1. Where you can get the best lift by improving your current sales process
2. Are there parts of your process you can automate quickly

That stated here are some questions you can ask yourself to start thinking about where to get started.

ROI around lead volume:

• How effective is your company converting inbound leads into sales qualified leads. How much time/bandwidth does your sales team devote to converting inbound leads? Do you follow up one or two times then drop that effort?
• Consequentially…how many dead leads are sitting in your database?
• How effective is your sales team in prioritizing your inbound requests.   Are they pursuing leads and working opportunities that don’t convert.

If this is a challenge you can focus initially on automated drip marketing programs.  You can score a leads engagement and prioritize much more effectively.

ROI around decreasing your reps time spent educating the buyer:

• How complex is your sale?  Or an even better question how many problem does your solution solve for your customer?
• How much education is required for your customer to become a viable prospect?
• How strong is your brand?   Do you even have a brand or do your sales reps need to establish your credibility and thought leadership position with your customers?
• How educated is your customer about your category and solution area?  How much time do your senior reps spend educating the prospect?
• Does your sale require a champion on the buyer side to educate their internal team?

If this is your challenge you can focus on creating a series of Webcasts, short videos and if you are working with Gabriel Sales you can implement our Digital Sales Base Camp™ to decrease the amount of time your senior reps invest in educating the buyer while simultaneously watching how the buyer consumes your content by contextualizing your content (including blog posts) for specific customer segments.

ROI from understanding your metrics

• What percentage of your revenue comes from new leads?
• What percentage of total opportunities come from existing prospects?
• Does most of your business come from leads generated in the last 30 days?
• How much of your business comes from customers that first demonstrated interest 3 months ago? 12 months ago?
• What is coming in from cold calling?  PPC?  SEO?
• Do you offer free trials or evaluations? At what rate do those free trials convert to paying customers? What is the process a buyer goes through to convert post a free trial?
• What ensure a trial implementation is successful?
• How deeply do they engage during a free trial?

A marketing automation software is also a great repository of all sorts of data sets.  With a smart marketing and sales analyst you can really drill down into multiple different areas of your sales process in half the time or less it used to take to do serious deal flow analysis.  Gaps and future areas of improvement are much easier to identify and get right from incremental and in some case exponential revenue gains.  We have also found that this data is invaluable for clients that are getting beat up by Venture Capitalists.  With hard data they are able to defend their valuations with hard data.

When approached the right way and asking the right questions of your sales process you can experience some quick wins with your marketing automation implementation. We are experiencing some fantastic initial success reducing cost of sales percentages for both ourselves and our clients. The learning curve is exponential. So pick a lane and get started.

If you have not checked out what these platforms can do here is a quick overview from Pardot  5 Minute Overview of Marketing Automation . If you have a stalled implementation or just want to get more out of your efforts and are curious if an outsourced sales and marketing company can get you on a faster track to sales results feel free to contact us for a quick consultative call.

We also invite you to check out our White Paper that has several sections that give you some hard ratios on how you can calculate your hard ROI base on sales conversions.

• Handing leads to your rep without them being educated on the piece that generated the lead.
• Not leaving a voice mail.
• Leaving a voice mail that just talks about your company.  Try something like “This is Mary from ACME, we help companies solve this problem, and I wanted to see if we could share another piece of content about.”
• Always leave your number at the beginning and end of the message.
• Don’t ignore non-business email addresses. Repeat…do not discount these. According to the latest TechTarget Media Consumption research, approximately 40% of corporate IT buyers indicate that they use their personal email account regularly for business.

A marketing automation is also a big help in increasing you ability to generate more business from your inbound leads. If you have not checked out what these platforms can do here is a quick overview from Pardot  5 Minute Overview of Marketing Automation .

If you curious if an outsourced sales and marketing company can get you on a faster track to sales results feel free to contact us for a quick consultative call.

Your sales rep needs know that the prospect is coming from an online source.  This means they understand that the prospect is researching and has already more than likely downloaded multiple content pieces—some from you and some from your competition. The reason that person is researching online is that they don’t have a proclivity to speaking with sales reps or it could be too early. So understand that this is probably not how they would prefer to be contacted and they are probably (or would rather have) an email contact vs. direct contact like a phone call. So as a best practice as an outsourced sales and marketing company we find you should do both:

• Make your initial follow-up contact via an email.  Share your name and a little reminder of the content piece they downloaded.Let them know the reason you are contacting them because you have helped other people solve a similar problem. Let them know and offer up some additional content in the email.
• When you get them on the phone make sure the rep knows what they have already researched and what piece of collateral they have already shared.
• If you are using a marketing automation platform make sure the rep has access to all the pieces of content they have already consumed.
• When you follow up stress the fact you have helped others solves similar problems.
• Finally always have script ready.  Nothing is worse than being caught off guard.

