Three decades inside industrial. Now he's writing about why 2025 is the watershed year.
Ed has spent his career inside industrial manufacturing: building, selling, advising, sitting on boards, and writing about what works. He is the author of two books on industrial sales and marketing, and works exclusively with lower-middle and middle-market industrial manufacturers and their private equity sponsors to build predictable, scalable organic revenue growth.
Ed's Cycles & Secular Changes paper named the watershed before most industrial marketers admitted the ground had moved. The frameworks below (Marketing for LLMs, the new top of funnel, ABM, partner co-marketing, passively-consumable content) are the systems Ed is building in response to a marketing landscape that broke in plain sight.
How Mature Is Your Marketing Engine, Really?
There's a maturity model for industrial sales, and one for marketing too. Most companies score average across both. A coming Ed Marsh framework will name the dimensions and benchmark you against industrial peers.
There are four levels of industrial marketing maturity: laggard, average, strong, and leader. Most companies sit at average and don't know it, because they're benchmarking against their direct competitors instead of against what's actually possible. The ORE diagnostic already audits the marketing dimensions: content discipline, website conversion, SEO/AEO, competitive intelligence, sales enablement, and lead generation. The standalone Marketing Maturity Model, currently in development, will add the dimensions that matter most in the new landscape: AI citation strategy, podcast and video distribution, partner co-marketing rigor, and what Ed calls passive consumability: the fitness of your content for buyers consuming while doing something else.
What separates a 'strong' marketing function from an 'average' one is rarely budget. It's whether the basics (defined ICP, a content calendar tied to buyer questions, attribution that follows the dollar, and a marketing-sales relationship that isn't war) are actually in place and being used. Most aren't. Industrial buyers can tell.
Your Next Buyer Won't Google You. They'll Ask AI.
AI Overviews now answer questions Google used to send to your website. The new game is being the source the AI cites. Different content, different schema, different distribution.
Content architecture for LLM crawling. Schema markup. Authority signals. PR for AI citations. AEO, Answer Engine Optimization, is the new SEO. The companies that understand this are quietly becoming the cited sources for their industries, and the ones that don't are watching their organic traffic disappear with no idea where it went. The shift isn't subtle: SparkToro's data shows nearly 60% of US Google searches now end with no click to the open web. ChatGPT and Perplexity answer without linking. The meta-game is no longer 'rank for the keyword'. It's 'be the answer the model gives.'
The good news is that the industrial buyer was already self-diagnosing on Google before the AI shift; AI just made the diagnosis faster and more efficient. The bad news is that the new authority signal isn't backlinks. It's whether real industry experts converge on your content as the trusted source. That's earned, not engineered. The companies winning here have a real publishing discipline, a real point of view, and real industry voices (operators, peers, customers) choosing to be associated with their work.
When Buyers Don't Trust Marketing, Marketing Has to Stop Looking Like Marketing.
The new top of funnel is podcasts, video, PR, partner endorsements, and earned authority: the channels buyers already trust. Form-fills, SEO landers, and gated content are deprecated.
Trust is at all-time lows. Buyers have a dim view of B2B sales people: 74% of recent buyers said the meeting was a waste of time and they would never take another with that salesperson; only 18% said the meeting met their expectations. The same buyers consume content peer-to-peer, through trusted podcasts, industry voices, conference replays, LinkedIn Live, partner-introduced video, and content from operators they already know. The marketing organizations that fill the funnel today are the ones with a media arm, not a campaigns arm.
Building trust requires transparency, empirical credibility, and authentic expertise demonstrated through channels buyers already consume. That means co-creating content with industry voices instead of writing about yourself. It means showing up on the podcasts your buyers listen to instead of running paid retargeting. It means PR that earns citations instead of brochures. And it means treating your customers, partners, and industry peers as the trust signals, because they are.
Targeted Demand Activation Against Named Accounts.
The opposite of fishing for inbound. Identify the accounts you want, build the play, run it across marketing AND sales as one motion. ABM is the natural shape of demand activation when your TAM is 500 accounts.
