How Steve Cummins Reaches a Hard-to-Impress Tech Audience

[00:00:02] Hector: Hello and welcome to another episode of the how to scale a business podcast. My name is Hector Santiago Esteban and I am your host for today. Our special guest, Mr. Steve Cummins. He is a lead marketer and someone who really helps businesses figure out what And where the next place to get their customers are.

[00:00:20] Hector: So, Steve, thanks for hanging out with us today.

[00:00:22] Steve: Hey, nice to be here.

[00:00:24] Hector: It's always, you know, we were talking about it before we hit the record button, but there's always a new shiny object in marketing. And I think it's because marketers are good at creating shiny objects. , but there's so many rabbits that someone can chase and you have been been, seen as someone who comes in and helps someone identify, Kind of the Elmer Fudd of, business, if you will, but take us into your story and let us know, how you got into this role and, why, that part of the business, you found was, what you wanted to focus on and help businesses with.

[00:00:57] Steve: Yeah, you're right. I mean, marketing is one of the things I love about marketing. It is always changing, right? there's always something new to play with some new toys, some new approach. And, the other end of it is this stuff that is no longer working. And you have to know when to, cut that as well.

[00:01:10] Steve: So, I actually started life as an engineer. So I think that lends pretty well to the marketing world. Cause it's very analytical marketing is more and more analytical these days. I started off as an engineer, quickly moved into the business side of things cause I realized that was what I was more interested in.

[00:01:26] Steve: So I have always, sold or promoted. Tech products, semiconductors, electronic components, data center equipment, everything that I sell is sold to a technical audience. and so that in itself gives you some challenges because, marketing can be a little bit of a dirty word with a technical.

[00:01:45] Steve: audience out there. So you do have to be a little careful, whereas in the B2C world, you can be out there and you can be doing, you know, yeah, TikTok dances and you're very sort of in your face marketing. I think in the B2B tech world, you have to be a lot more focused on, I hate to say authenticity, cause that's been an overused word, but on really trying to help people out rather than, shining up that shiny object.

[00:02:09] Hector: Yeah. I've heard the two, I'm a media of file, if you will, you know, my idols are Walt Disney and Ted Turner and Vince McMahon, people who have created IP. And one of the things that, has emerged from that is, media can be educational or it can be informative, right? And ideally it's both.

[00:02:33] Hector: And it seems like what you're talking about is that the B2B space specifically, least I like in value with. You know, someone's there to learn or understand something that's going to help them in their business or improve them at their role or help, it's going to have some sort of effect on, whatever position that they have in their company.

[00:02:53] Hector: How do you see Value when it comes to marketing, especially when it comes to, a B to B service based sort of maybe even like a boring s kind of niche or industry. How might someone approach their marketing in that way?

[00:03:09] Steve: Yeah, I think it's a real challenge because let's be honest. A lot of tech products are not very exciting, although oftentimes they may not seem exciting to an outsider, but actually to the person who is using them or buying them, maybe there is some something quite cool to it. So I think there's a couple of things you have to worry about.

[00:03:26] Steve: One is making sure that whatever you're talking about is at the right technical level, So, You could just have the engineers and the developers going out there and telling the story, but you need some kind of a marketing twist on it to really get down to the crux of it, and get people in there initially.

[00:03:42] Steve: I think the challenge with marketing for tech products is to get that initial interest pretty quickly. Those people that are interested and then going to want to go and talk to the sales engineers, the development specialist, they're going to want to dig into the white papers. They're going to want to do demos. And so the tech folks can do that. I think the challenge with marketing is how do you get that initial interest and get people to the point where they say, you know what, I would like a demo of that product or I am going to spend the time to to read the white paper and I think the other part of it is how do you keep them interested along the way.

[00:04:14] Steve: So if it is a very dry subject, I mean, one of, the products I sold for a number of years was electronic components. So basically when you take the back of a TV, all those little components you see on the circuit board, they are not the most interesting thing. So how do you keep people on that journey of saying, you know what, the next time I need that widget, these are the folks that I'm going to talk to.

