Episode 288: Scaling Sales Success: Insights from Cultivize Founder

Intro
Welcome to the Making Sales Social podcast featuring the top voices in sales, marketing, and business. Join Brynne Tillman and me, Bob Woods, as we each bring you the best tips and strategies our guests are teaching their clients so you can leverage them for your own virtual and social selling. Enjoy the show.

Brynne Tillman: Welcome back to Making Sales Social. I’m excited for my guest today, Jason Kramer. He’s the founder of Cultivize a consulting firm that specializes in B 2 B lead, nurturing strategies, and technology.

He’s got over 15 years of experience running a creative agency. Jason identified revenue gaps in marketing and sales funnels for distributors, service providers, marketing agencies, and manufacturers.

He launched Cultivize to provide customized solutions that empower businesses to connect prospects and customer data with marketing campaigns and sales team activities when not strategizing in CRM.

Jason enjoys family time with his wife, 2 kids, 2 dogs, and their lively New York home. Welcome to the show. Jason is thrilled. To have you here.

Jason Kramer: Hey Brynne, yes I am thrilled to be here. Thank you.

Brynne Tillman: So excited to talk about the topic of building a sales process that scales. But before we jump into the questions we ask all of our guests one question, which is, What does making sales social mean to you?

Jason Kramer: That’s a great question, and III will see that I will try to have a great answer. So when I think of selling socially, I think it’s about education is the forefront. So it’s creating not only content that is compelling, but also informative and trying to be a thought leader, but walking that fine line between sales is that is that is your question right? And that education. So I think that if you build rapport you provide good resources to people. Naturally, they’ll want to buy from you.

Brynne Tillman: Great answer. I love that. And as a digital marketer, I think, then say, you’d have a great answer. So I have a few questions I wanna dive into. And I love this idea of building a sales process that scales right? So many businesses. They’ll have a sales process. Maybe they have some campaigns that go along with that process.

But the idea of getting that to scale is just delicious to every entrepreneur and salesperson out there. So I wanna start with a question about your experience, what are the key components of a sales process that ensure it can scale effectively? You know, inside of that business.

Jason Kramer: Well, the one thing you don’t want to have is all of the insight and skill you know, depended upon one person. So if you have one great sales leader, or one great salesperson that’s got all the bag of tricks inside their brain, and it hasn’t been documented. Well, that can’t scale, right? Because you’re limited to that one person? So the things that we look for is a process in place that identifies what are the steps needed. So as the sales team grows, everybody can follow the same process. You know, that could be email scripts, phones quick phone scripts how to use the CRM that they have all the proper training. Those are all vital things, social selling, of course, as well, which I know is your avenue of expertise. So that’s where you start. Right is having those fundamental blocks.

Brynne Tillman: So I love that. So there are a few questions that come to mind. I’m gonna start on that customer journey alignment.

Jason Kramer: Right? So you know, as businesses scale maintaining a personalized customer journey can be quite challenging. Right?

Brynne Tillman: So how do you ensure that your sales process aligns with the buyer process and what the buyer wants?

Jason Kramer: Well, and that’s great that you said, what the buyer wants. So I think that. And it’s not just me you talk to any industry expert. The buyer has definitely in control in the last decade. They’re calling the shots. They’re they’re letting you know what they want when they want it. And so you have to understand that and at the same time, you might be dealing with different types of buyers, personalities, as well as even different target audiences. So it’s not just having the sales scripts in the playbook.

But it’s having. It’s more about the technology. I think, Brynne, as a big component and having even something simple as what we call dynamic content, where if you’re sending your first sales email to a sales manager versus a marketing manager, the language automatically changes in your email to fit their needs, their pain points and speaks to what they want to hear versus what the other person wants to hear. Unfortunately, a lot of companies don’t have that sophistication. So then you ask, Well, what can you do in that case? Well, you just have different templates, right to say, Okay, if we’re talking to this type of customer. This is the language you need to use, whereas if it’s this type of customer, this is the language to use, and having the arsenal, and that toolbox of more than just a screwdriver and a hammer will certainly help you communicate more effectively.

Brynne Tillman: I love it. I wanna go down that path a little more. So what role do technology and digital tools play specifically in scaling and part 2 to that is, where is AI fitting into all of that?

