Is email prospecting real, or just a comfortable fantasy? In this sales topics conversation, Ed Marsh and Derek Baer of Kurlan & Associates argue that the phone is still the most reliable way to start a B2B sales conversation. They also cover five topics every sales leader should be thinking about.

Derek describes a recent test: a BDR sent 3,000 personalized video emails using Derek’s own voice. Not one person replied. Derek says he has never booked a meeting from a cold email. His point is that a human voice is hard to ignore and an email is easy to delete. He also explains why phone technique matters so much, and why a 22-year-old reading a script to a Fortune 100 executive makes people conclude that “the phones don’t work.”

In this episode:

• How hard should salespeople work? Derek’s view is “whatever it takes,” with a practical limit before burnout. He also talks about the heavy lift of the first six months in a new role. Ed tells the story of a 24-year Army special operations veteran who became the top BDR on his team within a quarter.
• Intrinsic vs. extrinsic motivation. Not every rep is coin-operated. Ed and Derek discuss why intrinsically motivated reps may sandbag once they hit quota, and what that means for comp plans and accelerators.
• Should managers know reps’ personal financial goals? Why that conversation is about motivation, not intrusion.
• Comp during the ramp. In long sales cycles, they suggest rewarding things a new rep can control in the first 90 days: meetings, conversations, and real opportunities with real decision makers.
• Email prospecting vs. the phone. Derek’s multi-touch sequence: a LinkedIn connection request before the first call, short voicemails, brief “call me back” emails, and about 12 touches with the spacing getting tighter over time. Plus a case for weekend calls to hard-to-reach executives.
• Pipeline hygiene. How long a deal can sit with no activity before it’s dead, why stale deals inflate forecasts, and how “no decision” (The JOLT Effect) kills 40 to 60 percent of deals.
• Closing thought: Be patient, and be kind, including to yourself.

Key takeaway:
“If you want to make more money, work harder. Make the calls. Do the work.”

Mentioned in this episode:

• The JOLT Effect by Matthew Dixon and Ted McKenna
• Baseline Selling by Dave Kurlan

Connect with Derek Baer:

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/derek-baer-68a234b9/

Connect with Ed Marsh:

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/edwardbmarsh/
• Ed Marsh Consulting: https://www.edmarshconsulting.com/
• YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@EdMarsh
• X/Twitter: https://x.com/edbmarsh

If you’re serious about industrial growth, subscribe, leave a review, and visit edmarshconsulting.com to keep the conversation going.

Why do so many industrial companies still sell like it's 2005, while B2B software has built a whole cookbook of go-to-market recipes? Ed Marsh sits down with Brian C. Reed, Chief Market Officer at Corsha, to explore where tech marketing and sales meet traditional industrials. Brian has spent decades in software and cybersecurity, and now helps manufacturers secure the machines, robotics and physical AI that power modern production lines.

They cover why communities beat SEO content farms, how to tell stories that stick, what physical AI means for the plant floor (and its security risks), how AI is changing sales, and how a mid-market manufacturer should build a GTM team from scratch. Brian closes with a challenge: what if you spent 2–3% more of your capital budget on professional go-to-market instead of that next quarter-million-dollar machine?

In this episode:

• Why being part of peer communities (Pavilion, TMA, CMO Coffee Talk) makes you better at building communities for your customers
• Lessons from "unreasonable hospitality" and why service beats selling
• Harry the Hair-on-Fire, Paul the Proactive Planner, and Carla the Compliance person: three buyer personas found in almost every market
• Mapping the "communities of influence" around your ICP, and why you should join existing communities rather than build your own
• How to find worthwhile communities when engineers mostly lurk
• Information fragmentation: why the 20-page white paper is dead and snackable content wins
• Making your content GPT-friendly so AI tools recommend you
• From Duke BME/EE to CMO: learning the business side after a startup failed for lack of sales and marketing
• Storytelling as the brain's native format, with the OT ransomware story as an example
• Using AI as a writing and ideation companion without producing "AI slop"
• What physical AI is and how it will transform inspection and quality in manufacturing
• The security downside: constraints, fail-safes, and IT/OT/cloud convergence
• How AI is reshaping sales, and what makes the best salespeople (empathy, team sports, hospitality backgrounds)
• Marketing vs. sales: why you can't have a one-sided coin
• Specialization vs. full-cycle sellers, SDRs, and high-low selling
• Building a GTM team from scratch for a mid-market industrial manufacturer
• Defining go-to-market enablement: people, process, technology and content
• Why tech marketers should consider a move to industrials

Links:

• Brian C. Reed on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/briancreed
• Corsha: https://corsha.com
• Email Brian: brian@corsha.com
• Ed Marsh Consulting: https://edmarshconsulting.com

Mentioned in this episode:

• Pavilion (and the Pavilion podcast)
• Technology Marketing Alliance (TMA)
• CMO Coffee Talk
• Unreasonable Hospitality by Will Guidara
• StoryBrand
• SANS Institute
• ICS Village at DEF CON
• Mike Holcomb (OT security educator)
• OWASP
• All Day DevOps
• Dragos
• ARM Institute
• GridRaster
• John Barrows
• April Dunford
• Podcasts: Nerd Talking Good, StoryBrand, Prof G, CMO Confidential, Hard Fork

If you enjoyed this episode, please like, share, comment and subscribe, and pass it along to someone in your industrial network who'd find these ideas useful.