[00:04:34] Steve: So I think tech marketing is, is a combination of. Making it interesting, but also staying close enough to the technology that people realize, Hey, what you're talking about is actually something that's relevant to what I'm doing.

[00:04:47] Hector: Yeah, I would love to generally what is the answer? But I think before we get to that, I'm curious you're working with A number of people in this space and it's, kind of your, I love bringing on consultants cause they have a large sample size. And so I'm curious what either mistakes you see people making when it comes to implementing this stuff or what problems, the common symptoms that you see people coming into your emergency room with, if you will, and what some of those, commonalities are.

[00:05:14] Steve: Yeah. So I tend to work with, smaller sort of growth tech companies. So let's say 15 employees up to about a hundred employees. One of the reasons I like that space is first of all, they're pretty nimble. they don't need a lot of approvals to get stuff done. They just want to get stuff done.

[00:05:30] Steve: the other thing is they're typically at that stage where they know they need to do something with marketing, but they're not ready to hire a, full-time VP or, CMO. So they're serious about it. They want somebody to help 'em out. They come into the emergency room because one of two things.

[00:05:44] Steve: They either haven't got started on marketing yet, and they just don't know where to begin, or they've done this scattershot approach of, I'm going to do a little bit on LinkedIn. I'm doing some stuff on Reddit. I've done a couple of videos. None of it's working. so early days, a lot of the work is to really try and help them understand if you can only do one thing for marketing, what would be the one that's going to move the needle?

[00:06:06] Steve: so recently I would say for a lot of folks that's video because that is one of the most consumed media now for tech products. It tends to work pretty well. And that can be time consuming. So using that example, I would tell somebody. All right, we are just going to spend our time on video. We're going to be creating video.

[00:06:22] Steve: We're going to be finding out how to put video out there. We're not going to worry about, appearances on podcasts. No offense. we're not going to worry about, producing the best eBooks in the world. We are just going to do video. We're going to do video really well, get that established and then branch out from there.

[00:06:37] Steve: And I think the tendency is once you start doing marketing, particularly as a founder, you feel like you've got to do everything your niece is telling you, Oh, you should be on Tik TOK. somebody else's telling you, eBooks is, the way to go. You got to do webinars, I mean, everybody has their pet version of what to do.

[00:06:52] Steve: All of them are valid. But you just got to pick one and do it really well, because otherwise the danger is you do four or five things. You don't do any of them particularly well, you get lost in the noise. And that is the biggest challenge of the moment is how do you rise above the noise? Because everybody else is out there running webinars, doing their YouTube channel, whatever it may be.

[00:07:11] Steve: Yours is going to be really good for people to actually say, you know, I'm going to invest 10 minutes of my day to watch this video, or, I'm going to subscribe to this podcast because, you know, I get value out of it, particularly when you're a small company, how do you punch above your weight?

[00:07:24] Steve: You do it by being really good at one thing and get known for that and then you can build out from there.

[00:07:31] Hector: one of the things that came to me as you're talking about it is a lot of people will, break up the marketing into two sort of categories, strategy and tactics, there's the, Let's call it evergreen, right? There's the undying sort of strategies, if you will. And, people can use a different word. So, I think it's all semantics here, but there's the things that are unchanging. And then there's the tactics, the things that are, changing that are platform specific that you mentioned the tick tock or the webinar or do you find that your, um, I'll say your brilliance.

[00:08:03] Hector: Does it lie in identifying which path? is there a process there by which you're taking people to identify? Should I do tick tock? Do I do webinars? Do I do Facebook as I do that? Is that where a lot of the magic lies? Or is The secret sauce in actually the execution of those campaigns of once you actually, decide to do tick tock doing that effectively, because that is, a little different than running Google ads.

[00:08:31] Hector: Well, which is different than, running SEO. So they all have their unique flair. Where do you find or is it both? Where do you find, a lot of your expertise going?

[00:08:42] Steve: Yeah, I think people get caught up in this idea of, well, I've got to find the absolute perfect channel, a perfect platform to work with. and I don't think that's where the magic lies. You obviously. You want to be somewhere realistic, a very techie product probably doesn't need to be on tiktok as an example.

