Ryan Chapman, Director of Sales Campaigns at Honeywell

You know, marketing needs to give that initial value proposition that's going to get your customer interested. And then sales is going to need to show up and and you know, we say prove points in marketing, but then sales really needs to prove that through a conversation and make you believe it. All right. Today on the show, we bring on Ryan Chapman, who is a director of sales campaigns at Honeywell. Ryan, welcome to the show. Thank you very much, Richard. It's always a pleasure to hang out with you, and uh thank you for having me here today.

Yeah. Well, I'm really glad to have you on and and those of you who watched our show before, you'll see that we're in a a different location. So, I want to thank our good friends over at Anthem. Uh this is the Anthem Studios where they film a lot of podcast and other things. And so um our friend Nathan Yarion over there at over here at Anthem said we could use their studio for this conversation since we're both here in Houston. Yeah, this is a great spot. Well, Ryan, thanks for being on. Uh, you know, as you know, our our um our tradition here on the Above the Clouds Stories from the Boardroom podcast is to ask each guest, what if their company were a bird?

What bird would they be? What's your spirit bird of your company? Okay, so the spirit bird of the company and and I told you this um kind of pre-podcast that this was the hardest question for me out of all the ones that we reviewed was the what is the spirit bird of the company? What's my spirit bird? Because tricky. Well, it's honestly something I've never given a whole lot of thought about, you know. So, it was it was a nice exercise to sit down and think about what you never contemplated your spirit bird.

Uh, no. Well, um, I would say at one point that I I was a a blue J, but I've flown the coupe. So, excellent. That'll make more sense later in the podcast, I think. Um, that's something Richard and I have in common. That's right. That's right. Um or when I went to uh one customer one day uh I think it was it was a customer in Australia and I told them that I worked for SlumberJ. This was previous job guys. Uh she put down on my name name tag slumber J like it was a bird. I thought that was funny. It's a very lazy bird.

That was a very lazy bird. Slumber bird. That's it. So um but anyway getting back to uh current company Honeywell. Um what bird would they be? And I think it would be a hawk. Maybe you get that one a lot for companies. Um, Honeywell is definitely a very uh they're very focused. They're very strategic. Um, I I want to say aggressive, and I don't mean aggressive in a like anybody beats me when I go to work sort of way. I mean, they're uh they um have aggressive targets and goals and, you know, pursue them with purpose and uh and so I think a hawk is probably an appropriate way to to represent kind of their company culture.

I like it. Laser focused. That's it. Laser focus. Eye on the prize, you know. Let's get it done. That's great. That's a good one. Uh, hawks are are um really interesting birds. We had we had somebody that said they were their company was a bald eagle. Okay. Pretty majestic. But I think uh hawks are even better than bald eagles because bald eagles can also be scavengers. Okay. Hawks, I think uh they only like fresh meat. That's it. Only only go up to the good stuff. Right. All right. Well, um, Ryan, why don't you walk me through your career and and how did you wind up at Honeywell?

Oh, okay. Um, how far back should I start? You can go all the way all the way back uh to to the take us to the beginning. How'd you get interested in in this wild world that of uh sales and marketing? So, when I was seven, I stop. You said go way back, so I'm going really holding it back. Way back machine. So when I was seven years old, I had my own lemonade stand. My my dad has an automotive repair shop. They still have an automotive repair shop. And so I was selling lemonade. Um and I was pretty good at at selling lemonade, you know, and so I think that uh he had a a friend who was in sales and he said, "Look, this this kid is probably going to end up in sales one day, right?" And um uh so leave that there for a minute.

Um, fast forward, I didn't end up trying to end up going into sales. I I went to uh to school for mechanical engineering. Got myself an engineering degree. Um, at that point, I had never after I graduated, I never left the United States. Went on a backpacking trip to Europe for about 6 weeks and decided that the world was a big place and I wanted to see more of it. And I started actively looking for companies that would send me abroad. And so Slumberge, now known as SLB, uh gave me an opportunity to go work as a wline engineer in West Africa and Angola.

