Podcast
The Kula Ring
Hosted by Kula Partners · EN
The Kula Ring is a podcast for manufacturing marketers who want to drive real growth inside complex B2B organizations. Hosted by Jeff White and Carman Pirie (Kula Partners), each episode features candid conversations with industry leaders centred on practical, field-tested ideas you can actually use. Expect smart takes on account-based marketing (ABM), sales + marketing alignment, demand generation, positioning, content and website strategy, and the realities of modern industrial buying. If you market to engineers, plant managers, procurement teams, or multi-stakeholder buying groups, this show is built for you. New episodes released weekly, subscribe to stay in the loop.
42episodes
Episodes
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Your PhDs Are Your SEO Strategy: Leveraging the Authority Already in the Building
3d ago00:27:43Tap to summarizeElectraMet uses electrochemistry to pull copper and other critical minerals out of industrial wastewater — technology invented by PhDs and sold to wastewater managers at the world’s largest semiconductor fabs. Chris Richardson, a communications major with no electrochemical background, has to make that legible without dumbing it down. His answer isn’t better explaining. It’s association: make sure Google and the LLMs know which published scientists belong to your company, then build content on top of that link. Along the way he argues GEO is mostly just SEO done well, that earned backlinks still pay dividends, and that the surest way to win over a camera-shy expert is to show them what the internet already says about them.
Transcribe →Why Your Distributor Cares More About Your Brand Than Your End Customer Does
1w agoTap to summarizeIn a category where production outstrips demand and the end customer cares more about how a room looks than whose logo is on the box, Mauricio Inglada makes a counterintuitive case: the brand that matters most is the one you build with your distribution channel. As VP of Sales & Marketing at Del Conca USA, he walks Jeff and Carman through winning at the channel level — earning distributor trust, removing the fears that quietly kill deals (dead inventory, builder callbacks, the homeowner’s permanent regret), and competing against far larger rivals with a small but relentlessly responsive “Navy Sales” team. Along the way: why Pinterest is a secret intent engine and where AI will reshape the buying cycle.
Transcribe →Stop Asking for Permission: Why the Agentic Wild West Belongs to Marketers Who Just Build
2w ago00:37:35Tap to summarizeShane Colella, an Emmy-winning cinematographer turned marketing director at automation firm Westfalia Technologies, makes the case that the agentic era has no historical analog — and that the marketers who win won’t wait for permission to find out. He walks through the agentic infrastructure he’s actually building, from research dashboards to a Claude-and-n8n pipeline that erases hours of list-building, and argues the real bottleneck isn’t technology but getting everyone else on board. Along the way he reframes the fear of lost jobs and vanishing entry-level roles as a perception problem, and lands on a provocation: this moment belongs to disciplined creatives with the clearest vision.
Transcribe →Keeping Your Brand Voice Authentic When AI Makes Everyone Sound the Same
3w ago00:31:09Tap to summarizeAuthenticity was a Web 2.0 buzzword — and Luke Wittenbraker, Marketing and Sales Director at Mactech On-Site, argues it matters more than ever now that AI can make every brand sound the same. In this episode, Luke explains why blue-collar buyers see straight through corporate jargon, how he turned ten years of CRM data into short, punchy “job stories” that actually generate leads, and why figuring out what not to work on became his biggest marketing unlock. Along the way he shares a hard-won warning: lean on AI too heavily and you’ll be coached into a groupthink that sounds nothing like you.
Transcribe →Marketing on the Clock: In Private Equity, Everybody Has an Expiration Date
Jul 700:25:44Tap to summarizeWhen private equity owns the company, the clock is always running — and as Paul Olesh, CEO of Magneto Movement, puts it, everybody has an expiration date. Paul joins Jeff and Carman to explain how that urgency reshapes marketing inside a PE-backed platform: why a long 18-to-30-month sales cycle demands relentless funnel-building, how he holds his acquired brands together under a single Procter & Gamble–style promise, and why he insists marketing isn’t truly effective until the purchase order lands. It’s a candid CEO’s-eye view of building a marketing machine when both time and resources are scarce.
Transcribe →When Buyers Can’t Touch the Machine, Video Has to Sell the Quality
Jun 3000:31:04Tap to summarizeFor Impack, a Quebec maker of folder-gluer packaging equipment, video does something a spec sheet can’t: it sells machines prospects often won’t see in person until late in the deal. Brand Creative Lead Dmytro Zhurov explains how a well-produced video becomes proof of a six-figure machine’s quality—when the production matches the price tag, buyers trust that the product does too. He digs into using video to explain complex, sometimes competitor-less machines, why his team flies crews to client sites for documentary-grade footage, and how he prioritizes production around the deals already in flight. The throughline: quality video doesn’t just inform the sale, it justifies it.
Transcribe →Why Uniting With Your Competitors Can Be the Smartest Way to Grow a Market
Jun 2300:28:51Tap to summarizeMilford built its business on relationships in oil and gas. But breaking HDPE pipe into the municipal water market meant playing an entirely different game — one of competitive bids, regulatory hurdles, and contractors set in their ways. Tyler Fowler, Director of Marketing at Milford, explains why relationships rarely cross verticals even when the product does, and why he and his competitors put their differences aside to grow the category together. Along the way he shares how he treats organic social as a test bed for paid, why he resists vanity metrics, and why winning a new industrial market is a five-to-ten-year grind with no easy button.
Transcribe →Long Sales Cycle, Short Buying Window: How Manufacturers Win at ABM
Jun 1600:33:28Tap to summarizeAccount-based marketing isn’t new to manufacturers, but the way they have to run it is unlike anyone else’s. In this episode, Demandbase’s Nick Cholakis unpacks the defining tension of industrial ABM: a sales cycle that can stretch past two years, punctuated by a buying window that slams open and shut in weeks. With most research now happening anonymously and offline — increasingly inside LLMs — Nick explains how signal aggregation helps manufacturers spot in-market accounts, why behaviour should override firmographics when tiering, and how to arm distributors and channel partners with the context they need to act before the window closes.
Transcribe →Making LinkedIn Work for Niche Manufacturing: A Solo Marketer’s Playbook
Jun 900:24:47Tap to summarizeAs a solo marketer in a 30-person engineering firm, Reshmee Bissundyal has built something most industrial companies struggle to achieve: a LinkedIn presence that actually drives inbound leads. In this episode, Reshmee walks us through how she dramatically grew Mechanical Solutions’ LinkedIn following. Reshmee shares her approach to content planning and why she often leads with emotion rather than promotions. And how she has navigated the tricky task of getting engineers to participate in marketing.
Transcribe →Person-to-Person in the Digital Age
Jun 200:28:31Tap to summarizeManufacturing marketing often suffers when salespeople don’t have confidence in what’s being created. In this episode, Jeff and Carman talk with Tom Van Doorn, Director of Marketing and Sales at MP Equipment, about bridging the gap between digital presence and face-to-face sales. Tom brings 42 years of industry experience and explains how websites, video content, and digital tools should serve as the backbone of the sales process. We explore the critical role of effective marketing in priming prospects, how websites serve both outreach and sales-presentation functions, and why the traditional person-to-person sales model remains paramount in the industrial food-processing equipment industry.
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