How Segmenting Account-Based Marketing Increases Manufacturers’ Sales

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Catherine Bruce, VP of Product Marketing for Acuity Brands, joins us to share how segmenting account-based marketing can increase manufacturers’ sales.

Danny:

All right, so let’s jump into today’s episode. I have a very special guest here, I have Catherine Bruce here who is the VP of Product Marketing for Acuity Brands. Catherine, thank you so much.

Catherine:

Thanks for having me, thank you.

Danny:

Oh yeah, pleasure. Super excited. So, all right, for those who aren’t familiar with Acuity, there’s probably two people out there who don’t know. Everyone else should.

Catherine:

You’re very kind.

Danny:

Tell me, tell us, what do you guys do?

Catherine:

So, Acuity Brands is a technology company. I know a lot of our employees and a lot of people that are familiar with Acuity, may naturally call us a lighting company. In fact, I have to blame myself for saying that a lot when I explain what I do to my family. A lot of the base of our foundation and where we came from was a lot of lighting brands, but over the last decade, maybe 15 years, we’ve really turned ourselves into a technology company, combining lighting controls, electrical drivers, emergency drivers, and then building management controls, and IoT. Bringing the IoT into everything. And, how we can really create this holistic solution for the different needs of different building occupants, building owners?

Danny:

Yeah. So, I think it’s a great thing because I think a lot of people, traditionally… “Yeah, well, we’re a lighting company, that’s what we do,” but a technology company, I totally get that. That’s awesome. And it makes a lot of sense, especially when we get into a little bit more of the meat of what I want to talk about today. But, before that, real quick, I just want to get a sense, we talked about a little bit before, like your background. Like how did you get into marketing? What’s that story look like?

Catherine:

Right, so I actually started as a reporter and a television, local news producer. Actually, almost a little bit more than half my career now is with Acuity, which was a different realization for me. Yeah. But, for a long time, most of my career was into local television news as a producer and a reporter. And once I moved to Atlanta, I decided I really kind of wanted a break, I wanted a career change. I really enjoy storytelling. That’s part of the reason I got into journalism and broadcasting. I just, I love writing, I love telling stories, I love telling people’s stories. So I didn’t… I wanted to do something that I could continue that aspect of my career. But I really wanted to have a weekend off, or have holidays off. So I decided I wanted to do something in marketing, and I thought product marketing would fit in cause you’re telling the story of why this product is the best new thing. Whatever it is.

Danny:

Well, and it sounds like it works. So you’ve been there for a minute now.

Catherine:

Eight years, yeah, mm-hmm.

Danny:

Yeah. And, Acuity who’s got, just a handful of products. Right?

Catherine:

Yes. Just a handful. We have, I think I counted the other day, it’s 38 brands now with a recent acquisition of The Luminaires Group. So that’s five new lighting brands.

Danny:

That’s what I like sku-wise..how many? Any idea?

Catherine:

I believe we have about 7 million skus.

Danny:

Seven million skus?

Catherine:

I think so.

Danny:

Okay. That’s…a few.

Catherine:

Right, yeah. So we have several brands spanning lots of different product categories, whether it’s industrial lighting, outdoor lighting, indoor lighting, residential lighting, controls, building management controls, our brands span the entire country. We have some software and build Operating Systems technologies. Our Atrius brand is our IoT brand out in California. We have, our building management brand has offices in Lyon, France and Montreal, Canada. And we have offices in Des Plaines Illinois, and Granville Ohio and Atlanta, Georgia, we’re all over the place. So yeah.

Danny:

So, yeah, sounds like it.

Catherine:

Lots of products.

Danny:

That’s a little bit to manage. So that you talked about earlier how Acuity is a technology company, not a lighting company. And a little bit about that transformation you’ve had there. One of the things that I think a lot of companies, your traditional product, or that… I’ve got a B2B product and they’re manufacturing them, You mentioned earlier, you have this whole IoT platform, this whole like technology piece. Now, you guys are a technology company, making that shift and that transition from saying, “We manufacture and sell this widget, this X piece is one thing, but then now it’s connected.” And whatever that means, that means that can mean a million different things…

Catherine:

To a million different people.

Danny:

Yes. Exactly. How have you guys managed to kind of make that transition? You’re kind of like shifting that a little bit. Because obviously, there’s a lot of challenges with that, that we’ll unpack here in a little bit. But what does that look like for Acuity?