Jason Kramer: Yep, I knew the AI question was coming. I wasn’t sure I was coming this early, but I knew it was gonna come. So technology is really important. I mean for a few factors. So one is for scalability. You need to have some type of system. You can’t just rely on every team member using Outlook in a Google spreadsheet. And it’s just a recipe for disaster. So there has to be some level that doesn’t have to be a $200,000 salesforce implementation. But it’s gonna have some solo sophistication to help that team grow and give them the tools they need to be more productive because the end of the day a salesperson’s job is to sell. It’s not to write emails. It’s not to do all these technical things that should be done for them. So that’s certainly a piece of it. The other piece of technology is beyond CRM, you know, even something as simple as scheduling calls. Are they using you know calendar, or whatever else it might be, right? There are hundreds of them. But if they’re not doing that, and they’re manually scheduling calls. Well, that’s not a good use of their time. So when we talk about technology, it’s all the little pieces that come into it. Even, you know, we’re talking on Zoom today. So there’s tons of technology that play a really important role in making the sales job more effective.

Now, your second question, AI is certainly yet another powerful tool, but it’s gotta be used within reason, and it’s gotta be used when appropriate. I’ve seen all sorts of AI tools out there. We use them ourselves, for certain aspects. But at the end of the day, you gotta know how to use the tool, and when it applies right? So asking AI to write a LinkedIn post or a blog post for you? Yeah, it can do that. But is it going to be your voice? Is it gonna represent who you are? Probably not right? So you need to kind of feed it with prompts and know how to use the tool just like any technology.

And I think that the risk in my version of thinking about AI brands is AI chat. GBT, for example, is super easy to use, meaning you could go in there and type something, and I’ll spit out a response within 2 s. But just because it’s easy to use doesn’t mean that you’re using it the right way. And so that’s the fear I have with a lot of business technology. It’s so simple to use. But I’m a big believer. And this is a saying I always have that I’ll put on a conversation that technology and software don’t solve problems. Right? As people, we are the problem solvers. You know, technology is just a tool. So if you’re not understanding how to use the technology, AI being one of them, then it’s probably gonna cause more harm than good.

Brynne Tillman: Interesting. So I just share that one of the things that we do is, we tell folks to go on to Zoom, record your thoughts on a topic, grab the transcript, and use that inside of Chat Gp and tell it. Do not research. Use this transcript, only pull out, quotes, create a blog and we tend to get things a little bit more in their authentic voice.

Jason Kramer: Yeah, I mean, if you can feed it, if you can almost write, you know, like a bio about yourself, and put that as up, save as a prompt and then even say, Hey, chatgpt, go check out our company website, this specific page of using version 4. It can do that. Where that’s paid. But it’s great it’s it’s so much more worth it absolutely. But the point is like again it goes back to the prompts. If you can educate it and make sure it understands who you are, who your audience is, and what you’re trying to do. Then it can be a very effective and time-saving tool.

Brynne Tillman: So how does that play? If I go back to you talking about having templates in place for sales leaders, or CEOs? Right? So you’ve got this different persona. Does AI play well in that realm in that message writing?

Jason Kramer: I mean it it. It’s in there, right? So even some of the CRM systems we use for clients. There’s an AI component built into the email designer, even where it’s you know, you, instead of typing into a box or copying pasting from a copy deck, you can have AI generate a headline or generate copy. But again, it’s about the promises about the tools. So I would say that they’re probably more likely less used in those applications, like, if you’re designing an email or building a web page of that sort. But certainly in the world of social you know, if you’re responding to a comment, there’s a lot of tools I’ve even seen on platforms. LinkedIn is one of them where you could just so, you know. Have AI. Say, I want my comment to be funny. I want it to be serious. I want it to be this or that, and then I’ll generate a comment. You know that instead of writing your own comments, you know. So it’s there’s a there’s a lot of it out there, and it’s only gonna get it’s only gonna grow exponentially. You know, as time goes on for sure.

Brynne Tillman: So how do you know you mentioned briefly, that AI is kind of playing inside of your CRM, do you? What if you had a crystal ball? And you said this is how AI is really gonna help Sellers scale even faster, better, stronger in the CRM. What do you see coming down the pike?

Jason Kramer: I mean, in terms of AI I think if anything, maybe being able to generate more sales content materials. You know, I think, would be the place like. So, for example, I know even Shachi Bt is really good, like, if you had, let’s say, for example, this conversation and you took the Transcript, and he told Chachi Petti. I want you to turn this into a white paper about AI, and the use of AI and CRM right? It would do that in a pretty good job, and then you could take that, and then you could go to something like Canva and say, Hey, canvas, take all this content, and now make a beautiful, you know. Really sexy ebook for me, and it will do that really quickly. Right? So I mean, all those things exist if you know how to use them and what combination they need to be used.

