Sarah Scudder Podcast Transcript
Sarah Scudder joins host Brian Thomas on The Digital Executive Podcast.
Welcome to Coruzant Technologies, home of the Digital Executive Podcast.
Brian Thomas: Welcome to the Digital Executive. Today’s guest is Sarah Scudder. Sarah Scudder is a self-proclaimed supply chain and the CMO of SourceDay. She is a sustainability nut and lover of all things Bradley Cooper. She’s been trying to get a dinner date with him for over three years.
The struggle is real. She’s good at loading the dishwasher but can’t keep potted plants alive. Green is her favorite color and Sarah also hosts the what the duck direct materials podcast and a monthly voice of supply chain show that features people in supply chain doing extraordinary things. She also hosts monthly manufacturing supply chain woes and women in ERP shows and enjoy speaking about marketing and manufacturing supply chain related topics.
Brian Thomas: Well, good afternoon, Sarah. Welcome to the show.
Sarah Scudder: Thank you. I am joining from Austin, Texas. We have had absolutely incredible weather here the last week or so, like 80, 85 degrees. So it’s been nice to get outside and get some running and hiking in.
Brian Thomas: Absolutely. Love that. Was just down in Austin myself for the Thanksgiving holiday. So, great place. Weather’s awesome. Not like Kansas city, but hey, we’ll take it.
Sarah Scudder: I would say our weather is not awesome in the summer. So, I’ll caveat your statement there.
Brian Thomas: Absolutely. I hear you completely. So, Sarah, let’s jump right into your questions here. Want to talk to you about your career in marketing.
You served in several senior executive roles. Now you’re the chief marketing officer at Source Day. Could you share with our audience the secret to your career growth and what inspires you?
Sarah Scudder: So. I don’t know if there’s one magical aha moment or thing I can share. It’s been more of our journey, which I’ll kind of walk through briefly here. So I think I knew that. I wanted to have a career where I controlled my own destiny. I also knew that I wanted to make a lot of money. And those were two things that were really, really important to me.
So, when I was in college, I was planning to go into the fashion industry and I got a random job offer my senior year to go into this crazy, random, hard industry that I couldn’t pronounce called procurement. And fast forward after I graduated from college, I actually did accept this job offer and I started my career in sales, and I wanted to try sales because I didn’t want to ever be capped in my career.
At least when I was starting by a salary that somebody else set for me. I wanted to kind of be able to more control my own destiny, especially when it came to finances. So I went into my. New boss at the time and said, I want to be on the craziest max commission plan possible, which means my base or salary was almost nothing.
And I look back and I, I can’t even believe, you know, how I survived when I was just getting started. I was literally making nothing, but I did it because I saw a huge upside and that I would potentially. Be able to make a lot more money had I chosen to go into a traditional career.
And that was right. I was making 6 figures every single year, including the year. I started my new job because I was able to be on a commission structure and stay in sales. So that was one thing, just knowing that was important to me and choosing a career and setting myself up to be able to control my own destiny versus somebody else doing it.
The other thing that I think was really important to my success was that I learned how to embrace marketing, both as building my personal brand, but also the companies that I worked for. And what I mean by that is one of the things that I thought and still do think is kind of crazy with the sales outbound motion is people spending all this time cold calling and emailing.
So reaching out to people that potentially have no idea who you are and have no interest in what you’re selling. And I was spending a lot of time doing that motion and I thought there has to be a better way. So I went out and did some research and the time I was selling into people that were in what’s called a marketing procurement role, I was selling marketing procurement software and enterprise sales.
So these were 6 figure deals and I said, where are these people going to consume information and I, my research told me that if they were using social media, they were using linked in more than any other platform. So I decided to teach myself how to use LinkedIn. I found people that seemed to really know what they were doing and do it well.
And I looked at what they were doing. And then I made a commitment to myself to post one post on LinkedIn every single day for 90 days. And it changed my life. I became kind of a, an extra. And creator on LinkedIn and have been able to build out a personal brand that has catapulted my career. What it also did is it elevated and helped to drive an inbound motion.
Or the company I was working at, so we started getting inbounds where people were actually reaching out to us saying, hey. I saw you posted this, or I saw a video on this and we actually might have a need. Can you tell me more about your platform? And so, it really just taught me that if you know how to create good content that resonates with your buyer and get it in front of the right eyeballs, that you can educate a market at scale.
So when people are ready to buy, they will think of your product or service.
Brian Thomas: Thank you. I appreciate you sharing that, breaking that down. And the fact what really got me, everybody has their story here, but you talked about you know, not being like penned up or caged up or, you know, put basically box in the corner with your career and the fact that you took a a chance or an opportunity on sales really excites me in your story.
So, thank you, Sarah. And Sarah, as a fellow podcast host, I’m always curious what exciting and trending conversations are happening around the world. What was the genesis behind your podcast? What the duck? And what have you learned in your hosting journey thus far?
Sarah Scudder: Yeah. So, I joined source day a little over 2 years ago as the chief marketing officer.
So, I was hired to kind of set out our strategy and build out the marketing function on our go to market team. And 1 of the things that I did was I. Researched avenues and different sources of content that people were producing that were targeted at a very niche person, which is who we happen to sell to.
And that is people working at mid-market manufacturers. In North America that are on the direct material side of procurement. And I wasn’t finding a lot of content in particular video content that was being produced. And so, I said, 1, it’s either a really bad idea. People have tried it and failed and stopped doing it, or there’s a market here to create a podcast to provide useful, valuable supply chain people working in manufacturing.
So, in August of last year, my team and I decided to launch a podcast and our goal was to give it 12 months. I feel like we really needed to. Get things set up properly and get things going on a good cadence and we would give it a fair shot and then make an assessment and decide. And here we are fast forward more than a year later, still going with our podcast.
