Hello, and thank you, everybody, for joining us today on the B2B Manufacturing Marketing Leaders podcast. Today, I’m honored to be joined by Michael Griffin, Sigma Design Marketing Manager. Michael is a marketing leader with 15 years of experience across consumer brands and B2B services. His background includes digital growth, go-to-market strategy, team leadership, and P&L responsibility. He currently leads the marketing team at Sigma Design, a 350-person engineering firm developing complex products for some of the world’s largest companies. His work focuses on identifying new market opportunities, building go-to-market strategies, and translating technical expertise into clear, differentiated stories. Michael, thank you so much for joining us today.

Yeah, Dan, thanks for having me on. Pleasure to talk to you.

Before we jump into some of the questions around marketing, maybe you could introduce our listeners to Sigma: who you are, how you help, and things like that.

Yeah, awesome. Sigma Design is a product development and engineering firm. We’re primarily based in the Pacific Northwest, with offices in the Portland metro area, a Seattle facility, a San Francisco Bay Area facility, and a couple of smaller offices: one in Singapore and one in Pendleton at a drone UAS test range.

We specialize in what we call “fast and fuzzy” projects. These tend to be new, high-tech products with complex hardware that aren’t well defined yet. So, a lot of NPI [new product introduction]. We’ve been around for over 30 years, and we have over 350 employees. We focus on new product development, primarily complex electromechanical hardware for some of the world’s largest tech companies. We do drone infrastructure and robotics. We’ve done some humanoid robotics, and support and mobility tools for semiconductor manufacturers and data centers, among a lot of other things.

Excellent. “Fast and fuzzy” is the first time I’ve heard that description, but it’s such a clear description because we’ve all experienced projects like that. I appreciate you mentioning that.

This conversation wouldn’t be complete if we didn’t start with AI. That’s top of mind for everybody, across different industries, but maybe especially for us marketing folks. From your perspective, what happens to differentiation from a marketing perspective when AI makes pretty good marketing commonplace? Everybody can get there pretty quickly. Could you elaborate on that?

Yeah, totally. We touched on this a little earlier when you first got in touch. It’s a great topic. To back up a little, we’ve all seen that in the past, we would often differentiate our marketing by the polish. We would work really hard to produce great websites, content, marketing collateral, nice photo and video assets, clearly written brand statements, white papers, all this kind of stuff. AI has come along, and as it continues to improve, it’s making that polish free, basically.

It can rewrite stuff. There are some errors, but it’s getting better all the time. It can write very smart-sounding white papers, at least. It can design websites to great best practices with clear UX, and now produce a whole lot of other things as well.

When AI makes this polish free, what used to be a very good quality indicator, which showed some investment in the craft of the message, stops signaling anything. You don’t know if the company really put a lot of effort into getting crisp on it. They could have just pumped it out in AI. Maybe they’re not quite as legitimate as they look.

As always, differentiation moves to what’s expensive and difficult. For us, that falls into three categories: our work, our people, and our long-term investments. Just talking about that stuff is kind of cheap, particularly when it’s a brand speaking in a brand voice. But those three things are still strong differentiators, and we’ve got some ways to highlight them better.

Let me ask about the people you want to feature and whose expertise you want to leverage. They’re busy. They probably have a day job. Have you experienced that hurdle? How do you get around it to get some time on their calendars and their perspective to help you from a marketing standpoint?

Great. You’re jumping to the key one: our people. We’ve got a lot of expertise, a lot of knowledge, a lot of great thinking, and we want to get that out there and show that thinking. AI can’t make “I” statements. AI can’t say, “I’ve worked in engineering for 20 years and I’ve learned these things.” Having people stand up and make a statement is key.

And you’re right, they are busy. I’ve developed a bit of a process for getting those people together. The first thing we’ve got to do is get buy-in. Who’s going to step up and be willing to be a bit of a thought leader? It takes time, but it also takes some commitment. A lot of people don’t want to share their thoughts and opinions. They might be a little nervous. It takes effort.

In my view, you’ve got to get buy-in from the top, someone influential in senior leadership. You might need to make a strong business case, show examples from other industries. People are familiar with this. They’ve gone to events and trade shows, seen someone get up and speak. Everyone’s on LinkedIn now; they do see it. We can make a strong business case with the usual marketing metrics around impressions and engagement.

But for a lot of folks, they have to make a personal connection. They have to be willing to share their knowledge or argue for a point of view that they’ve been trying to communicate within the company, perhaps. You’ve got to find something they’re interested in and make it personally relevant. I’ve definitely found that with some encouragement and some buy-in from the top, we can get our senior subject matter experts to participate.

Excellent. Along those lines, I think what you’re hinting at is that some folks are experts at what they do, but that doesn’t necessarily make them open to taking risks and becoming a thought leader. You’ve got to find that sweet spot where somebody is willing to stick their neck out a little bit and is an expert in their field.

Talk a little bit about the difference between just an opinion and a useful or differentiated point of view. How do you think about that?

Good question. I had some notes here, but I’ll just riff on it. An opinion can be anything. We’ve got opinions about who’s going to win the Super Bowl, whatever. In our context, a point of view is something that helps a customer make a decision. It’s a clearly defined perspective that, for me, lands in the overlap of three factors.

One, it’s got to add value to your ideal customer profile. It answers a question they might be thinking about, or it explains your approach to a problem they may be experiencing. It’s got to add value.

