Marketers of Technology
00:05:02 · Andres Figuera, Jeremy Byars
[00:05:02] S1: It's all about the challenge, right? Making them want to use the product. And Jeremy, is it a highly regulated industry? Like I feel because it's with local governments and these types of utilities, do you have to face a lot of regulations, and does that tailor how you market to them? [00:05:17] S0: It doesn't necessarily tailor the marketing. It definitely tailors what we produce from a product standpoint, what we distribute. So we're a distributor for the... For one of the largest metering providers in the country called called Itron. In fact, they're a global 3,500,000,000 company. And ultimately, yes, it is a regulated industry, but the products themselves have to speak to that, not necessarily the marketing. Of course, there are things that you need to be fully aware of. Lead and copper rules is one of the big ones right now where utilities are having to go and mark, tag, and replace lead and copper lines just to make sure customers aren't their customers rather aren't getting contaminants in their drinking water, for instance. And so it's good to be aware of those things, but it's a little different, for instance, in the financial industry where every single word that came out of my mouth as a marketer had to be carefully, extremely vetted by our legal team because we were adjacent to a highly regulated industry as well. So yes and no.
00:06:20 · Andres Figuera
[00:06:20] S1: I get it, but I do understand. Yeah, I was taking the financial industry as the example and that's like, you can't promise anything that shouldn't be because that can make you be held liable against what you market or whatever. But then, Jeremy, you're mention... Jeremy, you're mentioning that it's a challenge marketing to all these companies due to their budgets and everything like that. But then, can you shed up a little bit more light into how you're being able to get them to decide to work with you guys? And if you have any campaigns or strategies you've implemented that work that you can tell us about, that would be amazing.
00:06:50 · Jeremy Byars
[00:06:50] S0: Sure. I take quite a bit of what I bring to this industry from the financial industry because of that sort of quasi regulated aspect. And that is most of the customers, whether they understand it or not, whether they think they need it or not, do need to be educated because there is an education shortfall. And honestly, this industry, there's so much turnover. A lot of people do not want to work within local government and with utilities. They feel like those are dead end jobs. They absolutely are not. They are amazing jobs. And I wish more people realize that. But as a result of that turnover, education and reeducation is so critical. So I guess maybe it helps to have that education background that I have and then to be in that highly regulated industry of finance and in retirement accounts, which is what we focused on, which is a subset, more regulations, Having that experience and having that sort of interest already, because I also was heavily involved in employee training, all that stuff co mingles and mixes together and makes it so that I want to make sure that, yes, we want to make the sale. Of course we want to make the sale. But sometimes you want to educate the customer first and you want to make sure that their pain point isn't solved by just more information, right? And if we can provide that solution to them and be that thought leader, be that company that understands, okay, yes, we want to have the product readily available, but we also want to make it known that we get it. We absolutely get it. And so I would say in this industry in particular, and during these times when funding's being cut and things like that, sometimes instead of trying to just wait on the long tail to be shorter, sometimes it's really just about providing that type of service, that knowledge, that hey, we will be ready when you're ready because patience is an absolute virtue in this industry.
00:08:52 · Andres Figuera
[00:08:52] S1: It is. It is. And Jeremy, when you're mentioning understanding the pain points for the customers and that way being able to empathize with them and show that you get them, how are you able to do that analysis? Or where do you get the data that allows you to know the pain points that the customers are suffering from?
00:09:09 · Jeremy Byars
[00:09:09] S0: Definitely being a former product manager, this helps, but customer interviews are huge. One of my favorite parts of job is going on-site and just seeing what type of conversation we can have. Yes, we get some great takeaways and testimonials from them, but to truly understand, because the difference between a small utility and a large municipal utility that may be a metro area, It is a massive delta between the two. And even a large utility, say in our backyard here in Kentucky, completely different than say a utility up in Wisconsin or Minnesota, and we work with all of them. So it really does, I don't want to say every single one is unique because that's a cliche, but more times than not, there are unique things, unique pain points, unique interests, unique goals that they have. One of our products that we offer, it's called UPM, and it's the flagship offering on one side of our business, the software and utility management side. And a reduction of 25% of the phone calls coming into the office, that's one of the solutions that we provide, at least 25%, that makes a humongous difference if your team is, say, three people or less. If your team is staffed out 30, 40 large, may not be as big of a difference. And then we have to look at some of the other solutions that we provide as a part of the UPM package to really help their efficiency and so on. That simplifies a little bit, but it really does. And also too, the things that you wouldn't think people want to continue to do, the old fashioned, as we would say, ways of operating, simply because they don't know that there's a better option out there. And even if they might know there's a better solution, whether it be technologically related or just education or what have you, they might worry about the amount of training, the amount of the between the ear stuff, like really having to re set their thinking. And one of our biggest challenges sometimes, particularly in some of these smaller utilities, is just helping them to understand, hey, this transition that we can provide you to this better way of operating, it's not as scary as you might think it is. So again, it's all about shortening that tail, yes, of course, but you've got to wiggle your way in and provide that connection first.
00:11:36 · Jeremy Byars, Andres Figuera
And in a, again, technologically underserved industry, and I can't stress that enough, as scary as that sounds, we're talking about water coming into your home for drinking, we're talking about gas being piped into your home and electricity being provided. The fact that this is a technologically underserved industry is a bit terrifying. All that said, we're here to assist with making sure that you aren't underserved. [00:12:03] S1: No. And I can only imagine because I've also spoken with companies or agencies that also help out more orthodox industries get revamped and modernized with technology, and there's always this little bit of pushback that they have, because they've been doing these processes forever, and they aren't broken because they work, but they could be optimized and made better, so it's making them understand, as you're mentioning, that you will provide a value that will ease the headaches going forward, but they do need to do the work of making sure it's implemented correctly, and working in a cohesive way with United Systems in order to be able to really evolve into what is going on in the world with more advanced companies nowadays. But Jeremy, once you have understood the pain point that you know the company you wanna talk to, how then do you showcase that you learned these pain points and what channels work for you in that regard?