[00:08:57] Steve: Right? so you have to be a little careful as to which, avenue you pick, I actually think far more important that is working on your messaging so that it's very clear and obvious what it is That you're doing for somebody, you know, what is the problem that you solve? Why would they come to you?

[00:09:13] Steve: Why are you different to somebody else? Because we've all done it, right? We're all consumers. You read something and a headline or a claim to fame, and you think one of two things, you either think, well, yeah, so everybody does that. Or you go huh what is that right so you gotta get your messaging down pat where you really understand okay i know what these guys do and i know why i should be interested so that's the first thing you gotta do because no matter how good you are producing videos or running a podcast or whatever if you can't explain what it is that you do and and the problem you solve for people you're dead in the water.

[00:09:48] Steve: I think the second part then is once you've picked that platform, and again, I wouldn't spend a ton of time deciding which platform or which channel I would do something that your team is comfortable with. I mean, there's no point in deciding that you're going to do video and then find out that nobody in your team is willing to go in front of a camera, It's just not going to work. So you got to find something you're comfortable with something that you've probably done a little bit with and you've had some success with, but once you've picked that, and by the way, for a lot of tech companies, it's linked in. I mean, there's not that many opportunities.

[00:10:15] Steve: So LinkedIn, Reddit, there's a few that you would pick from. but then it really is the execution that you talk about execution in terms of, it's gotta be high quality, right? If you're going to do a podcast, make sure you're paying somebody to produce it for you. or to get to edit it afterwards, get really good quality.

[00:10:31] Steve: If you're doing video, make sure you got good equipment, make sure you're working with somebody who knows how to edit it. if you're doing linked in, it's got to be somebody who can write, then really understand whatever that channel is and really optimize the crap out of it. Right? So get very good at it.

[00:10:46] Steve: If it's linked in, Really trying to understand the algorithm, really experiment with, hey, if I post on a Monday at 2 p. m. versus, Wednesday at midnight, do I get better activity through it? Really hone your skill on that one thing. If you've got the right message and you understand how to use the channel, the rest of it Kind of takes care of itself. and then you've really got to look at the analytics and that can be actually a challenge with some of these platforms because the analytics aren't always great unless you are, paying for the enterprise package or whatever. So, you have to really understand what are the metrics that are going to tell you whether this is working or not.

[00:11:23] Hector: Yeah, when we get back from break, I'm really curious about some more of these. you mentioned some of the execution and I found that some of the most memorable ways to learn are through, successes and failures. So I'd love to hear about some of those. so we're gonna get into that right after this quick break.

[00:11:42] Steve: Hey, y'all. Today's episode is brought to you by Amplify Media and we are a podcast and content production company. Well, we'd like to think of ourselves as fractional media.

[00:11:49] Hector: It's like a fancy way of saying that we create all the content and stuff so that you can get your message out there because chances are you're probably listening to this. If you have a passion, a product, a mission, a message, something that you're trying to get out to the world, but you might not have the time, the team or the tech skills to do it.

[00:12:03] Hector: Well, if that's the case, we can help. Go to amplify media. com. That's a M P L a F Y media. com. You can also check the show notes for the link. And with that, let's back to Steve, Steve. One of my, favorite shows, is ridiculousness. I don't know if you're familiar with it. It's on MTV and it's, basically a, a show of people getting hurt over and over, you know, it's them falling off their skateboard or, running into a pole or,

[00:12:29] Steve: would fit with my sense of humor for sure. I got to check it out.

[00:12:32] Hector: and, uh, at first I didn't watch it with my kids because I was like, I don't want them getting any ideas. But then after a while they sat down and, they started to realize like, oh, I shouldn't do that. Like, let me not do that. Are there any, are there any stories and, and we don't have to name names or maybe we can, but are there any ideas of, what's the train wrecks is the word that I'm looking for things that you've either walked into or seen, like when you look at, like, here's something that, because I find that a lot of people can put a lot of and effort and energy into marketing and there's all this buildup that goes into something and it, like, it doesn't work and, a lot of times it's because, answers and the reasons it didn't work were off very clear.

