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Disruptive Marketing With Web Technology with Jason Kramer

My guest is Jason Kramer who is the Founder of Cultivize, a company that helps identifies the right customers, nurture them to where they fall in love with you, and then convert them into paying customers. Welcome, Jason.

Thank you for having me.

It’s a delight to have you on the show. I met you when you and your team reached out to me in a sales call and here you are on the show. Let me outline for my audience a little bit about the experience that we had. Jason’s team reached out to me and said, “We can help you figure out who’s visiting your website and we’ll tell you how to get ahold of them once you know who they are.” I was intrigued. Jason gave me a little snippet of code that I pasted onto a couple of my websites and then he would be reaching out to me every couple of days with, “Mark, here are a couple of companies that have visited your website. Do you want to get ahold of them?” That’s a brilliant piece of magic. How did you stumble into this? How can our audience use this magic to figure out who’s visiting them? The people who have raised their hand said, “I want more,” then you can reach out and keep the conversation going.

Mark, that’s a great segue for me to give a visual of the idea of email marketing. Many people we talk to, and perhaps you’re one, I know I was one, many years ago used what we call traditional email service providers. You send out an email to a list and you’re super excited that you’ve got a 30% open rate or whatever the number might be. The reality is that what do that 30% of people do? More importantly, what about the other 70% that haven’t taken any action? A lot has changed since the world of email marketing. A lot of people may have heard the term automated marketing or lead nurturing. Even the term marketing itself, despite it being around for decades, is still vague. It can mean many different things. There’s no surprise that marketing automation is also still an illusion to understand what that means.

Disruptive Marketing: We’re in a digital age where everything we do is being monitored.

What we do for our clients, rather than a company deciding, “Tim, how about Tuesday morning we send out an email at 10:00 AM to our entire database?” Linda says, “What about Thursday?” Ultimately, Tim and Linda aren’t either correct or wrong because they’re deciding when their customers and prospects want to hear from them. We all know that’s not how business and how sales work. You’ve got to strike when the iron’s hot. You’ve got to strike when a prospect is showing interest. Somebody walking into a retail store is immediately showing interest because they’ve walked through the door. What our system is doing essentially is creating that virtual door to let you know when people are walking through it. We’re doing that in the web world. 99% of the businesses we help do not have a brick and mortar presence. In fact, 99% of them aren’t even an eCommerce website. They’re selling a service to either consumers or to businesses. They don’t even have a mechanism in place via their website to know who’s interested and who’s even potentially making a purchase. What we do is something quite simple. We all are familiar with the idea of the abandoned cart mechanism. Maybe you haven’t heard of it, but we’ve all experienced it.

We place an order, decide something distracts us. We get a phone call, we don’t place the order.

It’s all about learning behavior. It’s all about tracking. We’re in a digital age where everything we do is being monitored. Whether we want to accept it or not, it is the reality of the world we live in. What I contest is why not take advantage of that technology and that information that’s out there for your own business? You don’t need to be a $100 million company in order to leverage that technology. The majority of our clients are in that $1 million to $5 million range that don’t even realize that technology is accessible to their business.

That’s why I wanted to bring this to our audience. This is a cool concept. We can identify who is visiting or at least what companies are visiting your website, and then provide you with contact information that you can reach out to them. That’s cool.

You've got to strike when the iron’s hot. Click To Tweet

Not only is it cool, but it is going to amplify the ability to close more deals. Picture this. You have a database like many companies that we’re talking to our audience here that have 5,000, 10,000, 50,000 people in their database. The reality is that you haven’t spoken to many of those people in a long time. What our system has the ability to do is to be able to let you know and signal to you when that person has come back to your website and realized they’re not even filling out a form. They’re either going on the website, they’re watching a video, they’re reading a blog that you recently posted. They’re checking out a new service that you have added. They’re doing some level of engagement because they’re interested. If you don’t have a way to know that they’re interested, then that’s a potential piece of business that you potentially lost.

The other aspect of this is the anonymous visitor. People ask me all the time, “Jason, what about the people that aren’t in my database? What about the companies that are coming to my website that I’ve never spoken to before? How do I identify those people?” The unique thing about our platform is that we’re able to take repeat visitors that are coming to your website. By utilizing the IP address, which essentially for the non-geeks out there is the phone number for their computer, we see that visitor comes multiple times. We can then cross reference that IP address, that phone number and be able to match it up with information about their business. We’re able to give them information about the business owner, about the company, about the phone number, email address and other information for them that they normally wouldn’t even have access to. You’re being alerted to understand who’s coming to your website and more importantly, you have contact information to be able to reach out to them.

