Business networking is a necessity whether we like to acknowledge it or not. Some people enjoy a good networking event. Introverts do not enjoy networking opportunities. In life, sometimes you just have to “eat your broccoli.” Anybody can find networking success if they try. And try they should.
Harvard Business Review says, “A mountain of research shows that professional networks lead to more job and business opportunities, broader and deeper knowledge, improved capacity to innovate, faster advancement, and greater status and authority. Building and nurturing professional relationships also improves the quality of work and increases job satisfaction.”
Today, everybody is upping their digital networking game. This is a story of networking success stemming from two founders who met online. They are now working collaboratively on shared interests around serving their clients.
Networking Success – The Stars Aligned
When networking, it’s easy to meet a lot of people and not have a chance to stay in touch with everyone. In some cases, it’s even hard to remember the conversations you had. At other times, a networking contact stays in your memory.
Such was the case for founders Jason Kramer of Cultivize and Keith Reynolds of Publio who had met several years back while networking. When a mutual friend, Michael Bendit of the Trusted Referral Network, reintroduced them, they quickly knew good things could happen.
“It was [Publi.io’s] ROI Model discussion that sparked the connection,” says Jason. “Right away, we focused on our points of differentiation and our mutual goals.”
The Changing Media Perception of a Business Today
Due to the recent changes with COVID 19, many businesses don’t have the chance to meet prospects and talk face-to-face about their businesses. But when there is an obstacle, innovators find solutions. Jason and Keith started the conversation on a Slack channel this summer that led to a series of virtual meetings.
Within three months of working with one another, Jason and Keith found they shared many similar philosophies, though they each brought unique strengths. The collaboration became a magical combination.
Improving each other’s businesses by taking a look at each other’s business processes and approaches and more to see how they could help one another created value for both.
One of the themes of 2020 is there’s value in differences and multiple perspectives. Sometimes it’s hard to look outside of the box when evaluating your own company so it’s important to have a third party take a look.
Jason compares it to “getting dressed but never having a mirror to look into; it’s about making sure that potential clients perceive you as you want to be perceived.”
Jason and Keith easily agree the customer journey is most important to their sales process. Both looked at the other’s processes to refine the other’s business. They explored ways that content supports the lead nurturing process.
The result? Publio developed for Cultivize a turnkey content strategy and roadmap for growth using the “Publisher’s M.O.(tm) methodology. Cultivize set up and supports Publio’s SharpSpring and automated lead nurturing.
When partners collaboratively share resources, ideas, and processes, their businesses can go far by being a resource for both each other and their respective clients. The results have been quite compelling, and already they are working together on leads and customers.
About Cultivize
Over the last 10 years, marketing automation and CRM platforms have risen to prominence by enabling sales and marketing teams to become significantly more efficient and effective. After seeing so many businesses lose revenue due to identifiable holes in their sales funnel, Jason founded Cultivize. There are two areas where Cultivize technology support and integration can really help clients besides increasing sales revenue:
- Sales Goals and Marketing Spend Accountability
- Enhanced Teamwork and Customer Experience Standardization
Small and midsize companies come to Cultivize spending money on all forms of promotion – digital marketing, print advertising, direct mail, billboards, radio, TV, social media – to get leads for salespeople. In many cases, the money gets spent without the ability to attribute earned revenue to some or all of their lead-gen expenditures.
Today, most businesses don’t have a defined and repeatable process to nurture and educate their prospects through their buying journey. Aligning management/ownership, marketing, and sales organizationally on a configurable platform helps foster sales team building based on goal-setting and common data. This also ensures that customers are treated in a consistent manner, fostering branding and word-of-mouth marketing.
Cultivize was founded to stop this leakage in their clients’ sales process by educating and coaching people to learn the process and master the technology.
“We highly recommend our clients Get Cultivized!” Keith said without hesitation.
A Good Partnership for Clients
When an organization takes on or reboots marketing automation and CRM initiatives, it is also an excellent time to evaluate and organize the content you deploy in – and across – your campaigns.
Jason and Keith explored the symbiotic nature of working together to produce content-driven marketing automation systems that generate demand for products and services. At one early meeting they chuckled:
“Marketing automation and CRM is like buying hot dog stand; now you have to keep it stocked with hot dogs and all the trimmings to keep the customers coming back.”
Their shared emphasis on client success comes from listening to the client’s goals and collaborating on the solution.
“We build on one another’s ideas, strategize, and take measurable actions to solve problems. In the end, it proves that going from networking to working together can form many friendships and partnerships alike,” concluded Jason.
They are turning their attention to getting others involved in their network. An upcoming thought leadership event is in the works demonstrating how to use linguistics, AI, and machine learning to improve marketing and sales results. More on that soon.
About Publio
Do you need assistance building content strategy ROI into your organization? Publio is here to help innovators like you tell your story. Our collaborative, custom program development, training, and support services work for you and your business. We help you create a consistent content customer acquisition strategy and surround you with agile resources to scale your marketing investment.
The right content fuels robust lead capture and nurturing when you fuze people, process and technology. We partner with a growing list of people like Jason and the Cultivize team to further provide our clients with a competitive content strategy.