behind generally. If you're comparing it to tech and B2C products and everything else that are, their website is the brand cornerstone, so to speak, of what they're doing, manufacturing is just generally behind, just like you're saying.
I've always loved that because I think if you can get your foot in the door and show them what you're capable of and what their company is capable of, if they take advantage of it, the relationships are really solid, like 10 year plus customer relationships that go really deep. And I also think there's an advantage there to the companies that do decide to invest in their site. It's, you know, like I said, I love it when we could show that we're adding value and a lot of these companies have only a handful of competitors.
And so if they have four to six major global competitors that are all kind of lagging behind and you take them and move them to the front when technical performance and SEO and the visual brand and overall the quality of aesthetic, it's relatively easy to push them way out in front and to the top.
Mitchell: What sorts of things, you mentioned a couple of things that you're doing for these brands on the web to help them out compete. What are those things in detail? You talk about some branding, the aesthetic, raise the level of quality of the online brand.
What else technically, functionally are these clients of yours doing on their website?
Matt: Oh, that's a big question. I think, you know, touching on the brand aspect of it, you have plenty of experience with this, just jumping around to these websites or picking up new clients where there is just nothing invested in the aesthetic and user friendliness of their website. And so we have had customers where we've just, they've put a lot of effort into updating their website and making it look good.
Whether that's, they have an internal design team or we help them with that based on an established brand. But we've had a few clients say that their potential customers called them because they give the impression that the company is bigger than it actually is. It's like, you look like you're a very professional top-notch company and it could just be a small manufacturing company with 50 or less people, but they look like they're the best in their industry.
So that's definitely a way that, you know, we've got direct feedback from our clients that they've heard from their customers, how the website, a good website is helping them. But otherwise we really love finding unique tools that we can build for them, whether that's like a value sort of calculator, some simple JavaScript calculator, but that engages with the customer. Anytime we can give the customer sort of ownership over what they're purchasing, whether that's in being able to customize what they're looking at or figure out the value so that they can print something out and take it to their internal team.
We love doing those sorts of tools on, and those would be like front-end things. But then we also, with larger clients, end up doing a lot of custom integrations with other systems they might have, whether that's marketing automation, CRM stuff, some Salesforce type integrations, stuff like that.
Mitchell: What do you say to these clients who initially object to the idea of selling online? Are they selling online? Are any of these clients actually conducting some sort of e-commerce with these configurable, highly complex products that they sell?
Matt: Yeah, we have some that have e-commerce systems and their product might be an actuator that costs $400 or something, and they can buy things online and their customers can transact online. We also have done sort of request-to-quote carts, so to speak, where you can add either a solution, and a solution being this custom combination of products that solves something. But you can add this solution to your cart, which is basically just an inquiry or a quote inquiry, and you can also add specific products to a cart.
And we've done that using something like CraftCommerce. It is, for all practical purposes, an e-commerce system, but we're not transacting online. We're just sending that to the appropriate people within the business when they submit it.
So it might go to the specific sales rep for the territory and get copied to the marketing team, et cetera.
Mitchell: Okay. Are we putting any salespeople out of work with our web development work?
Matt: Man, I don't think so. I'm always an abundant sort of thinker. I think my favorite people...
I don't like when it's the sales and marketing director running the show because I feel like it's a little bit too much of a focus on sales and there's no sort of brand overarching marketing thought given to it. Not always, but it's just sort of a stereotype that I've noticed. But I as far as the individual sales person that's cruising around the country and dealing with these people, and a lot of these guys have been doing it for a long time.
And so I absolutely love getting those people on the phone or in a meeting to talk about the sales process and how we can help them basically just make their jobs easier by building stuff on the website that they can use as a resource.
Mitchell: Who are your clients? Who's reaching out? Who's making first contact and saying, yeah, I heard about you guys.
I think we do need to get on the web and I think we do need to take it seriously. Who is that? Is that the marketing director?
Is that the VP of sales? Who's reaching out?
Matt: Let's see, four or five different types of people. It's either ownership directly at a small company. So it's the owner, president of the company.
If they have a marketing team, we work with a number of clients who have a marketing person. So it's the marketing manager, something like that. And then we will do both design, development, all sorts of things for them.
We have clients that they have a slightly larger marketing team, like everything up until digital. So they have designers, they have copywriters, they have a CMO and a marketing manager or director, but they don't have in-house digital. And so we will just be an augmentation that's just attached to their team that worked exceptionally well.
But yeah, as far as people reaching out, I would say that we have the least success when it's a specifically sales-oriented function or a single new marketing person that doesn't have a ton of experience with their own company. Those tend to be tough sells.
