James: Hi, everyone. This is James from the CTRL+Listen Podcast, brought to you by Octopart, with a special guest for you today. This is Mike Maynard, chairman of Napier. Thank you so much for coming on the show. Really good to have you here.
Mike: Thanks very much for having me on the show, James. It’s great to be here.
James: Anytime. Just to get started, do you want to talk us through what Napier does and a bit about your background in the industry?
Mike: Yeah, sure. I actually graduated as an electronics engineer and spent my early career in electronics engineering. So I know a lot of people listening to the podcast will be in the engineering sector — I actually started as an engineer.
I really respect everyone who’s still an engineer. I realized I wasn’t a great one. What I enjoyed most was talking about engineering. I loved the subject but wasn’t necessarily great at doing it. So I became an applications engineer, doing technical support, and worked at a couple of companies, including an American semiconductor company where I ran their European apps team for a while.
I realized the only real route to promotion was either to go into marketing or to move to the States. I decided I wanted to stay in the UK — I had young children at the time — so I moved into marketing. I ran European marketing for a few years.
Then I met the person from the agency we used. She said, “The founders want to retire. You should buy the company.” And I thought, “How hard can it be to run an agency?” So, in my infinite wisdom and naivety, I bought a tech agency about three weeks before the dot-com crash in 2001. And during the dot-com crash, it turned out it was actually quite hard to run a tech agency. It was a baptism of fire.
Napier today does what I like to do: talk about technology. It’s probably the best job in the world for me because I get to talk about amazing clients doing really cool things in engineering, and I get to talk about them to people who care. We’re there to help those clients with their marketing, content generation, and ultimately grow their sales.
James: Fantastic. It’s one of those “do what you love” situations. Glad to hear it.
Mike: Absolutely. And I don’t have to do the hard grind work of putting together a bill of materials for a board, which I found really tough.
James: So, just to get a bit of clarity: obviously you work with people in tech, and probably some outside of it. What would you say are the main differences between selling to regular customers and selling to tech specialists?
Mike: The main difference is that when you’re selling to consumers, people say, “Don’t talk features. Features are bad. Talk benefits, not features.”
If you talk to engineers, you have to talk features. It’s really different. There’s no point saying, for example, “We’ve increased the clock frequency from 100 to 150 MHz, but don’t worry about the details, just trust me, it runs faster.”
The first thing the engineer thinks is, “You have no idea about my job.” Speed matters. 150 might be too fast or too slow. “Just faster” is no good to me.
So that’s the biggest difference: people really care about features, and very specific features matter.
James: So it’s an understanding and knowledge-based thing. Someone in the sector knows how things operate, so they want to understand how they operate and why that’s beneficial.
Mike: It’s that, and also the requirements of the job.
Let’s say I’ve got a code base that’s a couple of megabytes, and someone comes to me and says, “We’ve got a microcontroller with bigger memory for your code base.” That’s useless as a statement. If it’s over 2 MB, fine, I’ve got space and can grow. If the largest part in the family is 1 MB, there’s no point talking to me — no matter how “better” you think it is.
If you’re buying a car for yourself, would you like a car that accelerates faster? Absolutely. But you don’t walk into the dealership and say, “The 0–60 time must be 8.9 seconds or less.” Nobody does that. So it’s very different from that kind of consumer purchase.
James: That makes total sense. Great analogy. Thank you.
I know there’s a term that gets thrown around — “early adopters.” Do you want to talk us through what that means in this context?
Mike: One of my favorite marketing books — and anyone who’s into marketing and a bit older has probably read it — is Crossing the Chasm. It was one of the first works to say, “Early adopters are very different from the mainstream.”
In general, engineers are often considered early adopters. But when you look at the engineering market, that’s not really true. Within that market, you get a group of engineers who definitely adopt technology much faster than the rest — they’re the actual early adopters — and others who are much more mainstream.
And that’s usually driven by what they’re doing. If I’m working on a short-lifetime consumer gadget, maybe an electronic toy, I can take risks. I can use new technology that might not be perfectly reliable yet, because the product’s life is short and the risk is manageable.
If I’m attaching a wing to an aircraft, I’m not going for creativity and innovation; I’m picking something that’s never going to break.
So within engineering, people have very different risk environments, and that really drives their attitude to innovation.
