Episode 293: Genumark’s US Expansion, a chat with Stephen Musgrave (EVP, Sales & Marketing)

Welcome to Skucast, the podcast for entrepreneurs in the promotional products industry. Skucast shines a light on our industry's best work, features maverick personalities, and discusses what's really involved in running a modern promotional products business. Skucast is the official podcast of Common Skew.

Stephen Musgrave is the executive vice president at GenuMark, the largest Canadian-owned distributor and one of the largest in North America. GenuMark has been recognized as one of Canada's best managed companies, is a 13-time Pria Image Award recipient, and was honored as one of Counselor Magazine's best places to work. With its 42,000 square foot sales and distribution facility and over 100 full-time employees, GenuineMark serves over 2,500 active accounts. Prior to merging with GenuineMark, Stephen was the Executive Vice President of Sales at Right Sleeve and under his leadership received numerous industry awards, including a PPAI Web Award, Counselor's Best Places to Work, and PPPC Awards. As a musician and artist, Stephen brings a unique perspective to the business, developing a wide array of improvisational creative solutions for his customers. While building a bold, imaginative team in one of the most respected distributor companies in the industry. And now Canada's elite team of pros at GenieMarkt have made a major expansion into the US, recruiting one of the industry's most revered sales leaders, Johanna Godley, who is now GenieMarkt's Vice President of Business Development. Today, we talk with Stephen about this US expansion and how values play a crucial role in recruiting one of the most sought-after talents in the biz Plus, Stephen breaks down a tactical sales tip for newbies or seasoned pros called the 5-3-1 rule, a concept he coined and shared at SKU Camp in Austin, resulting in one of the most practical and inspiring sessions of the event. Hi friends, I'm Bobby LeHew, Chief Content Officer at CommonSKU. Hey, before our chat with Stephen, you might have heard the news that SKUCon, our signature event held in Las Vegas on January 14th, is 95% sold out. Now, if you haven't heard about SKUCon, it's the perfect all-day experience for you and your team to come connect with other like-minded pros, learn, and be inspired to kick off your brand new year in 2024. Join Denise Tashrow, Danny Rosen, Jonathan Isaacson, Jeremy Lott, and Joey Coleman, author of the book Never Lose a Customer Again, plus even more inspiring and challenging talks. But be sure to grab those last tickets today.

Before they're gone.

I hope to see you there.

Today's episode is brought to you by CommonsQ, the work-from-anywhere platform that powers your connected workflow, enabling you to process more orders and dramatically grow your sales. To learn more, visit commonsq.com. Now here's my chat with Steven.

As I mentioned in the intro, congratulations on your recent partnership with Johanna Gottlieb. Wow, what a, what an incredible partnership. Now, I'm— I want to ask a few questions about this because I want to help those that are listening that might be trying to hire top talent or recruit top talent. So let's talk a little bit about Geniumark and Johanna. So what made Geniumark appealing for Johanna in this particular role?

I mean, I, I hope a lot of things, um, I think we, we talk a lot about, it always sounds cheesy when I say it like this, but we talk a lot about being big enough to matter and small enough to care for our clients. We're large enough to have the resources of any of the biggest companies in our industry, but we're still small enough that you as a client matter to us. You can, we're a family-owned business, so you can talk to the CEO of our, of our company if you want to. Like, it's, it's, you know, we're focused on you like we're a small company with the resources of a big company. Like that's a thing we think is really valuable to our relationships with our customers. And that puts us in a spot where she can come in and have those resources that she's used to from working in a big company, but be able to make a really big difference. You know, she's, she's a star wherever she goes, but she's going to be really important at our company, especially like we've been, we've been quietly working behind the scenes to set ourselves up to head into the U— the US. We've had an employee in the US for a bit, but that's somebody on our team that had moved there. But this is our first big, like, line in the sand, we're coming for you, America moment. And, and like I said, I think she's in a spot with our company to make a really big difference for, for what the future of Geniemark looks like.

Well, I wanted to talk more about that Geniemark US expansion because that obviously is a part of this. What made Johanna And let's just call her Jo from now on, which everybody does and you do. But let me, let me, a sidebar, I want to mention Johanna is one of the most respected professionals in the industry, and that is no hyperbole. She has, she has been so instrumental in Promo Kitchen. She is so revered and looked up to. What made Johanna an ideal colleague in addition to this just being a reach into the U.S.?

I mean, she's a killer salesperson, like, right? That's, that's something you want. But beyond that issue, like there feels like a lot of value alignment.

Yeah.