Will that get easier? Yeah, I’m sure will. Right? You’ll you’ll have you know, Chatgpt combined with Canva combined to 3 other tools. And that’s just one big Mega tool that can do it all. That certainly, I think, has its place down the road. But for now, I think it’s knowing what to steer clear of. There’s a lot of noise, right? So it’s just trying to find the right tools for the right job. So I tell you my wish list for the CRM. In 2026.

Brynne Tillman: Let’s say my wish list is based on the persona inside of the organization, the stage that we’re in the length of time since we last connected the amount of outreach it will now pull all the right content that will get them from ghosting you to going. Oh that’s interesting. I need to start this conversation again. So you know, downloading all of the overcoming objections and everything that the salespeople are seeing and reacting to in the field and going. There’s a chance that this isn’t moving forward based on our data, which is gonna be my next question, based on the data that we see and based on what’s happening inside of this Ka client. Here’s the piece of content you should serve them now and that’s my hope. That’s my big wish list.

Jason Kramer: And Lu and you know that’d be amazing. I mean, and you’re right, because what we find to the salespeople that are really gonna taking notes and putting all that insight into a follow-up email, you know. Hey, Brian, I know we spoke 6 months ago. This was what was going on back then you were talking about this talking about that like those emails convert because it’s not just a boilerplate email. You’ve it shows you’ve paid attention. You’ve listened. But that takes time. And that takes a really good note taking you know, and it’s not easy for everybody to do that. I will say there’s some really great AI tools out there that record and transcribe

Zoom calls another, you know. Go to the Webinar. Yeah, which is amazing. I mean, some of them are really really good, and that should to to the person when you’re following up. They’re like, Wow! Jason really paid attention to listening. But it’s really the AI that’s doing all the all the hard work right. And it’s not that I wasn’t listening. It’s just the notes are so well done by AI that it’s even better than I could have done it myself. So you know, I think things like that are definitely going to help. And yeah, I love your idea. And you know, I see that happening. I mean, there’s no doubt that that will happen for sure. You know that to me would be amazing at scale. Yeah. So I use a note-taker called sybil.ai.

Brynne Tillman: Not only does it recap and tell you all the next steps, but it actually has. When did they not? When did they smile like it’s like, Oh, they liked that? Oh, let me go! They smile. Here, let me recap on that really really amazing right? So that leads me into a kind of data and metrics. Right? How do you use data and metrics to drive sales process improvements and scalability like,? What are the KPIs? What are you looking at? That can help drive the sales process at scale so once.

Jason Kramer: So some of these things might seem obvious. But I can’t tell you how many companies out there that either we talked to, and certainly once we haven’t spoken to that aren’t doing this thing. So one is a drip campaign. Everybody, probably on the listening knows what a drip campaign is. But if not, it’s a series of emails or touchpoints that’ll happen over a period of time most companies set that up and just let it run, and they don’t look at anything right? So if you’re dripping every 2 weeks every month and email for 12 months to somebody. You need to look at that data and see if are people opening the email, if they engaging, and what emails are they engaging in about test subject messages and test design. We find that which is not surprising, that plain text emails under 75 characters, not words, 75 characters, which is a really really short email, tend to do the best in these email drip campaigns, small little touch points, but enough uniqueness that they don’t feel that they’re just generic to everybody.

That seems easy enough. But it is a challenge writing a really good email and 75 characters. So I would certainly challenge listeners to think about that concept. So 75 characters. So a LinkedIn profile is 220 characters, 220. Yeah, so 75. I mean, it’s really challenging. Certainly, we’ve done once we do a combination of 75 to 1 50. But we find those really, really short emails.

There’s no Bs in there. Right? You’re just driving right to the point of why you’re reaching out while you think there’s value to connecting. Because let’s face it. You know, most people are on their phone,s right? Looking at email at all times. 100 and 50 characters, 75 characters will fit in your screen before you have to scroll right? So you won’t have to scroll to read that whole message. So when you pop open an email you can read that whole message without even scrolling.

Okay, do I respond, or do I not respond? I don’t have to sit there and read this long, lengthy email. I get a ton of emails solicited to me. And I find that people who write really long emails just clearly have no idea what we do as a company and no idea who I am. And they’re just hoping that something in that long email patch. The reality is, once I see more than one paragraph. I hit Delete, so they haven’t earned the right to take up that much of my time. Oh, absolutely not.

Brynne Tillman: So can you give me an example of what one of your emails may be? That’s short and sweet and converts.

Jason Kramer: So a short email. Okay, I’m gonna sort of paraphrase here. It’s the interest of time. But hey, Brandon, I’m reaching out to you because we know that as an online company that works with people in the social space. We’ve seen that the number one failure rate for retention of building new relationships is not having a CRM. Our client. Xyz had the exact same problem, and in just 6 short months we got this result for them.

