It is 2013 at last, and finally the economy is starting to show steady signs of improvement and increased momentum. Your sales plan should use this momentum to increase your sales performance in the coming year. here are our b2b marketing strategies and sales tips you may want to take into account in 2013 to increase sales.
10 B2B Marketing Strategies and Sales Tips for 2013:
Evaluate your sales process. In order to improve your process in the future, you need to have a clear understanding of your process as it is now. Work to ascertain what worked for your top performers in 2012, and share their techniques and processes with your entire company. In our work as a sales and marketing outsourcing company, we have found much success in improving efficiency by replicating what works for top sales producers.
Measure your sales pipe velocity. Putting the metrics in place to analyze your sales pipe velocity is a part of evaluating your sales process. These metrics will help you understand what specific message or piece of content causes someone to move from one stage of the sales process to the next.
Nurture your sales pipe. Our data at Gabriel sales, along with other research, suggests that over 50% of closed deals come from leads educated a year ago. This means you should not ignore past prospects, especially for complex sales.
Align your sales and marketing. The last thing you want to do in 2013 is measure what marketing puts into the pipe and what sales closes separately. You need to give your marketing team a “sales quota” and foster a team environment. You should also create shared success metrics in order to make sure everyone is focused on closing business with customers ready to buy and at the same time nurturing prospects that are not quite ready. In other words, you want to create content that supports the sale across its lifecycle.
Sell money. If you have a complex sales process or multi-dimensional product or service, you need to make sure your buyer can clearly understand and measure their return. You need to somehow be able to prove the ROI you can deliver with your product or service.
Build an ideal customer profile. Analyze the demographics of your current group of customers. Use this information to determine what companies give you the biggest profit, are the least demanding and quickest to scale.
Improve your lead targeting quality. Once you understand your ideal customer profile, you can immediately use this information to improve the quality of your leads. The first step in creating a successful pipe is improving the quality of what you put into it.
Use Social Media. In 2013, every B2B company needs to be plugged into the social media world. This means that (depending on your specific products or services), you need to have active profiles on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Google+. You may also want to start a company blog that works in concert with the rest of your digital marketing strategies.
Consider marketing automation software. Now that it is 2013, marketing automation is becoming a standard for B2B sales. In our experience as a sales outsourcing organization, the insights and efficiency gains are critical for us to compete in the new sales engagement model.
Join forces with others. With the increasing use of social media, digital content, marketing automation, webcasting and SEO tools in B2B sales, it might make sense to look at how a top sales outsourcing and marketing outsourcing company can help you augment capability and increase capacity, to increase your sales in the 2013.
In B2B sales and marketing, there are numerous strategies and tactics that have potential to drive sales growth, which correlate to what stage you are at in terms of sales and marketing alignment. Our experience has shown that a tactic is most effective when anchored in an overarching b2b marketing strategy based on real numbers and has the objective of targeting specific sales goals. A sales and marketing outsourcing company can help you create these types of strategies and tactics by working to create a unique plan to improve what is not working and build what is working based on hard sales targets.
If you would like to know more B2B Sales & Marketing Tips for 2013, please contact us.
As a B2B sales outsourcing company, current industry trends may have you wondering what sales outsourcing and marketing outsourcing is and what it could do for you. Many businesses in recent years have found success hiring the best sales outsourcing company in developing a clear strategy and achieving business goals.
When considering whether or not outsourcing is right for you, it is important to know that no two sales outsourcing companies are the same. This means some companies are better than others at what they do, and you need to know how to spot the best sales outsourcing company.
Here are some basic tips to help you in your search for the best sales outsourcing company possible to fit your business’s needs.
Look for their achievements
You should first determine what they have done in the past. Go to their website or do other research to see if they have a list of successes or accomplishments. Look for their average ROI statement and ask if the same could be expected for your company.
Determine their specialty
Most sales and marketing outsourcing companies have a certain area of focus. Some outsourcing company’s expertise is with the high-tech industry, while some are best at telesales outsourcing or setting appointments. When looking for the best fit for your business, you should make sure the company has experience selling in the markets you sell to. You should also look to see whether they have experience working with the type of product or service you provide and whether or not they have found success working in your specific industry.
Find out how they recruit
It is important to understand how a sales and marketing outsourcing company recruits their sales people. This is because if the company uses a third-party recruiter, you will likely be paying for this sometimes quite expensive service. If you do not have unlimited funds for outsourcing, you may want to looking to a company that does their recruiting in-house.
Ascertain their training process
In B2B sales, most sales teams need a fair amount of training. If you are going to outsource, you want to make sure training is something provided by your outsourcing company. Look into whether or not the company provides this extra sales training to its sales reps and how it is executed.
Verify their success with evidence
During your search for an outsourcing company, you should ask for success stories or case studies. If they have at least several immediately available to you, it is probably a good sign. On the other hand, if you cannot find any positive remarks from past clients about a company, you can walk away with confidence.
While this list of tips for finding the best sales outsourcing company is not exhaustive, it is a good place to start. The most important part of finding a good fit for you is to establish the reputation of the company and qualify the specific ways the company can help you.
