by gabriel_sales | Apr 23, 2012
Your blog can be used for multiple purposes. As a marketing sales company we have found that if you focus on the “sales” in marketing sales then (at least part of) the “marketing” will take care of itself. So we suggest that you start by looking at what content your B2B sales team needs to move deals through the pipe because we believe the sales conversation, the digital marketing sales conversation and the social media conversation are all the same conversation.
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.
by Glen Springer | Apr 16, 2012
As an outsourced sales and marketing company we handle inbound leads and also produce outbound leads with integrated campaigns. Often when we first engage with a company that is looking for more sales ready B2B leads we discover that there is not alignment, or in some cases, has never been a discussion, about what make a lead sales ready. This blog is just a quick overview of some of the lessons we have learned as an outsourced sales and marketing company producing B2B leads for technology, SaaS and professional services firms.
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.
by Glen Springer | Apr 11, 2012
Why Are My Sales Flat?
In Part 1 of this little snapshot of facts and figures we discussed the pillars of sales and marketing alignment and shared some facts and figures discussing the challenges of implementing a marketing automation platform. In Part 2 we discussed, from our vantage point of providing you with outsourced sales and marketing insights, why we feel like your leadership buy in is important to getting a sales process off the ground that sells to the buyer the way the buyer wants to buy.
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
by Glen Springer | Apr 8, 2012
You may have implemented Marketing Automation But Is Your Culture Ready for a Sales and Marketing “Process” Driven Culture?
In Part 1 of this series we discussed why as a B2B outsourced company we felt that implementing a sales and technology stack focused on marketing automation is only the start of transforming your organization. In that blog we share what an ideal database technology stack looks like for marketing and sales. In that blog we also posited the following four pillars:
- Sales Content and Marketing Content that sells to the buyer the way they want to buy.
- Training your sales in this new approach
- Giving Sales a Shared Sales Quota
- Implementing the sales and marketing technology stack
All four pillars are ultimately process driven where the results need to anchored in data requiring the need for a marketing automation platform.
If you examine these pillars they point to the following game changers for sales and marketing organizations:
- You can no longer function in silos when you create content. Sales needs to talk to marketing and marketing needs to talk to sales.
- You can no longer measure your success or failure in silos so your data needs to be integrated.
- We all give lip service to being customer centric but you can no longer be successful unles you focus all your attention respecting where your customer is in their buying cycle or you will lose business to your competitors.
Unless you are launching your sales and marketing organization from scratch all the points above may require a cultural shift:
- You can’t expect bag carrying sales reps and executives understand the new paradigm because they are focused on growing revenue and closing deals this quarter.
- You can’t expect a marketing organization to embrace having their B2B demand generation efforts be measured on closed business
- With the buyers calling the shots now your marketing team may need to listen to the “Voice of the Sales Force” More than they are comfortable with.
- Your executive team may need to be convinced that these endeavors are both a marathon and a sprint.
So ultimately if you look at the challenges your organization faces in aligning sales and marketing — the challenge you may face is no different from the challenges most organizations face – you need to start with commitment to a “process” driven culture.
To make this shift ultimately starts with a shift in culture. And the cultural shift needs to start from the top down. You either believe that the buyer now controls the sales process or you don’t. If you do believe the buyer controls the process you need to decide if your organization willing to:
- Evaluate both teams and bring in talent that understand both the technology and processes so you can shift your culture?
- Genuinely create an approach that puts the customer at the center of your process which starts with listening to the Voice of the Salesforce since they are closest to the customer?
- Is your company convinced that long term success that you need to committ to nuturing and educating customers not ready to buy?
The final blog in this series will give you some current trends that you can explore internally to see if your company is throwing B2B Marketing and Lead Gen Budget down the drain. Are you losing because you will not commit.
If any of the facts and figures we are sharing hit a chord or to see if 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
by Glen Springer | Apr 6, 2012
Sales and Marketing Outsourcing Alignment is More than Marketing Automation
As a company that specializes in sales and marketing outsourcing, Gabriel Sales is now a staunch advocate of pulling together an integrated sales and marketing technology stack to align sales and marketing around the one goal of helping your buyer to buy the way your buyer wants to buy. However the technology stack is only about 20% of the challenge we all now face. Getting that technology stack to do what it was designed to do may require significant shifts in both sales process and overall company culture (often from the top of the organization). This blog and the following blogs addresses those challenges at a very high level to arm you with some facts and figures to convince you to take a look at marketing automation and to help you understand that simply implementing a sales and marketing technology stack is no magic bullet.
First here is what a sales and marketing technology stack looks like:
Marketing Automation Software can tie together your inbound and outbound efforts data sets with your sales force database.
Second here are the challenges a sales and marketing stack will present for your business according to Gleanster:
As company known for its sales and marketing outsourcing prowess, we understand that implementing a sales and marketing technology stack requires that you align sales and marketing around the new rules of sales engagement that have the following five pillars:
- Sales Content and Marketing Content designed for helping your buyers where they are in their decision making process.
- Sales reps that are trained in the new rules of sales engagement and closing (hard closing no longer works) that is process driven.
- Giving Sales and Marketing a Shared Sales Quota that rewards putting sales qualified leads in the pipe that close that is metric driven
- Implementing the right technology stack for your sales and marketing organization to leverage as a team.
Success requires that you examine your sales and marketing outsourcing process. Technology doesn’t work unless your team has the incentive, desire, motivation and skill set to make it work.
If any of these struggles or challenges hits a register that resonates for you and your organization it may make sense to consider working with a business that is highly proficient in sales and marketing outsourcing. For more specific tactics you can implement right now we invite you to explore the discrete tactics in our Sell Smarter, Sell Faster White Paper of visit our B2B Demand Generation Knowledge Center. If you would like to receive a benchmark feel free to contact us directly to schedule a quick discovery session.
In the next blog in this series we will comment on some additional research that discusses some of the cultural challenges you may face as reported by Marketing Sherpa and finally we will look at what this means in terms of closing business so you can evaluate if you may be blowing your budget by not implementing the right sales and marketing process.
Related Content:
B2B Demand Generation Engine How To Video
