You should start by setting up and YouTube channel for your company, which you can think of as your own television station.  Through this station, you can present educational videos on industry trends, demonstrations of how your product or service solves business problems, testimonials from your past clients, short ads about promotional offers, etc.

The key to using video as a marketing strategy is to not to push the sale too hard.  Just like on television, deliberately pushy ads can annoy.  What you should focus on instead is providing something of value to your viewers.  If you can give them something entertaining, or better yet useful, your video will be much more likely to deliver the sales results you desire.  Using videos in your B2B digital marketing strategy can help you achieve your sales goals by improving retention (because you can show customers how to use your product/service) and fueling the decision-making process during the customer acquisition phase of the sales cycle.

Because producing and posting online videos is generally cost-effective, this is one area of digital marketing where you stand to gain a lot from a little effort.  In the B2B sales world where time equals money, it really does not get much better than that.

For more information on using video marketing for B2B sales, please reach out to us at Gabriel Sales.  You can find our contact information here.

In general, social media are websites and applications that allow users to create profiles, publish information and connect with friends and businesses.  The users of these sites connect by ‘adding’ or ‘following’ one another.  By adding or following someone or some company, you in effect ‘subscribe’ to all of the content they publish.  The type of content published varies across the different social media platforms.

The largest and most predominant social media site today is Facebook.  Facebook currently has 1.06 billion users and is mainly used by individuals to carry out digital, interpersonal relationships.  However, businesses of all kinds have started to use Facebook as a way to help market their company, build their brand and connect with their customers in the digital space.  Many B2B companies have recently discovered that most of their current customers and potential prospects are already on Facebook and have started to create Facebook-based marketing strategies to expand their reach.  Using Facebook, B2B marketers can now push updates on new products, promotions or other activities to a large number of interested people, with a single click.

Twitter is another social media site B2B companies are using to build brand awareness and expand their reach.  Twitter is similar to Facebook in that people ‘subscribe’ to your content by following you.  Twitter differs in that the content published by users is in the structured form of a ‘tweet’.  A tweet is a short message (140 characters max.) that can include short ideas, quotes, links to other pages, etc.  In the B2B world, tweets are a great place to post industry trends, a problem you helped solve for one of your clients or even some simple ad copy.  The one thing to remember with Twitter is your tweets should always stay on topic to things your followers are interested in.

The social media site most conducive to making B2B connections is LinkedIn.  LinkedIn was designed explicitly for business professionals, meaning B2B people are already using it.  This is now a place where B2B companies are making new connections with buyers and increasing their contacts.

Google+ is also becoming a major player in the social media world for B2B sales and marketing.  With now two times the number of users as LinkedIn (400 million), Google+ may prove to be a major competitor to Facebook in the future.  The value of this for B2B companies is that Google+ is more conducive to marketing than any of the other sites in that activity on Google+ is automated into its search engine.

If your B2B company has yet to take any action towards social media marketing, setting up profiles, finding followers and posting may seem like a daunting task.  However, it helps to look at these social media sites as communities that you wish to join.  Just like physical communities, once you start participating in digital communities, people starting interacting with you and relationships start to form.  On the other hand, if your company simply puts up a profile and then does nothing with it, social media sites aren’t likely to produce marketing results.  You need to remain constantly active on these sites, not just publishing your own content, but also interacting with the content posted by others.  Used properly, these sites can easily translate into B2B lead generation and increased revenue.

For more information on leveraging social media as a marketing strategy for B2B sales, please reach out to us at Gabriel Sales.  You can find our contact information here.

If you look at the process of hiring a new in-house salesperson, you see that it is a considerable expense to you.  You have to spend time searching for the right person and training him or her once found.  After all of this, you still do not come close to the amount of ability, competence and connections you have in a full team of people.  In addition, you may be hesitant to let an internal person who is not working out go because of the significant investment you made beforehand.  We therefore believe you stand to gain more success from hiring an outsourced team than you do with an internal rep.

Here are four more reasons we believe B2B companies can benefit from hiring an outsourced sales team:

1)    Low overhead cost and zero fixed payroll or benefit costs.  An outsourced sales team has its own office space, phones and computers to use, eliminating those costs for you.  If you go with the outsourced team you also do not have to treat the team as your own employees in terms of payroll and benefits. 

2)    Access to a larger and more resourceful sales team.  In most situations, the cost of an entire outsourced sales team is the same as hiring one full-time rep internally.