[00:13:14] Hector: You know, you could have seen him in advance. But are there things like that that come to mind or cautionary tales that might help to illustrate sort of mindset that you try and bring to some of your clients?

[00:13:24] Steve: Yeah, I mean, there's multiple ways I can answer that. I mean, simplest one is to say social media will frustrate the crap out of you because you could spend ages writing, you know, the What you think is the perfect post beautifully thought out, you know, the right graphics, all of that, and you'll get no pickup on it.

[00:13:42] Steve: And then on a Sunday, you'll be sitting there and you'll write a one liner about, you know, God, that was painful watching the jets this weekend or something. and, you know, you'll get tons of tons of interaction on it. So, the cautionary tale behind that is you don't know what's going to work on social media.

[00:13:55] Steve: You do have to try a bunch of different things. so I guess the, the other basis behind that is. If you are creating some good content, let's say it's a video or a podcast, be prepared to push it out in multiple ways. Don't just think that one social media post is going to be perfect. something that, and I learned this the hard way I mentioned about video earlier and, make sure that you've got somebody who's comfortable on, tape.

[00:14:18] Steve: So I was working one time with a CEO and he is a great speaker, very gregarious, talk to him one on one. Great guy. stand up on a stage with a microphone. the audience love him. So we put him in front of a video camera and I'd never tested this with him before. And he absolutely froze.

[00:14:34] Steve: this was for a product launch that we were doing and, could barely get a coherent sentence out. And, so that was problem number one. And then problem number two, he didn't want to do a second take. So I'd say, all right, well, that was okay, but now let's try and, you know, like, you give stage direction kind of thing.

[00:14:50] Steve: It's like, no, no, I already answered that. Let's go to the next question. So that was excruciating because at the end of it, I thought I got to make something out of this. We've just had an hour with the CEO's time. I can't go back and say, yeah, we forgot to hit record something. so course retail for that is somehow try and do some kind of a screen test or dummy run or something to make sure that this person who's going to be on video is actually comfortable on video, because it had never occurred to me that somebody who is very natural and outgoing in every other Mode somehow would freeze up in there, so it may not be your CEO who's the right person to be on camera.

[00:15:25] Steve: Maybe it's just CTO. Maybe it's, one of the developers, just somebody who is very natural on there. Obviously, particularly with the tech audience has the gravitas or whatever to talk about it, but don't go by the title. Go by the person who is actually going to come across and be very natural.

[00:15:41] Hector: Yeah, it's something that we come across quite a bit in our line of work and helping people because we see that exact same thing where you'll have a high powered executive. It's super successful in everything that they've done. And once again, you give them a microphone, you put a camera in front of them and they become a total novice.

[00:16:01] Hector: so we've had to learn how to coach them through some of those basics. But, very important to kind of think through some of those, just thinking through stuff, I think is a good lesson.

[00:16:12] Steve: Yeah, and give yourself plenty of time to rework stuff, right? You do not want to be doing that on a deadline if it's like, Oh, and this thing's got to go live tomorrow. So yeah, make sure you got time for plan B if you need it.

[00:16:23] Hector: Yeah. I want to get to some of the, tactics stuff, because I'm, I too, I'm a kind of a marketing, I think there's a term it's like MarTech, right? Like Mar, I think that's what it's called. I'm a MarTech nerd. However, so I want to get to that. but before that, With your team and with your clients, what else are you trying to bring to These campaigns, regardless of the platform or regardless of the tactics, are there any other key pillars or key philosophies, key, you will, that you think really inform whatever, wherever you're marketing or promoting your product or service?

[00:17:04] Steve: Yeah, I think a lot of companies struggle with consistency. It's very tempting to try something different every month. we got this messaging out there. We're going to, ah, that's not really hitting. Let's, try something else. Or, you might also find people try different approaches on different platforms.