You know, we, we got our B Corp certification this year and a lot of people think cool, they're into sustainability, but there's as many questions and as much time dedicated in that exhausting B Corp application to how you treat your people and how you work in, in like diversity, equity, and inclusion and spaces like that. That's a big part of it. It's really important to our company. And it's back, back to the cheesy saying, big enough to matter, small enough to care. I always say the third thing is that, and this is what we care about as we like move into this, this ESG era of our company with the B Corp certification. And Johanna is an amazing salesperson who has a ton of experience and would be valuable and fit in well, I'm sure, at any company. But I think with this direction we're headed in.

Around, like I said, being, being a little bit more values driven.

She's, she's, she's big, as big on that as she is on making great products for amazing clients. So I think that, that, that was the most exciting, like, part of this, this conversation for me is that opportunity to get, we're, we're trying to hire around our core values first and hard skills second, and she checks every core values box we have.

Yeah.

And then the hard skills are there to, to back it up.

This adventure into the US, um, from a very traditional Canadian company— was this a move also— do you have— and this is my ignorance, I just don't know— do you have a lot of US clients that have this pressure, you have this difficulty of selling in Canada versus US? Or what are some of the other things that— obviously then just it's a robust market— what are some of the other things that made y'all think it's time for us to open in the US?

Robust market is a big part of the decision.

We don't have a lot of US clients that are pushing us, um, to do this.

We want to expand with new US clients. I, in my, in my early days of my career at Rightsleeve, I would tell clients that my specialty was working with the Canadian office of, of US-based tech companies because the US-based tech companies don't care enough about their Canadian office. So I'm your guy on the ground in Toronto getting you a et cetera, et cetera. That's a big part of my, my sales pitch. So we do have a lot of Canadian clients that are parts of larger US entities that we'd love to work with the US side and haven't as much. But ultimately there's a lot of opportunity in the US is, you know, anytime I have worked on clients, a single client on both sides of the border, just like our population count, the sales are usually about 10 times bigger in the US than they are in Canada. Much more opportunity, but beyond that, we're, we have a tremendous amount of expertise. Like I, I don't, we're not just slapping logos on things. We've got some pretty, some pretty big niche. Sorry, we're, we're coming to the U. S. We've got some big niche sales, sales areas we work in. Like we, we do a lot of work in the sports space.

We do a lot of, we're, we're, I'd say the best in the entire industry at doing uniforms.

And we're great at summer camps like that, that some of those kind of niche industries that we, we focus on, we just have, I think, expertise beyond anybody else. And we've been holding that up in Canada. It's time to, to let it spread out a little more. And ultimately, US suppliers have a harder time selling in Canada. It's been a boon to us for years.

That's why I was so successful with all those tech companies.

They have a harder time selling in Canada because it's a small market and they haven't taken the time to learn how to sell in Canada. But yeah, we're sitting up here in little old Canada and a lot of the stuff we have to do for our clients has to come from the States anyway. So the nature of our business required us to be able to work well on both sides of the border, whereas US companies don't. So now we're just in a position to be a truly North American option for, for people because we're already, we're already good at this. We just haven't been.

Telling Americans about it as much.

So this makes a lot of sense because on one hand, Joe, to oversimplify things, Joe is an incredible hunter salesperson, right? Which he's also obviously incredible at taking care of clients. At Skew Camp, you shared one of the most popular talks and people raved about it. You said that most companies are not doing nearly enough to work to build business with the clients they already have, and that's the work of the farmers. And your whole presentation was on sort of the underappreciated role of the farmer in the business. Now, you distinctly are hiring both hunters and farmers. But for those that are listening, maybe they're fairly new to the business. What's the difference between a farmer, a hunter, and then just an order taker?

Yeah. So the, I mean, the hunters are doing the exact thing we were just talking about how to do it in the US. They're knocking on doors. They're trying to bring in new business.

They're getting the door slammed in their faces and then they're knocking on another one.

You know, that we all know it's that idea of a salesperson.

And then order takers are the people sitting in your office or at their homes, depending on how you're handling the post-pandemic world.

Just like people wanna buy shirts, they say, what shirts do you wanna buy?

Send me your artwork, I'll put it on.

Which by the way, most of us think we're salespeople when we do that, but that's not really what that is.

Yeah, we're, I mean, and doing that well, I don't even have, a lot of shade to throw at order takers. It's a hard, it's a hard, anybody that does hasn't like been refreshing a tracking number on a Friday afternoon at 4:30.

Just getting it right.

I love your perspective on that. It is hard to get right. There's a lot of things to manage, a lot of moving parts.

It is a very difficult job.

Great point.

