Graviss Marketing
The Zeros on the Back End Do Not Change the Work
In this Scale Smart Live conversation, host Taja Graham talks with JG Graviss about what it actually takes to scale a sales team with intention instead of luck. JG has managed teams as small as two sellers and a little over a million dollars in budget, and as large as 21 sellers and a 50 million dollar budget. His take: the number of zeros on the end of the budget does not change the amount of intentional work required to get there. The tactics that work for a one or two person sales effort are the same tactics that work at scale, just applied with more structure.
Building Sales Teams That Scale
JG starts with vision: a leader has to know what revenue success actually looks like before building the team to get there. From there, it is an honest evaluation of the existing team and hiring with intention rather than convenience. He gives a concrete example from his time in Atlanta, the number two African American market in the United States, where his sales team did not reflect the community it served. He built the team intentionally to close that gap. The same principle applies to experience level: new sellers do not carry the same blinders a 20 or 30 year veteran does, and a mix of experience opens up market segments a purely veteran team might never think to approach.
When hiring, JG looks for three specific things: the ability to connect and communicate, the ability to overcome rejection, and what he calls a burning curiosity, a genuine desire to learn a client’s business rather than just pitch a product. He interviews for it by asking candidates to describe a real experience rather than answer a generic question, because a real story is much harder to fake than a rehearsed answer.
“I do that by engaging the team and setting the accountability. If I’m doing it in a silo, I’m not always going to capture what’s important to the sellers.”
JG Graviss, Graviss Marketing
Accountability That Motivates Instead of Micromanaging
The line JG draws between motivation and micromanagement comes down to who sets the standard. If a leader defines expectations alone, in a silo, they miss what actually matters to the sellers doing the work. JG builds accountability with the team instead, sitting down and asking what the three to five things are that the best sellers do daily and weekly, then defining together what good looks like in each of those metrics. Accountability the team helped build does not feel like it was imposed from above. He also treats coaching as adaptable rather than one size fits all, since the best sellers rarely approach the job the same way he would.
Bridging Marketing Strategy and Revenue Execution
JG is direct that sales tends to be tactical while marketing is inherently strategic, and pairing a strategic sales leader with a strategic marketing leader is a force multiplier. On the lead generation side, the website has to function as the central portal, with social and paid channels funneling attention back to it, so a form fill becomes a warm lead instead of a cold one. Historically it has taken five to seven outreach touches to get a response, a number that stretched during COVID and has been compressing back down since, which is why an intentional, multi-channel cadence, calls, email, LinkedIn, in-person, matters more than any single tactic. Most sellers give up after two or three attempts. The ones who scale do not.
“It’s not about me and my company. It’s about what our client needs to do. Framing things in terms of what’s in it for our customers can be really important.”
JG Graviss, Graviss Marketing
Scaling Delivery Without Losing the Personal Touch
The closing theme is about keeping delivery personal as a business grows past the point where every client gets a one on one relationship. JG’s answer is to manufacture real feedback touchpoints on purpose, whether that is a survey attached to an invoice or a structured check-in cadence, because feedback is a gift a business has to actively ask for. He treats every client interaction as a chance to re-run the customer needs analysis rather than assuming the deal that was signed last year still fits the client today. Underneath all of it is a simple discipline: put the vision in writing as an actual business plan, revisit it as the business changes, and communicate progress to the team before, during, and after execution, not just at the finish line.
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 Local Media Outdoor sharpen their sales process and enablement.