3)    Improved sales coverage.  When you have multiple people, you are able to increase the number of people you reach and expand your list of potential customers. 

4)    Advantage of previously established business relationships.  By hiring an outsourced team, you gain access to a variety of connections and contacts you can exploit to gain profit for your company.

If you would like to know more about the pros and cons of an Internal Sales Rep vs. Outsourced Sales Team, please reach out to us at Gabriel Sales by contacting us here.

At Gabriel Sales, we understand that many businesses are just now beginning to look into the possibility of outsourcing sales.  Most B2B businesses have no prior experience working with an outsourcing company, they therefore may be confused or apprehensive about hiring one.

To help clear up some of this confusion, here are the five myths or misconceptions about sales and marketing outsourcing that we see the most:

1.    “If I outsource, I will lose control of my sales process.”

While it may feel as though you are handing the keys to your Corvette convertible over to a complete stranger, this does not mean you have to lose control over your sales process.  It is no doubt unnerving to hand the reigns over to someone else, but we have found that open communication between both partners can alleviate this tension.  At Gabriel Sales, we keep our clients informed of all of our activities and progress at all times and during all situations.

2.    “Hiring a full-time sales rep will not do anything for me.”

We understand many businesses do not want to staff a sales rep full-time, but our experience shows us this seldom works in the long-term. Usually, a company will start with a part-time rep, but soon needs to scale to full-time. A sales and marketing outsourcing company can help you to determine what the most effective balance is for you in this regard and help you to implement it. Gabriel Sales offers temporary, part-time, and full-time options for lead generation and inside sales.

3.    “I don’t need outsourcing because I already have a sales team.”

Just because you have a sales team in place already does not mean you cannot benefit from sales outsourcing.  Many of our clients already have internal sales teams of their own.  It is our job as an outsourcing company to improve on what you have.  We can act as an extension of your current sales team, and if we do employ a sales rep, it is usually exclusively for setting sales appointments, sales qualifying or B2B lead generation. We have also been taken on primarily to aid in the launch of a new product.  There are a variety sales services an outsourcing sales company can provide to an existing sales team; to see more of them, check out our services page.

4.    “My recruiting process cannot be improved.”

If you are now considering outsourcing your sales and marketing, that is a good indication your current process needs improvement.  An outsourced sales company can certainly help if you do not have years upon years of experience attaining salespeople who can execute at a high level. Hiring an outsourcing company allows you to take advantage of the vast sales expertise experienced sales personnel provide to them and therefore saves you the time and money usually put into the recruiting process.

5.    “Hiring an outsourcing company builds the outsourcer’s brand, not mine.”

Once you have hired an outsourcing company, their job should always be to sell you and not themselves. At Gabriel Sales, we perpetually put the client first and train our sales reps to act as your employees during all business calls and interactions.  We define our success in terms of your success.

We hope this blog helps to clear up any confusion you may have regarding sales and marketing outsourcing companies.  If you have further questions or concerns, or would simply like to know more about B2B sales outsourcing, please feel free to contact us.

So, the question now is not whether or not to use webcasts as a part of your digital content marketing strategy, but how to come up with a sophisticated plan for your webcasts that will get you the most return for your investment.

In order to help you with this endeavor, here are 21 tips regarding using webcasts for B2B selling to generate more leads, improve ROI and ultimately, close more deals.

1. Get the word out.

a. Send email invitations and up to two email reminders for each webcast.
b. Promote the event on social media platforms, with increasing posts the week of the event (Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Google+).
c. Write and post a blog about the event with further details about what the webcast will cover.
d. Require attendees to provide an email address prior to registration (but once they have given their information to you, do not require it again for each subsequent webcast they register for).
e. Encourage participants to “share” that they are attending your event by posting it on their various social media networks.

2. Cultivate an online community.

a. Develop content for your webcasts based on research of your customers’ demographics and biggest business pains.
b. Create one webcast a month (or at least bimonthly) to establish a stable cadence and encourage loyal viewers.
c. Build lasting relationships with prospects using Q&A sessions during and after your webcasts (if your webcast host platform has this feature).
d. Position yourself as a thought-leader within your industry by inviting industry experts to “guest-host” a webcast.
e. Show valuable content in a series or along a planned trajectory so that attendees come back to hear the next part of the “story.”