But I see this space in the middle when at SKU Camp I was talking about farmers.

Teaching your order takers these moments when they're taking orders to act, ask better questions and think more strategically to grow the business with the client that you're talking to.

Yeah.

To take advantage of this relationship you have. There's already some trust in you.

They're buying things from you, but how do you build the relationship more and provide more value to them through asking better questions, and fitting those into kind of a bigger strategic plan for how you want to grow that client.

So now it's like we have these 3 layers. We have hunters, farmers, and then we have the order takers, which could be underproduction, which those roles, as you mentioned and corrected me, were, are very valuable. How do we get, but how do we get order takers, folks that are order takers to become farmers? You shared something about the 5-3-1 rule. Can you talk about how in your organization you try to take folks that are in an order-taking role And you want to elevate their experience with the client to include more of a proactive selling approach.

Yeah. So I, I, a bunch of people talk to me about the 5-3-1 rule. Actually, there's probably some people at our company that are listening to this right now and I would be like, I don't know what he's talking about, but when I start to talk about it, you'll know what it is. I, I, I, as I started planning things out for my SKU camp talk, I was like, if you do, like now I have like a 5-3-1 with a little TM after it. Yeah, you had to code it. Yeah, you had to codify it, right? For a talk, you had to codify it. People that have worked with me for years are like, oh yeah, this old, this old thing he's talking about. So that's the idea that in these, in these transactions, there's 3, I mean, there's lots of types of questions you can ask, but if you think of 3 types of core questions, the first being things you need to do to build the product that the client's talking to you about.

I need water bottles here on this date at this time with this artwork on it.

There's like the 5 questions you need to ask. I basically just said them. What do you need? When do you need it?

Where do you need it?

How many do you need?

And right, how much are you looking to spend? You gotta ask those questions or you can't really process the order on any level. So ask all 5 of them every single time, obviously.

But the next section I'd call, the next type of question I'd say is questions to build value. And that's those questions about the product that you don't need to ask to get the water bottles to the place on time.

But the questions that might make you not send water bottles and send something that might be a little easier to hand out or more effective.

And those are the types of questions about like, tell me more about the event.

What's it all about? Tell me who you're giving this to, what you want them to think or what you want them to feel when they get it.

Like any types of questions like that, that go beyond the boring, like technical details of the product and help us create that connection moment that we're supposed to when some of what we make gets given out. And you should ask at least 3 of those in every single project. There's a million you could ask, but try to take the time to ask at least 3 things that add more value every project. And then the last section after build a product and build value is to build relationships. We're, everybody says we're a relationship business, but like what is building a relationship with a client? It's, it's finding out more about them and showing that you care about them. So you're making shirts for them, like find out some strategic information about the client that helps you understand their organization better. Like its structure, its size, their team, their role, anything that helps you kind of dive deeper into the person you're working with or the company you're working with. So that you can like think about that in the next project and ask better questions next time. And you should ask one of those questions every single time you're talking to somebody about a new project.

I don't care if it's a client that sends you 10 new projects a day. Be interested and be curious and ask them a question beyond what art they want on the shirts every single time. So you just ask 5 questions, 3 questions, and 1 question each time.

What I also love about that is we know how we work with a lot of the same clients over and over and over. I love how you actually would be training your client to sort of expand on when they give you a project. So eventually that relationship can look like them giving you that detail before you have to even ever even ask.

Yeah, I used to say this to, to Katherine Graham back in her old, her old right sleeve days that I thought I always find one of our biggest challenges is our competitors and not because they're beating us in the marketplace. It's because I start to ask people these questions And they'll be like, why are you asking me this? Companies like you don't ask us stuff like this.

I'm like, well, we should.

Don't you just want to know my address?

I'm like, no, I want to know. I want to know what makes you get out of bed in the morning, you know?

Yeah.

And they're like, that's weird. Like it's, it's hard to get people to open up at first, but the more regularly you work with contacts that you have, the more they see that you're actually curious, the more they open up. And yeah, you work with a client for years and they start sending you the the vibrant beating heart of the conference they're going to in the first email, right? And they're like, oh yeah, there's like 1,000 people there.

I'm like, you know, well, it's really hard to find— it's really hard to qualify who works really well in this business and who's going to work out in this business. There are tactical things you can do there, but the psychographic of who does well in this business is— has to be a large part of it has to be curiosity. So I think that's That's a big part of it.

Yeah, that's, I'll, I'll jump back in for a second. You know, in, in, in that SKU camp talk, I had 20 minutes. So when I first wrote it, it was like an hour and a bit. So I had to cut it down.

All right.

