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Creating Leads
Joanna Cortez
Fri, 05/22/2020 - 11:37
Lauren and Shay have Director of Marketing Doug Dudley back again for a conversation about creating leads. Doug will talk about how to get more sales leads by working with your existing customer base, growing your local network, leveraging your website, and expanding awareness with great content. We hear tips on maintaining current customers, discovering new leads, building up your reputation, and finding new opportunities to solve problems and ultimately grow your business.
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00:08 Lauren: Hi, welcome back to our sales and marketing training videos. I'm Lauren.
00:12 Shay: And I'm Shay. Today is all about one of the most crucial parts of any marketing effort, creating leads.
00:17 Lauren: We'll talk about how to get more sales leads by working with your existing customer base, growing your local network, leveraging your website and expanding awareness with great content.
00:28 Shay: We're back talking with Doug Dudley our Director of Marketing. Thanks for being here again, Doug.
00:32 Doug: Yeah, no problem, excited to be here.
00:34 Lauren: So, today's topic is about creating leads...
00:37 Doug: Yeah.
00:38 Lauren: And building your lead base. And normally when we think about creating leads, we think about new people, making new connections. But you actually argue the best way to find leads is to start with your existing customers.
00:54 Doug: Yeah, and the biggest reason for that is there is no easier sale than the person who's already been sold. Your existing customers already like your product, they already trust your company, your marketing has already worked on them. So they're gonna much more likely to give you an additional sale, maybe it's growing their use of Ignition inside their facility from one machine to another, or from one plant to another. Maybe they're setting up a chain trying to make it an enterprise-wide architecture. Or maybe they have friends or colleagues in other companies that would also be interested in Ignition. If you can win the trust of that customer instead of focusing on just making one more Ignition sale, actually try to win the trust of that customer and build a relationship there, you could potentially have a whole flood of new leads from inside that company or beyond from that relationship with that customer. So that's a way of looking at your existing customer base to find new potential leads for yourself.
01:57 Shay: So we had a tip on that, on maintaining these existing customers and being able to grow a business based off of that, that lead that you've already nurtured and been able to make a sale to, which is to make sure that you are performing magic tricks a little bit. Yeah?
02:11 Doug: Yeah, yeah. So this is actually something that Steve Heckman was talking to me about, and he said, that one of the best ways, especially with Ignition, one of the best ways that you can go in and make another sale is to go in to an existing customer who's had a problem, they've been hitting their head up against a wall because there's something they can't solve, and if you can go in there with Ignition and work a miracle for them, “be an Ignition magician” was the term he coined, you will just blow them away and win them over because you'll solve this problem that just seemed unsolvable and you'll do it with very little effort.
02:46 Doug: If you're able to do that... And Ignition gives you the tools to be able to turn those ideas into reality so quickly, if you can turn a proof of concept into a solution on your customer site when they think you're just coming out there to do an evaluation, you can totally blow them away. You can be that Ignition magician and they're gonna want you to come back and do more and more magic tricks for them, to solve more and more of their problems. So that's another example of what we kind of talked about before about doing more for the customer, kind of going above and beyond, and that can really help solidify that relationship so that they're gonna give you more and more, and more leads to help you have more, and more sales of Ignition. Yeah.
03:22 Lauren: I know another thing you've mentioned before that Steve and Wendy have talked about is looking for jobs while you're on the job. Can you say a little more about that?
03:31 Doug: Yeah, Steve told me that as an integrator, the best marketers he had were his technicians that would go on the job site, because they're there, they're building relationships, and they also have an opportunity to see opportunities on the plant floor. So if you go there with just the intention of solving that one problem, you might solve that problem, but if you're so laser-focused on that, you're very well gonna miss a lot of other opportunities for problem solving that your customers have.
04:00 Doug: They might not even know that they're opportunities. You might have ideas from things you've done in another customer's site. If you see those opportunities and just kinda share them with your customers, it's another example of doing more for them, being like, "Hey, I just saw this thing over here. I could use Ignition to solve this for you really quick, maybe we can take a look at it." It's just another example of doing more for your customers, being that initial magician, and finding opportunities. 'Cause if you're able to find them on the job, I mean you're getting paid, and you're finding more opportunities to get paid down the road. It's another example of being able to create those leads from existing customers. So those are just all some different techniques that can really help turn your existing customer base into even more and more, and more work for you.
04:40 Shay: Another piece of creating leads is figuring out where you want to look for those leads, where do you want your future customers to be. And oftentimes we tend to want to look big because if we're looking at a big area, that's going to equate to lots of customers, is kind of the mindset. Can you speak to maybe why that's not always the case, and what the better way to go about that is?
05:02 Doug: In so many things, it's better to focus in on what you're really, really good at and really be amazing at that, to do a good job. So in this case, instead of focusing on a big geographical area, especially when you're smaller, it's better to focus on a smaller geographical area and it's usually better to focus on your local area. There's a couple reasons for this. It helps you have focus so you can really do a good job of what you're doing, but also it helps you build a good local network. And as we've talked about before, word of mouth is a very powerful way to spread your brand. It's also a very powerful way to find new leads. If you do a really good job for someone in your area and they're just amazed with the work you do, they're gonna talk to other people about it. Very likely the people they're gonna talk to are other people at work, other people that are local. They're gonna have local connections too.
05:52 Doug: That word of mouth is gonna spread much quicker in a local area, and then the people they will talk to will likely also be in the local area or close by. So the word of mouth can spread faster and you'll be able to kind of build up a good reputation in that area. Once you have that good reputation, then it's easier to expand to a larger and larger, and larger area, but it's great to start with a good local network as kind of a base of operations, and really just kinda own that territory before you expand out too much further.
00:12 Shay: And I'm Shay. Today is all about one of the most crucial parts of any marketing effort, creating leads.
00:17 Lauren: We'll talk about how to get more sales leads by working with your existing customer base, growing your local network, leveraging your website and expanding awareness with great content.
00:28 Shay: We're back talking with Doug Dudley our Director of Marketing. Thanks for being here again, Doug.
00:32 Doug: Yeah, no problem, excited to be here.
00:34 Lauren: So, today's topic is about creating leads...
00:37 Doug: Yeah.
00:38 Lauren: And building your lead base. And normally when we think about creating leads, we think about new people, making new connections. But you actually argue the best way to find leads is to start with your existing customers.
00:54 Doug: Yeah, and the biggest reason for that is there is no easier sale than the person who's already been sold. Your existing customers already like your product, they already trust your company, your marketing has already worked on them. So they're gonna much more likely to give you an additional sale, maybe it's growing their use of Ignition inside their facility from one machine to another, or from one plant to another. Maybe they're setting up a chain trying to make it an enterprise-wide architecture. Or maybe they have friends or colleagues in other companies that would also be interested in Ignition. If you can win the trust of that customer instead of focusing on just making one more Ignition sale, actually try to win the trust of that customer and build a relationship there, you could potentially have a whole flood of new leads from inside that company or beyond from that relationship with that customer. So that's a way of looking at your existing customer base to find new potential leads for yourself.
01:57 Shay: So we had a tip on that, on maintaining these existing customers and being able to grow a business based off of that, that lead that you've already nurtured and been able to make a sale to, which is to make sure that you are performing magic tricks a little bit. Yeah?
02:11 Doug: Yeah, yeah. So this is actually something that Steve Heckman was talking to me about, and he said, that one of the best ways, especially with Ignition, one of the best ways that you can go in and make another sale is to go in to an existing customer who's had a problem, they've been hitting their head up against a wall because there's something they can't solve, and if you can go in there with Ignition and work a miracle for them, “be an Ignition magician” was the term he coined, you will just blow them away and win them over because you'll solve this problem that just seemed unsolvable and you'll do it with very little effort.
02:46 Doug: If you're able to do that... And Ignition gives you the tools to be able to turn those ideas into reality so quickly, if you can turn a proof of concept into a solution on your customer site when they think you're just coming out there to do an evaluation, you can totally blow them away. You can be that Ignition magician and they're gonna want you to come back and do more and more magic tricks for them, to solve more and more of their problems. So that's another example of what we kind of talked about before about doing more for the customer, kind of going above and beyond, and that can really help solidify that relationship so that they're gonna give you more and more, and more leads to help you have more, and more sales of Ignition. Yeah.
03:22 Lauren: I know another thing you've mentioned before that Steve and Wendy have talked about is looking for jobs while you're on the job. Can you say a little more about that?
03:31 Doug: Yeah, Steve told me that as an integrator, the best marketers he had were his technicians that would go on the job site, because they're there, they're building relationships, and they also have an opportunity to see opportunities on the plant floor. So if you go there with just the intention of solving that one problem, you might solve that problem, but if you're so laser-focused on that, you're very well gonna miss a lot of other opportunities for problem solving that your customers have.
04:00 Doug: They might not even know that they're opportunities. You might have ideas from things you've done in another customer's site. If you see those opportunities and just kinda share them with your customers, it's another example of doing more for them, being like, "Hey, I just saw this thing over here. I could use Ignition to solve this for you really quick, maybe we can take a look at it." It's just another example of doing more for your customers, being that initial magician, and finding opportunities. 'Cause if you're able to find them on the job, I mean you're getting paid, and you're finding more opportunities to get paid down the road. It's another example of being able to create those leads from existing customers. So those are just all some different techniques that can really help turn your existing customer base into even more and more, and more work for you.
04:40 Shay: Another piece of creating leads is figuring out where you want to look for those leads, where do you want your future customers to be. And oftentimes we tend to want to look big because if we're looking at a big area, that's going to equate to lots of customers, is kind of the mindset. Can you speak to maybe why that's not always the case, and what the better way to go about that is?
05:02 Doug: In so many things, it's better to focus in on what you're really, really good at and really be amazing at that, to do a good job. So in this case, instead of focusing on a big geographical area, especially when you're smaller, it's better to focus on a smaller geographical area and it's usually better to focus on your local area. There's a couple reasons for this. It helps you have focus so you can really do a good job of what you're doing, but also it helps you build a good local network. And as we've talked about before, word of mouth is a very powerful way to spread your brand. It's also a very powerful way to find new leads. If you do a really good job for someone in your area and they're just amazed with the work you do, they're gonna talk to other people about it. Very likely the people they're gonna talk to are other people at work, other people that are local. They're gonna have local connections too.
05:52 Doug: That word of mouth is gonna spread much quicker in a local area, and then the people they will talk to will likely also be in the local area or close by. So the word of mouth can spread faster and you'll be able to kind of build up a good reputation in that area. Once you have that good reputation, then it's easier to expand to a larger and larger, and larger area, but it's great to start with a good local network as kind of a base of operations, and really just kinda own that territory before you expand out too much further.
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Building Your Brand
Joanna Cortez
Fri, 05/22/2020 - 11:35
Lauren and Shay bring back Director of Marketing Doug Dudley to share another important aspect of marketing, which is building your brand. Doug discusses what a brand is, how to build your brand, defining a brand promise, the power of brand awareness, and how to spread your brand. We learn about the ways that customers talk about your brand and ways to build trust. Doug shares practical strategies that businesses can use internally to keep their brand promise and create a positive experience for customers with every interaction.
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Transcription
00:08 Shay: Hello and welcome to our sales and marketing training videos. I'm Shay.
00:12 Lauren: And I'm Lauren. Today, we'll be talking about another important aspect of good marketing, building your brand.
00:18 Shay: The topics we will cover today are: What a brand is, how to build your brand, defining a brand promise, and how to spread your brand.
00:26 Lauren: Today, our guest is Doug Dudley, Director of Marketing here at Inductive Automation. Doug, thanks so much for taking the time to sit down again.
00:33 Doug: Yeah, happy to be back.
00:34 Lauren: We're always starting off with kind of a hot-button question.
00:38 Doug: Okay.
00:39 Lauren: I know we've done a lot of crazy things, especially in our marketing department here at Inductive Automation over the years. What would you say is one of the craziest things you've ever undertaken as part of an Inductive Automation project?
00:54 Doug: Yeah, one specific thing comes to mind, and that was a few years ago at our conference, we were working on our keynote, and I'm part of the team that puts that together, and we had an integrator, Mo Moore actually. We'd found out he had actually put together a robot and was using Ignition to run the robot. And so once we found that out, we really tried to figure out how to work that into our keynote. And so trying to coordinate that robot on stage, and it wasn't just me alone. Travis Cox from our company played a key role, as well as Mo Moore, to do this, but that was kind of a crazy thing to be involved with, just because we had, as we're writing this keynote, we had this huge X factor of the robot's gonna go here. We don't definitely know what's gonna happen, but it'll be cool. So trying to build around that, but it all came off fine. The robot rolled out on stage.
01:46 Shay: Oh, so it rolled out?
01:47 Doug: Rolled out on stage.
01:48 Shay: On its own?
01:49 Doug: Well, it was by Ignition. Yeah, yeah.
01:52 Shay: That's so cool.
01:53 Doug: And he had a camera on his head, and he was looking out at the crowd, and even talked a little bit, and he was there at the conference at the INS booth after. It was a big hit, so that was a kind of crazy thing to be involved with, but it turned out pretty fun.
02:09 Lauren: I heard a rumor that there might be a robot 2.0 sometime in the future.
02:13 Doug: You never know. You never know what might happen.
02:16 Lauren: True, that's true.
02:16 Shay: The possibilities are limitless.
02:19 Doug: Limitless.
[laughter]
02:19 Lauren: That's very good use.
02:20 Doug: That's branding, right there.
02:21 Lauren: Yes, that's branding, and it's a great transition into today's topic.
02:25 Shay: Jumping into today's video, yeah. So, today, we're talking about building your brand.
02:28 Doug: Right.
02:29 Shay: And there's a lot of misconceptions about what a brand even is, so maybe we can start there. Can you talk to us a little bit about what a brand is and what it isn't?
02:37 Doug: Yeah, sure. When most people think of brand, I think the thing that comes to mind is a logo, because that's often what we associate with a brand. Like you think of the Apple logo, or the Nike logo, or something like that. The reality is the brand is what that logo represents, meaning the brand is what your customers think about you and what they feel about you, not what you say about yourself. So when that Apple logo shows and a customer has a thought about what that logo represents, who the company is behind it, the products they have, they have an idea of who they are and a feeling. That's what the actual brand is, and building that can be a little bit more challenging than just designing a new logo and putting it out there in the world.
03:26 Lauren: Right. I would imagine, you know, there's a lot behind it, beyond this logo and even a catchphrase or something, like we say, "Limitless."
03:35 Doug: Right.
03:36 Lauren: How do you really start to build and develop that real brand?
03:40 Doug: Sure. It's a lot like your reputation as a person, right? So what I mean by that is you build it basically the same way. If I want people to think I'm an honest person, then I need to be honest with people, and then when I tell people, "Oh yeah, I'm an honest person," they can either confirm that or not by hearing what other people say about me. So if I say I'm an honest person, but then I go around and I lie to everybody, I can say it as much as I want, but my reputation will not be as an honest person and my reputation will be the opposite, because it's what I'm doing that's actually building that reputation, and or taking it away from what I'm actually saying. So it's kind of like if you think about the logo for a company, it's almost like a person's name, right? If I, through my actions, build a positive reputation, when people hear my name or see my name, they'll start associating that reputation with it. The opposite will happen if you have negative actions that you associate with it. So it's what you do in the interactions you have to build trust with people that can result in building what that brand identity is.
04:56 Lauren: I can think about a certain internet provider who maybe like says that they are really great with customer service, and then you end up spending four hours on the phone with them.
05:08 Doug: Right.
05:08 Lauren: So even though the brand isn't saying that they have poor customer service, everybody associates that brand now with that bad customer service.
05:17 Doug: Yeah, and we probably don't even need to say who the name of that brand is, but most people probably know.
05:21 Shay: And that's kinda the power.
05:23 Doug: That's kind of the power of it, right? It's what you do, weighs a lot heavier than what you say about yourself. So, ultimately, for a company, it all comes down to building trust through making promises and then keeping those promises. So in the example you were just talking about, about the unnamed Internet provider, they've put a promise out there that they can do things in a certain way and a certain timely fashion, and handle customers a certain way, they clearly haven't actually followed through with that promise, and so, therefore, the things they say about themselves are automatically tuned out and not trusted by people. You have to build into your processes the ability to keep your promise in order for people to actually believe the promise, and that to build that trust that you need for people to trust your brand.
06:14 Shay: Definitely. So how do you get there? What are some things that you can do to make sure that you're in a position to keep the promises that you're making?
06:21 Doug: It kind of starts looking inside first. So, to start off with, you need to make promises that you know you can keep. If you do these really crazy outlandish things that there's no way to back it up, you're kinda setting yourselves up for a failure. I guess I'll use an example of one of the promises that we have for people, and that's to empower customers to swiftly turn their ideas into reality. That's our mission statement. That's a basic promise that we make to our customers, to empower them to do what they wanna do with our product. So, it's not just something we said and then don't do anything about. From the production team that works on our product to the support team that supports it, to the marketing team that talks about it, and beyond, every part of our company works towards fulfilling that mission, and each part of the company has an important role to play in filling that mission, as we work together as a company, to fulfill that mission of problem-solving for our customers, getting them the support they need so they can do what they need, making sure that our product actually gives them the ability to do things they need to do. Every touchpoint they have, builds trust upon trust upon trust, until they really start to understand who we are as a company. And that idea of who we are, that reputation of who we are, becomes what our brand actually is.
07:55 Lauren: What are some practical strategies that businesses can use to build this out in their company?
08:02 Doug: There are some very practical things they can do to help them keep their brand promise. One of the most practical things is, you've gotta find good people. Just like a personal reputation is up to that person for what they do, for a company's reputation, it comes down to all these individual people making choices. And collectively, that forms choices that the company ends up making. So, if you bring in good people that have high integrity, high intelligence, high energy, they're problem solvers not problem creators, people that really want to take care of the customers on a individual level, then collectively as a company, you're going to be taking care of your customers because you're making sure to hire people on the onset that already have that built into what they do, their own reputation. It's part of their own personal brand. That will help you form a good company brand. So, it's about building your company culture to be a culture that cares about filling that mission that you've set out and having each individual person contribute to that. But that starts with hiring those people, because those people are who your company becomes, basically.
09:25 Shay: Breaking that down even further, can you provide some little examples of things that we need, those people, now that we've got them, now that we've got those good people in our company, some things that they can do to continue on building that positive brand in it?
09:38 Doug: Yeah, it's very practical stuff. It's just best practices for your business, like, example is, when the phone rings, make sure to answer it, and make sure you have someone on the line answering it who can answer it in a very professional way, be very friendly, be very helpful and be very rapid and be able to transfer that call to the people that need to solve the problem for that customer, answer it. Just make sure you have a good front office. We're a software company, so a lot of our employees are for developing the software, supporting the software, but it's really important for us to have a really good front office staff too, to make sure the company runs well. You might have the most talented people in the world on your creative side, but you need to make sure you're taking care of the company too, 'cause if things start breaking down, like when our computers don't work in the morning because our IT department is not helping us out, or, yeah, the phone's not getting answered, or the building is not being taken care of, it's really difficult to impossible to do the job you need to for your customers, 'cause you're not taking care of your own office.
10:49 Doug: And then, just make sure you deliver things on time and fairly treat your customers. If you promise that you're going to deliver a solution in a certain amount of time, make sure you do it. If you say you're gonna bill a certain amount for the work you do, make sure you bill that amount. Nothing can ruin a relationship with your customers quicker than invoicing them incorrectly. And then also, it turns into this bad experience where, "Hey, the bill's twice what I thought it was." It's just, a lot of stuff, good business practice, to make sure you're not shooting your own brand in the foot by saying one thing and then doing another. And it just comes down to that very basic stuff, that you have your employees doing to just practice good business practices, yeah.
11:34 Shay: It seems really simple, but it seems like it would take some work.
11:38 Doug: It does.
11:39 Shay: To build that out for a big company, or even a small team.
11:43 Doug: It is, but in reality, it is simple, it's just done on a bigger level. It's simple, but it's powerful, because collectively, it can create this very positive experience for your customers. And I do think it takes the brand out of the realm of this abstract thing of like, "We have a brand, it's worth something, but we really don't know what to do to affect it, and try to get it more on a base level." It's just literally what you do, how you do it. And yeah, you have to think about every interaction, but it just starts by hiring good people, training them well, supporting them, support your customers. And it takes some time, but it's going to build a good, positive brand experience for your customers, which in the end, what they say, is what your brand actually is. Create a company that can treat your customers well, and they'll say good stuff about you, which results in a good brand.
