What Marketing Spend Drives Sales? And How Businesses Can Invest Better in Marketing with Solid ROI Tracking

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Welcome to today's episode.

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Our guest today is Jason Kramer.

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He is the CRM guy.

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Welcome to the show.

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Thanks, Eric.

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Happy to be here.

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Tell us a little bit about who you are and what you do, Jason.

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Sure, jason Kramer, founder of Cultivize, which is my second business that I started five years ago.

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I live in New York, right along the Hudson River, which is a beautiful place this time of year, and truly enjoyed that with my family.

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My background is in marketing, specifically on the creative side.

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However, I saw a gap about seven years ago, which we'll talk about a little bit today, where marketing typically stops at Legion and then the interaction between what happens with the sales team.

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There's a connection there communication.

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So I formed a new company that would help B2B businesses specifically with lead leakage and helping them create better systems to bring leads from lead gen into the sales funnel.

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Great.

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So let's start with a story that inspires the marketers and business leaders.

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Listening, we're ready to be inspired.

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Yeah, absolutely so.

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For me, it's a little bit of a perhaps a unique story in the sense that my company doesn't do inbound marketing right.

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However, we crossed the bridge into what clients are doing and helping them, so here's a quick story for two clients that had a similar issue.

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Most companies are doing something to generate leads.

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Eric, we could all make that assumption.

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Anybody listen here.

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Whether you're spending a hundred dollars a month or a hundred thousand dollars a month, you're doing something, and what we often find is that companies are doing that but they're not actually tracking the journey to say, okay, this is what we got in terms of a lead from this digital marketing effort or this trade show, et cetera, to know if it actually paid off.

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So years ago, we had a client who's traveling all around the world.

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They were selling products into the veterinarian space for helping with recovery of mostly dogs and cats.

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It was like a bodysuit that they sell to protect the bandages and everything in the woods, and so they were convinced that these trade shows that they spent tens of thousands of dollars to travel to and exhibit at were a great source of leads to generate for their business.

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But they didn't have a CRM.

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They didn't have any way to correlate the leads that came in and did it actually drive revenue?

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And so what we quickly discovered, once we put a CRM into place for them and help create best practices what in fact we noticed is that people were just coming by the booth to get the free swag right.

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They weren't actually a real customer that was actually buying any products from them, and so what we did for them which we'll talk about a little bit later is reinvest those dollars.

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We'll talk about how we did that.

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Similarly, we see clients even we have a new roofing client today who does direct mail.

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They have yard signs, they have trucks driving around, they do all these things radio, tv but they don't have any way to track it.

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They're spending a ton of money on marketing, and so we're helping them build better methods to correlate that to the estimates they're writing.

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Yeah, so I think marketing attribution is probably one of the most important topics, largely because I think almost 100% of the leads that businesses get are touched by marketing in some way.

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The question is, what was the amount of influence?

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Because a lot of B2B businesses in particular, they have salespeople who sell, but it's hard to say that marketing didn't influence every lead.

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When you think about the buyer journey today, because people look at the website which is created by marketing, people get outbound messages like an email, and they get thought leadership content and they get advertisements, and so there's so many things happening on the marketing side Events, like you mentioned, organizing the events and having people from their team speak at those events and exhibiting at those events.

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There's so many things that marketing is doing.

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But I think the difficult thing for businesses is to what I call get fingerprints on the weapon, like in CSI.

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They need to prove.

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marketers need to prove exactly what where the origin of each lead came from and what their influence on it was.

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That's where things get tricky because and complicated really fast because often there's lots of touch points and then trying to, in a after action review sort of way, see which touches had the impact can be challenging.

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There's different ways to look at it, there's different ways of thinking about it, which I think is healthy to have multiple views of that.

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But is that essentially a key thing of what you're helping clients do?

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Yeah, talking about attribution.

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So there's two main focuses that or not focuses but choices that business would have.

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So first is first touch attribution.

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How did they first find out about our company, whether that be a LinkedIn ad, whatever else might be a trade show, like you mentioned, a webinar, et cetera.

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But then there's also the last attribution model, last touch.

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So what was the final piece of marketing that actually put them over the fence to say, hey, let's have a conversation?

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Most companies are doing the first touch.