You and your team have figured out and accumulated billions of IP addresses. IP for the non-geeks stands for internet protocol. You have figured out how to identify what IP address belongs to what company. That’s the secret sauce and that is a moving target, so you’ve got a lot of technology going on to help maintain that list of IP addresses and who it belongs to. I know it’s difficult to always identify an individual, but the point is that we can identify which company is. It’s very likely that the person that you want to reach out to, you know what their function is, you know what their role is.

Mark, I’m sure like many people, you utilize your LinkedIn for your business to inquire about people. What you can do with this information is maybe you don’t see the CTO or the head of human resources or the person you need, but you find other people and their titles. You can then take that information, go on LinkedIn and then be able to trace to who you’re looking for that works for that company. The great thing about LinkedIn is that there’s a good chance that you might even have a connection in common. It’s no longer what I call a cold call. It turns into a warm call.

Disruptive Marketing: A company can get amazingly high revenue, but they can’t grow their business exponentially without any real software and system in place.

An example is we had a client that was selling what we call fire prevention systems for buildings. Those are those fire sprinkler systems and all the piping that go into commercial buildings and residential high structure buildings. Using our platform and our strategy, they were able to see that a prominent museum in Manhattan visited their website that was not a client. They were able to pull in who the facilities manager was through this same system. Rather than cold calling and trying to find out who that facilities manager was, which would have been weeks if not months’ worth of work, they called upon the facilities manager. They didn’t come out and say, “This is how we got your info,” but they said, “We’d work with other museums, and we wanted to reach out to see if we could have a conversation with you about the services we provide for other museums in Manhattan.” The conversation went very quickly to the appreciation of the phone call and the outreach to getting a scheduled meeting. Without that facility manager’s name and number, that probably would have never happened.

It’s examples like that and examples I even use for my own business. I will be the first to tell every customer we work with, I am not personally a big fan of cold calling. I want to be able to call on a company because there is value and I’m able to pinpoint what that value might be. You can argue you can do that without this type of technology. I will tell you, Mark, and to all those in our audience, it makes it so much more of a relaxed conversation knowing that a potential business is expressing interest in your company before you call them and to know exactly what they’re looking at. If your company’s offering a multitude of services, a multitude of products and being able to know out of the ten different things you offer, here’s the one thing that they expressed interest in. Your entire conversation, via email or via phone, can be all geared around that one service, which will lead to a lot more of an effective conversation.

Every conversation has to be relevant or it does damage to your company’s brand. The problem with cold calling is that we’re asking people to give us something, their precious time when they owe us nothing. When we can make a call and identify the fact that we have something that they’re interested in, the conversation goes much easier. Why not have conversations with people who give a damn about what you’re selling at the time when they give a damn about what you’re selling? That’s what you at Cultivize helps people do. What’s the process that you go through? The process that you recommend is people put themselves in a position to have these relevant conversations.

The first thing to make all the audience clear on is that there has to be for any business some source of lead generation. When a business says, “We get our business through referrals or through networking,” to me that’s not lead generation.

Do your due diligence; investigate who you're working with. Click To Tweet

Let’s talk about that. Word of mouth and referrals is not a sustainable or scalable marketing methodology. If you’re thinking about selling your company and your marketing method is referrals and word of mouth, you are unsaleable because the new owner can’t pour money into marketing and grow the company. It’s the icing on the cake but it is not the cake.

We do have a few criteria that make a good fit for companies that we like to work with, and not only like to work with but can help. If they don’t fit these criteria, then it’s nearly impossible for us to make any type of impact. I’ll run through them. One is they have to have at least a dedicated sales person or team. If there’s not somebody that’s going to be accountable and responsible for business development, that’s going to utilize this software in an easy way. When I say utilize a software, I’m talking about maybe an hour or two a week at most. It’s not like you’re sitting all day on it, but you have to have someone that’s going to be there dedicated.

You also have to have lead gen. If you’re spending a couple hundred dollars a month on Facebook and you’re testing out AdWords and you’re dibbling and dabbling around, that’s not sustainable lead gen. You have to have a marketing company you’re working with or somebody in-house that has a strategy that’s going to produce quantifiable and quality leads on an ongoing basis for our system to do the magic it can do. The other thing that we find is two components. One is either that you have a product that’s a little bit expensive. I always like to use the example if you’re selling a $28 bouquet of flowers, you don’t need us. You just need to have beautiful flowers. If you’re selling something that’s a few thousand dollars, $10,000, that’s not going to sell in a five-minute conversation. There’s a process to that. Something that’s a little bit more expensive, something that’s a longer sales cycle, those are things we look for when we’re talking to companies.

The other thing that we often find is that a company can get amazingly high revenue, but they can grow their business exponentially without any real software and system in place. Meaning they don’t have a CRM. They don’t have a sales process. They don’t have an integrated hub that’s connecting all of their efforts together. It astonishes me that clients can grow, but a lot of clients can’t grow because they don’t have this type of system in place. What we do is we look for and identify companies that either don’t have any system at all and we help develop that system for them so that they become more productive with their time. They can be more efficient. A lot of times our platform and strategy could take two people that would normally take 50 people worth of work to be able to accomplish, because of all the automation and things that we can do. We look for a company that wants to embrace the idea of being able to automate and systemize their sales, marketing and sales strategies together.