James: That makes total sense. On a similar topic: why would people not adopt or implement new technology? Is it because they’re scared?
Mike: Risk is a big factor.
In B2B marketing generally, a lot of what marketers care about is reducing the perception of risk. Not even the real risk — the perceived risk.
If you’re responsible for a development project and it fails, that’s not usually how you get a promotion. So people are driven to make relatively risk-averse decisions.
Engineers care about making something that works, is reliable, and lasts a long time. They don’t want to be the person who built the infamous Sinclair digital watch where, supposedly, there were more returns than products sold — on average, every customer returned the watch more than once. No engineer aims for that.
So will you buy something that has a bit of risk? It depends. If it lets you build a product no one else can build, or do something really cool, maybe yes. But if it doesn’t give you a dramatic, measurable advantage, why take the risk? Why not pick a product that’s already proven reliable?
In electronics, there’s an incredible amount of design reuse. You often see innovative companies designing in old products. Not because they think old is cool, but because they say, “How did we do this before? It worked brilliantly. It isn’t broken, so we don’t need to change it.”
James: That brings me to a term you used: “satisficing culture.” Do you want to explain what that is?
Mike: As someone who’s sold semiconductors and now helps companies market them, I’d love to believe engineers are always looking for the single best product on the market. That if I just explain the features and show why we’re better, engineers will flock to use it.
Increasingly, that’s not the case.
When I started as an engineer, maybe 35 years ago, engineers really did choose individual products. Today, because the world is so competitive, in many situations engineers choose vendors rather than individual parts.
There might be four or five manufacturers and all of them make a product that is “good enough.” So what do you do?
Around the turn of the century, a lot of companies ran vendor-reduction programs. They realized that the more suppliers they used, the more expensive it was to manage all the internal processes and relationships. So they said, “If supplier A already delivers 20 products to us and has a ‘good enough’ version of this new part, we’ll just use theirs instead of adding another supplier.”
The product suffices. So people say, “It’s sufficient, it suffices,” and they pick based on vendor, not ultimate “best in class” component.
James: And do you see that as potentially detrimental?
Mike: I don’t think it’s inherently detrimental. It just changes how manufacturers and marketers have to think.
Take the PC market. In the ’90s, when you bought a PC, you really cared exactly what Intel processor was in there — was it a Pentium or a 486? What was the clock speed? That made a noticeable difference.
Today, most people don’t obsess over that. “Core i5” is basically a brand label now. A modern Core i5 is very different from an early Core i5, but people just see the brand.
If you keep producing good products and deliver consistently, you keep customers for longer, and every redesign isn’t a massive fight. If you’re new to the market, though, it makes it really hard to break in.
James: I’ve always heard in sales that it’s easier to keep a customer than win a new one.
What would you say are some of the main reasons prospects don’t buy a product? Any red flags or hesitations?
Mike: The biggest issue — and one of the hardest challenges for vendors — is that the engineer never evaluated it in the first place. That’s often the real reason.
There are lots of reasons why that happens.
First, they’ve used something similar before that was good enough. They know it, they trust it, and it reduces development time and risk. Why go looking elsewhere?
Second, engineers, like any customers, have mental “boxes” for suppliers. They associate supplier X with one category and never think of them for others. So your product might never even come to mind.
Third, engineers are under pressure. Expecting them to research every product on the market for every design decision is unrealistic. So they pick a short list of vendors.
We talk a lot about being in those top five websites or vendors an engineer goes to. Often they have five main suppliers; they’ll start with those, and maybe 50–80% of the products for a design will come from that group. If that’s the case, why go anywhere else?
So being “top of mind” is incredibly important in engineering.
James: I’d like to expand that. You may have partly answered this, but what are some reasons great technology might not get adopted? Let’s say someone makes something better than most of the market — why might people still not use it?
Mike: The classic example is Betamax versus VHS for video recorders.
I worked in a television shop when I was at school, so I watched this battle. There were two standards: Sony’s Betamax and the broader VHS alliance. Betamax was technically better quality. But VHS had many suppliers, lots of models, and therefore more competition and lower prices.
Sony was a premium brand, so Betamax was more expensive. Customers wanted choice and lower cost. Over about two and a half years, I watched what we called a “Betamax town” switch to VHS.