Catherine:

You know, there isn’t a secret sauce to it all. Because we have so many people that have different ideas of just thinking of the word “connected, embedded, integrated.” Within our own company, we were all defining things differently. So it’s not a speedy process. We have to evaluate, what do these terms mean internally? What do they mean to our different customers? Because we’re selling these different integrated or embedded solutions, for different reasons, to different people, and everybody has a different value proposition as to why they might want some of these controls or these more sophisticated technologies embedded within their lighting fixture, whether it’s lowering the total cost of ownership, or enabling an easier design process or installation.

We do these things to try and bring some value to each of our customers. Because our customers are the contractors, they are the distributors, they are the architects and lighting designers. They’re also our lighting agencies. They’re our partners, but they’re our customers, too. So we’re trying to figure out how to create the solution be created in a way, and tell the story in a way that it doesn’t seem complicated. Because the whole point we’re doing it is because it’s not complicated. Let us do the complicated stuff and you reap the benefits of the simplicity.

Danny:

Right? Well that goes back to a little bit of that, you know, product development piece and understanding that but I think one of the principal challenges that I see is that traditionally, where you would go through your distributor, you would go through the architects and the GCs or the lighting designers. And instead of saying, “Hey, here’s the lighting and it’s… this is going to fit the room and the style and the feel, and here’s the use case for it, this is going to help drive employee engagement or whatever that is, whatever that buying decision.”

Now, all of a sudden, these things are connected. And there’s some amazing things that you guys are doing with them. But, somebody was sharing like a use case, like retail, for example, and collecting a lot of data, rolling out Wi-Fi throughout using your existing lighting infrastructure. And then but there’s a massive amount of data you’re able to go to take and fuel that back into the organization.So it’s whole, like, different business objective at that point. So how, what? Yeah, what do you…how do you guys do it? How does that influence in your marketing or your go to market strategy with that relative to? Okay, where it’s not just lighting anymore now it’s like this whole connected platform that has this whole realm of ramifications that are really awesome. But what’s this? How do you package that story?

Catherine:

Right. Very delicately… So a couple things to unpack there. Like you said earlier, there’s probably only two people that don’t know who Acuity is. We keep our main customers, contractors and distributors, even our agents. Like they know the brands,

Danny:

Right, yeah.

Catherine:

The brands that are part of Acuity, right. But when you start putting a connected solution together, it’s the brands that are connecting to each other and then it becomes this Acuity Brands solution. So there’s been almost a pendulum of, “Let’s Focus on the brands!” “No, let’s focus on Acuity!” “Let’s focus on the brands!” “But what about all of this connected stuff?”

Okay, so there’s this happy medium of where we want our influencers and our end customers to know the Acuity Brands name of the solution that’s connected, but that’s a subset of customers. You can say, that many contractors are still walking into their distributors and they say, I want that Lithonia troffer, that BLT here, or that IBG or that downlight, I want that Juno downlight. So we can’t forget about that. We have to do marketing for both the other pieces. When I started at Acuity, a lot of what product marketing was – the marketing manager role – was sales enablement. It wasn’t demand-gen necessary, demand generation. It was flyers and web copy and spec sheets, and merchandising…..

Danny:

Very transactional.

Catherine:

Very transactional and we were creating tools and packages and marketing messaging so that our internal sales team can teach and sell to the lighting agencies. And then the lighting agencies can then teach and sell to the distributors and the contractors and the design community. But now that we have this bigger solution, we have to tell that story, we have to teach them that piece of the story, which has created a lot of changes in how we do training and education and the different events that we go to, and how we go to those events as Acuity not necessarily only the different brands, but we still go to some events as the individual brands.

Because we have so many channels to market now. We’re either selling directly with our corporate accounts teams, where we have some old products that we sell OEM to other lighting manufacturers. And then of course, the big pieces our consumer and industrial or commercial and industrial channel, where we’re selling through the electrical distributor network. So we have partners that are just buying, I just need to stock up on this product. But then they’re even also dabbling in the, I want to create this renovation solution of products.

Danny:

Yeah.

Catherine:

So we’re trying to help teach them how these lighting fixtures embedded with our nLight controls are the best way to renovate XYZ spaces, or here’s a good, better best for these different renovation situations. Everybody’s trying to dabble in different pieces of the channel, so it makes marketing a little bit more interesting now, cause we’re not just doing sales enablement anymore, we’re doing more training and education and especially on the IoT and the corporate account side of things, we’re doing more account based marketing.

Danny:

Okay. Yeah.

Catherine:

Targeting certain customers that we know we want to be partners with or we know we want to surround.

Danny:

Yeah.

Catherine:

And make sure they know who Acuity is and what all of our brands stand for, and the value proposition of a connected solution.