I talk a lot, Bobby.

I had to cut it down to 20 minutes. And one of the things we didn't get to talk about a lot is I'm not going to say that 5-3-1 rule, easy peasy. Anybody that's taking orders at your company is going to think like this. And I think this, I'm, what I'm going to say to you is. When you're hiring people to work at your company, hire the types of people that would naturally ask those questions. See what questions they ask you in the interview. Do they have any? If they don't, they're probably just going to take their work and put it on the water bottle and be done with it.

If you want to hire people that are going to be farmers, you like need to look for people who are naturally curious.

Yeah. At Rice Sleeve, you grew up in a farming environment. So I mentioned in the intro, Genuine Mark and Rice Sleeve and that relationship and the merger and all that. What were some of the farming-type tactics that led to growth in that environment? Like, was marketing as a priority, sales goals, margins? If you had to narrow down your success, since you basically ran a business with nothing but farmers, if I'm right, what were some of those like key tactics that sort of helped you grow the business with that type of person in the role? Those things you did, a lot of tactical things like quarterly reviews and where are you at with the client and growth like that and margin goals and all those kinds of things. What was that rhythm like?

A lot of times it would vary on, on individual reps because some people need more, some people take to this more naturally than others. Right now I'm pushing us towards a cycle where we have quarterly client growth plans that are stored right in the client profile in CommonSkew. So we can have, like, if you're thinking about the, the 5-3-1 rule, the idea of the client growth plan is like this quarter we want to do this. It's like a mission statement for the quarter of where we want to see the relationship get. It's the types of build relationship questions we want to get answers to that we don't know. Like we have a conversation, we dive into the client a bit, look at where the relationship is, come up with some of those questions so that the people that let's less naturally have them come to mind when they're, when they're in the moment.

Like we're laying them out before and all they have to do is remember like, oh yeah, I am trying to find out like how many people are on the marketing team, whatever, whatever the question is.

And then we have a section with like some proactive things that we want them to do in the next quarter that are not just processing an order.

Yeah.

Status them as growth plans. And then I can just, you know, like they, they can be accountable to themselves and go work on those growth plans.

And, and if they're really busy and finding a hard time being proactive, at any minute their boss might be like, let's take a look at your, how your growth plans are going.

We're trying to set, I want to set them quarterly, review them sporadically throughout the quarter and tie them into, to annual plans.

I'm big at setting sales targets for clients, like numbers, but these are relationship plans that tie back to how to hit the numbers we want to hit and how those two things work together.

It's timeless and it's going to sound a little pedantic, but that 90-day goal, like those breaking that year up into quarters is so powerful. And you know, in the SaaS business, we use, we use OKRs for our quarterly goals and measurement.

And then of course, you know, we're not like werewolves and vampires, you know, we're like not the same thing, but like we kind of, we're closely related. Yeah. You love your contrast. You love your contrast. I love that.

The EOS use rocks. But it's so vital. Like, it's so vital. Otherwise, as in this business, because you can grow or you can drop clients so quickly, you don't— it gives us something to aim at. But that 90-day goal to me is such a— it's, it can be a little bit of pressure, but it's also far better to have that than it is some annual unrealistic goal that you can't even put your hands around.

Yeah, that's, that's the, some of the idea of this, even I just did one of these deep dive sessions and built out a client growth plan with one of the, like, man, she's been around for like 6 years now. So she's not that new.

And the, and the, in the, in the perspective of, of January, where that is a decade and we have lots of people who have been here over 25 years, she's pretty new.

And we were going through talking about how this year she's going to do, um, $70,000 with this client, but next year she wants to do $130,000.

And I'm like, I don't want you coming into January thinking, all right, January 1st, let's go get $130,000. I want you going into the quarter thinking, what small things do I need to do that make a difference?

Isn't doing any work.

How is this, how can I make this bite-sized so it's not overwhelming and I'm not scrambling and dropping the ball on it?

And also I'm trying to ensure that The questions we're asking and the things we're doing are adding value to the work we're doing for the client. They're not like sleazy sales things we want to find out or tricks we want to do. We're like, what can we actually do to be a better company and a better partner for our clients to grow them?

Very tactical things you can measure as a leading indicator versus a lagging indicator. Because I was always stuck in lagging measurements and that was not helpful. All right. Let's use our last, uh, 5 minutes here to talk about one of my favorite subjects. Let's talk about Stephen. From managing director at Right Sleeve to now executive vice president of sales and marketing, what really has been one of the biggest lessons you've learned embracing this role? Because you're, you're director over one of the largest sales forces and one of the largest distributors in North America. What have you learned? Do we need 4 more hours for that, or can you encapsulate what your biggest lesson was in this?

