Sales Process and Marketing Automation – Where to Start

by | May 8, 2012

Can a Marketing Automation Software make your sales team more productive?  Generally we find that the answer is yes.   However with all the features offered in these software solutions the more important question from our perspective as a B2B sales and marketing company  is where should you focus the software during the initial implementation to gain traction.  With the right focus you can start to produce and ROI quickly. We recommend you look at your Sales Process and Marketing Automation in tandem. To decide where and how to prioritize your initial implementation it helps to consider:

  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.

For more information from Gabriel Sales on business to business marketing strategy, marketing and sales services, please visit our Knowledge Center. 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.

B2B Sales Marketing Company – 5 Mistakes to avoid following up on Inbound Leads

by | May 3, 2012

Gabriel Sales helps companies move leads from marketing qualified to sales qualified deals faster.  As a b2b sales marketing company here are a several things we suggest you avoid when following up on inbound leads.

  • 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.

B2B Sales Tips for Outbound Follow Up on Inbound Leads

by | May 1, 2012

Outbound calling on Inbound leads is radically different from straight cold calling.  It takes a personality that is more customer service focused (the rep truly needs to want to help) and that needs to take priority over setting the meeting on that first live contact. This is especially true with a lead that has been in a marketing automation nurturing campaign.  Here are some B2B sales tips for outbound follow up on inbound leads.

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.