If you want to see if we can help you get more out of your inbound efforts and are curious if an outsourced sales and marketing company can get you on a faster track to sales results feel free to contact us for a quick consultative call.

Think about your Content in a Different Way – The whole point of a marketing automation platform is to drive more business in a more effective way.  This starts with how you are speaking with your buyer.  If your content is still all about your product – tech sheets, features and benefits etc. its -time to think about being customer centric rather than product centric.”  Your drip campaigns will drive more business if you talk to your customers about their problems and their needs.  You may need to look at the “voice” of your messages and refine your language a bit.  As a starting point look at how may time you talk about “Our’ product, “our” team vs.   “your” needs, “your” business and “your” customers.  Stop being product centric and start being customer centric.  Here is a series of blogs on how to shift your content approach and get sales and marketing on the same page.

Organize your Content Ahead of Time.  For a marketing automation platform to run effectively it helps to do two things with your content.  First you should isolate all your webcasts,  white papers, blogs, videos on individual website pages.  This allows you to easily understand what your customer specifics needs are which in turn allows you to score your leads more effectively as you track their digital interest.  Secondly, it really helps to also create landing pages that offers your customer content for all three stages of their buying cycle so you can track when your buyers are moving from educating themselves (kicking the tires) to being ready to buy (e.g looking at pricing or testimonials).  Gabriel Sales has created an easy to use sales content management technology – Gabriel Sales Digital Base Camp™ that can help you do this in a matter of weeks. Below is an example of one of those lead scoring features.

Involve Sales and Invest the Time Integrating with your CRM – What we have found is that even a basic integration can take an IT professional too much time.  Most of the marketing automation platforms we have seen have huge volume of really cool features and bells and whistles so you can tend to over design before you know how you want to use them. Ultimately this is about empowering your sales team and recognizing your IT teams expertise is not sales.  Probably one of the biggest bottle necks we have seen is that IT folks get proprietary and a project that they thought would take weeks can take a developer three months or more . The challenges are not with the system’s API or stability; they were with our client’s requirements, process definitions and prioritization. Like most development work that starts “easy” it quickly gets complex when they don’t understand the underlying business processes. Unfortunately as the time line  expands it ends up being sales and marketing that are on the hook for results and not the developers. Salesforce.com has been the easiest integration for all the platforms we have seen.

Keep your Initial Drip Campaigns Simple.  This is probably one of the biggest lessons we learned.  When we first started we came up with a very complex IF/ then workflow so if they opened this piece of content on a topic area we would send them another piece of content on topic area B and then if they didn’t open that we would send them content Z.  It was too much and just writing about it confuses me. What we found is about 80% of the value you are going to get from your initial drip campaigns is going to come from simply implementing them.  It takes time to learn a new software and the biggest value the software provided initially is simply keeping your brand and solution in front of your buyers over time so your reps don’t have to.  A simple five to seven touch campaign without any IF/then work flows was enough to get more deals flowing at less cost.  Don’t frustrate yourself.  You will quickly learn from your wins. If you are a smaller company, as a best practice, we recommend that you start by talking to your sales reps about their sales process and simply take that sales process map and create your initial drip campaigns for about three target markets.

Tap your vendors (and other vendors) knowledge centers -  This industry is not that old.  Eloqua, Pardot and Marketo (to name a few) all have fantastic knowledge centers that can teach you the basics of lead scoring and nurturing etc. Our vendor Pardot has been a huge help but we have also found both Marketo and Eloqua’s knowledge centers to be valuable as well.  Obviously as an outsourced sales and marketing company we also recommend that you strongly consider working with an organization like ours.  We have the advantage of having worked in the space across multiple enterprises so we have made a great deal of the mistakes already so you don’t need to.

We hope this blog has been helpful.  Marketing Automation is a relatively new concept for most marketing teams and we have found that once you start to gain some momentum you will quickly realize that it’s clearly how business will be done for the next decade. We are just at the beginning of a new paradigm starting with marketing automation and then,  as we are quickly discovering, if you implement correctly this will  drift towards sales automation.  Ultimately this will begin to drive more deals fast at less cost.  We are experiencing some fantastic initial success reducing cost of sales percentages for both ourselves and our clients. The learning curve is exponential. So have fun.