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They want to know where those dollars are actually driving quality leads.

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This is not impossible to do.

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I know you mentioned that it's difficult.

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I would say that it is, and it isn't If you have the right type of technology in place and you're working with a good marketing team that is putting in the right parameters to track all of those things.

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I'll go back to my quick story of the roofing company.

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They're just sending people to their website or to call them from their direct mail and door hangers and all these things.

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The simplest thing we told them is we're going to create a QR code that's different on all of your different channels and each of those QR codes is going to go to a similar landing page, but they're all going to be different.

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Visually they're all at the same.

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For tracking purposes they'll all be different.

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Visually they're all at the same.

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For tracking purposes they'll all be different.

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Then we'll actually know how much traffic we're actually getting from all those different channels, provided they're clicking on a QR code instead of Googling you or finding the website online.

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Super easy technology to use, but it's just people overthink it, I think, and that's the problem.

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So the answer is it's not difficult, it's just you need to have best practices and it has to be proactive, not retroactive.

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You can't be like hey, we went to a trade show a year ago.

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We want to know what we got out of it.

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We got to plan ahead and not plan for the past yeah, first of all, I think that the the different models of attribution, the first touch and the last touch I think people should look at it both ways to try to see what the answers are both ways, and then you can sort of see if it's a similar result or not.

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There actually is a third way that I also like to look at, which is I just call peanut butter, just spread the credit evenly across all the touches you have, and again, I don't know that the peanut butter is the right yet for all companies, but I don't know the first touch or last touch is also the completely right answer in every situation.

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So it really depends on the business and in some case that the campaigns you're running and the different channels you're using.

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So I like to ideally have a insights package where you can look at all three options.

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That's really ideal and it can be as simple as 20 years ago.

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The way my teams were doing attribution is in the CRM.

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You just have a lead source field which is records, where you first got this lead from, and so you can do that almost with no additional software other than the CRM.

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I think, as people have gotten to use a lot of different systems.

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In the golden age of marketing technology, as I like to call it, I think things get more complicated, and the more channels and programs that an organization is using, the more they're investing in marketing.

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Perhaps, the more complicated it gets.

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Yeah, and so we use a platform mostly for so we the two platforms we focus in on, are HubSpot and a platform called Shark Spring, which actually is now Constant Contact CRMs.

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They got bought two years ago.

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But both of those platforms and others as well, the ones that are a little more robust it's not difficult to track all of that.

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We can go in specifically now.

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I could pull up any of one of our clients and say what revenue do we get, by product, by sales, rep, territory, by any channel, any segmentation set we want, fairly quickly, within minutes.

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And it's a one-page report that highlights everything.

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And I think the I'm not a of think.

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I know that it's not that the technology and ability to do it isn't there, it's knowing how to do it.

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And the one thing that, eric, I think is for those listeners that have a CRM.

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I would say to them what are you getting out of it?

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We know that from a Harvard Business Review not done too long ago that over 70% of businesses are not even really leveraging their CRM and will fail to really maximize what it actually can do for the business.

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And it's not because they don't have the desire, they just don't know how to do it and they don't have the right skillset or the time to do it, so it just sits there and collects what I call tech dust, and so there's a lot of things that these things can be done by companies.

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But it's like I said.

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I think it's important to stress that it's not difficult today.

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It was 20 years ago, but it's gotten a lot easier, provided you have all the pieces of the puzzle aligned correctly.

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If you're trying to build a puzzle with 10 different puzzle boxes, it's never going to happen.

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It needs to be cohesive, yeah.

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I think that my personal opinion is that some of the CRMs, like HubSpot, have made things a lot easier than some of the other CRMs, like Salesforce.

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You can do a lot of great things with Salesforce.

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You just have to spend a lot of time, money and effort to set it up.

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To do it A lot of money.

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I think that HubSpot, as an example, has come a long way in the last years of a journey.

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Their product's gotten better and better.

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And so.

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I think attribution could be one of the things to say they've gotten better, because I've looked at all the dashboard reports that you getboards at HubSpot take you pretty far and you can get some pretty good insights there without as much effort as people had to put in historically.

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I do think there is some nuances and this is important in terms of credibility for marketers and business leaders when they're looking at this data.