Mitchell: When I started reaching into this vertical market, trying to learn about it, trying to see how would you gain clients in this space, I was going to trade shows. And one of the great things about this particular vertical is that the trade show is a big part of how these companies do business with one another. And that's not necessarily the case with other verticals that we've done web development work for, but in the industrial space it is.
You can go to these trade shows and there's thousands of people, tens of thousands in some cases, and they're all trying to find clients and they're all trying to find vendors and all that kind of thing. And I would go to the booths and I would meet people. If I met someone in sales, they were uniformly uninterested in talking to me because I was basically saying, I'm going to put them out of work.
I kept trying to say, look, I'm going to streamline your work. I'm going to make you more efficient and faster. You're going to increase your scale and your volume because you're going to use the web as a tool.
No, no, I don't. They're really skeptical. Occasionally I would get access to someone in a C-suite, you know, maybe a smaller company.
I would talk to the CEO or the owner. And when I started talking about web to someone who hadn't explored it before, or was anxious about it, or was kind of behind the times, I would consistently hear, if you can show me an ROI, then we can talk some more. If you can tell me how I'm going to spend $10 and make a hundred, then I'm interested in seeing a proposal.
But one of the problems is if they have nothing, if they have nothing on the web, they're not using digital at all, or virtually not at all. It's not really an ROI question because you're originating, you're creating a brand new thing. Like you're creating something new in that business that defies ROI in the beginning.
You had any experience with this? Are people asking you, what's the ROI? How am I going to get a return on this investment on the web? And how do you answer it?
Matt: That’s a good question. I don't know if we've always tried to present that, sort of outline the actual value to the company, once we have someone who's interested in working with us. As far as just sort of cold leads and trying to present that, or even warm leads, I think we've had more success in less in showing the actual specific ROI, and more in presenting things, like I talked about, like whether it's a calculator or a 3D rendered equipment video that sort of shows this complicated piece of machinery that's impossible to photograph well, shows that in action doing what it can do through some sort of 3D rendering, showing a specific integration and how it's streamlined things. I think if you can put enough of those things together, one of them will often be the thing that especially an owner is triggered by and says, that's what we've always wanted, or we've always been trying to solve that specific problem. So kind of throwing that type of spaghetti against the wall and seeing what sticks versus making any sort of particular promise, sort of letting them pull that out from the things that we can do.
Mitchell: One of the things we're seeing in this space is we have one client in particular who took the business over from, he and his brother took it over from the founder, who was their dad. And this is a baby boomer founder, and these guys are millennials. They're taking the business over.
And it's definitely an industrial manufacturing play. It's a complicated, high stakes, like if you buy their product, you're going to put it in something that is going to blow up if it's not the right configuration, the right tolerances, all that sort of stuff. What our client, the new owner told me in an interview was, he says, I just really don't like the sales team.
They've always gotten on my nerves. I've tolerated them because I didn't have control of the company. But as soon as I did, I wanted to make a change.
And I wanted to move as much of that sales activity online as I could. Well, they took a big leap. They do have e-commerce capability and they do sell five, six figure products from the website. Their clients come in, their customers come in, put a credit card in and buy this stuff. They configure it online. One of the things my client said was, we weren't able to do that online until we made some adjustments to the business itself.
What we sell and how we sell it had to change a little bit to be adapted and suitable for the digital space. But he had control, like he was an owner. He had that vision.
He saw where the company could go if they would streamline and create that scaling opportunity. Have you seen any of that or any of your clients? Are they seeing that they need to change or adjust their offering a bit so that it's more compatible in the digital space?
Matt: Yeah. I mean, I think the places, it tends to be sort of a spinoff, little skunk works within the company where they might sell totally custom, completely customized equipment or parts like you're describing. And then they will have something that's semi-stock type of product that they're like, let's make a go at standardizing this and keeping an inventory and see if we can sell this online.
It often starts with an experiment. I don't know about a whole, I mean, that's very forward looking of that owner to know that they need to make a wholesale change from the ground up to their business. I haven't seen that case specifically though.
That's really fantastic and awesome. For us, it's often like a little experiment with clients that trust us that are like, hey, we want to try something with different levels of success.
Mitchell: Yeah. Yeah. I see the same pattern.
A client is interested in trying to experiment and we're doing this right now with a client who they would like to see more sales activity taking place online. They're selling parts online, you know, like spare parts for the larger assemblies, the larger solutions that they sell. Moving their sales team away from being order takers and into being solution providers and strategists means putting parts online.