Danny:

Yeah, now that makes a lot of sense. I mean, because at that point, it’s really going to be a little bit more like solution selling ,really at that point. So, backing that up from a marketing standpoint, to your point, if you guys are employing an ABM strategy to be able to say, “Hey, look,” it’s almost like, here… I’m inferring… is it more like, “Hey, this, here’s the capabilities, here’s what we can do, here’s use cases,” kind of thing? Because it’s just, it is, I mean, honestly, the use cases can be almost endless I imagine.

Catherine:

Mm-hmm. Yes. I mean, in some cases, we’re trying to stay focused on certain vertical applications. Because we want to make sure that we’re scalable there.

Danny:

Sure. Yeah.

Catherine:

Make sure we’re hitting it hard and we’re scaling. We’re all about efficiency. So the account based marketing is a lot in the national accounts in our Atrius selling, and bigger solution selling, pulling the package together. But what my team has started… what my team has started dabbling in account based marketing, maybe around with our co branding with our lighting agencies. So one of the biggest struggles I faced earlier on when I was at Acuity was, I couldn’t do anything other than sales enablement, because I could never say, “Hey, look at this great product, it solves this problem for you, contractor. Go buy it,” because I couldn’t tell him where to buy it! But if we co-market with our lighting agencies who might not have the marketing power that Acuity has, we can grow our brand together, you can go the brand of Lithuania, or Juneau or Mark Lighting together with the agency and grow the agency’s brand, help them grow. And then point the sales qualified leads to them.

Danny:

Yeah, no, that’s great. And it’s really… I think a lot of manufacturers struggle with that a little bit, that whether it is, “We’re a technology company, and we’re selling, connected products or what have you that have bigger business case objectives,” but really making it easy, and helping them. Looking at it from a sense of, we have two different customers, you’ve got your end user, but you also have, you’re talking about the lighting agencies and helping them to be better and sell better. And then that way likely, and I don’t know how you guys are structured there, but I would imagine that they’ve got other products that they may be wrapping, and they might say, “Oh, well, what’s the difference being this one or this one? While these guys are here, Acuity is helping us, they’re driving leads, they’re helping my team to be able to sell into this a little better.” So that’s awesome.

Catherine:

Yep. That’s the power of Acuity.

Danny:

That’s awesome. That’s very good. So I actually see you bring up ABM and that is a pretty, it’s been pretty hot for the last several years. How did you guys…pivoting a little bit… How did you like, roll out with it because it does sound like a great way of being able to kind of sell in even with these… this connected piece, like, “Let’s target these groups of people,” which, I’m going to back up for our audience who aren’t- most of them are familiar, but some aren’t: account based marketing, instead of saying, “Hey, let’s just put our messaging out to just kind of everybody who might fit in here,” it’s like, “Let’s focus on a group of maybe 100 companies or 500,” whatever that is, “And they’ve got a defined challenge, And we have a solution or something around there. And we’ve got sales people, some of our distributors are trying to get in there. So it’s like a multi pronged approach, where we’re going to be focusing on that.”

Catherine:

Right, you surround the account, and always so….

Danny:

“You guys just pop up everywhere!”

Catherine:

Yes.

Danny:

That’s amazing.

Catherine:

Right, right. To every person that’s associated with that company, maybe?

Danny:

Yeah, exactly.

Catherine:

They’re going to get sick of seeing our ads. But yeah, so it was hyper focused on our IoT brand and the different value that that brand, that solution could bring. I guess an example would be, maybe a retailer is trying to increase the shopping cart size of their customers, right? Now with lighting fixtures, we can help create indoor positioning within their stores, that they can then have their, vendors their suppliers, of goods and merchandising, send advertisements and coupons to their shoppers, they can have help their shoppers navigate the store. They can offer customized or personalized coupons or journeys for the customers using their apps and all with the hope of maybe increasing the shopping cart size, right?

Danny:

Yeah.

Catherine:

And all of that infrastructure to provide them that data comes from the lighting fixtures and the controls and sensors and building management controls, it’s all an interconnected web of data, that is talking to each other right? So when we did account based marketing, retail is a big vertical that we’re going after. So, we may go after retail customers from an account perspective, we want to talk to the marketing team so they know how they can market, we want to talk to the IoT team so they understand the securities implications, and the infrastructure that needs to be put in place. We want to talk to the finance side of it because they can help see the ROI on a renovation. But you want to talk to facilities too, because facilities have to implement the the lighting design and the installation and the renovation, So you have to surround that account, with the different value proposition for each account. You can’t take the same message to all of them. And that’s what we’ve been doing with our account based marketing. That’s just a little piece of all of our markets.

Danny:

That one of the 7 million products.

Catherine:

Yes. That one of the 7 million products.