3. Nurture & Repurpose.

a. If you host your webcasts using a live format, repurpose it afterwards into an On-Demand video so it can be viewed anytime.
b. Host your webcasts on popular hosting sites to optimize for SEO, but also embed them on your own landing pages with your own unique branding.
c. Offer additional pieces of content on webcast landing pages, so your prospects can take themselves further down the buying cycle without any work on your part.
d. Repurpose the main points of your webcast into different types of digital content like blogs, whitepapers, Facebook posts, tweets, etc. that can be used in nurturing campaigns.

4. Measure.

a. Using a marketing automation solution, track data regarding each prospect’s basic demographics and level of engagement.
b. Use the data you collect on prospects to determine their location in their buying cycle and feed them content focused on moving them to the next stage (i.e. if they go to your “About Us” page after viewing a webcast, they are likely earlier in terms of decision making whereas someone who clicks on a “Pricing” page is closer to closing).
c. Give all of the data you collect on your prospects to your sales team (i.e. how many minutes of the webcast they viewed, what webpages they clicked through afterward, etc.), so they can set up conversations based on each prospect’s unique behavior and predetermined needs.

Overall, you want to use webcasts to strengthen your brand story while at the same time providing genuinely valuable content to your prospects. If you take an informed and strategized approach to your webcasts, you can position yourself as an industry leader and simultaneously create a community where people come to solve their business problems. Webcasts allow your prospects to engage with your brand in a one-to-many format but lets them feel like they are having a personalized experience—making you the hero that finally gave them the answer they were looking for.

If you would like to know more about how webcasts help improve your digital content marketing strategy or want to speak to a sales and marketing outsourcing company about content marketing or marketing automation solutions, please contact us.

What is B2B demand generation?

It’s about giving marketing a sales quota, so let’s start by defining what it’s not.  B2B demand generation is not about branding, awareness, positioning or value propositions.  These can be important and even critical, but demand generation is not about things that you need a research team or survey to measure.

It’s about giving marketing a sales quota, because buyers now digest an average of 10.7 pieces of content before finalizing their purchasing decisions.  So, you need a sales content strategy that supports your inside reps and supports how the buyer buys.

B2B demand generation and lead generation mean different things:

• Demand generation is the marketing and inside sales machine that put deals in and moves them through the pipe.
• Lead generation is the measurable output.

B2B demand generation’s job is to drive and close business.  Demand generation sources maketing qualified leads, takes leads from marketing qualified to sales qualified and then engage, nurtures leads not ready to buy (until they are), and supplies the closer with content required to take to proposal and close.

Successful B2B demand generation requires sales content that educates, verifies and finally convinces the customer to transact, along with the right technology to track digital consumption and content repurposed and pushed across media types, all leveraged by a well-trained inside sales team.  B2B demand generation is about your reps and marketers having the right conversations and sharing the right information in the right channel at the right time in the customers buying cycle.  Demand generation is about taking the content you created to support your reps and repurposing it across digital platforms and social media, so your customers can find you and you sales reps have third-party verification ground cover.  Your B2B demand generation engine needs a seamless sales process that integrates sales reps, leverages digital content and improves sales results with the right sales technologies stack.

Here is what a sales driven B2B demand generation process looks like:

First, you put prospects in the pipe using reps, tools, SEO, SEM and social media. You then profile, qualify and engage your prospects.  Next, you address one sales objection or buyer stage need at a time. Finally, you push content or nurture until business is closed.

Here is what a mature demand generation ecosystem looks like:

As your buys move through their buying process (and your sales process) through your initial offers, your inside reps, product specialists and senior talent help the buyer buy seamlessly. You need to do things this way because if you are not making it easy for the buyer, you are not taking competitive advantage of every opportunity you have for sales and marketing ROI efficiency.

To compete, you need to align your teams around how the buyers buy, provide feedback loops to your marketers, create content efficiently, and re-leverage that content every way possible.

How do you sell faster? More effectively? Grow your business? You have two options:

#1 Take up to two years to build your own.

or

#2 Pick the right sales team and sales marketing team to fill your gaps.

Gabriel Sales build machines from scratch or turns around stalled efforts.  We specialize in taking existing products into new markets and taking new products into existing markets.  We have a diverse B2B sales and marketing team experienced in selling to multiple verticals with solutions for companies selling to both the Fortune 500 and SMB markets that need to sell into sales and marketing, IT, operations and HR and legal budgets.  With expertise taking technology, media, SASS data and professional service solutions and products to market.