That's not easy, but it's much easier than some of the other stuff they sell. And the next stage we saw was what they call quick ship. This is totally separate client, different than what I was just talking about.
They, like you said, they have some things in inventory that are basically ready to go. And so they created, you know, in their database, a new flag in the database that these 15 solutions are ready to go under the right circumstances. Someone could just do a quick ship.
We'll put it on a pallet and get it out to them in less than a week. And they're good to go. We see experiments and we see these businesses sort of tiptoeing into the online space.
And I recommend that really highly. I like that attitude. I like that approach to the web because you're probably going to get a better result.
It's going data driven and you're in a position to experiment and learn. How often do you see the problem with this industry where when they've spent big money in the past, it's a big overhaul of an assembly center or a factory or whatever. So they're accustomed to big capital expenditures.
They're less accustomed to trying experiments. Like culturally, how often do you see that this is part of those companies?
Matt: I think it has varied by our client. If we have really strong relationships, we have sometimes have clients encouraging us to be more experimental. And I think, you know, good, really good clients tend to always be like that, where they recognize that they are not the expert in the space and they want you to be bringing them ideas.
So yeah, we've had a fair amount of that. I forgot, we did have a similar part integration, like half a million parts that they had in inventory that they were doing phone orders. And in that case, they implemented a Salesforce Commerce Cloud, I believe.
And then we integrated that part search into their website. So that was a secondary site. We integrated it into the primary site and they're doing a ton of business and streamline that whole ordering process.
Mitchell: Oh, cool. That's excellent. How big of a project was that for the client?
Like how much time, how much expense?
Matt: I don't know what the cost was. I know it was a lot. I mean, they already had the infrastructure, so that's not a case of the company changing operationally.
It was just request a part sort of thing on the website, or we have part call us to them independently sort of extending their Salesforce installation into something that could manage inventory and actually have a front facing e-commerce site. Like I said, that wasn't integrated into the main primary marketing site, but then we integrated that through Algolia, which just like a flat file sort of index search. So that we did some creative things with search.
So it was like, if someone was typing something that we determined was probably a part number in their search, we would go out and hit this other index that was the half million parts and recommend those particular links to them.
Mitchell: You mentioned Algolia. And one of the things that became obvious when I was first moving into this vertical market, looking at it was you hear in the web development world, talk about headless technologies, composable technologies. And by that, I mean having a website that's composed of separate functional units that don't necessarily all sit on the same server, or not necessarily part of the same sort of core content management system.
Your Algolia solution is a good example of that. So you have a data set somewhere else, and you need to expose that on the website somehow to make it available. You don't necessarily want to fully integrate that with whatever the CMS was, or a fundamental database running that website.
You have this sort of a composable integrated solution that is running separately, but is unified in a user experience that makes sense. How much of that type of stuff do you do? I really saw that there was a need, given what we said a minute ago, that it makes a lot of sense for these businesses to try experiments and move, or progressively move their operations and their sales activity online in steady steps.
How often do you feel like you're using some of those composable web development technologies to help solve that set of problems?
Matt: With Algolia, it's almost every single client that's in this space, because they sell parts and products, or they might have a hundred different sort of custom, even if it's a custom product that they sort of have engineered, say they have a hundred different case studies for that sort of thing. We've just always found that having a really fast, faceted, filterable search adds value. And I think at this point, practically every one of our clients, whether it's just the site search to quickly go through what they have available on the site to, like I said, half a million, 600,000 products in Salesforce, or yeah, just even when the products are actually integrated into the CMS, and that is what they're managing their products on their website with.
In every case, having a really fast, good search seems to work well.
Mitchell: The advantage there is you don't really care where that data is originating from, as long as you can consistently, like on a regular basis, daily or every three hours or so, get any changes into the search index, the Algolia index. We like to use Meilisearch, which is sort of an open source competitor to Algolia. But if you can get that in there, then you can expose that as a user interface on the website, and you've decoupled some stuff, reduced some risk, reduced complexity.
It's a really nice set of solutions. Anything else like that should she use? We talked a little bit about calculators.
We haven't talked in great detail about configurators, but is there anything else that you can decouple to sort of reduce risk and complexity and make things more progressively adoptable by the client?
Matt: I'm not sure. I think the first one, the first step always seems to be the CRM, whether you're just, it's like a web-to-lead thing where you're, instead of taking the leads into your CMS, you're sending them off to a marketing automation system or Salesforce. That's always the sort of most basic level.