ABM works when marketing and sales operate as one team against a defined target list, not when marketing pushes leads and sales ignores them. For industrial, where the addressable market is often smaller than 500 accounts and the buying teams are 8–12 people deep, ABM is the natural shape of demand activation. The IP for this isn't new: target account selling, named-account marketing, key account programs: these were the original B2B playbook before inbound briefly convinced everyone that demand should be measured in form-fills.
The mechanic that matters is coordination: the right contacts, the right people, at the right companies, at the right time. The marketing function identifies accounts and orchestrates the touches; sales runs the relationship work and the buying-committee mapping. The two functions share a target list, share a definition of progress, and share accountability for revenue. When this works, it looks unfair. Competitors describe it as 'they keep showing up everywhere.'
Most Industrial Revenue Flows Through Partners. Most Marketing Doesn't Reflect That.
Reps, distributors, integrators, OEMs, channel resellers. Joint demand creation through partners is the highest-leverage motion most industrial marketing teams aren't running.
Industrial revenue is rarely direct. It flows through manufacturers' reps, distributors, system integrators, OEM partners, and channel resellers. The companies that grow fastest treat their partner ecosystem with the same rigor they apply to their direct sales team: defined ICPs for partners, structured onboarding, co-selling motions, joint marketing programs, and accountability for partner-attributed revenue. From the marketing side, this means co-branded content, co-hosted events, joint case studies, MDF programs that actually generate measurable activity, and a content calendar that includes the partner's market, not just yours.
Partner marketing is a force multiplier when done well. It's a money pit when done badly. The difference is whether there's a strategy. Most industrial companies do the opposite: they sign anyone who shows up with a business card, send them a price list, hand over MDF with no accountability, and hope. The partners who deserve marketing investment are the ones with their own demand-generation motion who can be force-multiplied, not the ones who need to be replaced.
CRM, Marketing Automation, AI, and the Mess in Between.
Most industrial companies have technology that doesn't talk to itself. The right stack is invisible. The wrong stack creates work that nobody does, and reports that nobody believes.
The industrial revenue tech stack has four layers: CRM (the source of truth for accounts and deals), marketing automation (the engine for nurture and lead routing), sales acceleration (the tools reps actually use day-to-day), and an analytics/AI layer that turns the data from the other three into insight. From the marketing side, the failure mode is almost always the same: marketing automation deployed without integration, attribution running on a different ID system than CRM, AI tools generating content nobody reads, and a Frankenstein stack of point solutions that nobody fully owns.
The right stack is invisible to the marketer. Content goes out, engagement is captured, the right account-level signal reaches sales without a manual handoff, and reporting reflects what actually happened. Getting there isn't a tooling decision. It's a process decision first, an integration decision second, and a tooling decision third. Most companies try to do it in the reverse order and end up with a $200K/year stack that nobody uses.
Walking-the-Dog Content. Commute Content. Shop-Floor Content.
Buyers don't sit down to read whitepapers. They listen on the commute, watch on lunch break, scroll on the shop floor. The content discipline that wins is the one your buyer can consume without setting aside time.
Audio and video are the dominant industrial content formats now, not because every buyer prefers them, but because they're the formats buyers can consume in the spare moments they actually have. Ed runs the Industrial Growth Institute Podcast for exactly this reason: it's the format that gets in front of operators, executives, and PE partners during the windshield time, the gym time, and the dog-walk time. That's where industrial content gets consumed today, not at a desk, with a coffee, opening a 24-page whitepaper.
The marketing teams winning the trust battle are the ones producing audio and video on a sustained cadence, not the ones running monthly campaigns. The bar isn't production polish; it's authenticity, frequency, and the ability to keep doing it for 18 months before it starts compounding. The companies that quit at month six are the same companies wondering why their content marketing 'didn't work.'
Talk to Ed About Your Sales Team
Sharp diagnostic questions. An honest read on whether Ed can help, and if he can't, who can.
An honest read on your sales team.
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