12:38 Shay: I actually think it's really cool what you were saying about keeping a brand promise. That's such an important part, not only of branding but just great customer service. And we have so many exceptional integrators as part of our Integrator Program at Inductive Automation. I got the chance to sit down with one of our integrators, Vertech, and talk about this very thing. Here's what they had to say.
13:00 Chris McLaughlin: What makes Vertech different than Integrator X? And truth be told there is not a whole lot of difference between most integrators. We are largely doing the same stuff in the same ways and when we all come back to it, we're gonna say that it is our people that make us different, it's our culture that makes us different, maybe it's our processes that make us different, and there is some validity to that,of there are going to be better or worse of all of those different categories. But how do you show that off to somebody? How do you show that that is real and true? And the secret is, is that you really have to have it, you can't just say it. And then you have to show, not tell. And so the ways of doing that is to prove it and over-prove it. And the ways of doing that in this modern age, so much centres around your marketing and your website and your social media and videos that you put up and the content that you put up. And it's all an elaborate approach to prove that your people are the best and the brightest. Your solutions actually work. You're knowledgeable and experienced within your products. And that is the differentiation of, if I just tell you that we're the best that doesn't work, I have to show you that you want to work with us.
14:26 Shay: So, how can we go about creating and making promises that things are going to stand out to our customers and be easy for them to understand and grasp?
14:35 Doug: Yeah. Couple of things you can do. First is, you wanna make it a promise that's worth talking about, so that they'll remember it, it's memorable.
14:42 Shay: It's relevant.
14:44 Doug: Yeah. This goes back to knowing who your customers are, understanding what is gonna be relevant to them, what's gonna solve a problem for them. So, an example of this for us is, Unlimited, is a promise that we make with our product that's very memorable. One of the reasons it's memorable because it solves a very key problem that a lot of our customers face, and it does it in a way that allows them to turn their ideas into reality fairly quickly, and at a lower price point. So it makes an impact for them. It's also one word. It's easy to remember. And it says a lot about who we are as a company.
15:26 Doug: You also wanna keep it pretty simple, that makes it easy to remember. So another example of something that we do, we talked a lot in this last keynote about easy, fun and affordable. And a lot of that effort was trying, Steve Heckman working with us, to really try to figure out how do we say what we do as a company in a very kind of simple and succinct way, so that we can communicate that easily and make it something easy for people to remember. So three words, but each one of those words is a promise basically, right. Easy, we want Ignition to be easy to use. Then we work really hard, trying to make it easy for people to use. We want it to be fun, so that when you do turn your idea into reality successfully, there's a very satisfying fun feeling that happens there. We've had a lot of integrators tell us that because of the product and the way we support the product, their job has become much more enjoyable than it was a few years ago.
16:25 Doug: And then affordable is a promise obviously that we can keep with our pricing, but it's also tied into our licensing model. So each one of those is simple, easy to remember. Each one makes an impact and collectively they form a very strong promise that we make to our customers. So those are a couple of examples of how we as a company make promises that are easy to remember and simple, so that people can pass those along. Yeah.
16:52 Lauren: So let's say we've made our brand. We've made it memorable. We've put our little slogan together, our big slogan together. How do we get it out? How are we gonna get it in people's heads?
17:05 Doug: So this comes down to, you wanna create word-of-mouth, that's the best way to spread a brand. And to get people to talk about it, you need to do something that's worth talking about. And ideally, it's something that's tied to what your identity of a brand is. So, if your identity of a brand is to do an amazing job for your customers and go above and beyond, make sure that when your service people go out and service your customers, they do exactly what they say they're gonna do, and they also do maybe one or two steps beyond that. They look for more opportunities to help. They go the extra mile to make sure the customer's happy with what they're doing, really deliver an amazing experience for that customer that's worth them talking about, 'cause that's what's gonna spread the brand. They'll then tell the person they work with or someone who's a colleague in another company. And before you know it, if you keep doing that, that word-of-mouth starts to spread more and more and more, so that people are hearing about you and your brand before you even have a chance to tell them about it. So that's really how you get that brand to spread.
18:10 Shay: I think word-of-mouth is a really powerful tool for spreading information organically. And I think Lauren got to have some more conversations with another one of our premier integrators, Grantek.
18:19 Lauren: Yes. Yeah, we actually got the opportunity to talk to Grantek about word-of-mouth, so we'll have to roll that clip as well.
18:25 Shay: Perfect.
18:27 Geoff Farrer: Grantek's found a great way to get people to talk about our company is to try to share content across social media channels and our blog and really get buy-in. We have a concerted effort to try to grow our LinkedIn followers, for example. And we've found that it isn't so much pushing things that they don't wanna see, if we can appeal to them with content, they're gonna wanna read, they're gonna want to watch it makes it very easy to get people to actually talk and share and communicate this. So we internally encourage our staff and our employees, people who are there everyday on delivery jobs to actually share this as well across social media and our website. And in turn we hope that our customers do it as well. And we do see that and we can see a return on that in webinar registrations, for example. The same people who are sharing things across social media are also attending and inviting their colleagues as well. So it's always a great thing to see kind of all come together.
19:17 James Burnand: Yeah. I think if we deliver value to the marketplace, content that helps someone in their role, even if they're not a Grantek customer, they get to know who Grantek is, and that we are really out there to be able to contribute in a positive way. I think that goes a long way to creating a bit of the brand and the buzz around who we are.
19:42 Shay: So can we expect that word-of-mouth delivery to happen overnight? I'm imagining not. It takes time for things to travel.
19:49 Doug: It does take time for things to travel. It's not gonna happen overnight. You gotta give yourself... You have to be patient, you have to be persistent with getting your brand promises out there, but if you built it into your processes and you're integrating your promise throughout your marketing materials, like your business cards, your brochures, website, maybe even what your support people say when people call on the phone, or what your service tech, how they introduce themself or whatever they do when they're helping people. If you're able to integrate that into what they're doing, you can create all these different touchpoints, where you keep reinforcing your brand overtime.
20:29 Doug: So they've done a lot of marketing studies and they've found that it takes seven individual impressions for a person to remember a company's name. An impression is just any time that someone interacts with your brand in some kind of way, they see your logo, they hear your name of your company, someone tells them about your company, they stumble across your website when doing web search, whatever it is, they come in contact with you. It takes seven different separate instances for them to even remember who you are as a company and start to form some idea of what your brand is.
20:58 Doug: So that's a lot of different impressions. If you try to do that all with just your marketing, meaning just putting a bunch of print ads out or a bunch of emails, or whatever, you're gonna inundate people with too much. You've gotta build it into all your process to make those impressions kinda get out there. And if you're able to do what we talked about before and deliver experiences that cause your customers to spread, that is the most powerful way that your brand can be spread too, 'cause then they're creating impressions for you. And people will inherently trust the word-of-mouth from someone they know versus a company they don't, so that can weigh a little heavier too. So, if you pick your promise, you make it something you can actually fulfill and you stick with it and give it time, eventually, you'll end up with a strong brand that really helps your marketing efforts.
21:46 Lauren: Awesome. Well, thank you so much for sitting down with us today, Doug, and talking to us about brand. It's an exciting topic but I think we've gotten to dive into it in a way that is really helpful for people.
21:57 Doug: Yeah. I've had a great time talking about it. I'm looking forward to the next time we talk.
22:01 Shay: Yeah. We'll see you soon.
22:02 Doug: Alright, cool.
22:05 Shay: Thanks.
00:12 Lauren: And I'm Lauren. Today, we'll be talking about another important aspect of good marketing, building your brand.
00:18 Shay: The topics we will cover today are: What a brand is, how to build your brand, defining a brand promise, and how to spread your brand.
00:26 Lauren: Today, our guest is Doug Dudley, Director of Marketing here at Inductive Automation. Doug, thanks so much for taking the time to sit down again.
00:33 Doug: Yeah, happy to be back.
00:34 Lauren: We're always starting off with kind of a hot-button question.
00:38 Doug: Okay.
00:39 Lauren: I know we've done a lot of crazy things, especially in our marketing department here at Inductive Automation over the years. What would you say is one of the craziest things you've ever undertaken as part of an Inductive Automation project?
00:54 Doug: Yeah, one specific thing comes to mind, and that was a few years ago at our conference, we were working on our keynote, and I'm part of the team that puts that together, and we had an integrator, Mo Moore actually. We'd found out he had actually put together a robot and was using Ignition to run the robot. And so once we found that out, we really tried to figure out how to work that into our keynote. And so trying to coordinate that robot on stage, and it wasn't just me alone. Travis Cox from our company played a key role, as well as Mo Moore, to do this, but that was kind of a crazy thing to be involved with, just because we had, as we're writing this keynote, we had this huge X factor of the robot's gonna go here. We don't definitely know what's gonna happen, but it'll be cool. So trying to build around that, but it all came off fine. The robot rolled out on stage.
01:46 Shay: Oh, so it rolled out?
01:47 Doug: Rolled out on stage.
01:48 Shay: On its own?
01:49 Doug: Well, it was by Ignition. Yeah, yeah.
01:52 Shay: That's so cool.
01:53 Doug: And he had a camera on his head, and he was looking out at the crowd, and even talked a little bit, and he was there at the conference at the INS booth after. It was a big hit, so that was a kind of crazy thing to be involved with, but it turned out pretty fun.
02:09 Lauren: I heard a rumor that there might be a robot 2.0 sometime in the future.
02:13 Doug: You never know. You never know what might happen.
02:16 Lauren: True, that's true.
02:16 Shay: The possibilities are limitless.
02:19 Doug: Limitless.
[laughter]
02:19 Lauren: That's very good use.
02:20 Doug: That's branding, right there.
02:21 Lauren: Yes, that's branding, and it's a great transition into today's topic.
02:25 Shay: Jumping into today's video, yeah. So, today, we're talking about building your brand.
02:28 Doug: Right.
02:29 Shay: And there's a lot of misconceptions about what a brand even is, so maybe we can start there. Can you talk to us a little bit about what a brand is and what it isn't?
02:37 Doug: Yeah, sure. When most people think of brand, I think the thing that comes to mind is a logo, because that's often what we associate with a brand. Like you think of the Apple logo, or the Nike logo, or something like that. The reality is the brand is what that logo represents, meaning the brand is what your customers think about you and what they feel about you, not what you say about yourself. So when that Apple logo shows and a customer has a thought about what that logo represents, who the company is behind it, the products they have, they have an idea of who they are and a feeling. That's what the actual brand is, and building that can be a little bit more challenging than just designing a new logo and putting it out there in the world.
03:26 Lauren: Right. I would imagine, you know, there's a lot behind it, beyond this logo and even a catchphrase or something, like we say, "Limitless."
03:35 Doug: Right.
03:36 Lauren: How do you really start to build and develop that real brand?
03:40 Doug: Sure. It's a lot like your reputation as a person, right? So what I mean by that is you build it basically the same way. If I want people to think I'm an honest person, then I need to be honest with people, and then when I tell people, "Oh yeah, I'm an honest person," they can either confirm that or not by hearing what other people say about me. So if I say I'm an honest person, but then I go around and I lie to everybody, I can say it as much as I want, but my reputation will not be as an honest person and my reputation will be the opposite, because it's what I'm doing that's actually building that reputation, and or taking it away from what I'm actually saying. So it's kind of like if you think about the logo for a company, it's almost like a person's name, right? If I, through my actions, build a positive reputation, when people hear my name or see my name, they'll start associating that reputation with it. The opposite will happen if you have negative actions that you associate with it. So it's what you do in the interactions you have to build trust with people that can result in building what that brand identity is.
04:56 Lauren: I can think about a certain internet provider who maybe like says that they are really great with customer service, and then you end up spending four hours on the phone with them.
05:08 Doug: Right.
05:08 Lauren: So even though the brand isn't saying that they have poor customer service, everybody associates that brand now with that bad customer service.
05:17 Doug: Yeah, and we probably don't even need to say who the name of that brand is, but most people probably know.
05:21 Shay: And that's kinda the power.
05:23 Doug: That's kind of the power of it, right? It's what you do, weighs a lot heavier than what you say about yourself. So, ultimately, for a company, it all comes down to building trust through making promises and then keeping those promises. So in the example you were just talking about, about the unnamed Internet provider, they've put a promise out there that they can do things in a certain way and a certain timely fashion, and handle customers a certain way, they clearly haven't actually followed through with that promise, and so, therefore, the things they say about themselves are automatically tuned out and not trusted by people. You have to build into your processes the ability to keep your promise in order for people to actually believe the promise, and that to build that trust that you need for people to trust your brand.
06:14 Shay: Definitely. So how do you get there? What are some things that you can do to make sure that you're in a position to keep the promises that you're making?
06:21 Doug: It kind of starts looking inside first. So, to start off with, you need to make promises that you know you can keep. If you do these really crazy outlandish things that there's no way to back it up, you're kinda setting yourselves up for a failure. I guess I'll use an example of one of the promises that we have for people, and that's to empower customers to swiftly turn their ideas into reality. That's our mission statement. That's a basic promise that we make to our customers, to empower them to do what they wanna do with our product. So, it's not just something we said and then don't do anything about. From the production team that works on our product to the support team that supports it, to the marketing team that talks about it, and beyond, every part of our company works towards fulfilling that mission, and each part of the company has an important role to play in filling that mission, as we work together as a company, to fulfill that mission of problem-solving for our customers, getting them the support they need so they can do what they need, making sure that our product actually gives them the ability to do things they need to do. Every touchpoint they have, builds trust upon trust upon trust, until they really start to understand who we are as a company. And that idea of who we are, that reputation of who we are, becomes what our brand actually is.
07:55 Lauren: What are some practical strategies that businesses can use to build this out in their company?
08:02 Doug: There are some very practical things they can do to help them keep their brand promise. One of the most practical things is, you've gotta find good people. Just like a personal reputation is up to that person for what they do, for a company's reputation, it comes down to all these individual people making choices. And collectively, that forms choices that the company ends up making. So, if you bring in good people that have high integrity, high intelligence, high energy, they're problem solvers not problem creators, people that really want to take care of the customers on a individual level, then collectively as a company, you're going to be taking care of your customers because you're making sure to hire people on the onset that already have that built into what they do, their own reputation. It's part of their own personal brand. That will help you form a good company brand. So, it's about building your company culture to be a culture that cares about filling that mission that you've set out and having each individual person contribute to that. But that starts with hiring those people, because those people are who your company becomes, basically.
09:25 Shay: Breaking that down even further, can you provide some little examples of things that we need, those people, now that we've got them, now that we've got those good people in our company, some things that they can do to continue on building that positive brand in it?
09:38 Doug: Yeah, it's very practical stuff. It's just best practices for your business, like, example is, when the phone rings, make sure to answer it, and make sure you have someone on the line answering it who can answer it in a very professional way, be very friendly, be very helpful and be very rapid and be able to transfer that call to the people that need to solve the problem for that customer, answer it. Just make sure you have a good front office. We're a software company, so a lot of our employees are for developing the software, supporting the software, but it's really important for us to have a really good front office staff too, to make sure the company runs well. You might have the most talented people in the world on your creative side, but you need to make sure you're taking care of the company too, 'cause if things start breaking down, like when our computers don't work in the morning because our IT department is not helping us out, or, yeah, the phone's not getting answered, or the building is not being taken care of, it's really difficult to impossible to do the job you need to for your customers, 'cause you're not taking care of your own office.
10:49 Doug: And then, just make sure you deliver things on time and fairly treat your customers. If you promise that you're going to deliver a solution in a certain amount of time, make sure you do it. If you say you're gonna bill a certain amount for the work you do, make sure you bill that amount. Nothing can ruin a relationship with your customers quicker than invoicing them incorrectly. And then also, it turns into this bad experience where, "Hey, the bill's twice what I thought it was." It's just, a lot of stuff, good business practice, to make sure you're not shooting your own brand in the foot by saying one thing and then doing another. And it just comes down to that very basic stuff, that you have your employees doing to just practice good business practices, yeah.
11:34 Shay: It seems really simple, but it seems like it would take some work.
11:38 Doug: It does.
11:39 Shay: To build that out for a big company, or even a small team.
11:43 Doug: It is, but in reality, it is simple, it's just done on a bigger level. It's simple, but it's powerful, because collectively, it can create this very positive experience for your customers. And I do think it takes the brand out of the realm of this abstract thing of like, "We have a brand, it's worth something, but we really don't know what to do to affect it, and try to get it more on a base level." It's just literally what you do, how you do it. And yeah, you have to think about every interaction, but it just starts by hiring good people, training them well, supporting them, support your customers. And it takes some time, but it's going to build a good, positive brand experience for your customers, which in the end, what they say, is what your brand actually is. Create a company that can treat your customers well, and they'll say good stuff about you, which results in a good brand.
12:38 Shay: I actually think it's really cool what you were saying about keeping a brand promise. That's such an important part, not only of branding but just great customer service. And we have so many exceptional integrators as part of our Integrator Program at Inductive Automation. I got the chance to sit down with one of our integrators, Vertech, and talk about this very thing. Here's what they had to say.
13:00 Chris McLaughlin: What makes Vertech different than Integrator X? And truth be told there is not a whole lot of difference between most integrators. We are largely doing the same stuff in the same ways and when we all come back to it, we're gonna say that it is our people that make us different, it's our culture that makes us different, maybe it's our processes that make us different, and there is some validity to that,of there are going to be better or worse of all of those different categories. But how do you show that off to somebody? How do you show that that is real and true? And the secret is, is that you really have to have it, you can't just say it. And then you have to show, not tell. And so the ways of doing that is to prove it and over-prove it. And the ways of doing that in this modern age, so much centres around your marketing and your website and your social media and videos that you put up and the content that you put up. And it's all an elaborate approach to prove that your people are the best and the brightest. Your solutions actually work. You're knowledgeable and experienced within your products. And that is the differentiation of, if I just tell you that we're the best that doesn't work, I have to show you that you want to work with us.
14:26 Shay: So, how can we go about creating and making promises that things are going to stand out to our customers and be easy for them to understand and grasp?
14:35 Doug: Yeah. Couple of things you can do. First is, you wanna make it a promise that's worth talking about, so that they'll remember it, it's memorable.
14:42 Shay: It's relevant.
14:44 Doug: Yeah. This goes back to knowing who your customers are, understanding what is gonna be relevant to them, what's gonna solve a problem for them. So, an example of this for us is, Unlimited, is a promise that we make with our product that's very memorable. One of the reasons it's memorable because it solves a very key problem that a lot of our customers face, and it does it in a way that allows them to turn their ideas into reality fairly quickly, and at a lower price point. So it makes an impact for them. It's also one word. It's easy to remember. And it says a lot about who we are as a company.
15:26 Doug: You also wanna keep it pretty simple, that makes it easy to remember. So another example of something that we do, we talked a lot in this last keynote about easy, fun and affordable. And a lot of that effort was trying, Steve Heckman working with us, to really try to figure out how do we say what we do as a company in a very kind of simple and succinct way, so that we can communicate that easily and make it something easy for people to remember. So three words, but each one of those words is a promise basically, right. Easy, we want Ignition to be easy to use. Then we work really hard, trying to make it easy for people to use. We want it to be fun, so that when you do turn your idea into reality successfully, there's a very satisfying fun feeling that happens there. We've had a lot of integrators tell us that because of the product and the way we support the product, their job has become much more enjoyable than it was a few years ago.
16:25 Doug: And then affordable is a promise obviously that we can keep with our pricing, but it's also tied into our licensing model. So each one of those is simple, easy to remember. Each one makes an impact and collectively they form a very strong promise that we make to our customers. So those are a couple of examples of how we as a company make promises that are easy to remember and simple, so that people can pass those along. Yeah.
16:52 Lauren: So let's say we've made our brand. We've made it memorable. We've put our little slogan together, our big slogan together. How do we get it out? How are we gonna get it in people's heads?