Disruptive Marketing: When hiring someone else to help grow your business, make sure they’re going to be delivering the quality that you would expect from your own internal team.

After that, it’s about personality more than anything. A company that is passionate about what they do, they’re dedicated to it. They don’t run their business as a hobby, but they’re in it to win it. Those are the types of personalities that we look for from a business owner as well as the company themselves. We’re agnostic to vertical. We could work in a multitude of different environments, anything from clients currently in education to construction to distribution runs the gamut, even nonprofit. We’re looking to work with companies that are struggling with being able to grow and scale their business because they don’t have the processes in place. We want to give them those tools to succeed.

What can you provide to somebody who wants to put together those processes?

What we provide is more than the software, more than the technology. My company prior to forming Cultivize was around for many years and we provided digital marketing, branding and marketing services. What we bring to the table as a team Cultivize is many years of marketing expertise and knowledge and the willingness to want to jump in and help. Every one of our clients will start off by getting every single month a one-hour consultation, which is a strategy consultation with me personally. That’s where we go through. We evaluate the goals that were set. We want to see how we have achieved those goals. What new goals do we have to set? We want to make sure that they’re getting 150% out of the system, what we expect they can get out of it. We’re there to hold their hand, hold their team’s hand and guide them through it.

In addition to that, we’ll happily create content for blogs, for email newsletters. We’ll help design and create landing pages for them as well as all the nuts and bolts that go into the platform. We’re there to help as much as they want help. For the clients that have an in-house team or an external marketing partner, that’s terrific too. We’ll help and train those people to make sure that they know how to get the most out of the system. We’ll still be there for the hourly strategy calls every month, but we want to make them feel comfortable that they’re not pigeonholed to rely just on us. We’re there as much as they need us to be there.

You’ll help people start from scratch or you’ll help them augment what they’re already doing with this magic of detecting who’s coming to the website. What’s the most interesting project that you’ve been working with that Cultivize has helped grow with the methodology that you bring to the party?

There’s one that comes to mind and I can happily share it here with the audience. It’s a company called Edco. What Edco does is they provide fundraising programs for robotic programs at schools. The way that they do this is a little bit like a crowdsourcing type of a methodology limited directly to this one specialty. What we’re able to do with our platform is we’re able through what’s called an API, which stands for application program interface. What that means is that they’ve built a custom platform that their users go onto to create these fundraising pages to invite teams to build out a place for people to donate and to contribute. Through this API, we’ve been able to integrate our platform into their platform easily. The magic happens that when someone creates an account, there are different levels to getting to that fundraising process. For example, when you create an account you’re prompted to, “You’ve created an account, let’s create a fundraising page. They’ve created a page. Let’s invite some team members to the page. You have team members there, let’s set a goal. Let’s invite some people to donate.”

There are all these steps to have a successful campaign. Their software on their own has no way to engage the people that are creating these accounts. It has no way to educate them about the value of inviting new team members, about getting people to participate. We’re able to create specific drip email content that goes out to each member based on certain aspects of their profile. For example, if they didn’t reach their goal in a specific time, an email gets sent out through our platform. If they did reach their goal, we send out a congratulations email. If they haven’t added as many team members as we think they should have, an email goes out for that. What we’re able to do is we’re able to constantly be nurturing it and informing these users on how to get the most out of that Edco platform to make it a successful fundraising campaign for their school and their robotics program. That’s one example that’s specifically how we’re able to customize our platform to adapt to another piece of software that already exists.

Another example would be is for a heating and ventilation company. It’s a distributor. It’s the largest distributor in the Northeast. They distributed for Mitsubishi, Honeywell, Lux and a number of other nationally and globally recognized brands. What we’re able to do with the platform in their unique case is we’re able to produce content for key specific customer audience. This company operates across the Eastern Seaboard in nineteen different locations. We’re able to not in the case of my example of sending an email newsletter to your entire database. We’re able to send out content specifically to branch managers, sales managers, to internal communication, to customers of specific locations, to vendors. All this is possible because of the automation of the segmentation of data that we have in the system. Another thing which is as important is segmenting data. What we’re able to do is create automated rules to say, “If for example, your location equals X, then you’re going to get these series of emails. If your zip code is X. If this happens, then this is going to move your data from one place to another.” There are all these rules we’ve created for that particular client and others that help them create a systemized way to organize their data, which makes for effective content delivery to specific audiences.

This concept of segmentation is critical because otherwise, you have a generic message. A generic message persuades nobody. If a customer does not believe that we are talking directly to them, there is no conversation that’s triggered with an email.