Oh, it's pretty exotic first place to to live outside of the United States. It was a pretty Yeah, it was a it was different, right? Um and I probably had to go go home and look it up on the map, you know, after after I got the job offer. But I took it uh got there. Um definitely opened my eyes to a lot of things. um ended up working for them for 18 years almost 18 years. So I did Angola then Brazil uh Australia, Scotland and so you know was doing you know let's call it field engineering um at some point once again the company recognized that sales was probably the right place for me and so when I moved to Australia I went as a sales engineer and I did sales um ended up doing sales management uh was a sales manager or director for multiple business lines in Europe and then at some point um it was about time to leave that that assignment.

I wanted to come back to the United States cuz now at this point I've been out been out of the US for a long time. And so when I was thinking about what kind of bird that I would be, it was uh I I looked up that a swallow will migrate very long distances and return home. Yeah. And so I felt like I kind of did that. So maybe swallow would be my bird. You know, I it was time to come home and I got a call from from one of the business line directors and they said, "Hey, Ryan, you're going to get you're going to get a letter to go do Markcom or marketing communications." And I was very very surprised about that time cuz I um I had been doing sales for like eight or 10 years at this point and I was, you know, uh like to think that I was pretty good at it.

And so I didn't understand at that time why in the world the company would kind of want to take me out of that game and uh and put me into another direction. So yeah, I didn't didn't really understand that. And then I started working and um you know I started working in Mark and then that's when I really started to get that appreciation for um marketing and sales being the same thing but marketing just starting a lot earlier. I mean, I know there's all kinds of definitions about what is what is different between marketing and sales or the one to many or many to one and and all of that, but it really is, you know, marketing needs to give that initial value proposition that's going to get your customer interested and then sales is going to need to show up and and you know, we say prove points in marketing, but then sales really needs to prove that through a conversation and make you believe it and then help help you uh help guide you and tailor that to your to your specific situation.

Yeah, absolutely. Wow, that's a uh that's a that was an interesting ride, huh? At at Slumber, even before that. Uh do you remember your pitch at the lemonade stand? Oh, my pitch at the lemonade stand. I was um I had a bit of a captive audience. That helps, right? So, it was it was Florida. It was hot. Captive audience. So, the I was in the right place at the right time. I also noticed that between 7 to 11, my sales trailed off and so I was a lot more successful when I was cute or cuter and it was maybe my um my insistence was a little less annoying because I was smaller and cuter and so that's you know I had to start sleeping the floor around, you know, 11 or or 12 when I couldn't rely on that anymore.

Um, yeah. But yeah, I think I probably just politely annoyed you until you bought my bought my lemonade. Persistence, you know, I know some full grown salespeople today who uh who could learn that uh learn that trait. That's true. Persistence is important. Um, probably the best thing about that business was my parents paid for all of my uh material cost. Ah, so I had no overhead and I was just it was a pure profit operation. So, I was really making good money for an 8-year-old. Yeah. Nice. Yeah. Your your uh uh COGS were uh was was pretty good, huh?

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you know, zero zero dollars. I was was raking it in. It's like mafia uh business model. Yeah. It was all into the table, you know, taxes. Well, you got to be careful with that because the IRS might uh they might want to know how much are you charging perh per glass of lemonade. Well Well, I I I don't know if they watch your podcast. If they do, I think the statute of limitations is probably on my on my side there. That's good. That's good. So, tell me tell me your job at at Honeywell. Tell me a little bit about what what does your day-to-day life look like there in your new role.

Okay. So, at at Honeywell, they they asked me to do something called sales campaigns. When I was applying for jobs, it was a good fit because they were looking for someone who had sales and marketing experience. Mhm. And so initially what they wanted me to look at was um selling things where they have excess um stock. And so I was like, "Okay, you know, and I know how to sell things. Let's get in there and we'll we'll do all the all the sales stuff." Um what I found out was they make so many things. so many things that a lot of my job at the moment is figuring out what can be sold so we can um can give good direction to the salespeople because I can't send a send a list of you know raw materials or non-ellable things or whatever to the sales people.

So I actually spent a lot of time working with supply chain just to generate good clean list of what can be sold, get that to the salespeople, give them give them the right prices. And so I'm running a bit of a project on on being able to do that and we're successful in that space. And then after that or let's say in the past four or five months, I've only been there about nine months now. Uh I've been working on doing some of what you would think more of as sales campaigns. So looking at the uh the value proposition with the sales people um going and helping marketing understand what the sales people need to you know as let's say to soften the beach to to get them in the door generating some uh account-based marketing campaigns that are going to put that message out there in the world and then seeing how that flows through the kind of system into a into leads that sales can follow up on.