17:05 Doug: So this comes down to, you wanna create word-of-mouth, that's the best way to spread a brand. And to get people to talk about it, you need to do something that's worth talking about. And ideally, it's something that's tied to what your identity of a brand is. So, if your identity of a brand is to do an amazing job for your customers and go above and beyond, make sure that when your service people go out and service your customers, they do exactly what they say they're gonna do, and they also do maybe one or two steps beyond that. They look for more opportunities to help. They go the extra mile to make sure the customer's happy with what they're doing, really deliver an amazing experience for that customer that's worth them talking about, 'cause that's what's gonna spread the brand. They'll then tell the person they work with or someone who's a colleague in another company. And before you know it, if you keep doing that, that word-of-mouth starts to spread more and more and more, so that people are hearing about you and your brand before you even have a chance to tell them about it. So that's really how you get that brand to spread.
18:10 Shay: I think word-of-mouth is a really powerful tool for spreading information organically. And I think Lauren got to have some more conversations with another one of our premier integrators, Grantek.
18:19 Lauren: Yes. Yeah, we actually got the opportunity to talk to Grantek about word-of-mouth, so we'll have to roll that clip as well.
18:25 Shay: Perfect.
18:27 Geoff Farrer: Grantek's found a great way to get people to talk about our company is to try to share content across social media channels and our blog and really get buy-in. We have a concerted effort to try to grow our LinkedIn followers, for example. And we've found that it isn't so much pushing things that they don't wanna see, if we can appeal to them with content, they're gonna wanna read, they're gonna want to watch it makes it very easy to get people to actually talk and share and communicate this. So we internally encourage our staff and our employees, people who are there everyday on delivery jobs to actually share this as well across social media and our website. And in turn we hope that our customers do it as well. And we do see that and we can see a return on that in webinar registrations, for example. The same people who are sharing things across social media are also attending and inviting their colleagues as well. So it's always a great thing to see kind of all come together.
19:17 James Burnand: Yeah. I think if we deliver value to the marketplace, content that helps someone in their role, even if they're not a Grantek customer, they get to know who Grantek is, and that we are really out there to be able to contribute in a positive way. I think that goes a long way to creating a bit of the brand and the buzz around who we are.
19:42 Shay: So can we expect that word-of-mouth delivery to happen overnight? I'm imagining not. It takes time for things to travel.
19:49 Doug: It does take time for things to travel. It's not gonna happen overnight. You gotta give yourself... You have to be patient, you have to be persistent with getting your brand promises out there, but if you built it into your processes and you're integrating your promise throughout your marketing materials, like your business cards, your brochures, website, maybe even what your support people say when people call on the phone, or what your service tech, how they introduce themself or whatever they do when they're helping people. If you're able to integrate that into what they're doing, you can create all these different touchpoints, where you keep reinforcing your brand overtime.
20:29 Doug: So they've done a lot of marketing studies and they've found that it takes seven individual impressions for a person to remember a company's name. An impression is just any time that someone interacts with your brand in some kind of way, they see your logo, they hear your name of your company, someone tells them about your company, they stumble across your website when doing web search, whatever it is, they come in contact with you. It takes seven different separate instances for them to even remember who you are as a company and start to form some idea of what your brand is.
20:58 Doug: So that's a lot of different impressions. If you try to do that all with just your marketing, meaning just putting a bunch of print ads out or a bunch of emails, or whatever, you're gonna inundate people with too much. You've gotta build it into all your process to make those impressions kinda get out there. And if you're able to do what we talked about before and deliver experiences that cause your customers to spread, that is the most powerful way that your brand can be spread too, 'cause then they're creating impressions for you. And people will inherently trust the word-of-mouth from someone they know versus a company they don't, so that can weigh a little heavier too. So, if you pick your promise, you make it something you can actually fulfill and you stick with it and give it time, eventually, you'll end up with a strong brand that really helps your marketing efforts.
21:46 Lauren: Awesome. Well, thank you so much for sitting down with us today, Doug, and talking to us about brand. It's an exciting topic but I think we've gotten to dive into it in a way that is really helpful for people.
21:57 Doug: Yeah. I've had a great time talking about it. I'm looking forward to the next time we talk.
22:01 Shay: Yeah. We'll see you soon.
22:02 Doug: Alright, cool.
22:05 Shay: Thanks.
Series Order
20
Selling A Solution
Joanna Cortez
Fri, 05/22/2020 - 11:33
Lauren and Shay invite back Director of Marketing Doug Dudley to explore how to sell a solution rather than a product. Doug shares ways to make a customer feel confident in choosing you as a solution. We discuss methods for building awareness by distinguishing yourself, and staying focused on the needs of your customers. Doug also discusses focusing on the most relevant and impactful benefits to appeal to specific audiences, and why we should think about messaging emotionally rather than logically.
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Integrator Program Level
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Learning Series
Transcription
00:08 Lauren: Hello, and welcome to our marketing and sales strategy series.
00:12 Shay: This video is all about providing a solution and not just selling a product.
00:15 Lauren: People wanna feel very confident and comfortable in choosing you.
00:18 Shay: So today, we'll talk about distinguishing yourself to build awareness and staying focused on the needs of your customers.
00:24 Lauren: And to help us with this, we're sitting down with Marketing Director Doug Dudley.
00:28 Doug Dudley: Hi.
00:28 Shay: Hi.
00:28 Lauren: Great to have you again, thanks for joining us.
00:30 DD: Happy to be here. Yeah.
00:31 Lauren: So I have a question for you.
00:33 DD: Sure.
00:33 Lauren: I heard that you're a bit of a salsa connoisseur and I wanna know what the secrets are? What is your favorite recipe?
00:41 DD: I am a salsa connoisseur. I grew up... I had spent some time in Mexico when I was a kid...
00:45 Lauren: Oh, that's awesome.
00:45 DD: And my dad worked for the government, so he worked at the embassy there. So when I was there, I kinda developed a taste for salsa, so when I got back to the States, I didn't like any of the salsa that I was in the stores, so I decided to start making my own salsa.
00:58 Shay: Wow!
00:58 DD: Over the years, I've kind of concocted my own blend of spices to, just the way I like it, so I don't know if I wanna give away the secrets exactly.
01:08 Shay: Well, we do have an Inductive Automation salsa contest every year, so you can't give away too many secrets, or else you might be imitated.
01:16 DD: Yeah, that, I don't wanna give away my competitive advantage there, although I have lost the last couple of years in a row to an outstanding mango salsa, which I've not been able to edge out. So I'll give you one little secret: little liquid smoke in there.
01:29 Lauren: Ooh.
01:29 Shay: Interesting.
01:29 Lauren: Very nice.
01:29 Shay: Yeah.
01:31 DD: Lifts it up a little bit, makes it smokey, people are like, "What's going on there?"
01:35 Lauren: Yeah.
01:35 DD: So there...
01:36 Lauren: I've gotta see this, I'm gonna try this out.
[chuckle]
01:38 Shay: Alright, so now that we've got our salsa tips out of the way, Doug, we're talking about selling a solution, not a product today. Why do we say it like that, we're not selling a product?
01:49 DD: Right. Well, we are selling a product or if you're a service industry, you're selling a service, but if you're just selling it a product or service, that really becomes about what that product or service does, what it is, what it can do. Selling a solution is thinking about the idea of not selling just what the product can do, but selling what a customer can do with the product or in the case of a service, what a customer can do with the help of that service. So it's a subtle difference but it does change the focus of how you talk about that product or service.
02:25 Shay: And what's a good way to start doing that?
02:28 DD: So you want to sell the benefits of it. Don't just list out 100 benefits because then that becomes too many. You wanna focus in on what the most important benefits are and the way to determine that is to focus on the relevance of those benefits to your target audience, as well as the impact that those benefits will have on the work of your target audience. So, those benefits can also vary depending on who you're targeting. So, for example, if your service is targeting engineers, for example, you might focus instead on how easy the product makes it to do their jobs, the good support that it has, maybe the knowledgeable staff that can help them, right? Because they're using that product or service on the plant floor and they need to know it's gonna be there for them. If you're targeting maybe a C-level person, you might be focusing on more about how much the product will cost, what the ROI would be of using that service, what the speed of implementation is, maybe the years of experience that company has had working with customers similar to that one.
03:35 DD: So depending on who you're targeting, you wanna focus in on what the most relevant and impactful benefits are and then focus on the benefits for that individual, and that's kind of the difference between a solution and a product, it's not the benefits of the product, it's the benefits of using that product or service for that specific individual.
03:51 Shay: So kind of the whole story?
03:52 DD: It's the whole story and they're a key part of that story.
03:56 Lauren: And that makes sense to me, as an engineer, however, as I'm thinking of pitching different benefits to different crowds, I would be thinking of approaching that from a logical standpoint. Why would we maybe wanna focus on emotions versus logic?
04:10 DD: Yeah, and you're not the only one that would be taking that approach, especially in this kind of industry, people will think it's all about the numbers, the logic behind it, making this very logical case for why this product is clearly, or service is clearly, better than the other one. This is especially the thinking that happens in a B2B marketing. So B2B means business-to-business marketing versus B2C marketing, which is business-to-consumer. Because the thought is, "Well, I'm talking to a business. Of course they're more focused on the raw data, the raw results." The reality is there's really not that much of a difference between B2B marketing and B2C marketing in terms of who you're targeting, because you're targeting people and people make emotional decisions, whether they're at their desk at work or they're in a grocery store, whatever, they're gonna make decisions usually based on emotion first, and then they'll use logic to back those decisions up. We all do this ourself, right? We'll go...
05:06 Shay: No.
[chuckle]
05:06 DD: Go to a store.
05:07 Shay: Never!
05:08 DD: Let's say we'll pick something up, we're not even sure exactly why we like it, but there's just something that feels good about that. And then we start thinking, "You know, this is in the budget and oh, this would help me do this." And right, you start doing all of that stuff behind it to convince yourself what you already knew you wanted when you picked it up, right? So people make emotional decisions first. And the other thing is, it just feels good to buy things, especially if it's something...
05:33 Lauren: That is true.
05:34 DD: That you feel like is a good buy, like you feel smart, you're like, "Man, I found this deal. I found the perfect product." Right? You just wanna help people feel good about decisions. So yeah, going at it from an emotional approach first, thinking about the emotional state of what that prospective customer is when they choose your product or service, is a better way of cutting through some of that noise and helping them make the decision we know they already wanna make.
06:00 Lauren: So it sounds like there's some storytelling involved with that. And I know we talk a lot about using success stories in our industry. Can you kind of walk us through what that would look like for someone who's providing a service?
06:12 DD: Yeah, sure. So, a very easy way to kind of get to the emotional center of a product or service is by telling a story. The reason this is a good technique is stories inherently are built upon some kind of emotion. There's a hero, they go against some kind of conflict. They have to overcome that in some kind of climactic way. And then there's some result of that. So, if you're able to tell a story with your customer at the center of that story, and your product or your service playing a supporting role in helping that customer get a win, you've built this emotional center into that. You've also made the solution very real, if you're telling a real story. Don't make your stories up, make sure they're real stories. If you can tell a story about, "Hey, I had a problem, I went and found this service. They came in and helped me look great in front of my boss, get the problem solved for my customer. Now, we're winning more business and I feel great."
07:19 DD: Showing the results for both them and who they were helping, that is a great story to tell. And it puts your product in the supporting role to put them in a successful place. So, if you're able to do that and you have a lot of these success stories, you really start building this strong case for people that can come in and look at your product or service, and they see all these different success stories other people are having, like, "You know what, I'd like to feel that way too. I'd like to have my problem solved. This problem I have right now, if I can get it solved like this person, I'd feel great." So, that's a great way of going about that.
07:52 Lauren: So, if we can tell real success stories, if we can make the customer the hero, then we'll be successful in telling the success stories essentially?
[chuckle]
08:00 DD: Yeah. And you want to try to give the prospective customer the feeling of what it's gonna be like to use your product or service before they use it. If you can get them to feel that feeling, they already make the decision to buy, whether it's a product or service. I mean, this happens too when we go in the store and we pick up that really cool phone, but it's not ours yet, but we're like, "Man, this feels good. I wanna put this in my pocket." You're getting that feeling right away. And if you can get them to that point, you're getting that much closer to help them make the decision that they already know they need to make or one you'd like them to make.
08:33 Shay: So, another way we talk about standing out in marketing is the phrase purple cow, it's kind of a marketing inside word.
08:42 DD: It's a little bit of a buzzword, yeah.
08:43 Shay: Yes, it is. Can you talk about where it comes from and why integrators could use that?
08:47 DD: Yeah, and why are we talking about cows when we're talking about products or service, right? Right. And so the term purple cow was coined by author and kind of marketing guru Seth Godin, he wrote a book called Purple Cow. And if you really are interested in this subject about marketing a solution, I think it's a great book to read. The basic idea is he was, I think he was driving cross country with his family, and they went past this field of cows and they were all black and white. And he had the thought of, "Hey, if I really wanted to stand out, if I was a cow," it's kind of a weird thought to have, "if I was a purple cow, there's no way you wouldn't see that cow in this field of black and white cows and you have this purple cow stand out." He used that as an analogy for marketing, because he makes the case that as a marketer, you want your product or service, your marketing, to be a purple cow. You want it to stand out from the competition in a way that's very transparent and big. You don't wanna be like a little bit more black or a little bit more white than the other cows, or gray, or off-white, you wanna be purple, because there's no way you're not gonna be able to see that purple cow.
10:02 Shay: Pretty memorable too.
10:03 DD: Be memorable, stand out, be different. But also be different for a reason, don't just be different for the sake of being different, be different, because it makes a difference for your customers.
10:18 Shay: I know we kind of have the unlimited tagline here at Inductive Automation, that's, maybe would you say, that's kind of our purple cow?
10:28 DD: It's definitely a part of it. It's something that makes us stand out from our competition. It kind of cuts through a lot of the noise, especially when we first launched unlimited, and it was something that simply no one else was doing. But it also was a difference that made a real difference for our customers, because we didn't just choose unlimited as a marketing ploy. We built the idea of unlimited into the actual product of Ignition, because it solves a core pain point that our customers were having. They would try to get on and make these systems and they were getting nickel and dime for every single client they had, a connection, or whatever it was. And when our founder Steve Hechtman was thinking through how to solve this problem, you just take the limits off that stuff, and all these problems get solved. So, by solving a problem for our customers, we created a product that stood out from the competition in a very distinct way, purple if you wanna say it that way. But also in a way that was very meaningful, and impactful, and made a difference for our customers. So, that's a great example of building your marketing into your solution by listening to what your customers need and then making that difference in your product, so that it makes a difference for them.
11:52 Lauren: So, how can we focus on being great for our customers and not leaning in towards the competition? I think that would be a pretty natural thing to do, focus on discrediting your competitors and maybe saying nasty things about them rather than focusing on delivering value to your customers and that sort of thing.
12:10 DD: Yeah, and I think when usually you talk in marketing about standing out from your competition, that's usually the way you say it. And so, the first thing that comes to mind is, "Well, I need to see what all my competition is doing and I need to do the opposite of them." And that is a way you can stand out. I'm not saying you can't do it that way, but that way you are letting your competition dictate what you're saying to your customer, and if you're trying to build those differences in your product, you're letting your competition dictate what you're building into your product. When you're building a good solution or service that solves problems of your customers, you have to start by looking at your customers, not your competition. The way to stand out is to focus on what your customers need, what they're not getting from your competition, and then to build a product or service that answers those questions directly. So instead of focusing on what your competition is doing, look at your customers, focus on solving their pain points and it's gonna become pretty clear pretty quickly what aspects of your product can stand out from your competition. So it's still getting to the standing out from your competition, but it's not by focusing on them, it's by focusing on your customers.
13:23 Shay: So within that, would you say it's kind of like being the best you can be for a much more specific audience? I know we've talked about kind of targeting our audiences, that kind of plays into that a little bit?
13:35 DD: Totally plays into it. And that's why we did the video about understanding your customers because that is very central to so much of marketing. So if you really understand your customers and what they need, what their day-to-day life is like, what their pain points are, going back to that emotional thing like, What gets them down during the day? What makes them feel like they're banging their head against a wall? That if you can solve that problem for 'em, they're going to love your company, love your product, be loyal to it. They're gonna remember it.
14:07 DD: So one way of thinking about this is focus in on the exact target that you have. Try to make the target a little narrow. If you wanna think about it, you could think about it of being more of a food truck than a franchise. Let me explain that. Food truck has a very specific food it's selling and it goes to where it's customers are, goes right to them. And you can't put too many things on a food truck. You have to narrow down your menu a little bit. The opposite of that is like a franchise like McDonalds where it's around every corner. You can't help but see it. And so because they're ubiquitous and they're everywhere, people are going to find it. One is focused on just as getting as many customers as possible, and being in many places as possible. The other is focused on finding who your target audience is, literally driving to them and giving them exactly what they need.
15:01 DD: When you start off in your marketing efforts, it's better to think of it that way. Who is your audience? How can you deliver exactly what they're looking for and get it to them as quickly and as readily as you can to just make them be delighted in what they have because if you do that, they're gonna be able to tell other people, "Hey man, I had the best food truck ever, it was great. You gotta come next time." They'll bring people, they'll want more people to come. You're gonna get to the franchise eventually, you're gonna get to expand, but you gotta start by pleasing your core target audience first. They'll spread it by word of mouth, and then you'll be able to grow and expand and really get more customers from there.
15:46 Shay: Awesome.
15:47 Lauren: Yeah. So how can we work in A Plus exchange there? This is something that we've briefly touched on. Can you talk a little bit about what that is and how you would accomplish that?
15:55 DD: Yeah. That's great, so this is another way of standing out from your competition and really focusing on your customers and that's to give them more than what they ask for. That's a big element of delighting them. I mean nothing feels better if you go find that deal and you find this amazing product that you wanted. You got it on sale, and then you get it, and it's even better than you thought, you're gonna tell everybody about that. If you can go in as a service and go to a customer and be onsite and deliver to them way more than their expectations. Don't meet their expectations, exceed their expectations. You're gonna give them something to talk about, you're gonna give them something to remember. That word of mouth is gonna come back to you, so you'll be able to find more people that way and you're also gonna be able to build a loyal customer there, and when you're marketing, you're not just looking to try to get one customer, one sale, you're looking to try to bring a customer who will be a customer for life. So, there's no better way of getting that loyalty than to continue deliver more to that customer than they could expect. That's a way of delighting your customers and keeping them loyal in your marketing.
17:02 Shay: Well, Doug, you've given us a lot to think about today, thank you so much for taking the time to sit down with us.
17:06 DD: Yeah, I've had a great time and I'm looking forward to talk to you next time.
17:09 Shay: And we'll see you again soon.
17:11 DD: Alright, see you soon.
00:12 Shay: This video is all about providing a solution and not just selling a product.
00:15 Lauren: People wanna feel very confident and comfortable in choosing you.
00:18 Shay: So today, we'll talk about distinguishing yourself to build awareness and staying focused on the needs of your customers.
00:24 Lauren: And to help us with this, we're sitting down with Marketing Director Doug Dudley.
00:28 Doug Dudley: Hi.
00:28 Shay: Hi.
00:28 Lauren: Great to have you again, thanks for joining us.
00:30 DD: Happy to be here. Yeah.
00:31 Lauren: So I have a question for you.
00:33 DD: Sure.
00:33 Lauren: I heard that you're a bit of a salsa connoisseur and I wanna know what the secrets are? What is your favorite recipe?
00:41 DD: I am a salsa connoisseur. I grew up... I had spent some time in Mexico when I was a kid...
00:45 Lauren: Oh, that's awesome.
00:45 DD: And my dad worked for the government, so he worked at the embassy there. So when I was there, I kinda developed a taste for salsa, so when I got back to the States, I didn't like any of the salsa that I was in the stores, so I decided to start making my own salsa.
00:58 Shay: Wow!
00:58 DD: Over the years, I've kind of concocted my own blend of spices to, just the way I like it, so I don't know if I wanna give away the secrets exactly.
01:08 Shay: Well, we do have an Inductive Automation salsa contest every year, so you can't give away too many secrets, or else you might be imitated.
01:16 DD: Yeah, that, I don't wanna give away my competitive advantage there, although I have lost the last couple of years in a row to an outstanding mango salsa, which I've not been able to edge out. So I'll give you one little secret: little liquid smoke in there.