If you’d like to look into Gabriel Sales as a sales and marketing outsourcing option, please check out our services and client success stories, or contact us for more information.
For selling and marketing professional services your main objectives are:
targeting the right markets
generate qualified sales leads
close faster
upsell accounts
The ways of selling have changed, however, and your sales and marketing operations need to adhere to these new rules of sales engagement. Integrating sales reps, pushing digital content and measuring the results with smart technologies are just part of the process. You also need to push and repurpose that sales content across different digital platforms to make it easier for your buyer to educate themselves about your product while also helping your sales reps have educated prospects helping them to close deals.
For more information, watch this brief 3 minute video to learn more about selling and marketing professional services:
At Gabriel Sales, a B2B sales and marketing outsourcing company, we have experience accelerating the sales of both Fortune 1000 companies and small businesses. While the overall goals and basic sales strategy for each type of company is similar, they differ considerably in the amount of leads generated.
What we have found is that for small business B2B sales, companies have absolutely no chance of competing against their larger competitors if they do not implement the attitude that every lead matters. We believe it is imperative for small businesses to adopt the philosophy that you need to “work every lead.” Doing this will allows to increase the number of leads you put into your sales pipeline.
Our industry experience has shown us it is a pretty safe bet that your Fortune 1000 competitor employs an entire team exclusively to qualify leads. For this reason, we believe leveraging sales and marketing outsourcing team for this purpose may be necessary to keep up with the competition.
We also suggest this team, sometimes called a demand generation team, should directly report to the small business owner or the head of sales. This group should use a marketing automation platform and should be held responsible for the sales qualified leads put into the pipe. This will help ensure you reach your company’s hard sales goals in terms of revenue and your communication about progress happens in an ordered way.
Enacting the principle that every lead matters will make sure your small business is:
Professional—a lead that does not convert to a sales qualified lead may still turn into a referral, which can put you at an advantage in today’s ultra-connected world.
Responsive—there is evidence to show that ‘whoever gets there first, wins’ still applies in B2B sales.
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.
Learning—every lead that does not qualify is an opportunity to learn something. The demand generation team will collect copious amounts of feedback in this process, which can be useful for improving your strategy in the future.
We have found that it is up to the small business owner or sales leader to be the champion of working every lead and to create the proper environment for this success. If you would like to know more about using an outsourced demand generation team for your small business B2B sales operations, feel free to contact us for a free benchmark and 30-minute needs analysis.
This blog offers some tips for your B2B marketing strategy regarding how to make your blog work for you.
You may have heard by now that your B2B company needs to be blogging. As a B2B sales and marketing outsourcing company that specializes in demand generation, we would agree. But we only agree to the extent that you are blogging with purpose. Blogs for B2B sales can and should be leveraged in various ways to achieve your company’s sales goals.
To begin, if you have not looked at your blog strategy as a marketing strategy, we recommend you look through a sales/marketing lens. Several things to take into account are:
SEO—B2B companies often forget about their blog as a tool for improving SEO. Because Google and most other search engines now filter their results by relevancy, the more relevant you blog content is for your customers, the higher it will show up on search results pages. Our experience as a sales and marketing outsourcing company has also shown that aligning the input of your sales reps with your keyword research ensures you get the full value from inbound leads.
Thought Leadership—While some of the more traditional marketers may not agree, we believe your sales reps are a great source of content in terms of thought leadership. Your sales reps spend all day on the phone talking to customers, answering their questions and solving their problems. By drawing upon these conversations and turning them into blogs focused on answering FAQs and solving problems, you can establish your business as a thought leader within your industry.
Email Sign up—Every B2B sales companies’ blog should have a place to sign up/follow via email. This is the best and easiest way to leverage your blog for lead generation. The key to getting people to sign up for your blog is establishing yourself as a thought-leader and/or providing your prospects something of value.
Calls to Action—Leveraging your blog for lead generation can also be done using calls to action. Since your prospect has already shown interest in clicking on your blog, you should make it easy for them to reach out to you. All of your blog posts should include a highly visible place where they can contact someone on your sales team. Just be careful that your blog does not appear as one big advertisement for your company.
Recycling Old Content—Many companies do not take advantage of the long-shelf life of their sales and marketing content. Because of the way the Internet works today, content still capable of providing value becomes hidden from your prospects or disappears completely. A B2B blog is a great place to make use of this old content by providing links back to old posts in your newer ones. Another way to use old content for blog posts is to ask your sales reps for any independently created content they may have lying around.
If you would like to learn more about how a sales marketing company can help you improve your B2B marketing strategy for a fatter pipe and more closed revenue, please feel free to contact us for a free initial strategy conversation.
At Gabriel Sales, a B2B sales and marketing outsourcing company, we have experience accelerating the sales of both Fortune 1000 companies and small businesses. While the overall goals and basic sales strategy for each type of company is similar, they differ considerably in the amount of leads generated.
This blog offers some tips for your B2B marketing strategy regarding how to make your blog work for you.