Category: Revenue Ops

Episode 234

We humans like conversations that keep moving forward.  Every time we share some detail about ourselves, we expect the other person to remember it. 

If they bring that detail back up in our next interaction, we feel pleased and want to keep that relationship going. Conversely, we get annoyed when they blast us with messages we had already said didn’t interest us.  

This is severely problematic for us sales and marketing professionals. The sheer volume of people and details we all encounter is too much to keep straight in our outbound emails, let alone in our heads, and that’s why we use CRMs. 

But there are many CRMs out there and to fit a business, they all need to be customized. That’s where our guest comes in.  

A graduate of CalState in information systems, he worked in data analyst roles for several tech companies, including a Customer Relationship Management company that sold to enterprises. Wanting to work more with solopreneurs and SMBs, he decided to go out on his own as a CRM consultant to show them sustainable relationship-building techniques. Suffice to say, he is able to deliver immediate benefits to his clients under this business model.
 
He also has a passion for coaching people on their nutrition, which explains why both components are blended in the name of his business – the health data guy. 

Let’s go to Laguna Beach to speak with Brandon Drake. 

Chapters/Timestamps:

00:00 Why Memory Matters
00:34 Meet Brandon Drake
02:19 From Burnout to Health
03:44 Back to CRM Consulting
07:00 Relationship First CRM
09:14 Automated Nurture Emails
11:20 Crowdsourced Content Engine
12:11 Bio Form Data Hack
16:11 Progressive Profiling Scores
19.45 PSA: Funnel Reboot Reading Room
20:29 Segmentation Beats Spray
26:46 Protect Email Reputation
28:16 AI Needs Process First
32:28 Where to Find Brandon

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We often hear marketers talk about how vital their work is to sales. What we don’t hear nearly as often is the reverse: how essential sales is to a well-functioning marketing team.
If marketing creates the content, sales provides the context. And that context is what makes campaigns relevant, credible, and grounded in the real world. Sales teams feed marketing the on-the-ground truth—what prospects are actually saying, how they react to new pricing, and how they interpret a company’s positioning in different segments.
That’s especially clear when a business serving the SMB market tries to move upmarket. Sales hears almost immediately how enterprise buyers perceive the brand, revealing the gaps marketing must close for the company to compete at that level. It’s a live feedback loop marketers can’t get anywhere else.
Bridging those gaps requires real collaboration—sitting in on each other’s meetings, sharing insights early, and recognizing that both functions are cogs in the same revenue engine. Their shared job is to keep that engine running smoothly.
Our guest today understands that better than most. He’s a fractional leader of revenue and go-to-market teams, and host of the Revenue Problem Solvers Podcast, where leaders drop the script and speak candidly about what it really takes to build growth teams. He’s known for diagnosing the true cause of weak team performance – something he knows well from playing intervarsity sports. He gets frontline performing again too, using a coach’s tone to get them back on track. 
And he doesn’t restrict this just to his day-job, this Southwestern Ontario native spends his weekends behind the bench as a minor hockey coach. Let’s go talk with Karl Ortmanns.

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Chapters/Timestamps

0:02:29 Navigating the Rollercoaster of Sales and Problem-Solving

0:04:29 Bridging the Gap Between Marketing Content and Sales Context

0:07:34 How External Shifts Impact Revenue and Strategy

0:10:09 Adapting to Digital-First Selling and New Tools

0:14:50 Readiness and Challenges When Moving Upmarket

0:18:34 Marketing and Sales: Listening and Collaborating for Growth

0:22:10 Optimizing Pricing and Positioning Through Market Insights

0:26:01 Leveraging Churn and Product Data for Improvement

0:27:56 The Collective Responsibility of Driving Company Revenue

0:31:39 Shortening Sales Ramps and Boosting Profitability

0:34:58 Humility and Transparency in Revenue Leadership Changes

0:39:52 Where to find Karl

Shownotes

Revenue Problem Solvers podcast

Karl on Linkedin

This is the third in our series on Revenue Operations.

Our guest grew up on the west coast and received his degree from the University of California at Berkeley. 

Over the course of his 20 year professional career, Vito Mazzarino has been both a company owner and an employee brought in to help with Marketing and Business Development. While doing that, he grew to love using automation to streamline marketing & sales processes. 

By the middle of the 2010s, he knew the automation tools well enough to implement them. He took this as a signal that he should make a change, so he moved to Montreal Quebec and started his own agency.  

Growth Geyser was born in 2018 to strategize and deploy automation that grows a company’s  customer base and  hits their sales targets. 

People/Products/Concepts Mentioned in Show

Customer Lifetime Value (CLV)

Growth Geyser’s 17-point Lead Management Checklist for Small Business Owners (PDF)