01:29 Lauren: Ooh.
01:29 Shay: Interesting.
01:29 Lauren: Very nice.
01:29 Shay: Yeah.
01:31 DD: Lifts it up a little bit, makes it smokey, people are like, "What's going on there?"
01:35 Lauren: Yeah.
01:35 DD: So there...
01:36 Lauren: I've gotta see this, I'm gonna try this out.
[chuckle]
01:38 Shay: Alright, so now that we've got our salsa tips out of the way, Doug, we're talking about selling a solution, not a product today. Why do we say it like that, we're not selling a product?
01:49 DD: Right. Well, we are selling a product or if you're a service industry, you're selling a service, but if you're just selling it a product or service, that really becomes about what that product or service does, what it is, what it can do. Selling a solution is thinking about the idea of not selling just what the product can do, but selling what a customer can do with the product or in the case of a service, what a customer can do with the help of that service. So it's a subtle difference but it does change the focus of how you talk about that product or service.
02:25 Shay: And what's a good way to start doing that?
02:28 DD: So you want to sell the benefits of it. Don't just list out 100 benefits because then that becomes too many. You wanna focus in on what the most important benefits are and the way to determine that is to focus on the relevance of those benefits to your target audience, as well as the impact that those benefits will have on the work of your target audience. So, those benefits can also vary depending on who you're targeting. So, for example, if your service is targeting engineers, for example, you might focus instead on how easy the product makes it to do their jobs, the good support that it has, maybe the knowledgeable staff that can help them, right? Because they're using that product or service on the plant floor and they need to know it's gonna be there for them. If you're targeting maybe a C-level person, you might be focusing on more about how much the product will cost, what the ROI would be of using that service, what the speed of implementation is, maybe the years of experience that company has had working with customers similar to that one.
03:35 DD: So depending on who you're targeting, you wanna focus in on what the most relevant and impactful benefits are and then focus on the benefits for that individual, and that's kind of the difference between a solution and a product, it's not the benefits of the product, it's the benefits of using that product or service for that specific individual.
03:51 Shay: So kind of the whole story?
03:52 DD: It's the whole story and they're a key part of that story.
03:56 Lauren: And that makes sense to me, as an engineer, however, as I'm thinking of pitching different benefits to different crowds, I would be thinking of approaching that from a logical standpoint. Why would we maybe wanna focus on emotions versus logic?
04:10 DD: Yeah, and you're not the only one that would be taking that approach, especially in this kind of industry, people will think it's all about the numbers, the logic behind it, making this very logical case for why this product is clearly, or service is clearly, better than the other one. This is especially the thinking that happens in a B2B marketing. So B2B means business-to-business marketing versus B2C marketing, which is business-to-consumer. Because the thought is, "Well, I'm talking to a business. Of course they're more focused on the raw data, the raw results." The reality is there's really not that much of a difference between B2B marketing and B2C marketing in terms of who you're targeting, because you're targeting people and people make emotional decisions, whether they're at their desk at work or they're in a grocery store, whatever, they're gonna make decisions usually based on emotion first, and then they'll use logic to back those decisions up. We all do this ourself, right? We'll go...
05:06 Shay: No.
[chuckle]
05:06 DD: Go to a store.
05:07 Shay: Never!
05:08 DD: Let's say we'll pick something up, we're not even sure exactly why we like it, but there's just something that feels good about that. And then we start thinking, "You know, this is in the budget and oh, this would help me do this." And right, you start doing all of that stuff behind it to convince yourself what you already knew you wanted when you picked it up, right? So people make emotional decisions first. And the other thing is, it just feels good to buy things, especially if it's something...
05:33 Lauren: That is true.
05:34 DD: That you feel like is a good buy, like you feel smart, you're like, "Man, I found this deal. I found the perfect product." Right? You just wanna help people feel good about decisions. So yeah, going at it from an emotional approach first, thinking about the emotional state of what that prospective customer is when they choose your product or service, is a better way of cutting through some of that noise and helping them make the decision we know they already wanna make.
06:00 Lauren: So it sounds like there's some storytelling involved with that. And I know we talk a lot about using success stories in our industry. Can you kind of walk us through what that would look like for someone who's providing a service?
06:12 DD: Yeah, sure. So, a very easy way to kind of get to the emotional center of a product or service is by telling a story. The reason this is a good technique is stories inherently are built upon some kind of emotion. There's a hero, they go against some kind of conflict. They have to overcome that in some kind of climactic way. And then there's some result of that. So, if you're able to tell a story with your customer at the center of that story, and your product or your service playing a supporting role in helping that customer get a win, you've built this emotional center into that. You've also made the solution very real, if you're telling a real story. Don't make your stories up, make sure they're real stories. If you can tell a story about, "Hey, I had a problem, I went and found this service. They came in and helped me look great in front of my boss, get the problem solved for my customer. Now, we're winning more business and I feel great."
07:19 DD: Showing the results for both them and who they were helping, that is a great story to tell. And it puts your product in the supporting role to put them in a successful place. So, if you're able to do that and you have a lot of these success stories, you really start building this strong case for people that can come in and look at your product or service, and they see all these different success stories other people are having, like, "You know what, I'd like to feel that way too. I'd like to have my problem solved. This problem I have right now, if I can get it solved like this person, I'd feel great." So, that's a great way of going about that.
07:52 Lauren: So, if we can tell real success stories, if we can make the customer the hero, then we'll be successful in telling the success stories essentially?
[chuckle]
08:00 DD: Yeah. And you want to try to give the prospective customer the feeling of what it's gonna be like to use your product or service before they use it. If you can get them to feel that feeling, they already make the decision to buy, whether it's a product or service. I mean, this happens too when we go in the store and we pick up that really cool phone, but it's not ours yet, but we're like, "Man, this feels good. I wanna put this in my pocket." You're getting that feeling right away. And if you can get them to that point, you're getting that much closer to help them make the decision that they already know they need to make or one you'd like them to make.
08:33 Shay: So, another way we talk about standing out in marketing is the phrase purple cow, it's kind of a marketing inside word.
08:42 DD: It's a little bit of a buzzword, yeah.
08:43 Shay: Yes, it is. Can you talk about where it comes from and why integrators could use that?
08:47 DD: Yeah, and why are we talking about cows when we're talking about products or service, right? Right. And so the term purple cow was coined by author and kind of marketing guru Seth Godin, he wrote a book called Purple Cow. And if you really are interested in this subject about marketing a solution, I think it's a great book to read. The basic idea is he was, I think he was driving cross country with his family, and they went past this field of cows and they were all black and white. And he had the thought of, "Hey, if I really wanted to stand out, if I was a cow," it's kind of a weird thought to have, "if I was a purple cow, there's no way you wouldn't see that cow in this field of black and white cows and you have this purple cow stand out." He used that as an analogy for marketing, because he makes the case that as a marketer, you want your product or service, your marketing, to be a purple cow. You want it to stand out from the competition in a way that's very transparent and big. You don't wanna be like a little bit more black or a little bit more white than the other cows, or gray, or off-white, you wanna be purple, because there's no way you're not gonna be able to see that purple cow.
10:02 Shay: Pretty memorable too.
10:03 DD: Be memorable, stand out, be different. But also be different for a reason, don't just be different for the sake of being different, be different, because it makes a difference for your customers.
10:18 Shay: I know we kind of have the unlimited tagline here at Inductive Automation, that's, maybe would you say, that's kind of our purple cow?
10:28 DD: It's definitely a part of it. It's something that makes us stand out from our competition. It kind of cuts through a lot of the noise, especially when we first launched unlimited, and it was something that simply no one else was doing. But it also was a difference that made a real difference for our customers, because we didn't just choose unlimited as a marketing ploy. We built the idea of unlimited into the actual product of Ignition, because it solves a core pain point that our customers were having. They would try to get on and make these systems and they were getting nickel and dime for every single client they had, a connection, or whatever it was. And when our founder Steve Hechtman was thinking through how to solve this problem, you just take the limits off that stuff, and all these problems get solved. So, by solving a problem for our customers, we created a product that stood out from the competition in a very distinct way, purple if you wanna say it that way. But also in a way that was very meaningful, and impactful, and made a difference for our customers. So, that's a great example of building your marketing into your solution by listening to what your customers need and then making that difference in your product, so that it makes a difference for them.
11:52 Lauren: So, how can we focus on being great for our customers and not leaning in towards the competition? I think that would be a pretty natural thing to do, focus on discrediting your competitors and maybe saying nasty things about them rather than focusing on delivering value to your customers and that sort of thing.
12:10 DD: Yeah, and I think when usually you talk in marketing about standing out from your competition, that's usually the way you say it. And so, the first thing that comes to mind is, "Well, I need to see what all my competition is doing and I need to do the opposite of them." And that is a way you can stand out. I'm not saying you can't do it that way, but that way you are letting your competition dictate what you're saying to your customer, and if you're trying to build those differences in your product, you're letting your competition dictate what you're building into your product. When you're building a good solution or service that solves problems of your customers, you have to start by looking at your customers, not your competition. The way to stand out is to focus on what your customers need, what they're not getting from your competition, and then to build a product or service that answers those questions directly. So instead of focusing on what your competition is doing, look at your customers, focus on solving their pain points and it's gonna become pretty clear pretty quickly what aspects of your product can stand out from your competition. So it's still getting to the standing out from your competition, but it's not by focusing on them, it's by focusing on your customers.
13:23 Shay: So within that, would you say it's kind of like being the best you can be for a much more specific audience? I know we've talked about kind of targeting our audiences, that kind of plays into that a little bit?
13:35 DD: Totally plays into it. And that's why we did the video about understanding your customers because that is very central to so much of marketing. So if you really understand your customers and what they need, what their day-to-day life is like, what their pain points are, going back to that emotional thing like, What gets them down during the day? What makes them feel like they're banging their head against a wall? That if you can solve that problem for 'em, they're going to love your company, love your product, be loyal to it. They're gonna remember it.
14:07 DD: So one way of thinking about this is focus in on the exact target that you have. Try to make the target a little narrow. If you wanna think about it, you could think about it of being more of a food truck than a franchise. Let me explain that. Food truck has a very specific food it's selling and it goes to where it's customers are, goes right to them. And you can't put too many things on a food truck. You have to narrow down your menu a little bit. The opposite of that is like a franchise like McDonalds where it's around every corner. You can't help but see it. And so because they're ubiquitous and they're everywhere, people are going to find it. One is focused on just as getting as many customers as possible, and being in many places as possible. The other is focused on finding who your target audience is, literally driving to them and giving them exactly what they need.
15:01 DD: When you start off in your marketing efforts, it's better to think of it that way. Who is your audience? How can you deliver exactly what they're looking for and get it to them as quickly and as readily as you can to just make them be delighted in what they have because if you do that, they're gonna be able to tell other people, "Hey man, I had the best food truck ever, it was great. You gotta come next time." They'll bring people, they'll want more people to come. You're gonna get to the franchise eventually, you're gonna get to expand, but you gotta start by pleasing your core target audience first. They'll spread it by word of mouth, and then you'll be able to grow and expand and really get more customers from there.
15:46 Shay: Awesome.
15:47 Lauren: Yeah. So how can we work in A Plus exchange there? This is something that we've briefly touched on. Can you talk a little bit about what that is and how you would accomplish that?
15:55 DD: Yeah. That's great, so this is another way of standing out from your competition and really focusing on your customers and that's to give them more than what they ask for. That's a big element of delighting them. I mean nothing feels better if you go find that deal and you find this amazing product that you wanted. You got it on sale, and then you get it, and it's even better than you thought, you're gonna tell everybody about that. If you can go in as a service and go to a customer and be onsite and deliver to them way more than their expectations. Don't meet their expectations, exceed their expectations. You're gonna give them something to talk about, you're gonna give them something to remember. That word of mouth is gonna come back to you, so you'll be able to find more people that way and you're also gonna be able to build a loyal customer there, and when you're marketing, you're not just looking to try to get one customer, one sale, you're looking to try to bring a customer who will be a customer for life. So, there's no better way of getting that loyalty than to continue deliver more to that customer than they could expect. That's a way of delighting your customers and keeping them loyal in your marketing.
17:02 Shay: Well, Doug, you've given us a lot to think about today, thank you so much for taking the time to sit down with us.
17:06 DD: Yeah, I've had a great time and I'm looking forward to talk to you next time.
17:09 Shay: And we'll see you again soon.
17:11 DD: Alright, see you soon.
Series Order
19
Understanding Your Customers
Joanna Cortez
Fri, 05/22/2020 - 11:31
Lauren and Shay are talking to Director of Marketing Doug Dudley about understanding the wants and needs of your customers in order to build a meaningful relationship. Doug will discuss ways of connecting with your audience, identifying your target audience, staying relevant, and understanding the customer journey. We learn ways to connect with an audience, building trust and credibility. Doug also provides tips for researching demographics and eliminating guesswork, and explains why you shouldn't try to appeal to everyone.
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Integrator Program Level
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Topic
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Learning Series
Transcription
00:08
Shay: Hello, and welcome to our Sales and Marketing Training videos. I'm Shay.
00:12
Lauren: And I'm Lauren. Today, we'll be talking about an important part of Marketing, understanding your customers.
00:18
Shay: In this video we'll be discussing how to create a connection with your audience, ways to identify your target audience, and the importance of understanding the customer journey.
00:27
Lauren: Today, our guest is Doug Dudley, Director of Marketing here at Inductive Automation. Doug, thanks so much for taking time today.
00:33
Doug: Yeah, glad to be here.
00:35
Shay: I was hoping before we get into our content of understanding our customers, we could talk a little bit about how you got started with Inductive Automation in the Marketing department.
00:42
Doug: Yeah, that's a great idea. So I started here about eight years ago, or so, and I was brought in actually as a content writer to write marketing content. One of the reasons I was also brought in, is 'cause I could do a little bit of graphic design. That was my background, I got a degree in Graphic Design from Sacramento State. So because I could do that and I could write, they figured I was a good person to bring on the team. But when I joined, there was only two of us on the team, and it was really cool 'cause I got a chance to work on all kinds of different projects. I really focused on content at first, so I got the webinar program started. I wrote a lot of white papers and case studies for the company. Eventually the company grew, we got bigger and more people got added into Marketing and then I got a chance to work with a lot more people on different projects, like the Conference, which I've been involved with since the beginning basically. And working on different promotions for the product, like the launch of Ignition 8, and now I get to work on projects like this, talking about Marketing. So it's been a really cool place to work, a lot of awesome projects and awesome people to work with.
01:46
Lauren: Oh thanks.
01:48
Doug: You're among them.
01:49
Lauren: Yeah we are, yeah.
01:52
Doug: Yeah, so that's how I got started in Inductive Automation.
01:54
Lauren: Well, we're excited to start this series with you, and we're starting with kind of a big topic...
02:00
Doug: Sure.
02:01
Lauren: Understanding your customers. Why is that so important and how is creating that relationship or finding a relational point so important to building any marketing or even just starting out with marketing?
02:15
Doug: Right, so understanding your customers is definitely kind of a foundational principle for any kind of good marketing. And one of the reasons for that is you are just trying to build a relationship with whoever you're trying to market to. Similar to sales, where in sales, you're doing a one-to-one relationship, where you're talking to someone on the phone, or in person trying to get to know them, trying to win over their trust. Marketing is much the same, but the difference is, instead of a one-to-one relationship, you're kind of doing a one-to-many relationship.
02:44
Doug: So you're talking to hundreds or thousands of people at once. But in spite of that, you're still trying to build some kind of trusting relationship that you can build on so they start to trust you and start to believe the messages you're telling them about your product or service. And that really has to begin with understanding who your customers are, understanding your audience. It's very difficult to have any kind of meaningful relationship or trusting relationship, if you don't understand the other person. So if you had a friend who just didn't understand you, didn't know anything about you, chances are you probably weren't great friends with them, you probably didn't have a lot of great conversations with them, because they don't understand anything about you. You have to be able to understand something about the other person, to be able to relate to them and to start building that relationship, yeah.
03:38
Lauren: Awesome, and then how do we get to that point of not only understanding but connecting and making ourselves someone they come to for answers?
03:50
Doug: Yeah, so a couple things there to think about and that's being credible, and being relevant. So credibility is you want to kinda talk-the-talk. You wanna sound like your audience, people can pretty quickly catch on to the fact that you might not know what you're talking about, especially if you're trying to talk to them about a subject that they know very well. Your customers have probably have been doing what they're doing for a long time, they're experts in their field, so you have to be able to relate to them in a credible way, use the terms they use, understand the problems they face on a daily basis so that you can have conversations where they can start to have the feeling of, "This person knows what I'm going through. This person knows about my industry, about my business, about the problems I'm trying to solve," and that credibility can help them believe you more.
04:43
Doug: The other piece of it is relevance: So you could be incredibly credible, but if you are trying to relate to your customer in a way that's not relevant to what they are looking for at the time, they may very well discount you because you're not gonna be helping them with whatever they're facing at the moment. So, you know an example of this is if you were trying to market snow cones in Antarctica, right, it's gonna be hard to really relate to that audience there, because you are giving a solution, you're trying to market a solution to a problem, none of them really have. They're not worrying about warming up, they're... or they're not worrying about cooling down rather.
05:24
Lauren: Typical I know, they are, yeah.
05:27
Doug: They're worried about warming up [chuckle]. Unless they're in a...
05:27
Lauren: More of a hot-chocolate market. Yeah.
05:29
Doug: Yeah, that would be better, a hot-chocolate market, more relevant to the problem they're trying to solve, right? You're selling those same snow cones in a warm place like Miami Beach on a summer day, you have a relevant solution to a relevant problem that those customers are facing, and they're probably more likely to listen to what you have to say. So that also goes with understanding your audience. If you understand your audience, you understand what problems they're facing and therefore can give them a relevant solution to solving those problems. If you don't understand the problems they're facing, if you don't understand what they're doing in their jobs, it's very difficult to relate to them in a relevant way that's gonna be something they're gonna wanna take the time to listen to you for.
06:10
Shay: Definitely. So I agree, making sure that you're credible, and relevant to your customers is super important. And another huge piece of this is identifying who those customers even are. And a lot of times when we're getting started with this, we want everyone to be our customer, right? The more customers, the better. But why is that not always the best approach?
06:30
Doug: Yeah, it's kind of counterintuitive, right? Because you think, "Man, a really good marketing strategy would be to appeal to as many people as possible", 'cause then you have this much higher base of people that could be interested in your product, right? And that should give you more sales. And the problem with that is it really makes the message you have kind of too general to stand out to anybody, if you don't narrow your target down to who you're specifically trying to address. An example I have of this is, at one of my first design jobs, I was working at a small advertising firm and we had a customer come in who wanted us to create a campaign that appealed to a broad segment of the audience. He was selling trash bag liner and his thinking was everyone throws away trash, everyone needs a trash bag liner. This should appeal to everybody. Yes, it's a universal product, right? And so he had some very specific instruction about the type of campaign he wanted us to create for him. And so we tried to create a campaign that appealed to as many people as possible, and the problem was, by appealing to as many people as possible, it just was too general to stand out. And as a result, it just wasn't very successful.
07:35
Doug: If instead, you can narrow down to who you're really trying to talk to, who you're really trying to target and then be able to give them a product or a service and describe it in a way that's very relevant and credible to them at the time, you're gonna have a much higher success rate at communicating to that person and by having them think, "Hey, this is a product that really was meant for me and is addressing the problems that I have." You're gonna have a much higher success rate if you narrow your target down a bit. Yeah.
08:05
Shay: And what sorts of questions can we ask to be able to help narrow that down? What kind of things can we think about to look internally and look at, "Okay, what do I do that applies to them," or that sort of thing?
08:16
Doug: Right. Yeah, so when you are identifying your audience, I think as you said, internally that is a good way of going. Instead of looking outward and trying to speculate or figure out what is the best audience out there for me to try to capture, which industry is gonna be the most profitable or which one has the most people in it so I can sell the most, whatever. I think you're better looking inside-out. See who you are as a company, what values you have, what you do better than anybody else, and also who you know better than anyone, anybody else, and also like what audience do you really know?