If you have not checked out what these platforms can do here is a quick overview from Pardot  5 Minute Overview of Marketing Automation . If you have a stalled implementation or just want to get more out of your efforts and are curious if an outsourced sales and marketing company can get you on a faster track to sales results feel free to contact us for a quick consultative call.

Answer:  If you don’t have it and your competitor does you will lose business!

The rules of B2B Sales have changed.  Small Businesses can now compete against bigger budgets. With the new wave of technology available you can:

• Watch how your prospects are educating themselves
• Understand their needs
• Forecast their interest

All with limited interaction directly with your best reps until the prospects is ready to buy!

No one ever wakes up thinking I can’t wait to get a sales call today.  Nobody really wants to be sold. Especially by a salesperson. Really, when was the last time you even answered an unidentified call at work, much less listened for more than 30 seconds when a sales rep made his elevator pitch unless they hit a hot button in the first 15 seconds.  Would you take a second call if they did not offer you something of value first and some additional content at the end of that first call? The same is true for your prospects. That’s why they avoid your salespeople until the last possible minute.

While your customers don’t like being sold they still like buying. So instead they are educating themselves by accessing your publicly available information and connecting with peers online until they’ve narrowed down their options. In fact, SiriusDecisions estimates that the buyer’s journey is generally 70% complete by the time a sales person is contacted.  Think about it.  When was the last time you made a purchase without spending time researching on your own first.  Poking around on Google and Bing.  Checking out the companies website while you were on the phone with the cold caller if you were interested.   If how the buyer buys has changed… have you looked at how you sell to see if its meeting the buyers mark?  Is your sales team running to stand still.

The winning closer is no longer the rep that hunts but the one who consults with prospects to simplify their decision-making process based on a keen understanding of buyer interest and behavior. When a prospect finally reaches out, your sales rep had better understand everything there is to know about the buyer and be prepared to deliver value. Immediately. That’s why marketing automation and sales content is critical.  If you don’t have tools and processes in place your competition will win the business.

Marketing Automation Leads Means Sales Readiness – its about giving your salesperson the ability to  deliver the right content and the right message to the right person at the right time.   And its about:

Giving your highest paid talent a prioritized list of who to contact next based on

• Behavioral data that summarizes prospect interests and intent
• Tools that alert your top talent when their hottest prospects are online and at their desks
• A library of content aligned to specific stages of the buying process that helps your rep build trust and rapport with the buyer

Your success as a marketer, business unit manager or small business owner depends on your ability to help the sales team sell. Ask yourself these questions:

• What if your competitors demand generation engine could tell your sales reps what each prospect is interested before and during the entire sales process?
• What if your competitor gave their sales reps tools so they could send the right content and track that content as the buyer was buying?
• What if your competitors delivery team blogged once a week with their thought leadership and points of view to help your their sales reps address objections?

Who is going to win that deal?

If any of the thought  we are sharing hit a chord or to see if Sales and Marketing Outsourcing or some Sales and Marketing Process Consulting may be able to help you accelerate your B2B Demand Generation Engine please feel free to contact us for a free benchmark and 30 minute needs analysis.

Related Blog Posts:

Top 10 Strategies for B to B Demand Generation

How to Align Your Sales and Marketing Process

As a business to business sales outsourced sales and marketing company we work at accelerating B2B sales for the Fortune 1000 and small businesses.  The fundamental difference between the two types of companies is the volume of leads they can generate for their sales reps.  As a small business we guarantee that you cannot compete against the big boys if you do not adopt the principal that you need to Work Every Lead.  Adopting the philosophy that you need to “Work Every Lead”  will guarantee that you maximize the sales pipeline from your leads and we can almost guarantee that the Fortune 1000 has a team that’s sole function is to qualify leads for their sales reps.   This function is one major advantage a sales and marketing outsourced company  can provide.

We also recommend that this team reports directly to the sales head or the small business owner. Often referred to as the demand generation team this group needs to be held responsible for sales qualified leads they put in the pipe.  This group should leverage a marketing automation platform to keep both them and the sales reps accountable, to meet your companies hard revenue goals, and that all progress is communicated in a structured way.

Working every lead will ensure that your company is:

1. Responsive: There are numerous studies that show that a quick response leads to higher conversion rates.
2. Professional: A company that engages with a lead that does not turn into an opportunity can still gain from a prospect’s positive experience.  These can lead to referrals, which are very powerful in today’s socially connected world.
3. Learning: The sales demand generation team is now a great source of feedback to the demand generation teams on the effectiveness of programs.
4. Efficient: This structure will ensure that your company gets the best ROI on your program dollars, when measured in pipe to spend, or a close to spend type metrics.

