Christian Klepp  00:00

In the B2B world, marketing has been traditionally viewed as a cost center, where money tends to flow outwards rather than inwards. It’s also been viewed primarily as a support function that’s not linked to revenue generation. So how can marketers change this perception and turn their business unit into a profit center? Welcome to this episode of the B2B Marketers on a Mission podcast, and I’m your host, Christian Klepp. Today, I’ll be talking to Jason Kramer, who will be answering this question. He’s the Founder and CEO of Cultivize, a consulting firm specializing in lead nurturing and CRM implementation. With over 20 years of experience, Jason has worked with global and local brands to help bridge the gap between marketing and sales. Tune in to find out more about what this B2B marketers mission is.

Christian Klepp  00:52

Off we go. Mr. Jason Kramer, welcome to the show, Sir. 

Jason Kramer  00:56

Thanks, Christian, happy to be here. 

Christian Klepp  00:58

Oh man, I’m telling you like, well, first of all that, and secondly, I love how we’re so co ordinated, too. I mean, it’s just, you know, the stars are aligned today, man.

Jason Kramer  01:07

I got the memo. I got it nice and early.

Christian Klepp  01:10

Fantastic, fantastic. Jason, great to have you on the show. I’m really looking forward to this conversation, and as we talked about just before I hit record. I mean, this is a topic that, unfortunately, is not going to get old, right? Like this is something that it’s a it’s something that’s recurring. It’s something that B2B marketing teams struggle with day in day out. But let’s keep the audience in suspense a little while longer, and let’s dive right in. 

Jason Kramer  01:37

Let’s do it. 

Christian Klepp  01:38

Yeah, fantastic. Fantastic. So Jason, you’re on a mission to partner with businesses that empower teams to focus on what they do best, which is delivering exceptional products and services. So here comes the topic that we’re going to focus on today. Hold on to your seats, folks, how to turn B2B marketing into a profit center? Okay, so let’s kick off the conversation with two questions, and I’m happy to repeat them. So the first question is, why do you think marketing has traditionally been viewed as a cost or Expense Center in B2B? And the second question is, where do you see most B2B marketing teams struggle with regards to this perception?

Jason Kramer  02:18

Great questions. All right, so the first one would be simply that when marketing isn’t connected to sales, the often what you’re looking at in terms of a data point is, how many leads do we get? How many times the phone call rang? You know, we did marketing to get traffic to our trade show booth or to our webinar. How many people showed up? And that’s the quantifying number. And you might have a threshold to say, we want to get 100 leads, 50 leads, 500 and then when you get those, you’re happy. You’re like, we hit our goal. But to me, Christian, the disconnect is, well, what happened to those leads? How many were qualified? How many actually made it to an initial sales call, to a product demo, to a sample request, whatever it might be, and that’s where there’s often that disconnect, right? Because you’re not then connecting the marketing efforts to the sales efforts. Most CRM (Customer Relationship Management) platforms, which we’ll get in today, can do that. Can fix that, actually, quite easily. 

Jason Kramer  03:16

And I think the second piece to your question is it’s also the marketing jobs responsibility to make sure they’re collecting the right data. And so a good example of that is when you somebody’s coming to your website, whatever marketing channel you’re doing, you’re driving traffic in B2B, often, usually to a website or maybe the phone call. But there’s usually the two main buckets, right? I think you would agree with that Christian? 

Christian Klepp  03:41

Yeah, so absolutely. 

Jason Kramer  03:42

What they’re often not doing is they’re not capturing the hidden information. And what I mean by that is they’re capturing First Name, Last Name, Company, email, phone number, etc. But on their form, they’re not capturing the referring URL. They’re not capturing Where did that person come from? If they’re running AdWords campaigns and not recording in the form submission what keyword led them to the landing page to fill it out. And so part of that is either just not understanding how to technically set that up, or they haven’t had the experience to track that type of data, and they’re only relying on Google AdWords or whatever marketing platform they’re using right to run the campaign, and they’re not comparing that data to what actually is coming through. Because you and I both know marketing websites, and as good as Google ads is, there’s always going to be some inconsistencies with that information sometimes, and so you want to be able to compare it to another source. And so if you don’t have that source of data in your CRM, in your database, then that’s going to be the first point of contention where there might be a problem. 

Christian Klepp  04:47

Absolutely, absolutely. I want to go back to something you mentioned, like briefly, as you were answering Jason, like… 

Jason Kramer  04:55

Yeah. 

Christian Klepp  04:56

You were talking about how technology and the CRM platforms, and what have you were talking about how that can fix some of these problems. And… 

Jason Kramer  05:06

Right. 

Christian Klepp  05:06

You and I both know that there’s a camp out there that strongly believes, and in fact, they would probably even die on that hill, that no amount of technology or software can fix that gap between marketing and sales. It’s all about the processes and the systems put in place and the people. So w