08:57
Doug: If you start there, you are gonna be much more likely to be able to have a product or service that is gonna appeal to that audience or better said, you're gonna be able to know how to make that product or service appeal much more to the audience because you really, really know who that audience is. Some of the questions you need to ask about that audience is, what's their day-to-day job like? What kind of problems are they facing everyday that frustrate them? What slows them down from doing their job? If you can kind of identify those, those kind of pain points that they face, that'll really give you a blueprint to understand how to address that target audience in a relevant way and be credible with them as well.
09:40
Lauren: We had some time to actually sit down with some integrators and talk to them about this whole process of understanding your customers, relating to them and identifying your target audience, and two integrators in particular, Grantek and Vertech, had some really awesome things to say. We'll be cutting to them throughout the series, but today in particular, we're interested in hearing what they have to say about this topic.
10:04
Doug: Awesome.
10:05
Lauren: We'll roll that clip. Check it out.
10:08
James Burnand: The way we determine our target audience for our marketing is by creating profiles of our most successful engagements and clients. We like to look at those engagements from a number of factors, including where folks sit inside of their organizations, what the verticals of those organizations are, as well as what types of engagements we have to ensure that as we're creating marketing materials and we're crafting our messaging is that the folks that we're targeting are already the kind of people that we know will receive our messaging very well. Our typical customer can range anywhere from someone on the factory floor to someone inside of a corporate engineering role, or someone who sits inside of the executive suite at one of our clients' sites. What we found is that the key in those clients is really making sure that those folks have the support of the organization and not just from an engineering capacity, but also from a general business capacity for solving the issues of that particular customer.
11:02
Chris McLaughlin: Our typical customer, that, let's talk about the semantics of that. I would say that our customer is actually going to be down on the engineering level. And so this is an old... I don't know, it's kinda like a wives' tale of that you would be going after a C-level person or a director of this or the plant manager of that and that's who you're going to start with when you are selling an MES project or even a SCADA project, but we did a lot of research and found out that that's just not true.
11:34
Chris McLaughlin: The first person that always contacts us is some engineer or senior engineer or IT ‘this.’ And inevitably, that's the person that we are looking for to make that first contact. So the reason why we're appealing to the engineers and the IT people, we didn't choose them, they're the ones that are choosing us. And so, yes, we wanna talk to everybody in the company and inevitably, you're going to have to step it up a little bit as you get through these meetings, there will be more senior people or different positions that you're gonna end up relating to, but the first person that we have to relate to is going to be on that engineering and IT level. They are the ones that are searching after the solution. They are the ones that are doing the research on the software and on Vertech and therefore we want to show them what we're all about.
12:23
Lauren: Not only have we kind of established who our audience is and kind of refined it, targeted it a little bit, but we've also created some connection there, right? What's the next step? We talk a lot in marketing about the customer journey. It's this process that our customers go through from first discovering the name of our product to purchasing and maybe even giving the referral to somebody else. And I know there's a lot of steps in that process and I know you can walk us through it, but I have a really memorable analogy that I learned from you, actually...
13:01
Doug: Oh yeah, okay.
13:02
Lauren: That really helped me understand the customer journey and it has something to do with a marriage proposal on the first date. Can you tell me a little bit or our audience a little?
13:10
Doug: Yeah. Yes, I'm definitely happy to explain that and I feel that I definitely need to explain that. Yeah, so as you said, the customer journey is a typical journey someone goes on from first hearing about you to becoming a customer and then hopefully referring other customers to you. And the way they go through that journey is really through a series of commitments. So going to the marriage proposal example, if you were going on your very first date with somebody, and then you asked the person at the end of that first date to make a commitment for them to marry you, that's probably, that's probably...
13:47
Shay: Not gonna go well.
13:47
Doug: Yeah that's probably a no-go, right.
13:48
Shay: It's a no.
13:49
Lauren: It's a no for me it's a no from both of us.
13:51
Doug: Okay, and why is that? Maybe you had the best first date ever. Maybe there was a connection there and everything, but you haven't given it enough time.
14:01
Lauren: It's too soon.
14:02
Doug: It's too soon, there's not enough trust built up and it's just too big of a commitment to ask at first. However, if you were to ask somebody, that same person after let's say, a hundred dates. There's a much higher likelihood that they would say yes, 'cause they've gone on that journey with you, right? You've gone on that journey together, you've had a series of hopefully engaging conversation and dates if you've gone on a hundred of them...
14:28
Shay: Yup.
14:29
Doug: Right? Either that or you're really going to some nice places to eat or something. [laughter] And you probably had a series of commitments that have gone a little deeper, and deeper. So the first commitment from the first date is probably asking for the second date. That's a little easier to say yes to than...
14:46
Shay: Spend the rest of your life, with me please, now.
14:48
Doug: Right, just give me a small period of time, another date, and then after that there might be another commitment. So this series of commitments can kind of help lead along this journey. It's similar to the customer journey, in that when you're first marketing to people, the first part of the customer journey is awareness. And awareness is just when the customer first becomes aware of you. Maybe they see a print out that you put out, or maybe they stumbled across your website 'cause they were searching for you. Or maybe they just heard about you from a colleague, right, they become aware of you as a company and that you might have something that is of interest to them.
15:24
Doug: That leads to the next step, which is consideration. So consideration is where they have now, are now considering your service or your solution as a potential solution to their problem. Once they do that, they start evaluating other solutions as well, that's where the decision comes in, where they have to make a decision, "Should I go with your solution or should I go with the customer's... Or another competitor's solution? Hopefully they pick yours and if they do, then you get into commitment where they have now decided to buy your service, or your solution, they are committed to you, in some small degree, and you're committed to fulfill that in some small way.
16:00
Doug: Hopefully, you do a great job there, and if you do, then that leads to the last step of the customer journey which is referral where your customer has now gone all the way and they have used your product or service. They really like it and now they're really excited to tell other people about it, which then creates awareness for those people. And then those people go back into their own customer journey where now they're going through it with you too. So, if it all works really nicely then you kinda create this self-perpetuating flow of new awareness, new leads into this customer journey. And the transition point between each one of those steps is a slightly different level of commitment where you're maybe you're asking them to just to do a little bit more, a little more engagement, a little bit more commitment into the point where yeah, they become your customer, they love your product and they're telling other people about it. So that's just a little bit of an overview, what a customer journey is, and...
16:53
Lauren: Maybe could you give us a little bit more of a real world example, what does this look like for somebody in the Automation space, or a Solutions Provider?
17:01
Doug: Sure, so maybe kind of a real world example of how you could put this in play. Let's say you have a trade show and at the trade show, you have a booth there, and someone comes across your booth for the very first time and they see your name, and they're like "Oh," they become aware of you, great. Okay, so they become aware of you. You wanna have some commitment to ask them to take them to that next step of the customer journey, right? So a possible thing you could have there is, you could be hosting another event and you can invite them to that event. Say, "Hey, it's great to meet you, we're doing a lunch tomorrow, and we'd love to have you come out, get some free food. We have one of our customers, talking about the project he's working on."
17:39
Doug: Okay, that's a commitment, but there's free food involved, it's not a super, super heavy commitment. So let's say they show up the next day. They come, they listen to your customer talk, they get some free food. You want some other level of commitment at that point, there's gotta be some next step for them to take if you wanna keep them moving along on the customer journey. So maybe there, you have an invite to get a free consultation to learn about your product or service. They could find out a little bit more to see if it's right for them, right? So, that seems like a pretty good commitment. They say, "Okay, I'll do it for free. It's free."
18:11
Doug: In a little bit of all the time, they call you, you have a free consultation and then maybe at the end of that you send them a quote that's the next level. Okay, so now they've considered you and now they're starting to put some dollars to this, "Okay, should I make this decision?" Let's say they do, and then you make the sale. Now the next level is, you've gotta do some great project work, you gotta really fulfill your end of the promise. And then maybe a commitment after that point is, you ask that customer to do a little bit more for you by telling other people about you, maybe you even ask 'em to your next trade show, so that he can be the customer that's speaking and telling other people about the amazing service he got, and if he does that now he is referring people to you as well. So that's just an example of how you could have this kind of stair-step of different levels of commitment, going deeper, and deeper, and deeper each one transitioning that customer to the next level of the customer journey, and getting them all the way to the end where they're now hopefully creating some referrals for you that you can lead them along the customer journey as well.
19:12
Lauren: It sounds really exciting.
19:14
Doug: Yeah.
19:14
Lauren: And I know this comes up throughout our Marketing series...
19:15
Doug: It does.
19:17
Lauren: Understanding the point at which your customer is in their customer journey.
19:21
Doug: It's definitely a part of understanding the customer. So we talked about understanding who they are, building that level of trust, but then also understanding where they are on the customer journey, is a very important step to know how you should relate to them in a relevant way.
19:33
Shay: You don't wanna be pushy, right off of the bat.
19:35
Doug: You don't wanna be pushy, nope you don't want them running away.
19:37
Lauren: Can't start with the ring.
19:38
Doug: You wanna get to that hundred date, right? You wanna get to that hundred date and then...
19:43
Shay: Well, thank you Doug, this has been super helpful and we're excited to continue to get to work with you on this. Is there anything else that you wanna send us off with today?
19:51
Doug: No, I've just had a great time doing it. I'm looking forward to talking to you about even more tips for Marketing and yeah, excited.
19:58
Shay: So are we.
19:58
Lauren: Alright, so are we. Thanks, Doug.
20:04
Doug: Okay. Cool.
Shay: Hello, and welcome to our Sales and Marketing Training videos. I'm Shay.
00:12
Lauren: And I'm Lauren. Today, we'll be talking about an important part of Marketing, understanding your customers.
00:18
Shay: In this video we'll be discussing how to create a connection with your audience, ways to identify your target audience, and the importance of understanding the customer journey.
00:27
Lauren: Today, our guest is Doug Dudley, Director of Marketing here at Inductive Automation. Doug, thanks so much for taking time today.
00:33
Doug: Yeah, glad to be here.
00:35
Shay: I was hoping before we get into our content of understanding our customers, we could talk a little bit about how you got started with Inductive Automation in the Marketing department.
00:42
Doug: Yeah, that's a great idea. So I started here about eight years ago, or so, and I was brought in actually as a content writer to write marketing content. One of the reasons I was also brought in, is 'cause I could do a little bit of graphic design. That was my background, I got a degree in Graphic Design from Sacramento State. So because I could do that and I could write, they figured I was a good person to bring on the team. But when I joined, there was only two of us on the team, and it was really cool 'cause I got a chance to work on all kinds of different projects. I really focused on content at first, so I got the webinar program started. I wrote a lot of white papers and case studies for the company. Eventually the company grew, we got bigger and more people got added into Marketing and then I got a chance to work with a lot more people on different projects, like the Conference, which I've been involved with since the beginning basically. And working on different promotions for the product, like the launch of Ignition 8, and now I get to work on projects like this, talking about Marketing. So it's been a really cool place to work, a lot of awesome projects and awesome people to work with.
01:46
Lauren: Oh thanks.
01:48
Doug: You're among them.
01:49
Lauren: Yeah we are, yeah.
01:52
Doug: Yeah, so that's how I got started in Inductive Automation.
01:54
Lauren: Well, we're excited to start this series with you, and we're starting with kind of a big topic...
02:00
Doug: Sure.
02:01
Lauren: Understanding your customers. Why is that so important and how is creating that relationship or finding a relational point so important to building any marketing or even just starting out with marketing?
02:15
Doug: Right, so understanding your customers is definitely kind of a foundational principle for any kind of good marketing. And one of the reasons for that is you are just trying to build a relationship with whoever you're trying to market to. Similar to sales, where in sales, you're doing a one-to-one relationship, where you're talking to someone on the phone, or in person trying to get to know them, trying to win over their trust. Marketing is much the same, but the difference is, instead of a one-to-one relationship, you're kind of doing a one-to-many relationship.
02:44
Doug: So you're talking to hundreds or thousands of people at once. But in spite of that, you're still trying to build some kind of trusting relationship that you can build on so they start to trust you and start to believe the messages you're telling them about your product or service. And that really has to begin with understanding who your customers are, understanding your audience. It's very difficult to have any kind of meaningful relationship or trusting relationship, if you don't understand the other person. So if you had a friend who just didn't understand you, didn't know anything about you, chances are you probably weren't great friends with them, you probably didn't have a lot of great conversations with them, because they don't understand anything about you. You have to be able to understand something about the other person, to be able to relate to them and to start building that relationship, yeah.
03:38
Lauren: Awesome, and then how do we get to that point of not only understanding but connecting and making ourselves someone they come to for answers?
03:50
Doug: Yeah, so a couple things there to think about and that's being credible, and being relevant. So credibility is you want to kinda talk-the-talk. You wanna sound like your audience, people can pretty quickly catch on to the fact that you might not know what you're talking about, especially if you're trying to talk to them about a subject that they know very well. Your customers have probably have been doing what they're doing for a long time, they're experts in their field, so you have to be able to relate to them in a credible way, use the terms they use, understand the problems they face on a daily basis so that you can have conversations where they can start to have the feeling of, "This person knows what I'm going through. This person knows about my industry, about my business, about the problems I'm trying to solve," and that credibility can help them believe you more.
04:43
Doug: The other piece of it is relevance: So you could be incredibly credible, but if you are trying to relate to your customer in a way that's not relevant to what they are looking for at the time, they may very well discount you because you're not gonna be helping them with whatever they're facing at the moment. So, you know an example of this is if you were trying to market snow cones in Antarctica, right, it's gonna be hard to really relate to that audience there, because you are giving a solution, you're trying to market a solution to a problem, none of them really have. They're not worrying about warming up, they're... or they're not worrying about cooling down rather.
05:24
Lauren: Typical I know, they are, yeah.
05:27
Doug: They're worried about warming up [chuckle]. Unless they're in a...
05:27
Lauren: More of a hot-chocolate market. Yeah.
05:29
Doug: Yeah, that would be better, a hot-chocolate market, more relevant to the problem they're trying to solve, right? You're selling those same snow cones in a warm place like Miami Beach on a summer day, you have a relevant solution to a relevant problem that those customers are facing, and they're probably more likely to listen to what you have to say. So that also goes with understanding your audience. If you understand your audience, you understand what problems they're facing and therefore can give them a relevant solution to solving those problems. If you don't understand the problems they're facing, if you don't understand what they're doing in their jobs, it's very difficult to relate to them in a relevant way that's gonna be something they're gonna wanna take the time to listen to you for.
06:10
Shay: Definitely. So I agree, making sure that you're credible, and relevant to your customers is super important. And another huge piece of this is identifying who those customers even are. And a lot of times when we're getting started with this, we want everyone to be our customer, right? The more customers, the better. But why is that not always the best approach?
06:30
Doug: Yeah, it's kind of counterintuitive, right? Because you think, "Man, a really good marketing strategy would be to appeal to as many people as possible", 'cause then you have this much higher base of people that could be interested in your product, right? And that should give you more sales. And the problem with that is it really makes the message you have kind of too general to stand out to anybody, if you don't narrow your target down to who you're specifically trying to address. An example I have of this is, at one of my first design jobs, I was working at a small advertising firm and we had a customer come in who wanted us to create a campaign that appealed to a broad segment of the audience. He was selling trash bag liner and his thinking was everyone throws away trash, everyone needs a trash bag liner. This should appeal to everybody. Yes, it's a universal product, right? And so he had some very specific instruction about the type of campaign he wanted us to create for him. And so we tried to create a campaign that appealed to as many people as possible, and the problem was, by appealing to as many people as possible, it just was too general to stand out. And as a result, it just wasn't very successful.
07:35
Doug: If instead, you can narrow down to who you're really trying to talk to, who you're really trying to target and then be able to give them a product or a service and describe it in a way that's very relevant and credible to them at the time, you're gonna have a much higher success rate at communicating to that person and by having them think, "Hey, this is a product that really was meant for me and is addressing the problems that I have." You're gonna have a much higher success rate if you narrow your target down a bit. Yeah.
08:05
Shay: And what sorts of questions can we ask to be able to help narrow that down? What kind of things can we think about to look internally and look at, "Okay, what do I do that applies to them," or that sort of thing?
08:16
Doug: Right. Yeah, so when you are identifying your audience, I think as you said, internally that is a good way of going. Instead of looking outward and trying to speculate or figure out what is the best audience out there for me to try to capture, which industry is gonna be the most profitable or which one has the most people in it so I can sell the most, whatever. I think you're better looking inside-out. See who you are as a company, what values you have, what you do better than anybody else, and also who you know better than anyone, anybody else, and also like what audience do you really know?
08:57
Doug: If you start there, you are gonna be much more likely to be able to have a product or service that is gonna appeal to that audience or better said, you're gonna be able to know how to make that product or service appeal much more to the audience because you really, really know who that audience is. Some of the questions you need to ask about that audience is, what's their day-to-day job like? What kind of problems are they facing everyday that frustrate them? What slows them down from doing their job? If you can kind of identify those, those kind of pain points that they face, that'll really give you a blueprint to understand how to address that target audience in a relevant way and be credible with them as well.
09:40
Lauren: We had some time to actually sit down with some integrators and talk to them about this whole process of understanding your customers, relating to them and identifying your target audience, and two integrators in particular, Grantek and Vertech, had some really awesome things to say. We'll be cutting to them throughout the series, but today in particular, we're interested in hearing what they have to say about this topic.
10:04
Doug: Awesome.
10:05
Lauren: We'll roll that clip. Check it out.
10:08
James Burnand: The way we determine our target audience for our marketing is by creating profiles of our most successful engagements and clients. We like to look at those engagements from a number of factors, including where folks sit inside of their organizations, what the verticals of those organizations are, as well as what types of engagements we have to ensure that as we're creating marketing materials and we're crafting our messaging is that the folks that we're targeting are already the kind of people that we know will receive our messaging very well. Our typical customer can range anywhere from someone on the factory floor to someone inside of a corporate engineering role, or someone who sits inside of the executive suite at one of our clients' sites. What we found is that the key in those clients is really making sure that those folks have the support of the organization and not just from an engineering capacity, but also from a general business capacity for solving the issues of that particular customer.
11:02
Chris McLaughlin: Our typical customer, that, let's talk about the semantics of that. I would say that our customer is actually going to be down on the engineering level. And so this is an old... I don't know, it's kinda like a wives' tale of that you would be going after a C-level person or a director of this or the plant manager of that and that's who you're going to start with when you are selling an MES project or even a SCADA project, but we did a lot of research and found out that that's just not true.
11:34
Chris McLaughlin: The first person that always contacts us is some engineer or senior engineer or IT ‘this.’ And inevitably, that's the person that we are looking for to make that first contact. So the reason why we're appealing to the engineers and the IT people, we didn't choose them, they're the ones that are choosing us. And so, yes, we wanna talk to everybody in the company and inevitably, you're going to have to step it up a little bit as you get through these meetings, there will be more senior people or different positions that you're gonna end up relating to, but the first person that we have to relate to is going to be on that engineering and IT level. They are the ones that are searching after the solution. They are the ones that are doing the research on the software and on Vertech and therefore we want to show them what we're all about.
12:23
Lauren: Not only have we kind of established who our audience is and kind of refined it, targeted it a little bit, but we've also created some connection there, right? What's the next step? We talk a lot in marketing about the customer journey. It's this process that our customers go through from first discovering the name of our product to purchasing and maybe even giving the referral to somebody else. And I know there's a lot of steps in that process and I know you can walk us through it, but I have a really memorable analogy that I learned from you, actually...
13:01
Doug: Oh yeah, okay.
13:02
Lauren: That really helped me understand the customer journey and it has something to do with a marriage proposal on the first date. Can you tell me a little bit or our audience a little?
13:10
Doug: Yeah. Yes, I'm definitely happy to explain that and I feel that I definitely need to explain that. Yeah, so as you said, the customer journey is a typical journey someone goes on from first hearing about you to becoming a customer and then hopefully referring other customers to you. And the way they go through that journey is really through a series of commitments. So going to the marriage proposal example, if you were going on your very first date with somebody, and then you asked the person at the end of that first date to make a commitment for them to marry you, that's probably, that's probably...
13:47
Shay: Not gonna go well.
13:47
Doug: Yeah that's probably a no-go, right.
13:48
Shay: It's a no.
13:49
Lauren: It's a no for me it's a no from both of us.