The Algolia instance I talked about with all those products, we just told them, if you can get these into an Algolia index, we can deal with it. And they were able to with a separate team, get that index created, which pretty much makes your point that these can be totally separate databases of information. And they, they got that spun up and then we just accessed it.
Salesforce is a big one. Like you can do a lot of really cool stuff with Salesforce, depending on how far or how much of their business they've put in Salesforce. So we, we've created for one customer, we did a customer support portal.
That's essentially just a read-only data from their Salesforce install. So we have things like the hardware they own, the software, is it up to date and licensed, support tickets, not that they can interact with, but they can at least see that they have an open ticket. And so we've done some sort of interesting read-only customer support tools.
Otherwise, yeah, I think that's about it.
Mitchell: That's a pretty good list. You're reminding me that there's a conference that I attended last year. It was the end of January, early February.
This was in Austin. Let me give these guys a plug because it was such a great conference. The Industrial Marketing Summit. So this was a conference bringing together really basically marketing directors of these industrial manufacturing firm. Get them all in one place and, and like get them in a place where they can talk about, share your industry notes and knowledge and just kind of meet each other and talk to each other and commiserate a little bit. It was, it was a really well put together conference.
It was relatively small in the sense that you could meet everybody and talk to them over the course of two or three days. And I'm going to go back to that and I've pitched to be one of the presenters. I haven't heard back whether my pitch is going to be a win or not, but I wonder if you found yourself presenting in front of a group of industrial marketing directors, what would you say?
What would you talk about? What would you have them think about as a set of priorities to turn their attention to with regard to web development, with websites and so forth?
Matt: I think if it's a marketing oriented person, they understand the value of their brand and what the brand itself can do for the company. I would probably start with the value of having your website be the cornerstone of your brand as their customers sort of consume it and learn about it. Because you can have a sales team, you can have brochures and PDFs and all these different tools, but you're never going to read or advertise.
I guess manufacturing isn't really, doesn't tend to be a space that's doing a ton of advertising outside of specialty publications. So I think, you know, your website as a tool for communicating your brand, it's just a huge advantage if you can be those companies that choose to take advantage of it. So I'd probably start in some capacity with talking about that.
And then I'd probably move on to some of the other things we've talked about, like what it can do for operational value. I think that second sort of streamlining operations is a much better pitch to ownership, like you were talking about, than it is to marketing directors. I mean, it crosses over both to some extent.
Mitchell: One of the things I saw when I attended and I was talking to some of these industrial marketing directors is they're the only people in the company who have digital experience or digital expertise of any kind to help answer some of the questions of what should you do on the web? So just take the example of, hey, we've decided that we want to integrate our website with Salesforce. We just want a base level integration.
We want that contact form to post directly into Salesforce in real time, so the sales team has access to that immediately. Who is going to be in charge of making that happen? They almost always turn to the marketing director because that's the person on the team who's the closest to being able to answer that question.
But these marketing directors are like, I'm not IT and I'm not a web developer. I'm not digital. But it falls on my desk anyway.
I feel bad for them because they've already got enough on their desk and they're being asked to spearhead something that's really technical in nature. It's definitely sort of an IT oriented thing, but they don't necessarily have that set of disciplines in house, which is an argument for finding a good web development agency who can help make sense of some of that stuff.
Matt: Yeah. I think you can deliver a lot of comfort if people reach out in that situation, because they often have some general idea. I don't even know if it's as specific as we need to hook up Salesforce to our website.
It can often be much more vague of a question. We know we need to go this direction, but we're not exactly sure how to get there. And I'm sure you love that sort of question as much as we do, because it's like, yeah, we've done this 72 times before and we've made a lot of mistakes and we've had a lot of successes.
And here's exactly what we would recommend that you do in your situation. And I think that in combination with being able to turn it around quickly and solve that problem for them, that can be what ends up being a 10 year plus relationship. It's just a really easy way to get started if you have that experience.
Mitchell: Yeah, I agree. I've seen that too. Well, Matt, this was good.
I got a lot of good sort of information, got a confirmation about where things are in this space. I wish you and I had good answers for how we find the kinds of clients who need us and who can benefit from the sort of work that we do, but I guess we're still working on cracking that nut. But Matt, thanks for joining the podcast and thanks for all the insight that you brought to bear.
Matt: Yeah, I appreciate it for sure. And we'll obviously keep talking and maybe in six months we have an answer to the marketing question.
Mitchell: Where can people find you if you've caught someone's interest? What's the website?
Matt: astuteo.com. So it's pronounced like a studio. It's spelled the word astute with an O on the end.
Mitchell: Excellent. All right, Matt, thanks again.
Matt: Thanks, Mitchell.
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