Danny:

I think that sounds, that’s awesome. And that makes all the sense in the world. I mean, because again from a sales standpoint, I think you hit the nail on the head in terms of messaging. The messaging is different and understanding the decision makers or the influencer certainly on that. It’s a lot more of a sophisticated sell. So it’s not just, “Okay, a few people, Here are the pain points,” like, now there’s a million pain points you’ve got to address. “Well, how easy is it to roll out with? What does it look like? We were just wanting to, we just wanted to get lights for a darn thing, Now it’s like this whole thing!” It’s opening up this whole foray in a retail environment like, “Oh, well, we didn’t know that. We didn’t think this was possible! How would that look like?” and I would imagine that there’s a lot of challenges that come with that. But there’s also a lot of great, great opportunities.

Catherine:

Right.

Danny:

Well, it definitely sounds like there’s… it’s one of those things that iterates… you mentioned, somebody told us earlier on, it was a great phrase: “You try something out. You nail it, and then you scale it .” It kind of sounds like that’s what you…

Catherine:

That’s exactly what Acuity has instilled in me and all of the employees, is: you fail fast, if you do. Fail fast, but try new things. And then when you nail it, scale it. That’s it. That’s a great phrase.

Danny:

I can’t trademark that, it’s got to come from somebody that we had on a previous episode, but I love it. I use it all the time.

Catherine:

Right? Yeah,

Danny:

It makes sense for real. Well, listen, Catherine, I really appreciate the time and just sort of sharing what you guys are doing, areas that you found success, and obviously as we move into this, I mean, it’s there’s no right answer. There’s probably no one wrong answer. And I think what you just said there with just sort of the the Acuity way of just experimenting, and trying to figure that out, I think that’s…kudos to you guys for doing that. And not being afraid to fail, and trying new things. And it’s really truly a pillar of innovation.

Catherine:

I can’t take all the credit. Not at all. There are a lot of really really smart people at Acuity, that mad scientists, people crunching the numbers that are all part of like helping us make the decision to shift gears in different ways. And I think we’ve pivoted a lot at Acuity over the years that I’ve been there. I mean, I think I mentioned earlier, I look back on the eight years; it seems so slow in the…when you’re in it. But when I look back, we have changed so much. Even our website, when I got to Acuity, we had a corporate site. And we had 20 plus individual brand sites and dozens of little product micro sites. And that was eight years ago.

None of them were mobile friendly, even eight years ago, and now almost all of our brands are on the same platform. We have this wonderful search tool that’s part of our sites that is now extremely powerful using all of the best practices. We’re able to scale as we acquire new teams, new brands, we can bring them into that platform. And it just makes sense now from a digital marketing perspective. So that I mean, like, that’s a huge thing. The fact that we’re doing account based marketing, we’re actually doing demand-gen versus just sales enablement. Like that it’s been great to be a part of that transition.

Danny:

That’s awesome. Well, it sounds like you guys are doing some great stuff there. Tackling that challenge head on. I love the whole ABM piece, as far as it sounds like it sounds like a really great strategy on how to tackle that, that I imagine you guys just kind of take that and go one space to another and keep dominating, so…

Catherine:

I hope.

Danny:

That’s awesome. Well, Catherine, thank you again, so much for coming. If somebody wants to learn more about Acuity brands…

Catherine:

AcuityBrands.com.

Danny:

Perfect Yeah, thank you. Thanks for coming on.

Catherine:

Thank you for having me.

Danny:

All right. Okay, so wow, my head is about to explode. A lot, Lot of really cool things that we just talked about there, if you are a marketer, or you’re in sales, and you’re kind of facing the same thing where, there’s a lot of innovation going on in the industry, relative to products where they were, they were a traditional widget, if you will, and now it’s a connected widget, and it’s like, “Oh, my gosh, there’s all these amazing, amazing things you can do with it!” That obviously, is a unique challenge.

Think about some of the things that Catherine was talking about just a sense of leveraging ABM, I think a big thing actually we talked about was- and this is my fault- I love… I can get super excited, “Oh, it’s connected! And here’s the solution and this solution, we can do all of it!” Well, that kind of is a little bit of a challenge, focus on that, figure out that solution. And making sure that now the big thing is that the people who are going to be making the decision on that new connected product, a lot of different messages around the different people and they’re going to have different value prop. And so we need to be able to twist that using account based marketing. ABM is a really great way of being able to do that. So there’s a million other takeaways from that, take one or two and implement them, think about it, especially as we roll into 2020.

So that’s all I’ve got for today. If you have any questions I’d love for you to send them to us while I answer them for you on show industrialsage.com/questions. So thanks for listening and watching and I’ll be back next week with another episode of IndustrialSage and I’m done rambling. Have a great day.

 

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