It’s up to the sales leader to be the champion of this process and to create the proper environment for this success.  Ready to get started…feel free to contact us for a free benchmark and 30 minute needs analysis.

Related Blog Posts:

Top 10 Strategies for B to B Demand Generation

How to Align Your Sales and Marketing Process

Marketing Automation Implementation

From our perspective as a B2B outsourced sales and B2B Sales Company the first step in being able to address these new challenges we all face is to strongly consider a Marketing Automation Software.  A marketing automation solution brings significant advantages  in terms of  increasing the productivity of your sales demand generation across a wide variety of buying cycles. Marketer can now generate, score and nurture leads to a level that was not possible just a few years ago and in some cases for smaller businesses we are able to help implement solutions with some of our proprietary tools that allows you to eliminate marketing as a function and put these demand generation tools into the hands of your sales reps for decreased costs and increased productivity.

In fact the number one reason we have seen companies fail to convert these breakthrough technologies into success is because they are not letting sales professionals drive the implementation of the solution. The reason that many companies fail to exploit their demand generation success is that they fail to implement the key events of a sales persons proven sales process into their demand generation process.

Lead Scoring

Probably the biggest efficiency gain you can get from a marketing automation tool is its ability to score leads so your sales reps are focusing their phone time on the buyers most likely to buy. The lead scoring and nurturing features of these tools ensure that your company can manage the top of the funnel through to marketing qualified leads (MQL) with limited interaction with the sales reps. Marketing Automation Software allows you to observe and score the content your prospects are digesting online and in email follow ups. Once a lead has indicated (through the way they have navigated your content and digested information) that they are ready to buy your lead generation reps can prioritize that lead and take them through the final qualification steps with some human contact to move them to a Sales Qualified Lead (SQL) and into the pipeline.

Dedicated Demand Gen Team

The key to achieving a process that puts more Sales Qualified Leads into your sales reps pipe is  to create a dedicated team that takes the MQLs and converts them to SQLs. Many companies try to short cycle this by having the sales teams do this job. This does lead to pipeline and closed business this quarter but this has a cost to the long term value of your pipe.  You will land the 20% that are buying quickly but what happens to the rest of your revenue? It goes away and the reason for this is simple; sales people will take the shortest route to solving their needs and will cherry pick the good leads and leave the others. Why spend thousands on demand generation programs, only to have your company waste the investment, due to lack of rigor?

If you would like to learn more about how a sales marketing company can help you align your inbound and outbound efforts for a fatter pipe and more closed revenue please feel free to CONTACT US for a free initial strategy conversation.

If you are having cultural issues between sales and marketing we suggest you check out B to B Demand Generation Requires Sales and Marketing Alignment.  You can also checkout our Free White Paper on 10 Tips and What to Avoid to Sell Smarter and Faster.

As a second strategy we recommend that you don’t think about this from your “sales” cycle perspective but instead from your customer’s “buying cycle” perspective.

So if you have not looked at your blog strategy as a marketing sales company we recommend you look through a sales marketing lens.  Here are some things for you to consider:

Thought Leadership. Although some old school marketers would disagree we feel like the voices of your top sales reps are a great place to look for thought leadership. It may not always feel like it but your sales reps are talking to customers all day long helping them to solve problems and if they are doing their job they are solving a lot of problems.  You already possess a great deal of industry expertise in high volume. Your customers and prospects will be grateful if that information is shared so they can access it 24/7.

SEO. The more relevant your content is for your customers the more relevant your content will be for Google.   And the more content you create in your industry space, the more relevant your company will seem to search engines. As a marketing sales company we also recommend you align the input of your sales reps contribution with your keyword research to ensure you are getting the full benefit from inbound leads.

Calls to Action. Make sure you have calls to action in your blog.   After all your customers and your sales leads are already engaged with your content, so when inbound leads hit your site because you are optimizing for SEO you need to make it easy for them to reach out to you.  Your blog is the perfect place to turn the one to many conversation into a one to one conversation with your sale rep. Always offer some additional content within your blog and also make it easy to reach out to your sales team.  Just make sure your blog does not become a billboard for your company. Focus on adding value for your readers first. Readers will reach out when they are ready.