[00:17:19] Steve: So on Reddit, they have this sort of one personality, if you like, And then on LinkedIn, they're trying to be somebody else. And then on video, they're trying to be something else. So I think you got to be consistent in that sort of brand voice or brand style. If, you're a. Casual approachable company.

[00:17:33] Steve: You should be like that all the way. If you are a pretty formal company, then don't suddenly, stop putting videos out there that are jokes and very casual. It doesn't fit. So you want to be casual in your tone, but you also want to be casual in your messaging. So you want to make sure that if somebody reads a LinkedIn post.

[00:17:52] Steve: Goes to a blog, watches a video, listens to a podcast. They realize that it's the same company doing the same thing and pitching the same thing. Cause I think it's the more marketing you do, it's very tempting to say, Oh, we got to do something different over here. we've already talked about that, but the reality is very few people are.

[00:18:09] Steve: Consuming every piece of your marketing, so you want to have that thread that links them all together for some repetition. That's okay. Because most people don't pay attention to the whole thing. Anyway, don't feel as though everything's got to be fresh and everything's got to be new because we're not consumer marketing, right?

[00:18:24] Steve: Consumer marketing if you're selling shampoo or dog food or whatever, yeah, you constantly need to have something new out there and something different with b2b marketing with tech consistency is much more important takes time. I mean, this is the other thing, particularly with tech products, sales cycles along, I mean, pretty typical for my clients to have a sales cycle of 6 to 9 months.

[00:18:45] Steve: So you don't want to be changing your messaging all the time, right? when they start the process, they still want to be basically dealing with the same company in the same. Claims and the same messaging at the time they, closed the deal. So it's very different to what a lot of people would think of as marketing.

[00:19:00] Steve: When you're in these long sales cycles, you've got to make sure that you're carrying the thing right the way through.

[00:19:05] Hector: Yeah, I think there's a, I should memorize the stats, but I think the numbers are actually less important than the actual takeaway. And that's the study that Google did recently. And you might be familiar with it. And basically it said that someone needs to see your business for like something like I don't know, eight to 10 hour, eight to 11 hours across like seven different platforms on a variety of instances. I don't know. So someone knows the numbers out there and they're gonna, they're, they're shouting at the speaker, saying what the correct numbers are. The point is, is exactly what you're saying.

[00:19:38] Hector: It takes time and you need to be able to do it in a variety of different capacities and that consistency. You know, I think that a lot of, especially businesses, when they get into content creating. Or creating media or things like this is they know everything that they say and they're seeing it all the time.

[00:19:55] Hector: So they think that everybody else hears everything that they say as well. So they feel like they're repeating themselves all the time and it's like, no, no one even knows, no one's paying attention to you. you're, you would be lucky for them to be thinking about you a tenth of the amount of time that are giving yourself credit for, you

[00:20:15] Steve: think that's exactly true. It's very tough for the internal marketing team to, well, not to understand, they get it, but to just put yourself in those shoes of somebody has not been reading this stuff every day for the last two weeks. Right. The last time they saw it was three weeks ago. you gotta hit it up.

[00:20:29] Steve: Then, you know, the other, you were talking about my tech, and yeah, I'm a tech, I'm a techie. Right. So I love that stuff, but I think one of the least appreciated marketing Technologies is email, So many people go off to the, I got to get so many followers on LinkedIn. I got to get so many downloads on, YouTube, views on YouTube.

[00:20:49] Steve: the reality is as marketers, we want to get their email because we own that. We can use it however we want. We can send the messaging out that we want. We can be very consistent with it. So. I said at the beginning, you pick your channel, you do it really well, but really for most of us, the trick that we're trying to drive to is for somebody to volunteer and say, Hey, here's how you get in touch with me.

[00:21:09] Steve: And then, then we get into sort of the old traditional marketing, but most of what we're doing is really trying to get us to that point where somebody says, yep, I would like you to actively send me information.

[00:21:21] Hector: yeah, well, I think you answered my question, which is, what are you excited about? when it comes to tech, obviously, AI is a big thing. see a lot of these technologies that are able to, aggregate data and scrape information. I mean, there's all these wild things that you're like that they can do that.