And so it really um you know in these big companies making sure that product management, sales and marketing are all rowing in the same direction is is actually a a pretty tough challenge, right? Because they all have kind of different uh backgrounds, personality types, objectives, ideas. And so there's a handful of products that I'm, you know, spending a lot of time with them. First I'll go talk to the offering manager and say why should somebody buy this thing that you made? Yeah. A good question. And then you know going to the salespeople and saying okay the offering manager thinks this is the reason that people should buy this.

What what are you hearing from your customers? You know what is you know which of these value propositions actually resonate with them? and then going to marketing and saying, "Hey, this is this is now the ad copy we're going to use to generate that um generate that interest and then also helping them tailor those uh sales presentation. You know, marketing a big output of marketing is the sales presentations that the sales people need to use to sell sell." And so, and then helping them, you know, understand what um what's the product, you know, that their internal customer, the salesperson needs.

And so just back to the slumberj experience when I was had became Markcom um I eventually figured out why they did put me in that position and I think a lot of it had to do with exactly what I'm talking about now is that sales is an internal customer. So being previously one of those internal customers I spent a lot of time at slumberj as well trying to make sure that the material that sales was getting was was fit for purpose. Yeah, for sure. And I think, you know, especially well, you touched on a couple things that I think are interesting.

You know, when you first started, just making sure you had the ground truth on the products and, you know, all those things. I think that is a a way to miss the, you know, whole first rung of the ladder if you don't go through all that stuff. I mean, it seems a bit tedious. And, you know, for the people who watching this have worked for really big companies with massive portfolios and I don't know how many SKs does your company have. I can't even imagine. Oh, just so I work for the industrial automation part and I'm working closely with five out of seven of the business lines or what they call um GBEs and 500,000.

Oh, I would say. Yeah. Yeah. That'll uh you know that's that's one hell of a spreadsheet. Imagine. Yeah. Well, well, there's there's a powerbi that I have that for one of the business lines won't won't load everything. I have to do it in by region. Wow. That is that's a lot. So, there's a lot of stuff, right? Sure. And it's easy for things to slip through cracks or, you know, the pricing wasn't updated. And so I could imagine that if if you don't go through that due diligence like you did could really wind up um getting the sales people to you know sell things that are priced wrong or no longer in stock or not available in their area.

So there's you know could be fraught with you know risky and uh uh tough things that you know would could um betray the trust between sales and marketing with the with the sales team. Right. Yeah. Well, well, you know, I think that, you know, the salespeople are knowledgeable and and if I give them a a part number that they know is doesn't make sense. They're gonna, you know, they're going to know that. Um, but it really would kill the credibility if we did, right? Say, "Here's a list of stuff to sell." And they're like, "Well, half of this is not even sellable." Then who's nobody's opening my email anymore, you know?

That's we want this new guy in here. Yeah. This this weirdo, you know. Wow. That's great. And I and I love how you described how you were working with in between, you know, being that um that point person between sales and marketing. And we see uh we see that a lot with our clients that they don't have a role like that many times. Mhm. And it's nearly impossible without having somebody in between those two roles to to be that broker and to communicate the messaging. I don't know what it is. I think marketers are good communicators and I think sales people are good communicators but sometimes they don't communicate very well with each other.

It is and you talk to everybody and everybody's got this uh problem um that sales and marketing don't don't seem to interact maybe as much as they should. I think everybody's got their own uh their own objectives and uh and things to work on. Um in the oil industry it was always geologists and drillers and we would joke joke a lot about that. Um, oh yeah, those the those two are uh always always at odds. The drillers were always uh tougher and uh had more budget so they usually win, right? And most companies who controls the dollars is the one who who's going to win.

Yeah. Just thinking about that that you know that dynamic uh between the between marketing and sales. when you were in sales, how how much of the uh how much work how much customization work did you have to do when with the marketing materials because I because I was probably one of the people who helped either directly made or oversee saw the making of a lot of those materials. So, so you have kind of two two issues in big most big companies and you know I've look I mean I've only got experience in two but I've talked to people who who work for others right and this seems to be um seems to be across the board you have a problem with a distributing the material correctly and um and a lot you know a lot of that happens on shareepoints or through email or you know a guy and that's how you get the the material right um a lot of companies today are solving that with uh good sales enablement platform.