So a better product lost because it didn’t fit what customers actually needed: variety, price competition, and availability. That happens a lot in engineering.
You might have the “best” product, but if it’s expensive, hard to get, or only from one vendor with limited support, engineers will often pick the “good enough” one that’s easier to work with.
James: There’s a perception that engineering teams and marketing teams don’t always get along. How accurate is that, in your experience?
Mike: I think they probably get along more often than people think, but both sides can make big mistakes.
Engineers often make fact-based decisions — and tools like Octopart are built around that. If an engineer knows exactly what they need, they put in the specs and find a part.
But with other decisions — say, choosing a processor family — it’s not just a parametric search. That choice affects software, tools, long-term support. You start asking questions like:
- Do I trust this vendor to keep investing in this architecture?
- Do I think they’ll stay high-performance?
- How good is their support?
- Are their development tools any good?
Those aren’t black-and-white questions. They’re gray.
Engineers don’t like gray. They love black and white. They want facts, numbers, clear trade-offs.
Marketers, on the other hand, are often more people-focused. They like debating positioning, perception, messaging. They enjoy that gray area.
So engineers are saying, “We should reduce this down to a fact-based decision.” Marketers are saying, “We should do this because it’s awesome and emotionally resonant.” They end up talking different languages, and the relationship breaks.
If you can get engineers and marketers talking in the same language, they get on great and respect each other. If you let them talk past each other, it all falls apart.
James: So communication and compromise basically hold it together.
Mike: Absolutely. And here’s a secret marketers might hate me for: marketers secretly love engineers.
In what I do, we can’t do good marketing without experts giving us the technical substance for our content. We need engineers.
Engineers sometimes question the value of marketers. But engineers also have to recognize that some decisions are not purely fact-based. Brand, positioning, and perception matter.
So if you’re an engineer, go and hug a marketer.
James: (laughs) Thank you. I’ll tell our engineering team.
When I first came across your site, I was looking through case studies and one really stood out: developing technical content for the launch of a new quality inspection robot. Do you want to talk us through what was involved?
Mike: We do a lot of this. Marketers love talking about “content marketing,” but at its core it’s simple:
- Create something that grabs a potential customer’s interest and makes them want to learn more.
- Provide the deeper information they need to make a decision.
At some point there’s a line between marketing and technical publications. I actually think datasheets are marketing content, because they help people buy. Engineers and tech pubs people might hate that label, but in practice, everything you produce influences purchasing.
For the inspection robot, we sat down with the client and talked about the product. It’s going into a market with lots of other robots and vendors. So we had to find out: what’s interesting, what’s different, what’s exciting, and what the market cares about.
The best moment as a marketer is when a product manager or engineer says, “The problem is all the other solutions do it this way, and that really sucks because of this. So we do it that way instead.” That’s the perfect story.
More often, you’re working with incremental improvement — you’re 5% better or just catching up. Then you lean more on brand.
In this case, we worked with ABB Robotics, a very well-known, respected brand at the high end of quality. So we could tell a story that combined the robot’s specific advantages with ABB’s reputation.
James: And that’s fully available for people to read on your website?
Mike: Yes, people can read the case study on our site, and they can also look up information on the robot itself.
We’ve done a wide range of campaigns. Another project I found really interesting for ABB Robotics was robotics in construction, which is a very early-stage market.
ABB said, “We’re selling a couple of robots into construction companies and don’t really understand exactly what they need. We need market research. We need to know if this is experimental or a real opportunity, whether we’ve got the right product, and what we need to change.”
So instead of just blasting out emails, they did proper product marketing: research first, then strategy.
We went out and interviewed architects, building firms, academics — a wide range of people. We ended up producing a 96-page white paper. That wasn’t the original plan, but the project grew.
That white paper became the reference for robots in construction. Even the EU cites it as the key paper on robotics trends in construction. That’s fantastic positioning for ABB as a market leader.
James: Is that also available on your site?
Mike: That one’s on ABB’s website, not ours. But if you Google “robotics construction ABB,” you should be able to find it.
James: Fantastic. I want to move to broader industry trends. Obviously COVID was a game-changer. What changed in this space since COVID? Has there been a shift in how business is done?
Mike: Sales changed dramatically, and that drove a big change in marketing.