Joe Angel — Executive Vice President of Industry Outreach for PMMI (The Association for Packaging and Processing Technologies), founder of Packaging World magazine, and a true legend in the packaging industry — joins Ed Marsh to unpack the full arc of B2B media, from bingo cards to AI.

Ed and Joe cover:

• Why PR and traditional media are becoming relevant again as SEO and organic search decline
• The early days of launching Packaging World in 1993–94, and how print media measured leads before the internet
• How the 2009 recession (not digital disruption) forced Summit Media to rethink its business — and led to the birth of digital lead-gen tools like landing pages
• Why PMMI ultimately acquired Summit Media Group in 2014, and what "always-on" content means for trade shows@james
• How manufacturers misuse (or underuse) verified audience data — and what smart companies do differently
• Blending print, digital, and events: the "Game Plan" personalized show-floor guide as a case study in integration
• Whether AI can replace editors — and the real risk Joe sees: losing decades of tacit engineering knowledge as experienced workers retire
• Why in-person relationships and trade shows still matter, even in an AI-driven world
• Joe's advice for treating marketing as an investment, not an expense

Whether you're in packaging, industrial manufacturing, or B2B marketing more broadly, this conversation is a masterclass in how media strategy has evolved — and where it's headed next.

Reach out to Joe directly via PMMI, or stop by the PMMI booth at the next PACK EXPO show.

• Joe's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/joeangel/

Like, share, comment, and subscribe to the Industrial Growth Institute podcast for more conversations on growth, marketing, and strategy in industrial and middle-market businesses.

#B2BMarketing #TradeShows #PackagingIndustry #IndustrialMarketing #PMMI #PackagingWorld #IndustrialGrowthInstitute

Derek Baer returns to the Industrial Growth Institute podcast for a candid, unscripted conversation about the sales accountability issues most companies avoid talking about.

Ed and Derek dig into four core topics with plenty of detours, war stories, and a little friendly disagreement along the way:

1. Do Performance Improvement Plans (PIPs) actually work? Why most companies wait too long, what a PIP should really look like, and how to handle a rep who's crushing quota but showing all the wrong behaviors
2. "Telephonobia" — why so many salespeople avoid the phone, the self-limiting beliefs behind it, and a real story of a single cold call turning a "maybe in November" into an immediate opportunity
3. Where marketing ends and sales begins — handling chatbot leads, using website visitor intent data, and why sales reps ignore some of the best tools they already have
4. Creating deals vs. uncovering them — the real stats behind buyer shortlists, why only 3% of buyers are "in market" at any given time, and what that means for how you should actually be prospecting

Plus: PIP horror stories, a secret side project proving that "our industry is different" is almost always an excuse, and why compensation structure quietly shapes rep behavior more than most leaders realize.

👍 Like, share, comment, and subscribe to the Industrial Growth Institute podcast for more real talk on sales, growth, and accountability in industrial and middle-market businesses.

💬 Disagree with something Derek or Ed said? Drop it in the comments — let's argue about it.

#SalesLeadership #ColdCalling #SalesAccountability #PerformanceImprovementPlan #B2BSales #IndustrialGrowthInstitute #SalesManagement

Peter Caputa (CEO of Databox, former 15th employee at HubSpot) returns to the Industrial Growth Institute podcast to unpack how business intelligence and AI-driven performance management can transform the way private equity firms oversee their portfolio companies.

Ed and Peter dig into Databox's evolution from a marketing dashboard tool to a full business intelligence platform — now featuring OKR management and forecast modeling — and explore why organic growth remains the most under-supported piece of most PE investment theses.

They cover:

1. Why most PE and VC firms don't closely track portfolio company performance — and the risk that creates in today's market
2. Goodhart's Law, vanity metrics, and Amazon's "weekly business review" approach to KPIs
3. The five-step SPEARS framework (Strategize, Plan, Execute, Adjust, Repeat, Scale) for building a data-informed growth strategy
4. Common blockers to becoming data-driven: broken CRM discipline, IT resistance, and misaligned incentives
5. Correlation vs. benchmarking — and how portfolio-level comparisons could reshape PE diligence and oversight
6. Why "inbound marketing" as a standalone strategy is dead, and what's replaced it (multi-channel, multi-format, multi-perspective content)
7. How AI and agentic systems are pushing businesses toward being managed more like algorithmic hedge funds

Whether you're a PE operating partner, a portco executive, or just curious how data discipline separates high performers from the rest, this conversation is packed with frameworks you can apply immediately.