This sounds interesting to you. We’d love to see you further something like that. Right? That’s more like 75 words, not 75 characters. Exactly. I understand that. But that’s me. I can’t count that like that in my head. Brand that short but that is the the paraphrasing that down to 75 characters, if you can. If I drink coffee. I’d probably have the capacity to do that. But you call me off the guard, so I’m so so I in my head if I were to put something out.

Brynne Tillman: I would say, struggling to fill your pipeline click here for a free ebook that will transform your sales. And that’s it. There are no more characters left. Yeah, exactly. So. Yes, that’s it’s well, well said, yes. Right. So if you need someone to help with those messages, just give me a call.

Yeah, no, I love that. So that’s interesting. I wonder, even on Linkedin, if something that short would work. And I like the idea of just getting to the point.

Jason Kramer: The short stuff does work on Linkedin. I mean one thing that I’ve also been because, listen, I think you know every platform linked, especially B, two, so the major platform, there’s a lot of noise out there, a lot of people reaching out that shouldn’t be reaching out to people because they’re just in the white net, right? And so it’s not targeted. And I certainly the on the receiving end, a lot of that. But I think, yeah, really, really short messaging on Linkedin, like I love. I love that because it’s like you just. And it’s guaranteed to be read. That’s the thing I like about LinkedIn. It’s like, unlike your inbox.

You know. It’s very easy to kind of fall, you know, out of the inbox. Go to the spam folder. But, on Linkedin, you’re getting an alert on your phone that you got a new message and you’re probably gonna read it. Whether or not you respond is different, but you’ll at least read it, and if it’s short and maybe make someone smile, you know, or laugh. Hey? You know. That’s a good way to kind of start, you know, building a report.

Brynne Tillman: So I wanna just throw in another little tip around, that is if you’re on. If you’re sending a message to someone, you can look to see if they are currently on Linkedin. If you get to their profile, there’s a little green circle at the bottom right of their picture. They’re on a desktop. If there’s a green circle with a white circle in the middle, they’re on Mobile. So if you’re like, you know what they’re gonna respond on Mobile, they’re they’ve got the app open right now. So sending a short one of your short messages while they’re on is gonna increase your odds of them responding immediately. So that’s why I love talking to you about it because I didn’t know that I learned something new when I talked to you about Linkedin. Well, that’s what I knew, anyway. So I’ve 2 more questions.

My last question that I’m prepared with is, you know, scaling a sales process comes with a lot of challenges. Can you discuss some of the most significant challenges you face when either scaling your business or helping a client scale their business? And how did your technology and solution fix that?

Jason Kramer: Okay, so there’s a couple of key factors. So one is you have to be doing something to generate leads right? So without leads, there is no sales process to even need so. So obviously, there’s this outbound right cold calling and things like that. But there has to be something. So I would, you know, first sort of argue if you want to see that strong word, but to say that what is your current process to fill the funnel right at the top of the funnel. What are you doing? You know, SEO, I don’t really count, because that’s just hoping for the best.

You know. But what if you actually spending money to generate leads? So that’s number one. Number 2 is you have to have buy-in from management and from, you know, the senior level, you know sales team, and whoever that is, that’s going to help you right and help the team grow, because if they don’t believe in it, and if they’re not using the technology in the process. Then I could almost guarantee it’s gonna fail very, very quickly.

Because there’s not going to be accountability. There’s not going to be any real respect for everybody if no one’s using it. So those are the 2 biggest things that we see. Why it doesn’t work. You know. And then, aside from that, obviously a lot of little small details in between. But those are the biggest things that we look for

Brynne Tillman: also. And what do you do? That helps them fix that?

Jason Kramer: Well, I mean, so my company does not provide any inbound marketing right at all. So you know, we guide them on what I’ll give you a really quick story. So I was talking to a pro prospect today who does commercial or residential cleaning, mostly floors and things of that such. And they’re a small business, a few people. And you know they’re looking at, you know, different CRM platforms. And I was like, listen, you’re you’re small companies, no doubt about it. I spent. He was talking about trying to grow, and he wasn’t doing even obvious things. And now listen. This is just me with my almost 30 years of marketing experience.

But I said to him, Brynne, I said, Listen, I don’t you know, in your market? I’m sure there are people buying houses, and I’m sure there are people moving into new business locations. It’s very easy to get that data, and if you were to reach out to them at the moment of when they’re buying that house when they’re moving in, guess what they’re gonna probably need their carpets and floors cleaned when they just moved into a new facility or new horse. Right? So why not do that versus blanket? The whole neighborhood with a flyer. That’s not gonna work they said. Oh, that’s a really good idea. And I’m thinking myself, I’m like, it’s not really that good of a good idea.