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Looking at this data.

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If you present information and it doesn't really give the accurate picture and people feel like you're spinning or taking credit for things you shouldn't take credit for, that's where things get weird, because then they don't believe anything else you say.

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So I'm careful with some of these reports as well, because there's those positives or weird dynamics that sometimes happen.

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I think one of the most famous ones is that sometimes when there's a lot of marketing happening, that's awareness marketing that causes people to go to Google and do a search and then people click on the paid ad for the search and you attribute that to Google pay-per-click and not to the marketing that drove the awareness.

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That's where sometimes it's hard to know what really happened.

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If you will, I feel like it's like the clue mystery game at that point.

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But one thing that I've done and this is just a finesse on top of it, but I think it adds a lot in terms of credibility and it's worth it is every time you win a customer to do two things have the salesperson ask the customer, hey, what influenced your buying decision here?

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And have the salesperson capture that.

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And I know that's in one hand, a lot to ask of salespeople, but on the other hand it's pretty important.

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And I know that's on one hand, a lot to ask of salespeople, but on the other hand it's pretty important.

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And then the second thing is to ask the customer, after they've signed up as a customer, the same question directly.

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And by doing both of those things, I find that salespeople are actually pretty honest about it, because they generally are wanting to get more business and they're happy to give credit to marketing when a lead came from a trade show, like In your Story and they want to see more replication of things that work and less replication of things that don't work.

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And I think a lot of times customers are happy to share.

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If you ask them in the right way at the right moment, they're happy to share what things influence them.

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So I think those two things can give a credibility to the reporting and the systems and I think you can probably capture those things in the CRM, right?

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Yeah, listen, it comes down to the data, as you pointed out.

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Crappy data in is going to be crappy data out, but it also comes to your team as well.

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If you don't have a team that is capable and is comfortable having these conversations to your point, eric, talking to customers, then that's going to be problematic, right?

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If they don't want to ask certain questions that are important for data collection, then that's more of a management issue than a data issue or the team issue.

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There's a few factors, obviously, that make this all work cohesively, but, again, none of this stuff is rocket science and ultimately that difficult.

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It's just aligning everything to meet those specific needs.

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But I just wanted to point out one thing.

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So then we're going to wrap up here in a little bit.

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I talked before about the trade show example.

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What I didn't mention was what we did as an outcome of giving this advice and delivering the findings that trade shows really weren't that beneficial.

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We brought in a geo-targeted Facebook approach for that particular client in the pet care space.

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So, instead of traveling to Europe and all these places, they ran geo-fenced Facebook ads and other geo-fenced ads the day of the trade show and every day the trade show was running within the specific geo location of the trade show.

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So, as people were doing the trade show, ads were popping up on their phones for my client's company, still promoting what they were selling, but they didn't physically have to go there so they weren't missing out on the trade show.

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They just would air it in a virtual way instead of a physical way, which actually wound up yielding really good results in terms of people actually showing interest to their particular product and not just a free sweatshirt or the things they might've been given away at the booth.

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I think the one thing I've loved about your shows is it's all about looking at the data.

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And the one thing I'll wrap up here to say I always use the analogy of investing money in the stock market or the financial advisor, and most people, the people that are thinking wisely about their money, are not just going to fork over a few thousand dollars a month to a financial investor and never ask them hey, eric, am I making any money with that investment?

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What's happened with that investment?

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And I find that, to bring this full circle, that's what happens so many times with businesses.

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They just hand over money to marketing agencies and it's not the fault of the marketing agencies.

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It's the problem that there's no connection of data that we're talking about here today, and so I would just leave listeners with the thought of if you're investing even a few thousand dollars a month in marketing, whatever the number might be, are you making money?

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And if you don't know if you're making money or not, I would almost challenge them to say stop marketing, stop advertising and I know it might be a bold thing to say but stop it until you have a find a way to actually track the roi, because otherwise you could be spending tens of thousands of dollars a year and making no return on that investment awesome, awesome.

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I think that's great advice.

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I agree 100%.

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I'm going to link to Jason's website in the show notes so that, if you want to learn more and chat more about this really interesting, deep topic, you can reach out to him directly and do so.

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I encourage you to do that.

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Jason, thanks so much for being with us today.