During COVID, salespeople couldn’t visit customers. Traditional B2B sales — the salesperson visiting the customer’s site — stopped.
Customers realized they could do things over Zoom. Conversations became more transactional: “We want this, this, and this.” It was harder for salespeople to wander around, ask questions, and uncover new opportunities.
At the same time, during COVID there was a huge growth in creating what we call “content” — articles, videos, white papers, webinars. Content marketing wasn’t new — companies like HubSpot had been talking about it for years — but it really exploded.
Customers realized, “I don’t actually need to talk to a salesperson. I can do my own research.” And frankly, a lot of salespeople don’t know their products as well as they should. Some are great, some aren’t.
So engineers started doing what Gartner calls “self-directed research,” and what everyone else calls “looking it up on the web.” They often make 80% of the purchasing decision before talking to a vendor.
That makes marketing much more important. If your marketing isn’t great, you won’t even get the chance to sell.
You’re also seeing more and more completely online purchases of technical products — no salesperson involved. That’s where platforms like Octopart come in as part of that ecosystem.
James: I can confirm that from other sectors too — consumer electronics, automotive, everything. Before someone even steps onto a showroom floor, they’re often 80% of the way towards a decision.
So I’ll ask the big topic question: what’s the impact of AI on tech product marketing?
Mike: AI really excites me.
In tech marketing, though, it’s a bit different than in consumer. In consumer markets, you see a lot of AI-generated content. In technical markets, the quality of pure AI-generated content often isn’t good enough.
There are a few reasons. First, generative AI is probabilistic. For fashion, for example, there’s a huge amount of training data, and the concepts are broad. For narrow technical topics, the training data is much smaller.
And we often want content about brand-new products or approaches that didn’t exist when the models were trained. AI struggles more there.
The first AI-generated article you see on a technical topic might look impressive. By the third or fourth one, you realize it’s the same thing re-worded. There’s little depth or originality.
So right now, generative AI struggles to create great technical marketing content on its own.
Where GenAI does shine is in processing information. Comparing two products from their datasheets, extracting differences, summarizing long documents — things that might have taken an engineer half a day can now be done in minutes.
We even have a client who jokes, “One day our AI will be selling to the engineer’s AI.” That might be extreme, but you can imagine engineers sending out AI agents to gather data on products, and vendors optimizing for those agents.
Because of that, we’ve started working with a product for Generative AI Optimization (GEO) — essentially SEO for GenAI. The idea is to help our clients’ products show up when engineers ask questions in tools like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and so on.
If GenAI tools don’t “know” about your product, we’re back to that classic reason: engineers don’t evaluate it because they never saw it.
So for us, GEO is a huge opportunity to help clients gain share as search behavior shifts from Google to GenAI.
James: That’s fascinating. It’s a whole new ballgame. It used to be just Google SEO; now you’re competing in a different space, learning a new set of rules.
Mike: Exactly. And those rules will probably change again in six months.
It’s possible that in six months I’ll be saying, “GenAI is now awesome for generating technical content.” Things are moving that fast.
Right now, it’s a great support tool. It helps speed up drafting, research, and comparison. But you still need humans to get the best technical content. Six months from now, who knows?
James: I’ve seen articles about companies that moved too fast — firing staff and handing everything to AI, then discovering productivity actually dropped. So it’s clearly about balance: where humans stop and AI starts.
Mike: Absolutely.
There’s also the issue that GenAI models don’t like to over-train on AI-generated content. They prefer human-generated text as training data. If everyone floods the web with AI sludge, future models suffer.
So if you want your content to show up in ChatGPT, Grok, Perplexity, etc., you still want human-authored material, possibly supported by AI, not replaced.
At the moment, humans absolutely still add value.
James: Definitely. That brings us towards the end of the show. One last question: if people want to keep up to date with Napier, see what you’re doing, or get in touch about your services, where should they go?
Mike: If anyone has questions and wants to contact me, just email me. People listening to this podcast are smart — you’ll work out that my email is mike@napierb2b.com.
To keep up with the company, check us out on LinkedIn or visit our website: napierb2b.com.
James: Mike, thank you so much. It’s been absolutely fascinating talking to you, and I’d love to have you back on in six months to see if AI has changed everything again.
Mike: I might have a lot more free time if AI has taken my job, so thank you very much for having me as a guest, James.