It’s just a very simple, straightforward common sense idea to me. But it’s surprising how many businesses don’t think logically about leachen, you know, they’re like, Oh, we’re gonna do adwords because everybody else does adwords. Well, if your audience isn’t doing, you know, looking on on Google, why are you gonna waste your money? And so what I often find to answer your question, Brynne is giving clients, and even people with that aren’t a client that we talk to. I give them high-level advice.

I’m not gonna go implement any of those things, I tell them, but I sure point them in the right direction to say, you know, if you’re gonna put all this separate in, if you’re gonna build a sales team, if you’re gonna build that process, you need to have something in place. one last quick example of trade shows. We have so many clients to do trade shows, and they think they’re great because they walk away with, you know, tons of leads, and I’m talking tons, maybe a hundred, 200, a couple of 100.

And I say to them, Brynne, are they qualified leads, or did they just want your free swag and the crap you were given away right to get, you know, to get it. They had to get their email address. What we find is a lot of these trade shows are not producing qualified high-quality leads.

And so then I begged the question to my clients, why are you spending the money and the time to travel and go to the show and have the booth for a couple of days when it’s really not your target audience that you’re attracting? And so, you know, you just have to be strategic.

I’m not saying it’s easy, but it’s easy to make the mistake. You know, it’s it’s harder to make the right choice.

Brynne Tillman: Hmm, yeah, that’s that. It’s a good perspective for sure. So the last question, what question did I not ask you that I should have?

Jason Kramer: What question? Well, I think you know, maybe one would be timeframe and investment. To actually get something like this off the ground would be a good question. I’m sure it’s what everybody’s thinking. So how about that? Alright. Well. What we’re talking about. Like I said before, it’s not rocket science. It’s just really applying a strategy that’s been thought out that makes sense and that aligns with the business. You know.

We could write a playbook and put together a sequence of emails in less than 30 days. I mean, it’s not like it’s months and months worth of work. So a lot of times this is apprehension. Oh, my God, this is gonna take forever! It’s gonna take a year to build this out and all these things it doesn’t. The only thing that slows down that process is when you don’t have decisive decision-making from a client, you know, too wobbly about who their target audience is. They’re really not sure, like what their differentiator is in the marketplace like we can’t solve those problems for people. I mean, you could bring in a branding company to help fix that. But so that’s you know. So the process can be pretty quick.

You know, and even the cost-wise. You have to think of it as an investment. Right? So we’re not talking hundreds of thousands of dollars, you know. It might be thousands, or, you know, certainly under 5, 10 grand, you know. You can have this whole thing set up. So we’re not talking about an exorbitant amount of money. It’s really just investing in the feature for the business, right, and for the growth of scaling your sales process. So you know, we’re just looking for smart, hungry, you know. Savvy people who are running successful businesses already that really just want to take it up a notch, and you know, not having being rely on human capital to make that growth happen.

Brynne Tillman: Yeah, I think that’s great. How you scale faster, I think, is what it comes down to. That’s great. So thank you so much for joining. I think there were so many golden nuggets, and today I really appreciate it. And IAA. How can people get in touch with you if they want to have a conversation?

Jason Kramer: Well, I knew if I didn’t have a Linkedin profile. We wouldn’t be talking today so huh! You can find me on Linkedin. Jason Lee. Kramer Lee is spelt LEIG. H you can also go to the lead.com which will bring you to a lot of great resources. We have a free playbook. That explains the whole lead nurturing process and provides a framework for how to apply that to your business.

We often also offer email diagnostics. So if you’re doing email marketing already. And you’re really not sure what’s happening after it. Send Happy to do a free analysis on any email platform you’re using to tell you really what’s happening behind the scenes, as well as a bunch of other great resources. And I’ll leave everybody also, Bryn, you and I know each other, but for those that don’t know me.
I love these conversations, you know, feel free to reach out. I will return your phone call. I’m not gonna pass it off to another team member. I’m all about providing this type of education and resources that we talked about today to anyone who would be happy to chat with me.

Brynne Tillman: Great! Thank you so much, Jason. You’ve brought so much value, and I’m very grateful for your time and for everyone out there when you are out and about. Don’t forget to make your sales social.

Outro
Thanks for watching and join us again for more special guest instructors, bringing you marketing, sales training, and social selling strategies that will set you apart. Hit the subscribe button below to get the latest episodes from the Making Sales Social podcast give this video a thumbs up and comment down below on what you want to hear from us next. You can also listen to us on Apple podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, and Google Play. Visit our website, socialsaleslink.com for more information.