So hopefully as we move forward that becomes less of an issue. And then you have, you know, marketing needs to create uh material that kind of works for everybody. Um but what I what I've seen is that marketing sometimes wants to say this is the message and then sales you need to go deliver that that message. I was even told one time that uh we don't want sales to modify our material and and for me that was the exact opposite of what we should be doing. What what the the material that marketing should provide should be um should be customizable because it is literally sales job to take the value proposition and tailor it to a customer.

And so their material should be made for them to do that. And if they're not doing that properly, the problem's not with the marketing material, it's with the sales people, you know, they they need to be able to do that. But you got to give them something good to start with. Yeah. Um, but a lot of the times I would I would take a whole things from many, many different spots and then make my own decks. Um, which was appropriate, but I'm sure it would have um made my marketing communications manager very upset at the time if you saw any of the stuff that I was was making as a sales manager.

For sure. Yeah. you know, um I used to really when uh when I was at at SLB, I would always get really uh upset when I would see that the salespeople had like really changed things because they didn't necessarily uh it was all engineer sales people, right? So, they didn't necessarily appreciate the aesthetics and we went through when we did it. And so, I'd always be really frustrated with that. And then when I left SLB and I went to work for a uh branding firm here in a B2B marketing firm here in Houston and uh I was in a BD role there essentially and uh you know so they I was like where's the stuff like give me the brochures give me the sales deck you know what you know what do we have do we have case studies you know I need I need stuff and so I I went and I gathered all that stuff and I looked at it and I did exactly what you described and I was like this is going to like I can't use this for this client in this industry or this particular person in the buying cycle and I changed everything and then I realized like I'm that guy.

You're that guy. Here I am. I am I'm I'm fully a BD person now. Yeah. I came full circle. So yeah, that is one of the things that you're right and it's classic challenger cell, right? Teach, tailor, take control of the cell. And so, yeah, if you're not tailoring it to your your buyer, then you're not doing it right. Well, if you're not tailoring the message, then you don't really need sales. Yeah. Right. I mean, if you're if you just have one message that's going to fit a particular segment, that's that's marketing, right?

That's uh it's a buy now button on the website. Exactly. Right. That that's in, you know, in you know, Tik Tok store or whatever. It's not um it's not the kind of business that um that Honeywell's in or that that Slumber's in, right? Or sorry, SLB. In fact, we get frustrated with the sales people who don't customize their messaging for the customers in the B on the B2B side because they go, "Wow, this was not a very good lead that came through." Yeah. You're like, "Well, why did you think it was a very good lead?

It's the right size company. It's the right job title. It's, you know, in fact, it's a customer on our targeted list and a job title on that target list." Well, you know, I don't know. They didn't seem very interested. Well, did you ask any questions about what they were looking for? Well, no. Just went through our slide deck and told them how many years we've been in business and all of our locations and, you know, all this, you know, stuff that was in the starter marketing kit. Like, oh gosh, come on.

Well, it's funny you mentioned the challenger sale and then um and then spinelling, you know. So, so Neil Rackman, he wrote the forward for the challenger sale. Yeah. Yeah, you know, Neil Rman, he uh he wrote this book called Spinelling, which is probably um old hat now, but uh he was the guy who um at least that I know about um really uh pointed out the difference between BTOC sales and and B2B sales. Yeah. And if you read that book, it's it's all about that kind of journey on, you know, his his initial problem statement was that all of the sales material that was out there was was B TOC and that he wanted to to make some uh particular B2B material and then you know challenger they have taken that to the next step um with the series of books that they've written and uh and I would like to I think I haven't seen it and and you know if there's somebody who wants to write in the comments that's, you know, a reference for me to go look at or a book to read.

Really somebody doing that for marketing, too. And because because I I do see a lot of uh B2B businesses still kind of using BTOC marketing processes or, you know, the the value proposition for the buy now, you know, the buy here uh click button that we talked about. Yeah. Yeah, you know, it's it's a real problem and I think even in, you know, all the marketing schools that I know of and the degrees and when I studied marketing, they they really teach you B TOC. All the case studies are are, you know, Coca-Cola and car companies and, you know, all these things where you just it's totally focused on the B TOC cell and or B2C marketing and it is just it's a completely different world.