With Gabriel Sales, your B2B demand generation process can be up and running in as little as two weeks.  We can have you set up with a B2B demand generation team and marketing operations deploying a repeatable sales process that is accountable to targets and metrics, selling to your buyer the way they want to buy.

As an outsourced sales and B2B demand generation company, we can help you with:

• Sales strategy and speed to market
• A managed and transparent process
• Smart and authentic sales content creation, production, digital production and distribution
• Staff that executes seamlessly
• Sales tools and all the metrics to maximize ROI

Services range from full-time sales and marketing operations, consulting, staffing, and digital execution, along with a sales and marketing process designed for your specific needs and challenges.  To see if Gabriel Sales can help you ramp your sales faster, please contact us.

In order to meet the customer where they’re at, you need to have a clear understanding of where he or she is in the buying cycle for your product or service.  Knowing the stage of the buying cycle the prospect is at tells you what marketing content is appropriate to move them to further down the pipe. Giving someone the wrong content at the wrong time will confuse or annoy your prospect, neither of which is an effective sales strategy.

Just as you would not serve crème brulee as a breakfast dish, you should not give a prospect a video of a complex software demo after their first interaction with your company.  You need to provide your prospect with a full menu of content options and let their behaviors inform you of what they would like to be served.  Using a marketing automation solution, you can watch prospects interact with different “menu options” and gauge if they are in the mood for breakfast or lunch.

Following this metaphor, here are the different stages of the buying cycle for B2B customers along with what type of marketing content is appropriate for each stage.

Stage #1: Breakfast

Prospect expresses interest.

Content types: basic info about value proposition, “welcome” emails, educational blogs, best practices whitepapers

Stage #2: Lunch

Prospect is engaging.

Content types: Invitations to webinars/webcasts, reminders about events, segmented content based on specific page views

Stage #3: Dinner

Prospect is ready to make a decision.

Content types: case studies, software demonstrations, service/product options, feature comparisons, testimonials, pricing

Stage #4: Dessert

Prospect becomes an ongoing customer.

Content types: new product/service info, review/testimonial requests, newsletters, requests for customer data updates

These four stages (or meals) of the buying cycle comprise the majority of the B2B marketing process. However, the problem remains: what if the prospect isn’t hungry?

In cases where the prospect is showing no interest in digesting your content, you need to prove to them how great it tastes.  Maybe your prospect is hungry, but you haven’t offered them anything appealing yet. These prospects need to be nurtured with content like surveys to better assess their specific business needs. Prospects that aren’t hungry also need to be given incentives to engage in your content; offering a promotion of some kind may be able to initiate reengagement (e.g. “Today Only: FREE Samples!”).

In summary, we have gone over the various stages of the B2B customer buying cycle and explained what marketing content each stage necessitates. If you have any questions or would like to know more about B2B buying cycles or content marketing, please contact us.

Customers now want to be treated like individuals with individual needs and desires.  For marketers, this means providing individualized marketing content based on each prospect’s preferences and habits.  Without marketing automation, this task can be daunting for B2B companies trying to reach hundreds or even thousands of prospects. When leveraged properly through a well-designed content marketing strategy based on buyer insights, a marketing automation solution can severely decrease the workload required for both B2B marketing and sales teams by reaching hundreds of prospects with a few clicks.

There are nearly endless pieces of the B2B sales and marketing process that can be automated with marketing automation. Here are 3 things that B2B marketers should always automate that will drive revenue while simultaneously decreasing the sales effort required to close:

1. Customer/Prospect Data.  In terms of new prospects, marketing automation is a great way to start a relationship while exerting very little effort.  By creating and automating an email “Welcome Campaign,” you can offer basic information about the business problems you solve and request more information regarding prospects’ needs.  You can also use marketing automation to maintain your existing customer relationships by asking them to update their information with any recent changes, which may present you with new opportunities to upsell.

1. Reviews & Testimonials. Reviews of your product or service by your existing customers have tremendous value in the new, customer-centric sales cycle.  Using marketing automation, you can solicit these reviews and then turn them into marketing content in the future.  In addition to requesting reviews or testimonials of your product or service, you can ask reviews of the marketing content your prospects engage in as they move through the nurturing process.  This will allow you to give your prospects more incentive to engage in your content (e.g. “This whitepaper was extremely insightful on industry changes and offered amazing tips for generating demand!”–John Smith, CEO) while also giving you feedback on how to improve your own marketing strategies.