Email sign-up. The easiest way to generate leads from your blog is the simple and oft forgotten email sign up. If your content is provides enough value, readers will exchange their email address for keeping up to date with your posts. It’s a great way to start building a relationship.

Reuse old content. Content has a long shelf-life, but getting full use out of a well-crafted piece of content can be hard. Your blog provides a great way to link back to this older content where applicable, squeezing value out of your content for years to come.  Ask your sales reps for the one off content they may have created without marketing’s input and turn that into content as well.

If you would like to learn more about how a sales marketing company can help you align your inbound and outbound efforts for a fatter pipe and more closed revenue please feel free to CONTACT US for a free initial strategy conversation.

If you are having cultural issues between sales and marketing we suggest you check out B to B Demand Generation Requires Sales and Marketing Alignment.  You can also checkout our Free White Paper on 10 Tips and What to Avoid to Sell Smarter and Faster.

Start with a Definition of What Makes a B2B Lead Sales Ready – As an outsourced sales and marketing firm we have the opportunity and the advantage of working with multiple companies and we find that about 50% of the time your sales team,  your marketing team and your management may all have different view of what they think makes a lead sales ready.   No two companies will have the same criteria so we recommend that you get your team together so there is at least general consistency in when it make sense to transition leads to your sales reps (generally your most expensive resource) to that their time is as productive as possible.  As and outsourced B2B lead generation company here are the questions we like to ask of ourselves internally before we transistion a lead to a customer:

• Do you have a basic understanding their Need/Pain
• What is the Potential Opportunity identified and have we been able to match it to a product or solution? product matched to pain
• What is the timeline for making a decision?
• Do we know who all the stakeholders are?
• Do they have budget or do we know how they will champion a path to funding and/or getting budget? Initial Budget defined or path to budget
• Is their a specific challenge or compelling event that make them interested in purchasing the solution? (Nice to haves are now tougher to close)
• Are all the decision makers identified and how will the decision made?  Is it one person, a committee?  Who are the gate keepers?

Outbound B2B Lead Generation Needs to Be Smart to Ensure ROI so Start with an Ideal Customer Profile – In a blog post several months back we discussed the ROI of cold calling.  In that blog we discussed when as an outsourced B2B lead generation company we felt outbound calling made sense so we won’t go through those number again here.   We just want to reiterate here that when you are going to execute an integrated email and cold calling campaign you need to start with an Ideal Customer Profile to maximize your investment.    We wrote several blogs on this topic which we invite you to visit for more details and as a quick recap here are some of the crtierea we recommend your team explores before launching an outbound campaign:

Hard criteria related to both the company and the specific decision maker:

• Annual revenue of the company
• Number of employees
• Level of Contact – C-level,  senior Manager, middle manager
• Functional Area –  business Area, technical Area
• Title
• Revenue Responsibility – budget maker or budget spender
• Geography – global, national, local
• Technology Adopted –  in some cases knowing what  ERP, CRM, and if they have virtualized may be critical
• Their Clients – e.g.  are they doing business with a Procter and Gamble, Federal government, education (local gov.)  Walmart, Intel,  EMC etc.

Qualitative criteria:

• Business Pain/Need
• Vertical Industry Trend –  established or in transition,  growth or decline
• Competitive –  large competitors or a volume of competitors
• Psychographics – company culture, leadership style, corporate values

It is also important to know who you don’t want to sell to:

• Decision makers whose jobs could be threatened
• Internal Support Functions – for example, if you are selling data analytics you may want to avoid MR groups, or if you are selling operational efficiency services you may want to stay away from operations managers and start with supply chain directors

Finally with the increased maturity of different database companies and even our own internal databases if you are a technology company and your solution works better with some technologies than others it is now possible to segment lists based on your targets existing technical infrastructure.  If this is a possible you should jump on this competitive advantage.

Inbound Inquires are not necessarily Sales Ready Leads -  Gabriel Sales has been doing some really interesting work over the past 6 months integrating Content Marketing,  Marketing Automation and  Telesales Account Profiling and Inside Sales.  As part of this integration we have benchmarked several types of sales and over the course of the first quarter of 2012 we have generally found across verticals and solution types that between 15-20% of leads generated from SEO and Pay-Per Click are sales ready and that the number is hold steady with leads generated by email campaigns as well.  That means that about 1 in 5 leads are actually ready for your Sales Reps to work.  What does this means for your business?   You can’t afford to pass these leads to sales reps and you also can’t afford to send them to sales because  they will either be abandoned or you will be wasting too much time educating customers not ready to buy.  We have three recommendations here:

Follow Up with Every Lead within 24 hours -  If someone is ready to engage you will be first in line.  But follow up with an inside reps whose job it is to profile that account.  Pass the Sales Ready leads up the food chain and…

Be Ready to Offer those Not Ready to Buy More Educational Content -  Have at least a couple of blog posts, a white paper or a webcast ready to offer your customer if there not ready to engage right now.