Yeah. And it's it's funny um you asked about you know me kind of getting into marketing and getting into marketing for through slumberj. So the very first thing that I did when I got that job as a marketer was I um I took an online marketing class at at Berkeley. Um because I was like well they want me to run marketing communications. I don't you know know anything you know except for what's in my heart I guess you know about marketing communications got to learn about this and it was good right it was a lot of foundational stuff but it was all as you said it was all B to C yeah I don't know it's uh I think that is something that is and I don't know why it's that that's the case either because I think that there uh more B2B companies you know out there than there are or it's pretty close split you know the B2B companies versus the B amount of B TOC companies.

But I think when people think of marketing, I certainly did when I was like, I'm going to go into advertising and marketing. I was thinking of selling beer and cars and, you know, all the all the fun stuff that you see on the Super Bowl commercials and uh you know, I just happened to be in a a B2B market and uh you know, end up selling oil tools and medical devices and all these things that you're not going to see TV commercials for. Well, you know, it's it's funny. I think that a lot of people have this or a lot of people in industry have this conception that B2B um that marketing is not as powerful for B2B.

Yeah. Because you know B TOC marketing is a lot on emotion and and B2B and I'll go back to you know exactly what uh they laid out or Neil Rackman laid out in spin selling is that when you sell to a corporate you know a company you usually have a multi-person buying center. It's more complex. There's more steps. there's more analysis. So, it is a less emotional it's not a it's not an emotional decision as much as it is um for the B TOC. But, uh I remember when I once again when I first got this marketing job, I was still very much sales and we were doing a workshop with Andy Graham uh who who we both know and Andy was um kind of making the counterargument that B2B can be driven by emotion.

Maybe not as much, but you know, it can be driven by emotion. and he he told a story about when he was young in his career when he um went to a customer and he was having this conversation and they say oh you know well marketing doesn't work for B2B and he was sitting across the table from a bunch of people who had Mont Blanc pens and you know they were wearing I guess they were making the argument that oh marketing doesn't work on me right because they're having this conversation and they said yeah but marketing doesn't you know fine maybe it's good for B TOC maybe B2B but aside you know it doesn't work on me because I'm a very analytical person.

Yeah. And he's sitting there and he's looking at him and they have their Mont Blanc pins and you know their custom suits and their Rolexes and their Yeah. They roll up in their BMW or Mercedes or whatever. And tell me again how marketing doesn't work on you, you know. Yeah. Absolutely. And I think that is um you know we we talk to our our clients about that too and we do an exercise in the in our and because a lot of our clients are engineers or doctors or you know STEM people and um when we talk to them about about the emotional side of things and they say well we're engineers we don't have emotions and I think that is definitely not the case in a lot of B2B uh situations because they might be you know make doing something that uh will their employees lives are maybe at stake.

Mhm. They're could lose millions of dollars or have a potential to gain a lot of dollars, lose a big bonus, uh get fired. Those are very emotional things. Yeah. And and I think way more emotional than a an ink pen or even a maybe not as much as a car, but but uh but yeah, I mean those are very emotional things and I think you you've got to be able to tap into that, but not in a way that fearmongers or you know, you don't want to scare your uh you know, your customer to death. But we always like to say, you know, if your if your client wakes up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat and their spouse says, "Honey, what's wrong?" It's not usually the the features that the engineers develop for that tool.

It is going to be one of those things where what if we try this and somebody gets hurt or what if we do this and we don't reach our targets and uh I don't we don't get our bonus or derail derail an entire project. Yeah. Exactly right. There's a lot of emotional things at stake I think in B2B. I think that's an excellent point. Yeah. And um going back to the challenger when you um they they propose and it's it's a very very nice way to lay out a sales presentation um and aside from the kind of opening steps they recommend that you make an emotional connection.

You know what does this mean for the for the customer? And then you follow it up by something they call rational drowning. Mhm. So, you know, you you kind of have of an opener, which is you um you know, demonstrate that I've got the knowledge to play so to speak, right? I'm you know, belong here. Yeah. Then you um you move to the you know, kind of what is the problem? What are the emotional implications of the problem? Then what are the rational kind of um you know, points that that back up that problem or you know, I've said it's really serious.