13:51
Doug: Okay, and why is that? Maybe you had the best first date ever. Maybe there was a connection there and everything, but you haven't given it enough time.
14:01
Lauren: It's too soon.
14:02
Doug: It's too soon, there's not enough trust built up and it's just too big of a commitment to ask at first. However, if you were to ask somebody, that same person after let's say, a hundred dates. There's a much higher likelihood that they would say yes, 'cause they've gone on that journey with you, right? You've gone on that journey together, you've had a series of hopefully engaging conversation and dates if you've gone on a hundred of them...
14:28
Shay: Yup.
14:29
Doug: Right? Either that or you're really going to some nice places to eat or something. [laughter] And you probably had a series of commitments that have gone a little deeper, and deeper. So the first commitment from the first date is probably asking for the second date. That's a little easier to say yes to than...
14:46
Shay: Spend the rest of your life, with me please, now.
14:48
Doug: Right, just give me a small period of time, another date, and then after that there might be another commitment. So this series of commitments can kind of help lead along this journey. It's similar to the customer journey, in that when you're first marketing to people, the first part of the customer journey is awareness. And awareness is just when the customer first becomes aware of you. Maybe they see a print out that you put out, or maybe they stumbled across your website 'cause they were searching for you. Or maybe they just heard about you from a colleague, right, they become aware of you as a company and that you might have something that is of interest to them.
15:24
Doug: That leads to the next step, which is consideration. So consideration is where they have now, are now considering your service or your solution as a potential solution to their problem. Once they do that, they start evaluating other solutions as well, that's where the decision comes in, where they have to make a decision, "Should I go with your solution or should I go with the customer's... Or another competitor's solution? Hopefully they pick yours and if they do, then you get into commitment where they have now decided to buy your service, or your solution, they are committed to you, in some small degree, and you're committed to fulfill that in some small way.
16:00
Doug: Hopefully, you do a great job there, and if you do, then that leads to the last step of the customer journey which is referral where your customer has now gone all the way and they have used your product or service. They really like it and now they're really excited to tell other people about it, which then creates awareness for those people. And then those people go back into their own customer journey where now they're going through it with you too. So, if it all works really nicely then you kinda create this self-perpetuating flow of new awareness, new leads into this customer journey. And the transition point between each one of those steps is a slightly different level of commitment where you're maybe you're asking them to just to do a little bit more, a little more engagement, a little bit more commitment into the point where yeah, they become your customer, they love your product and they're telling other people about it. So that's just a little bit of an overview, what a customer journey is, and...
16:53
Lauren: Maybe could you give us a little bit more of a real world example, what does this look like for somebody in the Automation space, or a Solutions Provider?
17:01
Doug: Sure, so maybe kind of a real world example of how you could put this in play. Let's say you have a trade show and at the trade show, you have a booth there, and someone comes across your booth for the very first time and they see your name, and they're like "Oh," they become aware of you, great. Okay, so they become aware of you. You wanna have some commitment to ask them to take them to that next step of the customer journey, right? So a possible thing you could have there is, you could be hosting another event and you can invite them to that event. Say, "Hey, it's great to meet you, we're doing a lunch tomorrow, and we'd love to have you come out, get some free food. We have one of our customers, talking about the project he's working on."
17:39
Doug: Okay, that's a commitment, but there's free food involved, it's not a super, super heavy commitment. So let's say they show up the next day. They come, they listen to your customer talk, they get some free food. You want some other level of commitment at that point, there's gotta be some next step for them to take if you wanna keep them moving along on the customer journey. So maybe there, you have an invite to get a free consultation to learn about your product or service. They could find out a little bit more to see if it's right for them, right? So, that seems like a pretty good commitment. They say, "Okay, I'll do it for free. It's free."
18:11
Doug: In a little bit of all the time, they call you, you have a free consultation and then maybe at the end of that you send them a quote that's the next level. Okay, so now they've considered you and now they're starting to put some dollars to this, "Okay, should I make this decision?" Let's say they do, and then you make the sale. Now the next level is, you've gotta do some great project work, you gotta really fulfill your end of the promise. And then maybe a commitment after that point is, you ask that customer to do a little bit more for you by telling other people about you, maybe you even ask 'em to your next trade show, so that he can be the customer that's speaking and telling other people about the amazing service he got, and if he does that now he is referring people to you as well. So that's just an example of how you could have this kind of stair-step of different levels of commitment, going deeper, and deeper, and deeper each one transitioning that customer to the next level of the customer journey, and getting them all the way to the end where they're now hopefully creating some referrals for you that you can lead them along the customer journey as well.
19:12
Lauren: It sounds really exciting.
19:14
Doug: Yeah.
19:14
Lauren: And I know this comes up throughout our Marketing series...
19:15
Doug: It does.
19:17
Lauren: Understanding the point at which your customer is in their customer journey.
19:21
Doug: It's definitely a part of understanding the customer. So we talked about understanding who they are, building that level of trust, but then also understanding where they are on the customer journey, is a very important step to know how you should relate to them in a relevant way.
19:33
Shay: You don't wanna be pushy, right off of the bat.
19:35
Doug: You don't wanna be pushy, nope you don't want them running away.
19:37
Lauren: Can't start with the ring.
19:38
Doug: You wanna get to that hundred date, right? You wanna get to that hundred date and then...
19:43
Shay: Well, thank you Doug, this has been super helpful and we're excited to continue to get to work with you on this. Is there anything else that you wanna send us off with today?
19:51
Doug: No, I've just had a great time doing it. I'm looking forward to talking to you about even more tips for Marketing and yeah, excited.
19:58
Shay: So are we.
19:58
Lauren: Alright, so are we. Thanks, Doug.
20:04
Doug: Okay. Cool.
Series Order
18
Selling MQTT
Joanna Cortez
Fri, 05/22/2020 - 11:26
Lauren and Shay sit down with the Co-Inventor of MQTT, and CTO of Cirrus Link Solutions, Arlen Nipper to discuss selling MQTT. Arlen talks about how the addition of MQTT modules creates a more efficient SCADA system and how that solves current system issues and creates an infrastructure ready for digital transformation. Arlen discusses the partnership between Inductive Automation and Cirrus Link Solutions, the MQTT modules, the key selling points, the Sparkplug specification, and the guiding principles of utilizing Ignition and MQTT. And we get to see Arlen do a demo!
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Transcription
00:09
Lauren: Welcome back to our sales and marketing series. Today's topic is selling MQTT. I'm Lauren.
00:14
Shay: And I'm Shay. We're sitting down with the co-inventor of MQTT, CTO of Cirrus Link Solutions, Arlen Nipper.
00:21
Lauren: We'll be talking with him about how the addition of the MQTT modules creates a more efficient SCADA system, and how that solves current system issues, and creates an infrastructure ready for digital transformation.
00:33
Shay: Arlen, thanks for being here today.
00:34
Arlen: Thank you.
00:35
Shay: We're really excited to talk a little bit about the partnership between Inductive Automation and Cirrus Link. Can you kinda touch on what that relationship looks like?
00:44
Arlen: Literally, it was on a project with Plains Midstream pipeline, they were using MQTT, it was a legacy product, and we just didn't have any tools. We didn't have any way to... It was a black box. And so we went to a lot of IA's competition, and we say, "Hey we've got this idea of something we could do with MQTT." "No, Arlen, thanks, but we've got smart guys, they're gonna come out with our next IoT strategy." Then it was somebody in Calgary that said, "Hey have you ever heard of Inductive Automation?" I said no. And so I called and got a meeting, this was about four years ago, flew out, I met with Travis and the team for a day, I said, "You know, I've got this idea." and they go, "Great, We're open, we've got an open SDK, we're based on Java." And that was what myself and our developers at Cirrus Link knew.
01:43
Arlen: So literally, just from a prototype, I flew home Friday evening, and by Sunday morning we had a prototype working. I demoed it to Steve Hechtman, and he goes, "Oh, this is awesome." So in his keynote he mentioned that, "Oh, you should go see what Arlen's gonna present, this MQTT thing." So that was when I did the first demo of MQTT. We had only Engine, we had one module, MQTT Engine. And we demonstrated discovering 300 PLCs, and I think it was like 30000 tags in less than 10 seconds. And that's kind of where, right after that, during that show, I talked with Steve and Don. And so, Cirrus Link are still a independent... We're a privately owned company, but we are one of only two strategic partners to Inductive Automation. And really our product line are developing best-in-class modules that you can plug into Ignition to give it the MQTT capabilities.
02:45
Shay: So I had never heard that story. That's really awesome. I think it goes to show the power of MQTT. And now your module stack with us has kind of grown. So can you speak to what Cirrus Link modules you have available in Ignition and how they work?
03:01
Arlen: The first module is MQTT Transmission, and it's a MQTT client that knows two things. It knows about the internal structure of an Ignition tag. So if you think about when you go into Designer and you're designing your folder structure and you're bringing tags into Ignition, and then you're giving those tags properties, you're giving them a tag name, engineering units, engineering ranges, maybe a documentation, well that creates an internal tag in Ignition. Well, MQTT Transmission knows how to take that tag, convert it into Sparkplug B format and publish it using MQTT. Now, the next module that you would wanna look at is the MQTT Distributor Module. So, MQTT Distributor is an Ignition module, but literally, it just sits there to be an MQTT server, so really easy to download it and to install it and manage it.
03:56
Lauren: So when you say server, are you referring to the same thing as an MQTT broker?
04:01
Arlen: Yes, for 25 years, they were called data brokers and when we took MQTT through the OASIS-standards body, so that was IBM, Microsoft, Red Hat, Cisco, to get actual international certification for MQTT, it was funny in the meetings, there was like a half-a-day argument, "Is this an MQTT server? Is it a broker?" So, officially I try to stay with the term MQTT server, but everybody in the world knows it as MQTT broker, so those are interchangeable. And then finally, MQTT Engine is kind of the reverse of Transmission, in that it knows about Sparkplug B messages. And when they arrive, again, we're talking about post and subscribe. So, when they arrive, Engine is able to take that tag, and if it doesn't already exist, inside of the Ignition database, it can actually create tags on the fly. So with Transmission, Engine, and because of Sparkplug, we basically have self-discovery of tags.
05:05
Lauren: So you started to touch on some of the main selling points of this infrastructure, but we thought it would be fun to kind of put you in the hot seat and take you through some of the key selling points. Make sure you've got all your bases covered.
[chuckle]
05:18
Arlen: Okay.
05:18
Lauren: Are you ready?
05:18
Arlen: I'm ready.
05:19
Lauren: Okay. Is it bi-directional?
05:21
Arlen: Yes.
05:22
Shay: Is it Pub/Sub?
05:23
Arlen: Yes.
05:23
Lauren: Is it statefully aware?
05:25
Arlen: Yes.
05:26
Shay: Is it secure?
05:27
Arlen: Definitely.
05:27
Lauren: Is it fast and efficient?
05:29
Arlen: Very.
05:30 Shay: Can you do store-and-forward, with zero data loss?
05:33
Arlen: Yes.
05:33
Lauren: Oh, we're sold.
[laughter]
05:39
Shay: I know a lot of our customers are looking to use Ignition along with MQTT to do their own digital transformation. So what are the three tenets that you often speak to that are kind of guiding principles to help our customers through that process?
05:54
Arlen: The first year that we came out basically it was all about decoupling. My notion is that poll response protocols, or proprietary protocols are the biggest hindrances to digital transformation. So the first tenet is we should look at decoupling wherever possible. What I mean is we should be connecting devices to infrastructure, not to applications with protocols. So if you think today we take a perfectly good PLC and then we basically hard-code it to an application using a protocol. Now, we can expand that, but typically what will happen from an operational standpoint, is nobody will ever change that. It's gonna be the way that it is. The second thing is that we came out the year after, after we got Sparkplug specification out, is being able to provide a single source of truth. If you think about what we do today, everything is a register-based protocol.
06:51
Arlen: So we have a register, it's 40,012, it's got a value of 160. What is that, 160 degrees, 160 gallons? So what do we do? We manually click on that tag and we start to give it properties. We give it a tag name. We give it engineering units. We may have to scale it. We may have to give it engineering ranges, and those are all manually entered. And then if you wanted to use that same 40,012 again, you've gotta do it again and again and again. And editing tags, keeping them up to date, it becomes a pretty much a full-time care and feeding of a SCADA system over the entire life of the project. But providing a single source of truth using MQTT and Sparkplug, we can publish that information one time with all of the properties, and we basically created a SCADA object. So instead of just a register, we're publishing an object that then has state for the rest of its life as far as usefulness.
07:51
Arlen: And then the last thing that really comes out is that we're finding out that digital transformation really is not IT down to OT. We've got to give the operational departments, the SCADA departments, we've gotta give them the tools and the technologies to put together an infrastructure that is digital-transformation ready. So the third tenet is: Be able to show your customer a superior operational system, first and foremost. That empowers them to do what they're good at: That they have the paradigm expertise at the operational level. With Ignition there and with MQTT, now they will be Cloud-ready going forward.
08:35
Lauren: So what does a solution like that actually look like?
08:40
Arlen: The first solution was we were very oil-and-gas centric or very remote SCADA. So we were quite happy if we could get a PLC, and maybe a flow computer publishing information over MQTT very efficiently into Ignition as a SCADA host system, but it's gotten much larger than that. I remember, it was funny, we were happy when we could get 500 tags and then 5000 tags, and now we have customers that have systems, some of the larger ones, 6.5 million tags. So all of these solutions, you ask me, "Arlen, what did you think a typical solution would look like?" but the customers are taking Ignition and all these capabilities and they're doing stuff that we didn't even think about.
09:26
Shay: And that's incredible. So MQTT is really awesome. I think we all, in this room, know the power of MQTT, but where does Sparkplug B come into play? Where does the Sparkplug specification, I should say, come into play?
09:38
Arlen: In working with the customers with Inductive Automation, we found that the industry was very fragmented. So we had a lot of OEMs that were looking at MQTT, we had a lot of service providers looking at MQTT. The only problem was nobody was doing it the same way. And so, for all of the advantages of MQTT, we were losing any sort of interoperability. So here, about three years ago, myself and the development team at Cirrus Link sat down and said, "Look, we've been doing MQTT ever since it was developed. We've got some best practices, things that have worked well." So we sat down and we wrote a specification, we called it Sparkplug, and Sparkplug basically does three things: One, it defines a topic namespace that can be used in MQTT, that makes sense in industrial applications. The second thing that we did was we looked at the best way to represent process variables inside the payload.
10:38
Arlen: Now, up until this point, everybody's been using JSON, all the Cloud providers that use MQTT. And I don't wanna say there's anything wrong with JSON, but we live in a world where, yeah, we may have some customers that have high bandwidth, but we have other customers that are using VSAT, using spread-spectrum radios, using cellular, and my notion is that in our world, bandwidth is neither free nor is it unlimited. So we kind of took a middle-of-the-road approach, and we used a technology called Google Protocol Buffers that let us build a data model that makes sense for process variables. So really very similar to what an Ignition tag looks like, in that it lets you give it a tag name, engineering units, engineering ranges, description, maybe asset tags. And then we wrap that in this Google Protocol Buffers schema and that defines a payload that really anybody can implement.
11:38
Arlen: So we've got a known topic namespace, we've got a known payload, and then the last thing that you've got to have if you're doing mission-critical, real-time SCADA with MQTT, is you've gotta have state. Now, Andy and I built stateful awareness into MQTT. You know if an end device is connected and you know when it's disconnected. But nobody had defined what topic are you gonna use for your death certificate. So Sparkplug lays out all three things. It lays out a well-known topic namespace, lays out a payload representation that is process-variable centric, and it tells you how to deal with state of your connected devices. And with that, you really have everything that you need and we're hoping that Sparkplug now, it's in the Eclipse Foundation. We're hoping it becomes a very highly adopted standard.
12:29
Lauren: That's really exciting. But we've got all of these basics coming together. Now, where do we actually see these being used? Where can we see this applied?
12:39
Arlen: I would have said it started in what I would call wide area SCADA. So, oil and gas, water and wastewater, electric utility, anywhere where you've got long distances and you're using expensive communication networks. And it did prove out. So, some of our first customers were oil and gas, water and wastewater. But I think that we're seeing it expand out. Now, I would say that from the conventional, one of our big use cases now is in solar, monitoring solar farms and things like that, and then going out into electric utilities. And a lot of our customers, even in logistics, in automotive, in pharmaceutical, in manufacturing, are looking at the tools on Ignition and going, "Well, wait a minute, if I could go and connect this to my PLCs on my plant floor and then give them tag names and give them properties and publish that into my operational system on the plant floor and then from there I could go on to all of my cloud service providers." So, we're going back to that actual single source of truth, where we're publishing it from the edge and then all of the data consumers, all the way up and down, get the same single source of truth.
13:54
Shay: This has kind of become a buzzword. In the last five years, we've heard a lot of folks talking about IIoT, about digital transformation, but we're not seeing a lot of folks do this successfully. So, why are people struggling so much with this?
14:09
Arlen: We should enable OT. And a lot of these approaches, again, industry says, there's gonna be OT or IT to OT convergence. But, let's face it, they each have their own specialty too. And so for operational, I don't care which industry you go in, there is tribal knowledge, there's experience, there's certain things that you know. For example, what is a 4-20 milliamp loop and how does a limit switch open on open and a limit switch close on close, open on close, work on a motor operative valve? Those are things that you've got to know in those sectors. So, again, for successful digital transformation, I think we have to attack it at the infrastructure level. One of the notions that I've got is that, currently, most of the existing OT infrastructure is not conducive to digital transformation. So, if we can provide OT with the tooling and the technology to create an infrastructure that's IT-ready to begin with, but then it actually makes a better SCADA system, then I think it's a win-win and you will see successful digital transformation projects. But it's gotta start from OT first.
15:25
Lauren: That's an exciting proposition. Who would you say MQTT is really for?
15:32
Arlen: It's almost just assumed. Anywhere I go, IT are already using it. IT have known what pub/sub is. They've known message oriented middleware, and I would bet that all of the IT departments are already using MQTT. But you ask me who... We invented it for real time SCADA systems. So, you can say what you want about it, but it's got, uniquely, it's got all of the mechanisms built in, like the last will and testament and things like that, continuous session awareness that are uniquely for operational systems.
16:08
Arlen: If they are using, again, wide area SCADA, I think it is absolutely evident that MQTT would give them a faster infrastructure and they would be able to bring back more data. If you think about... We did a survey with Chevron here are several years ago and they were looking at a booster station or a tank farm location. How much data is actually available? If you look at smart transmitters like heart transmitters, if you look at PLCs, if you look at flow computers, gas chromatographs, and you know the figures are anywhere from 80 to 95% of valuable data we're leaving stranded in the field today.
16:53
Arlen: Now, that may be limited. But if an integrator can tell a customer that if they're using MQTT they can save 80 to 95% of their bandwidth that they were using, then the way you can look at that, that's 80 to 95% more stranded information that the integrator could be bringing back for that customer. Now, the other thing. Now, the integrator can show the customers that not only is that coming into your Ignition system for a better OT solution. Oh look, we've got injector modules for AWS and for Amazon and Google Cloud and IBM Watson and SAP Leonardo. So, now they've done more than just do a SCADA system, they've put together an infrastructure for their customer that can scale.
17:39
Lauren: So, I think that says it all. It's the easy option.
17:42
Arlen: It is. It's the easy button.
17:44
Shay: Yeah. [chuckle] So, we've gotten to look at the different modules that are available. We've talked through MQTT and Sparkplug. If I have a customer that's coming to me and asking me, "Shay, how can we apply digital transformation to our systems today or how can we get to industry X.0?" What are your recommendations for that? How do I do that?
18:05
Arlen: Download it. Do it today. Because everything that we've talked about, uniquely, Ignition, I can download a full Ignition Gateway, I can download Ignition Edge and I can run it in trial mode for as long as I want. So, the way I would suggest getting started is you could start download Ignition Edge, put it on a Raspberry Pi, put it on any Linux-based or Windows-based embedded computer, connect it to a PLC. And just see how easy it is to use the tools that Ignition Edge has to bring tags in at the edge and give them context, just give them tag names, engineering units, engineering ranges. Well, now, we've talked about Distributor, that MQTT server/broker, that I can install on my Ignition Gateway running in trial mode, so now my Edge can connect, my Edge MQTT can connect to my Distributor. Now, I'm connected. And now my Engine Module on my Ignition Gateway can subscribe to that data and all of those tags that I've got in Edge are now showing up in my Ignition Gateway.