It’s got to be authentic to the speaker. There are a lot of things that add value to the customer that we might say, but if it’s not authentic to, say, the VP of engineering who’s going to be speaking, it’s going to land flat, and they’re not going to be motivated to say it.

Finally, it’s got to be a differentiator. That may sound a little circular: you’re asking how we differentiate, and I’m saying it’s got to be a differentiator. But to find those points of view that hit those three criteria, value to the customer, authenticity, and differentiation in the marketplace, you’ve got to know the marketplace and the customer.

What I do is set up interviews. I have a series of questions, and I take an hour-long interview to tease out an authentic point of view that may be differentiated. Maybe there’s something a little contrarian, or maybe there’s something that doesn’t occur to people unless they’ve had 20 years of experience working on a problem.

Absolutely. Once you capture those insights or stories, I’m going back to their time being valuable. You probably want to leverage it in many different directions from a marketing perspective. How do you scale those insights and perspectives beyond just the one asset they came out of?

Yeah, totally. I work through my questions and take a lot of notes. I use AI to record the interviews and get more notes for me. We’ve got a great content production team here, a couple of video people, some strong writers, and designers.

When we’ve got that list of points of view or perspectives, and usually from a good interview I come away with seven or eight positions that fit our criteria, I meet with the team and go through it. Which one of these is going to be best illustrated with an infographic? Which one might be a short-form video?

This also comes from knowing the subject matter expert, the thought leader. I’m a little hesitant to use that term sometimes. I use it, but I’ve noticed it scares people off. You get to know that person and recognize, “This person is going to be really good on a short-form video,” or can be coached into it to explain this.

For a lot of people, it’s a blog post or a white paper of some sort. We get those perspectives documented and go from there. A lot of times, we try to produce a few different pieces of content around a particularly strong point.

Excellent. Following that thread, look back a few years in your career, and then get your magic wand into the future. How do you feel the level of input and impact of individual experts is changing from an organizational or marketing perspective, with how important their expertise and insights are?

That’s a good question. Particularly for us in the B2B services space, which a lot of the listenership is in as well, a lot of our work is wrapped in NDAs. It’s hard to share. What comes out of that work that we can share is those perspectives.

The kind of people who can do the work, can lead a team, but can also extract some insights from their experience and, with some help, communicate them, are going to be a lot more valuable in the future.

Ten years ago, maybe you wouldn’t hear from those folks as much. Maybe every once in a while there’d be a talk or presentation at a conference, but otherwise, they would sit back behind the brand and let the brand assets and overall brand messaging carry the day. Now it’s a lot more incumbent upon us as marketers and those subject matter experts to collaborate and get their insights out there in front of our customers.

You mentioned an interesting point. In the space you’re in, and many of our listeners are in, confidentiality is always a hurdle. We’ve got lots of great stories that we hear, and then we as marketers say, “Great, can we tell that?” The answer many times, unfortunately, is, “Well, not yet,” or “No.”

How does your organization demonstrate that expertise when confidentiality is probably a hurdle with almost every story that you’re looking to tell that includes a customer or a project?

Great question. Of course, we can talk about categories of work, things we’ve done in broad terms. We feature some anonymized client testimonials on our website. It’s safe for us to credit a director at a Fortune 500 company, even though we’re not saying the client name or the project. We can still get a quote from them.

Anonymizing those stories while still showing value and coming across as credible is definitely a challenge. It does come back to leveraging that subject matter expert as a credible witness for your skills.

One thing I was working on yesterday was a great project where a client needed a new device that could maintain a certain air pressure under difficult circumstances. It’s a really exciting thing. I’m explaining it in the most bland way possible. A key way we accomplished this new device was to come up with a decision matrix and pull in a lot of engineers from different disciplines, everyone from mechanical to firmware to systems and design engineers, and have them rank a lot of options we’d brainstormed.

In the matrix, they categorized the strengths and weaknesses of each solution relative to their area of expertise. This process we’ve done many times, and we can describe it in a way that clients can see their problems in it without getting into the specifics of what we did or what the final product was.

We can talk about how a systems engineer views a variety of factors that go into a piece of hardware versus a mechanical engineer, and show how we average out that input to land on a solution we’re going to pursue.

Interesting. You mentioned up front that one of the ways you’re using AI is with note-taking and things like that. When you’re seeing other brands communicate, whether competitors or just brands in the ecosystem, have you seen any signals that make you ask, “Is this real expertise, or is this heavily AI-generated?” What are your thoughts on that?

Great question. Our procurement team deals with this all the time because we’ve got to source and sometimes hire out other experts. We’re always vetting other people as well.

As you mentioned, I am a huge proponent of using AI to streamline operations, and we don’t want to discredit people who are using AI to create content. But what we look for is some evidence of commitment to their perspective. Have they been in this field long enough to develop a coherent point of view and commit to it? New tech adoption, for example. We want to look for those kinds of things.

What we don’t want to see is a lot of nice-sounding brand statements that can sometimes feel like the lights are on but no one’s home. These are some great words from the brand, and they’ve been around a long time, but who’s behind it? Who are the people who are actually going to do the work, and what’s their experience?

Excellent. Michael, thank you so much for joining us today. This has been extremely interesting. I know our listeners are going to appreciate this. I wanted to say thank you again for the opportunity and for carving out some time in your schedule. We know you’re super busy.

I know you are as well. I appreciate the time. It’s always great to chat with you and other folks in our industry. Good luck out there getting some good perspectives and showcasing the individual talent behind your brands online and in real life.