Graviss Marketing
This Scale Smart Live conversation with Jonathan Graviss and Jonathan P. Graviss gets into what actually changes an operator's growth trajectory.
A Company That Started in a Dorm Room
On this episode of Scale Smart Live, host Taja M. Graham, founder and CEO of OpsIQ, sat down with both Jonathan Graviss and Jonathan P. Graviss to talk through how Graviss Marketing actually runs, not just what it sells. Jonathan P. Graviss started the company in his college dorm room, building websites as a hobby before realizing he had no time left to do both the operations and the selling. He brought his father, JG, a 30 year veteran of the billboard business, on to run sales. JG describes himself as a bit of a unicorn: highly social but also highly analytical, an implementer rather than a visionary, which is precisely why the partnership works. Jonathan stays the visionary. JG runs point on making that vision real.
Inconsistent Marketing Is a Systems Problem
The first theme of the conversation is direct: business is a series of systems that combine to drive revenue, and marketing is no different. Jonathan is clear that most of the inconsistency he sees is marketing treated as a checkbox instead of a strategy. Clients come to Graviss Marketing asking for specific services with no real reason behind the request, so the first job is sitting down and asking why. What is the ultimate goal? That conversation is what turns a checkbox request into an actual strategy, broken into milestones, a social media plan first, a website or landing page second, the sale itself as the outcome those steps were built toward.
JG adds the sales side of the same point: sales cannot succeed without marketing, and marketing cannot succeed without sales, so the real inconsistency almost always traces back to the two operating in separate silos instead of reviewing strategy together on a quarterly basis.
Aligning Marketing and Sales Around Revenue
Internally, that alignment looks like daily communication rather than departments that only interact when something breaks. Sales asks marketing for the specific collateral a deal needs, a visual client gets visual material, and marketing gets built around what will actually move that conversation forward. JG has had to apply the same discipline to himself: leading sales while simultaneously teaching clients how to run their own sales process means holding himself to the exact cadence Graviss Marketing teaches, not a looser version of it.
“When you get an objection to price, oftentimes it’s a smoke screen for you haven’t uncovered what their true needs are. You defend it by having a clear understanding of what the client’s needs are and supporting the pricing with the benefit to the client.”
JG Graviss, Graviss Marketing
Scale Smart Live
The sharpest point in the episode is about pricing. JG is direct that a price objection is usually a smoke screen for needs that were never fully uncovered. The fix is not discounting, it is re-anchoring the conversation in the client’s actual benefit. Value and worth are different things: what a market is willing to pay tells you what it will bear, not what something is actually worth, and a seller has to be willing to walk away from a deal that does not reflect that. The two of them tie this directly back to the investment mindset that runs through the whole conversation. The real question is never how expensive something is. It is what outcome the investment is expected to produce, defined clearly before a contract is signed, so both sides know exactly what “delivered” is supposed to mean.
“Value and worth are two different things. How somebody values your product or service does not dictate what your worth is. It’s just telling you what the market would bear.”
JG Graviss, Graviss Marketing
You can see how this fits into the bigger picture on our how Graviss Marketing helps independent operators page. And for broader industry context, the Out of Home Advertising Association of America is a useful resource for operators navigating these same questions.
For a real example of this in practice, see how we helped Trailhead Media build the digital backbone for a growing multi-state OOH operator.