It's weird because like my head is immediately going to one that I'm in the middle of learning.

Yeah, share it.

Okay. Because being at a small company with a small team is very different than, you know, I spent the first 10 years of my career in a room every day. A room, if you've ever been, some of you have been to the Right Sleeve office, it's a 4,500 square foot room.

With 20 people in it, like shoulder to shoulder calling people about their promotional product needs every day. It's easier to like manage by walking around and people learning from each other naturally because we're in this open concept space and, and there's lots of room to just like work with people one-on-one as individuals. And now I've got people spread out.

I was going to say all over the country, all over the countries.

With an S, you know, and it's finding these, these ways to build out support that gets to people, systemize things a little more and make it so that our whole team can, can grow and be effective is a work in progress. Yeah.

Like of me, yeah. Me expanding, expanding my skillset and the company approach. To be able to handle the large sales team we have as we prep to significantly increase the size of our sales force over the next few years. Yes.

Yeah.

That, that's a big thing for me is we could have probably not make any changes and keep being a really successful company for the next bunch of years, but this expansion into the States And my hunger for growth and our still relatively new CEO, Mitch Fried's like hunger for growth. We're looking to, to build out a much larger organization and we need a lot more systems in place to help make that effective. So I'm trying to figure out how to like get that cute little je ne sais quoi of Rightsleeve, like at scale.

Yeah, I hear that. Last two questions for you. About Stephen, you've always had this incredible marketing mind, very creative mind. Where do you find inspiration? Like, what brands do you follow? What are you into that inspires you that's sort of like tangentially related or not even related at all to our business?

I like, I'm really into design. I don't think as I, I don't get inspired by people's marketing strategies as much as how beautiful things are. So I don't know. Like, it's not, it's not exactly what you're asking. I just like, I'm obsessed with interior design the last few years.

Yeah.

I want to, I want to have some answer about like this really powerful brand that everybody knows that like their marketing's just top notch.

But I just look at Matilda Goade's Instagram all the time and dream about giant clamshell bowls that are handmade in ceramics.

Like, I just, I love it. I love, I think, I think our industry gets very focused on product and new product innovations, but like the real value and power that we bring is marrying amazing product with beautiful design.

So I tend to focus on the beautiful design part in my, my personal life.

That's a big lesson in and of itself for us. What's the last question? What's one book, podcast episode, movie, album experience that you've had that has had the most impact on you? And it doesn't have to be business related.

Can I give you two, but I'll try and keep them quick.

Yes.

This is from when I was really young. I remember hearing the album Less Talk, More Rock by Propaganda, who are a Canadian punk band, and hearing them mention small town Canada in the lyrics and being really surprised. I was like a young kid in small town Canada who liked punk and listening to this band on this big California record label and opening my eyes to like, oh my God, they're from where I'm from. Not exactly, but kind of similar experiences. And it really made me dig more into their lyrics and think about how the lyrical content of the music and their political ideas fueled the music. They're poppy, they're angry, they're a whole bunch of things all at once, and their lyrics are funny and serious at the same time.

You said before, I like contrast. This is really about this juxtaposition of these far opposite sounds and feelings. But then also I'm mentioning it because my talk at SCU Camp was The Vegetarian's Guide to Promo Sales. And that's the album that has a song about animal rights that first made me go like, hmm, what's this about?

When I was a teenager and it took me a few years to really come around to it, but now I've been vegetarian for like 23 years.

So it's, it's a core piece of art that changed the direction of my entire life.

That's amazing.

And then more on point, I'm really into, is it Infinite Mindset or The Infinite Game? The Simon Sinek book about infinite mindsets from the last couple of years. I heard him on a podcast talking about it, about people with infinite mindsets versus people with finite mindsets who look at things that have an end date and a winner and a loser. Set rules and players, and I'm not that kind of person. Everything's infinitely expanded in front of me. The rules are always changing, and it really helped me understand a lot of people I work with and how we think about things differently and helped me relate to people a little differently.

So Simon Sinek, his work on infinite mindset in the last couple years has been really interesting.

That's awesome, Stephen. Thank you, my friend. Thanks for joining us. Thanks for that amazing talk at Skew Camp. And congratulations with the partnership with you and Joe, and we wish you all the best.

Thanks for having me on to chat.

Thanks so much for tuning in to this episode of SkewCast. Be sure to keep up with our latest content content by subscribing to SKU Cast on iTunes or to our blog at community.comandsku.com. Until next time, friends, thanks so much for listening.