It’s also about the accuracy of data. There’s one funny occurrence. One thing I did as a test for me is the people that started email marketing to me, without any relevant content and not understanding my business. For example, I would get emails about we can help your HR department. I don’t have an HR department in my company. The point is I would get this email from this one company and it kept on saying, “Hi, Angela,” and my name is Jason. I thought, “I’ll let it go,” and it kept on happening. I emailed them back. I wind up getting on the phone with the owner of the company and I said, “I’m not trying to sell you. I’m trying to let you know that there’s some data that’s inaccurate in your system. My name is not Angela. You have the right email address. You should look into it because if it’s happening to me, it could be happening to other prospects you’re trying to reach out to.”

Since that phone call, I still get emails to Angela from that company. The point being is that there are a lot of people that might have the technology, they may not be working with the right people that don’t care about the quality of what’s being done. The integrity of me and my company is of the utmost importance. I only use that story because there are many people out there who are doing all sorts of different things. A lot of them are doing great things for companies when it comes to marketing, even this type of work that we do. There’s a lot that isn’t checking everything the way it should be checked. I offer that out to the audience too is that when you are doing your due diligence, you investigate who you’re working with. Make sure that they’re going to be delivering the quality that you would expect from your own internal team by hiring someone else to help grow your business.

There are lots of great ideas in our conversation, Jason. We’ve covered a lot of ground. To our audience, a couple of things to think of. One is if you’re not doing it now, you’ve got to do list segmentation. You’ve got to create relevance for everybody you’re reaching out to. You have to have a marketing system. One of the most important questions that I can ask somebody that I’m working with is the simple question, “Do you have a formal funded marketing plan?” Formal is a critical aspect and funded is a critical aspect. If the answer is no, I can predict that your business is on the downward slide whether you believe it or not. It’s critical to put together these systems if you’re going to create the best possible operation. With Jason and the Cultivize methodology of being able to identify companies that are coming to your website. What a critical and interesting aspect of having people who are interested. They’re hungry for your information. To be able to reach back out to them and say, “The reason why I’m reaching out is that here’s what we do for companies like yours,” and then having that conversation to accelerate the relationship. All those are such great ideas. What’s the best way for my audience to get ahold of you?

The best way is, by all means, you can email me personally if you’d like. It’s Jason@Cultivize.com. Our phone number is (845) 201-9353. The website is Cultivize.com. You could also find us by going on good old Google and doing a search if that’s easier.

One thing that I suggest to our audience if you’re fascinated by this, have a conversation with Jason. He’ll send you a little snippet of code that you hand off to your web person and he’ll start to tell you who is visiting your website. It’s been fascinating that the conversations that we’ve had about that. Thank you for providing me with these insights and to bring them to our audience so we can disrupt sales by doing things completely differently.

It’s my pleasure, Mark. It’s been great to have the conversation with you. I look forward to keeping more conversations going and to seeing what the audience has to say. I’m always excited to hear who’s been utilizing this type of technology and what their successes have looked like.

Thanks for being on the show.

Thank you for having me.

Important Links: 

• Cultivize
• Edco
• Jason@Cultivize.com
• Cultivize.com

About Jason Kramer

The fact is, without a Lead Nurturing platform, you can only identify 2% of your website visitors, because the rest did not fill out a form. Imagine the ability to put a name to the anonymous prospective customers on your site, and deliver automated content based on their levels of interest and actions. 

Your sales team will love the ability to track deals and get insight to “hot leads” and use this information to close more deals.

We provide a “Done For You” lead nurturing strategy that is backed with our 20+ years of marketing expertise. As a Certified SharpSpring partner, our team can completely manage your lead nurturing and automated marketing campaign on a monthly basis. You’ll get a personalized 1-hour monthly strategy call to ensure you’re leveraging all features of the platform. 

Intrigued? I welcome the opportunity to share the successes of our customers and give you a personal live demo with me, follow this link to schedule our call – https://www.cultivize.com/schedule-demo/

We Help Businesses Who…

☑ HAVE AT LEAST ONE SALESPERSON

☑ SELL A PRODUCT/SERVICE OVER $1,000

☑ HAS A 30+ DAY SALES CYCLE

☑ SPENDS MARKETING DOLLARS EVERY MONTH WITH LOW RESULTS

☑ ARE SEEKING A SEAMLESS SALES, CRM & MARKETING PLATFORM

Best practice tips you can use right now to improve your email marketing and sales process strategies:

✔ Segment your CRM or Email System, create content for each target audience, versus sending the same message to everyone

✔ Use lower case in your subject messages to get better open rates

✔ Create a follow-up process for your sales team so that phone calls and emails are sent on a consistent basis

✔ Connect your marketing & sales efforts to track which strategies are producing the most leads and resulting in new revenue

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