We reduce we release an episode every Wednesday morning at 7 a. m. across all the major podcast channels. And what I’ve learned is. There’s a lot of value in doing something that’s very niche and specific. There are thousands and thousands of podcasts out there. And sure, I could have gone and launched a podcast on marketing.
I could have launched a podcast on LinkedIn. These are more general and broader. But if you really have a unique skill set or unique type of content, you can replicate it at scale and have enough to talk about on a weekly or monthly basis. There is definitely value in producing something that’s going to a smaller subset of people.
It doesn’t always have to be our target is millions and millions of people are millions and millions of downloads. We can have something that’s smaller scale, that’s super niche, but if it’s done right and impactful, it can impact and drive pipeline and drive inbound for our company.
Brian Thomas: Thank you. I’ve not heard that perspective.
I talked to a lot of podcast hosts. I listened to it a lot and certainly again, a unique perspective the way you approach this. So thank you for sharing that. And Sarah, your supply chain platform source day removes many of the typical headaches that we all experience with P. O. changes, delivery date, et cetera., what really makes SourceDay’s stand out above your competition?
Sarah Scudder: Yeah, so I would say we don’t really have a direct competitor. We’re more of what you call a category creator. My co-founders both worked in manufacturing and experienced all the manual work that was involved in managing purchase orders. So acknowledging purchase orders, um, managing all of the changes, handling the follow up reminders.
And so, they decided to try to build a software solution to address and solve the problem that they had, which turned out to be SourceState. So the question is what makes us unique and different? So, there’s not, we’re not in a space where we’re, Competing against 20 or 30 or 40 other platforms because our category hasn’t really been created yet.
P. O. Change management is not something that most people are going to wake up one day and say, we need a better way to manage our purchase orders and manage all of our, the changes that we get on the purchase orders. So, people aren’t doing a lot of Google searching or coming out. And so, we’re a very educational sale where we’re going out and telling people there’s a better way.
Here’s the how and here’s why it will impact you. So, our competition is the status quo. It’s people who have been working at the same manufacturing plant for 20 or 30 years, who have been doing their PO management in the very same way. And they’re used to using email and spreadsheets and post it notes to manage the purchase orders once they’ve been issued from their ERP.
So that, I just wanted to call that out because we’re kind of in a unique situation where we’re not like being included in massive RFPs or RFIs. So, people are coming to us and it’s either us or they continue doing what they’ve always done, which is a very manual process. What makes our platform unique and different is that it solves a very, very Specific pain point and niche to people who are working in the manufacturing space in that we prevent late part deliveries to prevent manufacturing plants from having to shut down their production lines.
And if you have to shut down a production line, it’s a massive, massive impact on the business, huge impact to revenue. And can cause disruptions for months afterwards. So we’re solving a very unique and specific problem that people don’t often think about, or even, oh, it’s not going to happen to me until that raw material or that screw or that hammer doesn’t arrive because there was a breakdown in the PO process.
And then you’re like, oh, shoot. And then it’s too late. And it’s already happened.
Brian Thomas: Thank you, Sarah. I appreciate your again, sharing how you really haven’t traded that category for your particular solution. And I love the fact that you are again a little bit niche here, but really like the uniqueness of what you’re doing, your platform and the way again, that you’re marketing this.
And Sarah, last question of the day, we are a tech platform podcast. We like to ask everybody doesn’t matter if you’re a techie or not, if you’re leveraging any of that new and emerging tech in your business, and if not, maybe you found a cool tool or app you might share with us.
Sarah Scudder: So, I’m a huge proponent of AI. I think it’s going to have a major impact on all industries. And in particular in mine, I’m in marketing and there’s a lot of manual tasks that are already starting to be automated. So huge proponent of trying and using things myself and encouraging my team to do so as well, mostly right now from a creation perspective.
So, whether that’s creating an image, creating a video. creating content that’s, you know, going across multiple distribution channels. One, I’ll, I’ll touch on a couple of things. One of the newest tools that I’m using, a friend of mine named Leslie, who does a lot in the sales space actually recommended it to me, and it’s called Reggie AI, R E G I E dot AI.
And it does ranking and reviewing and scoring of SDR or BDR emails. So if we’re writing an email cadence that we’re going to send to prospects, we will drop it into the platform and it ranks it on a scale of 0 to 100, 100 being perfect. And we will not send anything that is less than 90 percent. So. We run a sequence, the tool, it’ll say 70 percent and then it immediately highlights and tells you what to change to improve your score.
So it might be removing an emoji. It might be adding an exclamation point. It might be tweaking the subject line. It might be changing. The copy of the email, so that’s a tool that is very, very useful and very impactful. I would say the second tool that has been really, really important and seems super, super basic is Calendly.
And Calendly, what it does is it automates scheduling of meetings. One of my biggest pet peeves ever is getting an email with 15 people on the email and 20 emails later, you’re still going back trying to schedule a date and time to meet with a group or meet with one person. So Calendly allows you to create a calendar.
To send it to someone to instantly book a meeting with you, and it automatically goes in your calendar with the zoom or whatever platform you’re using.
Brian Thomas: Thank you, Sarah. Appreciate the 2 highlights of those. Obviously, they’re free plugs here for these apps or these companies anyway. And we always get that on the podcast, which is really cool.
But what’s more important is people in the audience get to hear something new that. They might be able to leverage in their everyday business or life. So, thank you. And Sarah, the last thing is it was such a pleasure having you on today. And I look forward to speaking with you real soon.
Sarah Scudder: Thank you.
Brian Thomas: Bye for now.
Sarah Scudder Podcast Transcript. Listen to the audio on the guest’s podcast page.