19:05
Arlen: Now, from there, I can see that I've got a single source of truth, I can see that I've got self-discovery, all the tags are created automatically, but now I wanna take it to the next step. So I could get a Injector Module for AWS or Azure or IBM Watson or Google Cloud Platform and I can see those tags go there at the same way in real time. So when we do demonstrations, we show everything happening at once. So the demo now is 1,800 devices, 150,000 tags with over half updating faster than once a second, and all of that being discovered in less than 10 seconds going into Ignition, into AWS, into Microsoft, into IBM and into Google Cloud Platform.
19:52
Lauren: Well, now you've gotten us all fired up and excited. Can you show us a quick demo?
19:57
Arlen: Sure.
19:57
Lauren: Alright.
20:00
Arlen: Okay, Lauren and Shay. This is a very high-level demonstration of some of the capabilities of the MQTT modules for Ignition. Now, what I'm showing in my browser right now is Ignition Gateway, and probably all of the modules that everybody are already familiar with, but you'll noticed down here at the bottom that we have some of the Cirrus Link modules installed. And one of the ones that we're gonna be looking at here is MQTT Engine, and when we install that we get a tab that let's just go in and look at the configuration for MQTT Engine. Now, notice right now it's disabled, but once we enable it, we're able to define two available MQTT servers that MQTT Engine can connect to.
20:43
Arlen: Now, also as part of the demonstration, we have Ignition Edge running on an embedded computer. Now, that has fewer Ignition modules installed, but it's got the Cirrus Link in MQTT Transmission Module along with the EFM Emerson ROC Driver. So if we take a look at our dashboard, I basically built a topology drawing, if you will, of our infrastructure. So this is our Ignition Gateway connected to both Greengrass Core or Azure Edge from the MQTT Transmission Module. I'm showing the Cloud Injector modules that could go to any of our cloud services. And here, we're showing MQTT Engine Module that's not enabled yet, but will be and connecting to two available MQTT servers. Now, before I enable Engine, note that although we have a tag provider, MQTT Engine, let's go in here and look and notice that we don't have any UDTs, and we don't have any Edge nodes and therefore really no tags. So if we look at our total system tag count, we have 192 tags, but what we show down here, is all of these devices, both real devices, real PLCs, flow computers, smart transmitters are connected into the infrastructure representing over 2,000 devices and also representing over 170,000 tags.
22:16 Arlen: So what we're gonna see is once we plug in Engine, how long it will take to discover all the devices, all of tags and all of their metrics. So I'm going to enable MQTT Engine here, in this small web browser, I've embedded in the designer. Now, note, when I hit the change, we'll just wait and see how long it takes the system to discover what's out there.
[pause]
23:00 Arlen: Boom, a few seconds later, we have discovered over 2,000 devices and 179,000 tags. Now, notice that as Engine was discovering those tags, we were also able to provide those tags in real-time, to services like Greengrass, Azure Edge or any of the cloud services. So let's go over here and see what we discovered. Remember, the Engine folder was empty so we're gonna refresh our Edge nodes, and we can see here that we discovered our embedded computer running Ignition Edge connected to a flow computer out in the field. We'll see here that in our pipeline group, we discovered five groups with 20 stations each. Each one of those having a line with a unit PLC, and we can see here that we didn't know about this entire unit just a few seconds ago. Now we know it's here, and we can look at our case pressure and we can see that it has a zero to 50 kilopascals. So we discovered all of that in just a matter of seconds.
24:09 Arlen: Now, if we go back to our Edge, now this is the Designer for Ignition Edge running at the edge, connected to this FloBoss 107 flow computer. Now, notice that we also defined a UDT to make those process variables from that flow computer easier to work with from the standpoint of a human being, not needing to know all the enumerations and everything for a flow computer. So that we can come back to our Ignition dashboard, go to that same folder structure, the same folder structure got published and we can see here that we also got that UDT published. So literally through the power of Ignition, we could open a new design window, we could have created a template for that UDT. So that once any of these data types, any of these complex data types were discovered, we literally can go into our Meter-Config, Meter Run number 1, drag that UDT, drop it onto the screen, and we basically have created a live configuration screen that could be replicated over and over and over again.
25:27 Arlen: So again, not everything that... Not great detail on everything that we can do with the MQTT modules, but I think a very high-level demonstration and just demonstrating some of the power of what we can do with the MQTT modules.
Lauren: Welcome back to our sales and marketing series. Today's topic is selling MQTT. I'm Lauren.
00:14
Shay: And I'm Shay. We're sitting down with the co-inventor of MQTT, CTO of Cirrus Link Solutions, Arlen Nipper.
00:21
Lauren: We'll be talking with him about how the addition of the MQTT modules creates a more efficient SCADA system, and how that solves current system issues, and creates an infrastructure ready for digital transformation.
00:33
Shay: Arlen, thanks for being here today.
00:34
Arlen: Thank you.
00:35
Shay: We're really excited to talk a little bit about the partnership between Inductive Automation and Cirrus Link. Can you kinda touch on what that relationship looks like?
00:44
Arlen: Literally, it was on a project with Plains Midstream pipeline, they were using MQTT, it was a legacy product, and we just didn't have any tools. We didn't have any way to... It was a black box. And so we went to a lot of IA's competition, and we say, "Hey we've got this idea of something we could do with MQTT." "No, Arlen, thanks, but we've got smart guys, they're gonna come out with our next IoT strategy." Then it was somebody in Calgary that said, "Hey have you ever heard of Inductive Automation?" I said no. And so I called and got a meeting, this was about four years ago, flew out, I met with Travis and the team for a day, I said, "You know, I've got this idea." and they go, "Great, We're open, we've got an open SDK, we're based on Java." And that was what myself and our developers at Cirrus Link knew.
01:43
Arlen: So literally, just from a prototype, I flew home Friday evening, and by Sunday morning we had a prototype working. I demoed it to Steve Hechtman, and he goes, "Oh, this is awesome." So in his keynote he mentioned that, "Oh, you should go see what Arlen's gonna present, this MQTT thing." So that was when I did the first demo of MQTT. We had only Engine, we had one module, MQTT Engine. And we demonstrated discovering 300 PLCs, and I think it was like 30000 tags in less than 10 seconds. And that's kind of where, right after that, during that show, I talked with Steve and Don. And so, Cirrus Link are still a independent... We're a privately owned company, but we are one of only two strategic partners to Inductive Automation. And really our product line are developing best-in-class modules that you can plug into Ignition to give it the MQTT capabilities.
02:45
Shay: So I had never heard that story. That's really awesome. I think it goes to show the power of MQTT. And now your module stack with us has kind of grown. So can you speak to what Cirrus Link modules you have available in Ignition and how they work?
03:01
Arlen: The first module is MQTT Transmission, and it's a MQTT client that knows two things. It knows about the internal structure of an Ignition tag. So if you think about when you go into Designer and you're designing your folder structure and you're bringing tags into Ignition, and then you're giving those tags properties, you're giving them a tag name, engineering units, engineering ranges, maybe a documentation, well that creates an internal tag in Ignition. Well, MQTT Transmission knows how to take that tag, convert it into Sparkplug B format and publish it using MQTT. Now, the next module that you would wanna look at is the MQTT Distributor Module. So, MQTT Distributor is an Ignition module, but literally, it just sits there to be an MQTT server, so really easy to download it and to install it and manage it.
03:56
Lauren: So when you say server, are you referring to the same thing as an MQTT broker?
04:01
Arlen: Yes, for 25 years, they were called data brokers and when we took MQTT through the OASIS-standards body, so that was IBM, Microsoft, Red Hat, Cisco, to get actual international certification for MQTT, it was funny in the meetings, there was like a half-a-day argument, "Is this an MQTT server? Is it a broker?" So, officially I try to stay with the term MQTT server, but everybody in the world knows it as MQTT broker, so those are interchangeable. And then finally, MQTT Engine is kind of the reverse of Transmission, in that it knows about Sparkplug B messages. And when they arrive, again, we're talking about post and subscribe. So, when they arrive, Engine is able to take that tag, and if it doesn't already exist, inside of the Ignition database, it can actually create tags on the fly. So with Transmission, Engine, and because of Sparkplug, we basically have self-discovery of tags.
05:05
Lauren: So you started to touch on some of the main selling points of this infrastructure, but we thought it would be fun to kind of put you in the hot seat and take you through some of the key selling points. Make sure you've got all your bases covered.
[chuckle]
05:18
Arlen: Okay.
05:18
Lauren: Are you ready?
05:18
Arlen: I'm ready.
05:19
Lauren: Okay. Is it bi-directional?
05:21
Arlen: Yes.
05:22
Shay: Is it Pub/Sub?
05:23
Arlen: Yes.
05:23
Lauren: Is it statefully aware?
05:25
Arlen: Yes.
05:26
Shay: Is it secure?
05:27
Arlen: Definitely.
05:27
Lauren: Is it fast and efficient?
05:29
Arlen: Very.
05:30 Shay: Can you do store-and-forward, with zero data loss?
05:33
Arlen: Yes.
05:33
Lauren: Oh, we're sold.
[laughter]
05:39
Shay: I know a lot of our customers are looking to use Ignition along with MQTT to do their own digital transformation. So what are the three tenets that you often speak to that are kind of guiding principles to help our customers through that process?
05:54
Arlen: The first year that we came out basically it was all about decoupling. My notion is that poll response protocols, or proprietary protocols are the biggest hindrances to digital transformation. So the first tenet is we should look at decoupling wherever possible. What I mean is we should be connecting devices to infrastructure, not to applications with protocols. So if you think today we take a perfectly good PLC and then we basically hard-code it to an application using a protocol. Now, we can expand that, but typically what will happen from an operational standpoint, is nobody will ever change that. It's gonna be the way that it is. The second thing is that we came out the year after, after we got Sparkplug specification out, is being able to provide a single source of truth. If you think about what we do today, everything is a register-based protocol.
06:51
Arlen: So we have a register, it's 40,012, it's got a value of 160. What is that, 160 degrees, 160 gallons? So what do we do? We manually click on that tag and we start to give it properties. We give it a tag name. We give it engineering units. We may have to scale it. We may have to give it engineering ranges, and those are all manually entered. And then if you wanted to use that same 40,012 again, you've gotta do it again and again and again. And editing tags, keeping them up to date, it becomes a pretty much a full-time care and feeding of a SCADA system over the entire life of the project. But providing a single source of truth using MQTT and Sparkplug, we can publish that information one time with all of the properties, and we basically created a SCADA object. So instead of just a register, we're publishing an object that then has state for the rest of its life as far as usefulness.
07:51
Arlen: And then the last thing that really comes out is that we're finding out that digital transformation really is not IT down to OT. We've got to give the operational departments, the SCADA departments, we've gotta give them the tools and the technologies to put together an infrastructure that is digital-transformation ready. So the third tenet is: Be able to show your customer a superior operational system, first and foremost. That empowers them to do what they're good at: That they have the paradigm expertise at the operational level. With Ignition there and with MQTT, now they will be Cloud-ready going forward.
08:35
Lauren: So what does a solution like that actually look like?
08:40
Arlen: The first solution was we were very oil-and-gas centric or very remote SCADA. So we were quite happy if we could get a PLC, and maybe a flow computer publishing information over MQTT very efficiently into Ignition as a SCADA host system, but it's gotten much larger than that. I remember, it was funny, we were happy when we could get 500 tags and then 5000 tags, and now we have customers that have systems, some of the larger ones, 6.5 million tags. So all of these solutions, you ask me, "Arlen, what did you think a typical solution would look like?" but the customers are taking Ignition and all these capabilities and they're doing stuff that we didn't even think about.
09:26
Shay: And that's incredible. So MQTT is really awesome. I think we all, in this room, know the power of MQTT, but where does Sparkplug B come into play? Where does the Sparkplug specification, I should say, come into play?
09:38
Arlen: In working with the customers with Inductive Automation, we found that the industry was very fragmented. So we had a lot of OEMs that were looking at MQTT, we had a lot of service providers looking at MQTT. The only problem was nobody was doing it the same way. And so, for all of the advantages of MQTT, we were losing any sort of interoperability. So here, about three years ago, myself and the development team at Cirrus Link sat down and said, "Look, we've been doing MQTT ever since it was developed. We've got some best practices, things that have worked well." So we sat down and we wrote a specification, we called it Sparkplug, and Sparkplug basically does three things: One, it defines a topic namespace that can be used in MQTT, that makes sense in industrial applications. The second thing that we did was we looked at the best way to represent process variables inside the payload.
10:38
Arlen: Now, up until this point, everybody's been using JSON, all the Cloud providers that use MQTT. And I don't wanna say there's anything wrong with JSON, but we live in a world where, yeah, we may have some customers that have high bandwidth, but we have other customers that are using VSAT, using spread-spectrum radios, using cellular, and my notion is that in our world, bandwidth is neither free nor is it unlimited. So we kind of took a middle-of-the-road approach, and we used a technology called Google Protocol Buffers that let us build a data model that makes sense for process variables. So really very similar to what an Ignition tag looks like, in that it lets you give it a tag name, engineering units, engineering ranges, description, maybe asset tags. And then we wrap that in this Google Protocol Buffers schema and that defines a payload that really anybody can implement.
11:38
Arlen: So we've got a known topic namespace, we've got a known payload, and then the last thing that you've got to have if you're doing mission-critical, real-time SCADA with MQTT, is you've gotta have state. Now, Andy and I built stateful awareness into MQTT. You know if an end device is connected and you know when it's disconnected. But nobody had defined what topic are you gonna use for your death certificate. So Sparkplug lays out all three things. It lays out a well-known topic namespace, lays out a payload representation that is process-variable centric, and it tells you how to deal with state of your connected devices. And with that, you really have everything that you need and we're hoping that Sparkplug now, it's in the Eclipse Foundation. We're hoping it becomes a very highly adopted standard.
12:29
Lauren: That's really exciting. But we've got all of these basics coming together. Now, where do we actually see these being used? Where can we see this applied?
12:39
Arlen: I would have said it started in what I would call wide area SCADA. So, oil and gas, water and wastewater, electric utility, anywhere where you've got long distances and you're using expensive communication networks. And it did prove out. So, some of our first customers were oil and gas, water and wastewater. But I think that we're seeing it expand out. Now, I would say that from the conventional, one of our big use cases now is in solar, monitoring solar farms and things like that, and then going out into electric utilities. And a lot of our customers, even in logistics, in automotive, in pharmaceutical, in manufacturing, are looking at the tools on Ignition and going, "Well, wait a minute, if I could go and connect this to my PLCs on my plant floor and then give them tag names and give them properties and publish that into my operational system on the plant floor and then from there I could go on to all of my cloud service providers." So, we're going back to that actual single source of truth, where we're publishing it from the edge and then all of the data consumers, all the way up and down, get the same single source of truth.
13:54
Shay: This has kind of become a buzzword. In the last five years, we've heard a lot of folks talking about IIoT, about digital transformation, but we're not seeing a lot of folks do this successfully. So, why are people struggling so much with this?
14:09
Arlen: We should enable OT. And a lot of these approaches, again, industry says, there's gonna be OT or IT to OT convergence. But, let's face it, they each have their own specialty too. And so for operational, I don't care which industry you go in, there is tribal knowledge, there's experience, there's certain things that you know. For example, what is a 4-20 milliamp loop and how does a limit switch open on open and a limit switch close on close, open on close, work on a motor operative valve? Those are things that you've got to know in those sectors. So, again, for successful digital transformation, I think we have to attack it at the infrastructure level. One of the notions that I've got is that, currently, most of the existing OT infrastructure is not conducive to digital transformation. So, if we can provide OT with the tooling and the technology to create an infrastructure that's IT-ready to begin with, but then it actually makes a better SCADA system, then I think it's a win-win and you will see successful digital transformation projects. But it's gotta start from OT first.
15:25
Lauren: That's an exciting proposition. Who would you say MQTT is really for?
15:32
Arlen: It's almost just assumed. Anywhere I go, IT are already using it. IT have known what pub/sub is. They've known message oriented middleware, and I would bet that all of the IT departments are already using MQTT. But you ask me who... We invented it for real time SCADA systems. So, you can say what you want about it, but it's got, uniquely, it's got all of the mechanisms built in, like the last will and testament and things like that, continuous session awareness that are uniquely for operational systems.
16:08
Arlen: If they are using, again, wide area SCADA, I think it is absolutely evident that MQTT would give them a faster infrastructure and they would be able to bring back more data. If you think about... We did a survey with Chevron here are several years ago and they were looking at a booster station or a tank farm location. How much data is actually available? If you look at smart transmitters like heart transmitters, if you look at PLCs, if you look at flow computers, gas chromatographs, and you know the figures are anywhere from 80 to 95% of valuable data we're leaving stranded in the field today.
16:53
Arlen: Now, that may be limited. But if an integrator can tell a customer that if they're using MQTT they can save 80 to 95% of their bandwidth that they were using, then the way you can look at that, that's 80 to 95% more stranded information that the integrator could be bringing back for that customer. Now, the other thing. Now, the integrator can show the customers that not only is that coming into your Ignition system for a better OT solution. Oh look, we've got injector modules for AWS and for Amazon and Google Cloud and IBM Watson and SAP Leonardo. So, now they've done more than just do a SCADA system, they've put together an infrastructure for their customer that can scale.
17:39
Lauren: So, I think that says it all. It's the easy option.
17:42
Arlen: It is. It's the easy button.
17:44
Shay: Yeah. [chuckle] So, we've gotten to look at the different modules that are available. We've talked through MQTT and Sparkplug. If I have a customer that's coming to me and asking me, "Shay, how can we apply digital transformation to our systems today or how can we get to industry X.0?" What are your recommendations for that? How do I do that?
18:05
Arlen: Download it. Do it today. Because everything that we've talked about, uniquely, Ignition, I can download a full Ignition Gateway, I can download Ignition Edge and I can run it in trial mode for as long as I want. So, the way I would suggest getting started is you could start download Ignition Edge, put it on a Raspberry Pi, put it on any Linux-based or Windows-based embedded computer, connect it to a PLC. And just see how easy it is to use the tools that Ignition Edge has to bring tags in at the edge and give them context, just give them tag names, engineering units, engineering ranges. Well, now, we've talked about Distributor, that MQTT server/broker, that I can install on my Ignition Gateway running in trial mode, so now my Edge can connect, my Edge MQTT can connect to my Distributor. Now, I'm connected. And now my Engine Module on my Ignition Gateway can subscribe to that data and all of those tags that I've got in Edge are now showing up in my Ignition Gateway.
19:05
Arlen: Now, from there, I can see that I've got a single source of truth, I can see that I've got self-discovery, all the tags are created automatically, but now I wanna take it to the next step. So I could get a Injector Module for AWS or Azure or IBM Watson or Google Cloud Platform and I can see those tags go there at the same way in real time. So when we do demonstrations, we show everything happening at once. So the demo now is 1,800 devices, 150,000 tags with over half updating faster than once a second, and all of that being discovered in less than 10 seconds going into Ignition, into AWS, into Microsoft, into IBM and into Google Cloud Platform.
19:52
Lauren: Well, now you've gotten us all fired up and excited. Can you show us a quick demo?
19:57
Arlen: Sure.
19:57
Lauren: Alright.
20:00
Arlen: Okay, Lauren and Shay. This is a very high-level demonstration of some of the capabilities of the MQTT modules for Ignition. Now, what I'm showing in my browser right now is Ignition Gateway, and probably all of the modules that everybody are already familiar with, but you'll noticed down here at the bottom that we have some of the Cirrus Link modules installed. And one of the ones that we're gonna be looking at here is MQTT Engine, and when we install that we get a tab that let's just go in and look at the configuration for MQTT Engine. Now, notice right now it's disabled, but once we enable it, we're able to define two available MQTT servers that MQTT Engine can connect to.