Now, what are the the data that proves that it's serious? And then uh and then ultimately, how can we solve the problem? That's the last thing you discuss. Yeah. Which is the way that it should be. But when you when you just talked about the uh the emotional side of it, um I think for engineers, you know, you or anybody, you know, you need to bring out that emotional side, but then back it up with some of the numbers. Yeah, that's right. And I think that is u always have the question of why would someone believe why would they believe that?

Yeah. to be true and I think that is something that you if you don't answer that part with a skeptical or you know very uh rational audience then that you you will never close the never close the deal. So you can't have the emotion without the rational. Yes. I think you need Yeah. I think that is 100% correct. Cool. Tell me tell me what's one thing you know now that you wish you would have known on day one when you started at Honeywell. Oh. Um, it's funny because I figured it out that I started at Honey Well, but then I look back through my career and how much it would have helped me is um project management.

M and so now um and it's not that every time I don't understand something I go out and take a course you know but I I'm now taking a course in project management because as you move up in whatever v you know uh if you if you want to be in a big corporation as you move up you're going to have to impact larger and larger groups of people and and you know and you're going to have to roll out a program or a project to do that and you're going to have to have goals and um you know different elements of that program or project that you're going to have to track and and get people on board with and and measure and drive and and project management helps you do all of those things.

And so um now that I'm at Honeywell and they a very processdriven organization you know that this hawk you know hawk mentality um everything has what you call a management operating system and you set up the system and you have the meetings and you drive it and you close the actions and you measure it and you improve it and they're very um they're very serious about that and it's an excellent way to drive um you know an efficient efficient process and so I've been learning quite a bit of that there but then I've um realized that I needed to expand my own skill set as far as the tools and processes um to be able to to run things the way that they like to run things there.

And then I think back about um to my um to my time at uh SLB definitely in in the Markcom world where you know a campaign is a it's a project. Yeah. You know a campaign's a project. You need to plan it out. You need to write your brief. You need to get everybody on the same board. you need to run your different chapters or phases or whatever you want to call them. And so, um, you know, if you want to get things done with large groups of people, um, I would recommend investing some time and, uh, and learning about project management.

Yeah, you bring up a really good point and I think that in um a lot of marketing campaigns, you're right, there are a lot of moving, you know, pieces and you got a lot of characters involved and uh when you're dealing with marketing people and salespeople, they be it can be somewhat difficult to hurt sometimes. And so, yeah, having that framework and and you know, a process that you can you can lean back on and make sure that you you uh can deliver is critical. Yeah, we have we have it took me a while to figure this out, but we have dedicated project managers for our clients too because uh you know, like I said, marketing people, which I consider myself one.

Uh you know, sometimes we get really excited about the offering and and all that and maybe not so much about the process. So, you're saying that marketers are generally not super processoriented, Richard, is that Yeah. In fact, we do a u we do a uh a personality assessment called uh the Burkeman. Okay. And so it's wonderful because it it you know breaks the world into kind of four categories where you're a communicator, a thinker, a doer or processoriented person. H assign colors. Colors. That's right.

So green uh for for communications, blue for thinking, uh yellow for process, and red for uh for task oriented. It drives me crazy that all of these frameworks have the same they have the same kind of goals, you know, in classifications. They have the same colors, but nobody uses the same colors for the same thing. No, that's an aside. Sorry. Well, is um is it definitely not a universal color coding system? No. And as somebody who did study engineering once upon a time, that part does drive me crazy, right?

We need API certification. That's it. Need an API color code for for emotional intelligence. But we hired a designer and uh if I would have seen his his Burkeman, I probably wouldn't have hired him because he is like a yellow. Does he know that? And uh yeah, I brought it up to him. Okay. Because it would be awkward if you found out about it on my podcast. Well, he may he will be listening to this because he's edit them. So maybe a a worried awakening. But I thought, you know, when I think of designers, I think, you know, blue thinking and being conceptual and then maybe a little bit of green to communicate it, but you know, mostly kind of that that blue, but and you know, project managers and you know, those kinds of folks are usually the the yellow world, but he came in as a yellow like he's deep yellow and uh and some red and like I was like, "Wow, what?" But he's one he's a fantastic designer.