1. Events.  Events are becoming more and more popular in B2B sales and marketing. Digital events like webinars and live demos are a great way to generate new leads and educate and nurture prospects.  You can use marketing automation to send out many different types of messages related to an event, depending on a prospect’s behavior.  After the initial invitation, you can automate different responses based on if the invitation was opened or if the prospect registered for the event.  You can also automate “thank you for attending” emails containing new marketing content to prospects who actually attended your event while sending “sorry we missed you” emails offering recorded versions of the event to no-shows.

Marketing automation has the potential to take all (or at least most) of the guesswork out of the B2B sales cycle.  Using marketing automation, you can gather customer insights at the same time you nurture prospects and close deals.  Marketing automation puts the information you need to sell at your fingertips, as long as you know what to do with it.

If you would like to know more about how marketing automation helps B2B companies streamline their sales and marketing efforts into one easy-to-manage process, please feel free to contact us.

Before we dive into what a company needs to do in order to generate demand, we need to ensure that there is a clear understanding of the differences between demand and lead generation. If you were to do a quick web search for the two terms you might get back a few dozen definitions. Let’s take a look at the real differences between the two disciplines.

Lead Generation vs. Demand Generation

For Gabriel Sales, lead generation is about putting targets into your sales funnel at the very front end. A lead is getting an individual from a company that is interested in learning more into your sale funnel. Demand generation is the process of moving that lead through the sales and marketing process, educating the buyer so they are interested and ready to speak to sales.

Demand Generation & Sales Lead Management

B2B demand generation’s job is therefore to drive and close business. In order to close business, successful B2B demand generation requires sales content that educates, verifies and finally convinces the customer to transact. That content must be integrated with insights about your customer buying cycle, so that relevant and valuable content reaches your prospect at the right times. These insights could include knowledge on whether your ideal customer prefers short YouTube videos or long whitepapers. This is what successful sales lead management is; knowing your lead well enough to give them the right information in the right form at the right time.

If you add the sales content and customer insights to the right technology to track digital consumption, your well-designed demand generation strategy will give your team the ability to:

• Source marketing qualified leads
• Take leads from marketing qualified to sales qualified and then engage
• Nurture leads not ready to buy (until they are)
• Supply the closer with content required to take to proposal and close

B2B demand generation involves your reps and marketers having the right conversations and sharing the right information in the right channel at the right time in the customers buying cycle.

If you would like help with any part of this strategy, Gabriel Sales has the experience and expertise to help you jumpstart this process and reach your business goals. We can help you take the content you create to support your reps and repurpose it across digital platforms and social media, so your customers can find you and you sales reps have third-party verification ground cover. At Gabriel Sales, we can help you create a B2B demand generation engine with a seamless sales process that integrates sales reps, leverages digital content and improves sales results with the right sales technologies stack.

For more information on demand generation for sales lead management, please contact us.

Blogs in the B2B sales world can be used as a platform for publicizing information about new products or services, promotions, etc.  Informative or educational blogs can also be used to position yourself as an industry expert.  If you can demonstrate expertise to your readers, your product or service starts to look much more appealing.

Blogs are also a great way to add a human quality to your business’s digital presence.  In addition to information about new products or industry trends, you can use a blog to profile different employees or discuss a particular instance when your business solved a problem it was facing.  This will help give your company a human aspect that is often lost online.

The key to achieving success in terms of B2B digital marketing with a blog is to make sure it remains active.  This obviously takes more time, but constantly posting new and different information on your blog is well worth the effort.  If you are able to consistently give your readers something of value, they will continue to come back and hopefully they will eventually reach out to you in some way.

While blogs are not necessarily considered social media, some of them can be thought of as online communities.  There are many blogs that function as authorities in specific industries, which are often read by buyer’s who are looking for quality information in regards to making a purchase.  If you are able to convince the blogging authority to endorse you in some way, you will likely attract a lot of leads.

It may be difficult to convince someone to advertise your product or service for you, but it is possible.  Gaining the support of influential bloggers can be done by enticing him or her to write a review about you in exchange for a free product or service.  However even if you cannot achieve this, any positive mention of your company is a good thing.

If you still need convincing that blogging can be an effective marketing tool for B2B sales, or would like help creating a corporate blog of your own, please feel free to contact us.