Consider a Marketing Automation Software -  Depending on the size and volume of your database  and the amount of sales content you have already produced it may make sense to invest the 15K to 30K it would take to automate your lead nurturing process.   For more detailed ROI metrics feel free to pick up a copy of our White Paper – Sell Smarter, Sell Faster.   If you are not familiar with Marketing Automation check out this quick 5 minute demo from one of our partners Pardot for a quick overview.

If you have any questions or feel like a conversation makes sense to learn how Gabriel Sales can help you pull together a more effective demand generation program whether you are  mid cycle or building a new effort feel free to CONTACT US.

For a quick look at what a B2B demand generation engine looks like to get a sense if you could benefit from some quick sales and marketing automation process consulting we invite to CLICK HERE you to check out our short 4 minute video.

As an outsourced sales and marketing company it’s our job to stay on top of the latest research data so you can stay focused on your business. What follows are some facts an figures about the current state of sales and marketing alignment:

According to Marketing Sherpas 2011 State of B2B Demand Generation  report:

• 80% of leads that are turned over to sales people are raw leads.
• Of these leads 77% are long term leads (future opportunities) often ignored by sales people (which makes sense because its their job to transact this quarter).
• 80% of marketing leads consequentially wind up lost, ignored or discarded
• 73% of companies have no process for re-engaging or nurturing leads after sales.  (e.g. no nurturing process).

What all this means is that about 80% of the leads marketing turns over to sales reps are not qualified.  The buyers is not ready to buy yet.   So this means that as much as 60% t0 70% of your companies potential revenue is being squandered.

What Can Your Company do to Turn this Around Immediately

With the right resources you don’t necessarily need an outsourced sales and marketing solution long term. In our White Paper Sell Faster and Sell Smarter 12 Tips you can implement immediately to turn around your B2B Demand Generation Team today we get into some detailed tactics.  What follows below are some high level approaches we advocate exploring to start to shift your culture now.

Aligning Sales and Marketing – Best in Class companies know that both Sales and Marketing must get on the same page.

•       A Mutual Definition of a “Lead” – agreed upon by Marketing and Sales

•       Service Level Agreement (SLA) – Sales commits to timely follow up and closes the loop on every Marketing Generated Lead, agrees to reject unqualified leads back to marketing for nurturing

•       Measure – Ongoing communication between both parties to evaluate progress toward goals and gaps in the process

Prompt Follow Up – Forrester says 46% of marketers at firms with mature lead management processes have sales teams that follow up on more than 75% of marketing-generated leads.  As a sales outsourcing organization we staff sales account profilers and B2B lead profilers to support our own internal sales reps and your sales reps

Higher Conversion Rates –Gartner says when greater integration is accomplished between marketing and sales, conversion rates for leads (defined as earning the designation as qualified and/or committed to the sales pipeline) can increase by as much as 50%.  We have our B2B lead profilers follow up with all leads to determine their readiness in a friendly and customer service oriented way.

Why is all this critical.   Because bottom line you end up with More closed deals – CSO Insights says – Companies with mature, defined lead generation and management practices have 7% higher sales win rate.

Implement a Marketing Automation Platform and take some of the pressure off your sales team.  You can nurture your not ready to buy customers and ensure that when they do you are the first in line.  If you have not checked out what these platforms can do here is a quick overview from Pardot  5 Minute Overview of Marketing Automation .   You can also start to leverage your content consumption to determine if the buyer is ready to buy by scoring that consumption, which a marketing automation platform allows you to do.  Here is a quick sample.

To see if an outsourced sales and marketing solution or sales and marketing sales process consulting engagement may be able to help you accelerate your ability to take advantage of the current competitive advantages that technology and a quick cultural shift can provide please feel free to contact us for a quick consultative call.

We also invite you to visit our knowledge centers for more detailed tips:

Tactics to Lift or Launch B to B Demand Gen

New Product Launch Sales and Marketing Tactics

Digital Content Strategies to Give Marketing a “Sales Quota”

Sales Strategies for Tech, Software and SaaS Sales

Sales Strategies for the Professional Service Sale