20:43
Arlen: Now, also as part of the demonstration, we have Ignition Edge running on an embedded computer. Now, that has fewer Ignition modules installed, but it's got the Cirrus Link in MQTT Transmission Module along with the EFM Emerson ROC Driver. So if we take a look at our dashboard, I basically built a topology drawing, if you will, of our infrastructure. So this is our Ignition Gateway connected to both Greengrass Core or Azure Edge from the MQTT Transmission Module. I'm showing the Cloud Injector modules that could go to any of our cloud services. And here, we're showing MQTT Engine Module that's not enabled yet, but will be and connecting to two available MQTT servers. Now, before I enable Engine, note that although we have a tag provider, MQTT Engine, let's go in here and look and notice that we don't have any UDTs, and we don't have any Edge nodes and therefore really no tags. So if we look at our total system tag count, we have 192 tags, but what we show down here, is all of these devices, both real devices, real PLCs, flow computers, smart transmitters are connected into the infrastructure representing over 2,000 devices and also representing over 170,000 tags.
22:16 Arlen: So what we're gonna see is once we plug in Engine, how long it will take to discover all the devices, all of tags and all of their metrics. So I'm going to enable MQTT Engine here, in this small web browser, I've embedded in the designer. Now, note, when I hit the change, we'll just wait and see how long it takes the system to discover what's out there.
[pause]
23:00 Arlen: Boom, a few seconds later, we have discovered over 2,000 devices and 179,000 tags. Now, notice that as Engine was discovering those tags, we were also able to provide those tags in real-time, to services like Greengrass, Azure Edge or any of the cloud services. So let's go over here and see what we discovered. Remember, the Engine folder was empty so we're gonna refresh our Edge nodes, and we can see here that we discovered our embedded computer running Ignition Edge connected to a flow computer out in the field. We'll see here that in our pipeline group, we discovered five groups with 20 stations each. Each one of those having a line with a unit PLC, and we can see here that we didn't know about this entire unit just a few seconds ago. Now we know it's here, and we can look at our case pressure and we can see that it has a zero to 50 kilopascals. So we discovered all of that in just a matter of seconds.
24:09 Arlen: Now, if we go back to our Edge, now this is the Designer for Ignition Edge running at the edge, connected to this FloBoss 107 flow computer. Now, notice that we also defined a UDT to make those process variables from that flow computer easier to work with from the standpoint of a human being, not needing to know all the enumerations and everything for a flow computer. So that we can come back to our Ignition dashboard, go to that same folder structure, the same folder structure got published and we can see here that we also got that UDT published. So literally through the power of Ignition, we could open a new design window, we could have created a template for that UDT. So that once any of these data types, any of these complex data types were discovered, we literally can go into our Meter-Config, Meter Run number 1, drag that UDT, drop it onto the screen, and we basically have created a live configuration screen that could be replicated over and over and over again.
25:27 Arlen: So again, not everything that... Not great detail on everything that we can do with the MQTT modules, but I think a very high-level demonstration and just demonstrating some of the power of what we can do with the MQTT modules.
Series Order
16
Identifying Required Modules
Joanna Cortez
Fri, 05/22/2020 - 11:20
Lauren and Shay are talking with Training Content Manager Paul Scott about how to identify the correct modules for specific customer needs and leveraging those modules for successful projects. Paul covers the correct time during a sales process to bring up these modules to educate a customer, not overwhelm them. Paul covers the level of knowledge you should have on the modules, what to understand about the customer’s project, and ultimately determining the best module by breaking up the solutions into categories: device connectivity, data logging, visualization, reporting, alarming, and enterprise solutions. Paul gives some examples of what modules might be the best solutions under certain circumstances.
Video Transcription:
00:08
Lauren: Welcome back to our Sales and Marketing Training Videos. I'm Lauren.
00:12
Shay: And I'm Shay. Today, we're talking about identifying the required modules for customer projects.
00:16
Lauren: We're sitting down with Paul Scott to talk about how to leverage the Ignition modules for success. Paul, thanks for being here.
00:23
Paul: Thanks for having me.
00:25
Lauren: So today we're talking about identifying the best modules for your customers and projects. When do you really start talking about that in the sales call process or in the sales process in general?
00:37
Paul: So it's kind of tricky because you don't wanna lead with it. So if you've been following along with this video series, you know that understanding the solution, understanding the end goal, understanding the customer's needs is really the most important part. When you start talking about the modules, they're just naturally more complex, and they start leading towards a very technical area, where each module does what. So I generally find it's not too helpful to lead with them. I mean, you don't have to hide that modules exist. Ignition's the platform, and that's fine, but really maybe a little bit later down in the process, after you've already kind of figured out what the solution should be, or what your potential options are. Another way to think about it is that the modules are really the tools you're gonna use to build a solution, and you don't really need to get too focused on what the tools are initially. And it's something you really kind of examine later once you understand what the problem is. So really to answer your question, I guess, you can lead a little, but I would definitely maybe kinda push it back towards ... maybe the middle or towards the end of that whole discussion or the series of discussions.
01:39
Shay: Definitely. So it sounds like you kind of get a sense of discovery, figure out what problem they're trying to solve, and then once we kind of have an understanding of how Ignition works, then we can look at ‘How do we actually solve that? What tools are we going to use to do that?’ So with that, how do we avoid that complexity in the initial conversation or conversations with customers?
02:00
Paul: Again, try to focus on the solutions or the big picture that you're here kinda heading towards. And again, you really need to understand what the modules do before you can really identify them. So you're gonna need to have at least some solid understanding of at least how they work, you're gonna wanna be familiar enough. Those details about how they work and stuff don't necessarily have to come up in the initial talks, but you really wanna have them in the back of your head, just to be able to piece this whole project, or what that whole project or series of projects will ultimately end up becoming.
02:31
Lauren: So once we've had those initial conversations, how do you determine the best module for someone's needs? Are you looking to solve a specific problem? How do you consider that?
02:40
Paul: Sure, so yeah, it's definitely best to maybe abstract away the individual modules and kinda focus more on general categories of solutions. Common ones would be device connectivity, data logging, visualization, reporting, alarming, and then enterprise solutions.
02:57
Lauren: Quite a few. Well, why don't we start with device connectivity?
03:00
Paul: Sure. Now, fortunately this one is relatively simple. You need to understand basically: What hardware does the customer have? What are they trying to connect to? Also, what do they have currently? A lot of the times, either we're replacing a system, or they're just adding on to an existing system, so they might wanna try to keep all their hardware in a particular family of devices or vendors. So first of all, do they have an OPC server or some sort of MQTT solution already that exists? So if they already have those, and they wanna keep those, we can connect to those easily, and you don't really need any modules except for the MQTT side, you might need some. If you're going to be using our OPC server, then you'll need our drivers, right? So it kind of depends at that point. You may need to look at incorporating our OPC-UA module as well as our device drivers, or maybe you can skip them entirely and just use what's already there. It really kind of depends what the customer's comfortable with using. So you don't necessarily have to throw away everything they have, they might wanna keep it around.
04:03
Shay: For example, if someone has some Allen-Bradley devices that they're wanting to connect up to, they can use our OPC server and then our Allen-Bradley driver suite. And then they're not gonna need any third-party driver or anything like that. Whereas if they were using something like Kepware, then maybe they would wanna take advantage of a third-party drivers suite with other devices.
04:21
Paul: Correct, yeah.
04:23
Shay: So we've connected up to our devices with our drivers, and now we wanna log the data. What options do we have for that?
04:29
Paul: So for data logging, you really do have two main options here, and this is definitely where it gets a bit trickier. So we'll talk about both options, so the Tag Historian Module, this is basically the ‘set it and forget it’ sort of solution. The whole module is really designed to kind of take care of the whole database maintenance aspect of it, which is fantastic, because you can just install the module, you can go to your tags, you can turn on history, and then you can just start trending. And that's really it. You don't really have to do a lot of other things. You can start building, you can start putting charts down on screens, and you're good to go, and really, indefinitely. And again, it'll manage all the tables in the database for you. It's fantastic if you're doing any sort of time-based or time series charting solutions. It also does a lot with the actual charting approach, so the actual retrieval of the data in addition to sort of handling the retrieval portion itself. It does a lot of interpolation of the data.
05:26
Paul: So, if you technically have like millions of records, and you're trying to like push those out to a chart on something, client or something like that elsewhere, you don't have to worry about performance because we're go ahead and we're basically giving you accurate representations of what those datas are without the millions of data points. It does a lot for you so you don't have to. It is definitely the most, again, simplistic approach. Conversely, it's not a very friendly format if you wanna try to modify or make changes later. So what I mean by that is, is that whole module will try to manage the database tables itself. It has very specific expectations on what it wants, and if you're looking to modify those, you can, but then you go in this territory of what I tell most folks that you really need to understand what those tables do, and that's not something we really expect most folks to know. You can learn it's there, you can see what they're doing, but it kinda goes above and beyond what most folks probably want to do at that point. So it's definitely the easier solution and it's great for trending.
06:26
Paul: So to kind of transition, and then talk about SQL Bridge. So this is a little bit more complicated to set up, but when I say complicated, I mean it's in between getting out of the bed in the morning and going to the grocery store to shop. It's not like super complicated, there's just a couple of extra steps you need to do, it's a little more transparent. The transaction groups you create from this module, they can record based on intervals of time, just like the Tag History system can do, but it doesn't do a whole lot of magic in the database. It doesn't have a bunch of tables, it's putting stuff up, it keeps everything centralized in one. It's also nice because it's actually living as a project resource. A lot of folks kinda like that, they like to have a dedicated history and data collection project, which the Tag History system kinda just does silently in the background. So there's something nice about having that kind of visual element, you can kinda monitor and do things with. But where these really shine, these transaction groups, is event-based logging, so Tag History is doing this time-based recording every number of seconds or whatever, generally speaking.
07:31
Paul: But transaction groups can go into event-based logging, so if you have some bit you're monitoring, and every time that goes high, and it goes at high at odd intervals or under certain cases, the transaction groups can natively record that. The Tag Historian system, if you wanted to do that, you need a script. Which is a little bit trickier to do, obviously. So it's kind of nice because it takes care of all that, it has a built-in interface. It's a lot more elegant with the whole representation of what's going on with a recording system, and then you can kinda customize it too. This is also ideal if you did want to have some database interactions. So you're not just like recording stuff. The idea with the transaction groups is, yeah, you can record stuff with them, but then you can also very easily pull them back under, those records, back under certain conditions, and so on. That was a lot. So, how do we boil this down to some key points? Just to kind of like help solidify this.
08:28
Paul: So if you're talking to the customer, and you're talking about these data logging solutions here, if you hear things like "time series," or "trending," "ad hoc charting," Tag Historian is much easier to use, it's definitely more the ideal module to use in those cases. You can use SQL Bridge for it, but there's a lot of extra work you gotta put in, so that's why I prefer that in that case. For SQL Bridge things you wanna listen for, "event-based," "triggers," anything that kind of invokes an idea of a particular action or event occurring, not necessarily on a set schedule, but then you're gonna wanna do something. So if you're recording for particular events, I wouldn't say alarms because that goes into another topic. Also, what's great about the transaction groups, there's a lot of folks that like to create their own like recipe management system for a lot of things. Transaction groups are really easy to do that. That's actually really common use for a lot of our customers.
09:22
Shay: We actually do have two posts on our blog about 12 different ways to use this SQL Bridge Module. So if people wanna check out even more ways they can leverage it, they can look there as well.
09:31
Paul: Absolutely.
09:32
Shay: Yeah. And then moving on, we've got our data, we're logging it, we might wanna build some screens next, what do we have in terms of visualization?
09:40
Paul: So you really have two main options, again. So you have Vision and you have Perspective. Vision has all of these kind of common HMI aspects and features and functionality that you would expect to have. And any sort of visualization product Perspective. It's the newer one. It's got a lot of the same toys. It's definitely a more modern approach, it's using a lot more modern tech, even just looking at it, it's more of a sleeker, web-based kinda look and presentation. And it's a fantastic solution for trying to build any sort of project that requires any sort of responsive design. So you're gonna be looking out on a big screen, you're gonna be looking on your phone or smaller screen, something like that. We also have dedicated apps for Perspective, which a lot of folks have always been kind of clamoring for. Let's talk about the keywords real quick. Because again, there's definitely a lot of overlap. When talking, if you hear things like "desktop" or "HMI," maybe "Vision."
10:38 Paul: HMI's a little vague because, technically, that could still be a Perspective application. A big part of that, is whether or not, at this point in time, if the customer's interested in, or at least okay with having a browser on these workstations. 'Cause right now, the main way on a desktop to view a Perspective session is in the browser. And then of course if you're trying to view something on your phone, on a tablet, something, maybe a little smaller device, Perspective is fantastic. I mean it was really built for that whole solution. Now, something that a lot of folks maybe won't realize right away, is that you can't have both, you really can't. So it's possible to create that sort of desktop solution in Vision, but aside from Vision, you're creating tags, you're creating alarms, you're creating a lot of these other resources in the project that aren't really owned by Vision. Perspective can also use those. So, when you're building for one, technically you already have a good foundation to kinda add something into Perspective.
11:34
Shay: Definitely. And one really awesome feature with Ignition is the ability to do on-screen reporting. And with on-screen reporting, we can be using our awesome charting features, taking advantage of the modules that we spoke about for logging data and history. But what are their options if they would like a PDF report, or something that they're emailing out to someone?
11:56
Paul: So it's funny, you hit a really kind of funny aspect of reporting. 'Cause the term reporting is incredibly overloaded. Lots of things are a report, right? So yeah, even something you made with one of our visualization modules, that could be a report. That could be a real-time report or however you wanna call it. So, yeah, the Reporting Module as you kinda said, it's really ideal if you need to make a document. If your end goal is, "I need a PDF," or something like that, "I need an email," "I need something that doesn't necessarily live in one of your visualization applications," it's something that could be sent out or saved elsewhere entirely. It also has some built-in scheduling capability. Which is great because if you're trying to shoe-horn that functionality into the visualization modules, that gets tricky, you're doing a lot of scripting, it's not always gonna be ideal. Whereas the Reporting has this really nice interface, and it's super simple to kinda get started with. So yeah, definitely again, key terms, things to look for, to kinda decide if you should be using a Reporting Module here, "schedule," "printing," "print the report," "write," something like that, or we're creating a document, PDF, like I said, "email," stuff like that. But if you wanna listen to those terms, that gives you a good idea of maybe Reporting is useful to you.
13:20
Lauren: Awesome. And then moving on to alarming, what do we have to offer?
13:24
Paul: Sure. Now, this one trips up a lot of folks. You gotta remember, alarming is part of the core platform that is Ignition. So if you just wanna alarm some things, you don't need to talk modules. If you're trying to record events that happen to your alarms, we have the alarm journal which is also part of the platform. None of that requires any module at that point. So when we start thinking about modules and identifying modules, we're starting to also discuss alarms notification. That you wanna focus on the Notification. Our alarming solutions modules are all designed to send out some message or something, some signal outside of the products that people can respond to it. So the main modules in this case would be ... they're a little bit easier because they're all based off of different delivery mechanisms. So you can send emails, we can actually call someone, so we can have a robot to do a little text-to-speech thing, tell someone what's going on and actually call them, we can send text messages with the SMS module, and then we have the Twilio module which also sends texts, but with the Twilio service here.
14:31
Paul: So big thing to keep in mind when you're talking to customers about these modules, these also require some sort of delivery mechanism, some hardware like a modem, or an SMTP server, or we need to sign up with Twilio or something, depending on which one of those you're using. So, key terms for these, "alarms," yeah, maybe. Really, again, if you just want something on screen, that's the visualization option. You already have the alarms available, and we have components. So "notifications," you wanna listen for notifications. Oh, maybe we should consider some of these modules. "Acknowledgements," "remote acknowledgements," if someone's trying to do mobile acknowledgement, or "alarm checking," or something like that. Then maybe the Alarm Notification Module would be appropriate.
15:19
Shay: So we've gotten to work with a lot of really large customers, and to help out with these big, really big installations, we have what's called the Enterprise Administration Module. Can you speak a little bit about its capabilities and when we should be offering that to customers?
15:34
Paul: Yeah, so you have multiple Ignition installations. Maybe some of them have similar resources and that's intentional. You have some sort of maybe corporate standard, or your customer has some corporate standard of screens and visualization options that they want, and you're trying to make sure all of those different installations have them. That can be kind of a nightmare. If you're trying to make sure everything's up-to-date, that's a lot of work that you have to put into it. So the Enterprise Administration Module, we just call it EAM. So EAM helps you by getting the gateways to do some of the work for you. So the general idea behind this is that, when you're using EAM, there are two types of gateways. There's a controller, and there's only ever one, and then there's any number of agents. So the controller can basically ask agents to run tasks to do very specific things, which then the agents will do.
16:26
Paul: You can set these on a schedule, you can do it on demand, and those tasks help you in a lot of different cases. You can run upgrades, you can apply licenses, you can share those resources, I was talking about there. You can collect backups, you can even restore an agent. So if you had some hardware failure on a server somewhere, well, the controller keeps a copy of all the configuration items, so once you get a new server in place, you just tell the controller, "Hey, new agent's over here." And you basically go, and activating your backup and running again.
16:54
Lauren: So was that module required if I have multiple gateways within my installation or set up?
17:00
Shay: Well, no, actually. So it's helpful for these maintenance tasks. It's definitely useful there. And when you start using it really depends on how comfortable you are with how many gateways you have at that point in time. You could start using it when you have just two, but maybe two is pretty manageable. So it might make sense for you to maybe look at this a little bit later, maybe five, maybe 10. It depends on how active you're developing on this, how many people are working on it, is it a good communication between folks? 'Cause at some point, you might have some breaking point, where it makes sense to have this module or multiple instances on each gateway. Now, it's important to know that you don't necessarily need this if you're doing any sort of data connectivity or sharing between these different gateways. We have remote tag providers part of the platform. So you don't necessarily need EAM to share data like that. There's a little bit of myth about that that folks run into, and you don't need it. Again, those maintenance tasks, that's what EAM is for.
18:04
Lauren: So when talking to customers, what are the key terms they should look for?
18:07
Paul: So, yeah, key terms, "enterprise," usually comes up a lot when we start heading in the direction of needing or being interested in this module. "Multiple installations," "managing installs," "maintenance," "change of management," actually. If you're interested in having a development server, and then you wanna take the changes on the development server, and then push them over to production, this is also another kind of key term or key scenario you wanna be aware of.
18:34
Shay: And you can do that manually. So you don't necessarily require this module to be moving things from a dev server to a production server?
18:41
Paul: Correct. Yeah, you don't need it, but it does help a lot when you get to the point where when that whole dev server, production server ... When you start having a whole bunch of dev servers, it's nice. But yeah, you definitely don't need it. You can still do that manually.
18:55
Lauren: But when we're having a discussion with a customer, how do we explain how these modules plug into the platform and how they actually work?
19:02
Paul: Sure. So fortunately, that's a really easy topic to discuss. The key or the core modules that most folks are actually interested in, come with the installation of Ignition. So there's not really any extra work you need. In the few rare cases where there are modules that you do need to add in, it's very easy to just add them onto any existing installations. You don't have to restart your entire gateway, or server, or anything like that. They're easy to plug in and start using, and they all work on a trial, as I'm sure we're all familiar with at this point here. So it's really easy to get a new module, start playing around with it, even without a license or anything with it. Put together a proof of concept showing what it does and how that particular module's functionality or core feature set can help us reach the goal of the solution we're trying to reach.
19:50
Lauren: So with this, at what point do we start talking about expansion beyond the modules that they initially requested or were looking for for a part of their first solution that they built with Ignition?
20:00
Paul: So really, it's an ongoing process. As you're talking to your customer, you've better understanding what solutions may work for them, you may find out that different modules may actually be appropriate even if you didn't hear the key terms. So again, that's just continuing to discover and talk to the customer, and understand what it is they're actually trying to do.
20:21
Lauren: So Paul, we went through a lot of different topics today, and I know our integrators and viewers will want to continue their education on this topic. Do we have any resources available?
20:31
Shay: Absolutely. Paired with this video, you'll find a document containing all the terms you can use as a cheat sheet in your conversations with customers.
20:39
Lauren: Awesome.
20:40
Shay: Well, Paul, thanks so much for sitting down with us today. It was great getting to learn so much about the offerings that we have, and when we should be presenting them to customers.
20:48
Paul: My pleasure. It was great to be here.
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