[00:21:39] Hector: And that's legal,

[00:21:41] Steve: All right. Yeah.

[00:21:43] Hector: is there anything like either there on the, whether it's on the fringe or new that you feel you're excited about, or that might be worth people looking into

[00:21:52] Steve: Yeah. I mean, the first thing I say is for the kind of companies that I work with, a lot of this. Tech just it's not meant for their scale, it's meant for when you have marketing operations or a rev ops team and they can crunch all the numbers and do all the data analysis. So I look at it, I'm interested in it, probably not practical.

[00:22:09] Steve: one thing that I think is. It's quite effective because it's not being used much yet is personalized video and I don't necessarily mean I'm seeing some of it now being used in sort of cold outreach where somebody records a video and send it to you, maybe where I think it's really impactful is as part of the sales cadence.

[00:22:28] Steve: So maybe you've had that first. Discovery call with somebody getting to know you call and then follow up with an email. from my perspective, right, it might be, I would shoot a quick video, my face is in the bottom corner. I'm on their website and I'm saying, hey, here's a couple of things I think you could do to improve your.

[00:22:45] Steve: performance, So for tech companies, it may just be a sales engineer talking to camera and saying, Hey, you know what we talked about this problem you're having with X. I've been thinking about it. Here's a couple of other things you could take a look at. Right? So I wouldn't say it's high tech, but it is tech in that there's Platforms now like vidyard and loom and a few others that make it very easy for somebody in front of their computer to capture that quick 2 minute thing, send it off to somebody as a link. Nice thing about it is, if they've watched that video, right? So it gives you that follow up. So it's relatively low tech, but it's very accessible tech for.

[00:23:22] Steve: Small companies, detect that people get excited about, the AI, the scraping tools, all of that. It's expensive. It needs a dedicated person to, to work on it. and for most of the people I work with that, it's not the best use of their time. Personalized video one on one video, I think has a long way to go because not many people are doing it.

[00:23:39] Steve: So when you get that in your inbox, you're going to pay attention to it.

[00:23:42] Hector: Yeah, that's for sure. This is great stuff. I got one last question for you, but before we get out of here, if people want to get more info on, what you do, go deeper in your world, where's the best place to go?

[00:23:54] Steve: Yeah. so I always tell people to go to LinkedIn cause that's where I do most of my stuff. I also have a podcast. Doesn't everybody have a podcast these days called the marketing mix, where I talk specifically about B2B marketing for tech companies. and you know, you can find that wherever you listen to podcasts.

[00:24:07] Steve: So that, another good thing to check out as well. But yeah, absolutely. Send me a, link on LinkedIn. I'd be happy to chat to anyone.

[00:24:14] Hector: So we'll link those up in the show notes. You can find those there. last question for you, Steve, in your opinion, what is the secret to scaling a business?

[00:24:22] Steve: Ah, I think focus. And intentionality, right? So focus is not trying to be all things to all people. it's having a focus message. It's being very focused on what you want to do. And then intentional, why are you doing these things? I mean, even when somebody wants to talk to me about coming in and sort of helping them set out marketing, what are you trying to do with your marketing, Is it trying to increase brand awareness? Is it trying to grow your, your email list because you have investors and they, just want to show how you're scaling. So. very focused on what you're doing and understand exactly why you're doing it. and then the other part is you well know for a founder, you just got to have enthusiasm.

[00:25:00] Steve: If I talk to a founder that's just sort of going through the motions, then, they're not going to get where they need to be.

[00:25:05] Hector: Yeah, they're not gonna go. Yeah, they're gonna stay where they're at. Um, that's for sure. Well, I want to thank all of you, Steve listeners for hanging out today. It was was a pleasure being with all of you. We would be forever grateful for a rating or review wherever you get your podcast. And if you know someone who needs to hear this, hit that share button and send them a message.

[00:25:25] Hector: Let them know that you were thinking about him. You thought the episode might help. And, as always, like I said, it's great to be a part of the community with you. We'll see on the next one. Later y'all