🔗 Learn more about Databox: databox.com

Connect with Peter on LinkedIn
https://www.linkedin.com/in/pc4media/

📘 Check out Peter's course, Predictable Scale: databox.com/predictable-scale

👍 Like, share, comment, and subscribe to the Industrial Growth Institute podcast for more conversations on growth, strategy, and operations in industrial and middle-market businesses.

#PrivateEquity #BusinessIntelligence #DataDriven #B2BMarketing #PortfolioManagement #Databox #GrowthStrategy #IndustrialGrowthInstitute

Why can't successful industrial leaders change — even when they know they should? It's not stubbornness. It's not bias. It's something deeper: their beliefs aren't opinions — they're truths. And you can't argue with truth.

How often is that dissonance the real source of buyer objections?

Understanding epistemological truths — and how to work with them instead of against them — is the key to unlocking change in your company and in your buyers.

In this solo Episode #76, host Ed Marsh explores why middle-market industrial companies struggle to adapt, even when the evidence for change is overwhelming, and lays out five practical strategies for navigating buyers' deeply held beliefs.

Summary

In this episode, Ed Marsh introduces the concept of epistemological truths — beliefs grounded in real evidence and experience that function as unassailable truth for the person holding them. He explains why these truths, not simple bias, are the real barrier to change in middle-market manufacturing companies. Using eleven common examples from industrial sales and marketing, Ed shows how two people can hold completely contradictory yet fully justified truths — and why that makes traditional persuasion useless.

He then presents five strategies for working with epistemological truths rather than against them:

• Explore whether their truths are delivering the outcomes they need
• Surface contradictory evidence without attacking the belief
• Test predictions that their truths imply
• Run premortems comparing outcomes under different assumptions
• Follow a truth to its logical conclusion to reveal gaps

Takeaways

• What we call "bias" in business is often epistemological truth - beliefs backed by real evidence and experience
• You cannot hold two contradictory truths simultaneously, which is why change feels impossible
• The traits that made founders and Gen2 leaders successful become their ceiling
• Telling buyers they're wrong doesn't work - their truth is as justified as yours
• Companies that repeat the same messaging as competitors get deflected by buyers' existing truths
• Consultative sales and marketing must help buyers examine whether their truths serve their goals
• Creating new recognition beats forcing confrontation every time
• The political polarization analog applies directly to B2B sales conversations
• Sales reps who bring business acumen and outcomes focus can reach CEOs; those peddling specs cannot
• 84% of the time vendors are contacted, the spec doesn't change - so create projects, don't just find them
• Five practical strategies can help you navigate buyers' epistemological truths without attacking them

Takeaway Quote from Ed Marsh

• "Stop trying to convince buyers they're wrong. Start helping them discover whether their truths are serving their goals."

LinkedIn: Ed Marsh

Twitter: Ed Marsh

Instagram: Ed Marsh

YouTube: @EdMarsh

Show Transcript

Chapters

B2B sales in 2025 is confusing.

On the one hand, it's just the same as it's been for years. We need to connect with buyers, build trust, and guide them through decisions.

On the other hand, it's a completely different beast.

That's why Derek Baer is in the studio this week, for a free-wheeling, no-holes-barred discussion and debate on sales topics.

It's time to get comfortable being uncomfortable!

We talk:

• Whether to track "quotes" as a metric
• Whether anyone can be trained to sell successfully
• Accelerators (kickers) in sales compensation
• Whether we should hire for technical/industry knowledge, and more.

And the conversation is blunt. "Tell them to f$%k!ng apply" Derek says at one point!

Summary

Derek Baer brings a new format to the studio this week, debating and discussing B2B sales topics. He and Ed disagree about various aspects of sales, and agree about others. Topics include:

• the importance of tracking quotes
• the compatibility of salespeople with complex B2B sales
• qualities that make a great sales rep
• role of sales decks - significance of accelerators in compensation plans
• how to manage underperformers and disrupters within sales teams.

The conversation emphasizes the need for continuous improvement and investment in sales skills, drawing parallels between sales and other professional pursuits.

Chapters

Check out Derek's Sales Training website.

LinkedIn: Derek Baer and Ed Marsh

Twitter: Ed Marsh

Instagram: Derek Baer and Ed Marsh

YouTube: @EdMarsh

Show Transcript

Read more from Ed's recent paper on these critical changes.