“I knew this trade show was going to be a success. We knew it, because leading up to it, I could see people hitting our website. People downloading our white papers coming to this trade show, and that’s why we have so many people visiting our booth.”
John Hayes of Vecna Robotics joined us on the floor at MODEX 2018 in Atlanta to show us the company’s line of AGVs (from tuggers and palette jacks) to AMRs (like piece-picking and tote-picking). Vecna just celebrated their twentieth anniversary this year, in fact! At MODEX, they showcased a lot of products…but most particularly, their TRS (tote-retrieval system) robot that can deliver totes to picking robots.
Part of Vecna’s plan for their products and their customers is to focus on the future of automation, where many people envision almost-entirely human-free, lights-out warehouses. A future like that requires the ability to scale and expand, which not many traditional AGV purchases in the past would allow.
“The world’s changing. Things coming in the door [are] completely different now, and might be tomorrow. So to buy a solution that hems you in to a monolithic package and application is not the world that we live in.”
And as it turns out, the same thing goes for marketing techniques in our evolving world as well. Vecna knows that traditional marketing at events like MODEX is still going to bring in a large portion of their leads, but they also know that the trade shows do so on a bit of a cycle. They get fresh leads from events for about six months, then they have another six months to nurture them and bring in fresh leads from some other source: that’s where digital comes in.
Digital assets like marketing automation and website analytics are crucial components to the success of their sales team during the half of the year when trade shows aren’t as frequent. Both methods, however, are successful because Vecna is very deliberate in their marketing strategies and united corporate identity.
“The first thing you have to do in any organization…is first, you have to understand who you are, and what you do, and why do you care?…and clichéd as this is, you have to turn that into thirty seconds.”
Beyond that, John also explained to us just how valuable their CRM – SharpSpring – is for them. They use the system to rank leads based on where they are in the sales funnel. That software helps them see how their audience is reacting or responding to their nurture campaigns, which provides invaluable feedback.
“If companies aren’t using marketing automation, you’re wasting your marketing dollars…[it] allows you to put your message out, and it allows you to track who actually sees that message and who responds to it; and it also allows you to see who responds to it multiple times…
“…I always say… ‘Sales leads the company. Marketing leads everything.’ ”
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Author: Rica
Since the inception of IndustrialSage back in 2017, Rica has been one of the driving forces building IndustrialSage. As Marketing Manager, she's dedicated to producing amazing content on the site. There's little she loves more than storytelling: helping to explain new ideas in order to aid others in solving their problems. Fortunately, that's what IndustrialSage is all about.
