by gabriel_sales | Sep 10, 2013
In the world of B2B sales, many people are starting to notice that the sales and marketing strategies that worked a few years ago (trade shows, cold calling, etc.) are no longer as effective as they used to be. With no visibility into how and why this is, it is hard to determine how to rectify the issue. However, Outsourcing Sales Reps can be solution.
As a sales and marketing outsourcing company with over 13 years of experience helping B2B companies jumpstart their sales and grow their revenue, we have been on the front lines of these changes and can therefore offer some insight into what has happened and how to proceed.
From our perspective, selling is no longer as effective as it used to be because more and more products are “bought” then “sold” everyday. This is because the democratic and participatory nature of the internet put power into the hands of the buyer, who now controls the sales process from start to close. B2B buyers now educate themselves about their buying options online and only engage with sales reps when it is absolutely necessary.
In order to adapt to the way B2B leads now like to buy, many companies are choosing to look into outsourcing sales reps who have experience with this new kind of selling. By taking on an outsourced sales force, you gain the knowledge and expertise of a team that lives and breathes sales as well as their experience selling to consumers in a digital landscape.
Here are several instances when outsourcing sales reps from a sales and marketing outsourcing company can be an effective strategy:
- Your core competency is something other than sales/marketing (i.e. manufacturing, new product development, etc.)
- You haven’t updated your marketing strategy since “branding” and “positioning” were the hot buzzwords
- You have yet to look into how a marketing automation platform impacts sales
- Your top employees are currently stuck focusing on sales instead of innovation or serving customers
- You are a startup who has yet to break into the market
- You have a new product to launch and need help getting it in front of your ideal customers
While there are many more instances when outsourcing sales reps can help, these are some of the most common. If you are considering an outsourced sales team to help your B2B sales, there are several things you need to consider to make sure you choose the best team for your business.
If you would like to learn more about how the rules of B2B buying and selling have changed and what you need to do to adapt, you can download our white paper. If you are interested in learning about the sales and marketing outsourcing services we offer, you can visit our Services page.
If you have any questions please feel free to contact us.
by gabriel_sales | Sep 9, 2013
How B2b marketing leads to more profitable outcomes
As a sales and marketing outsourcing company with over 13 years of experience, we have executed countless email marketing campaigns for both ourselves and our clients. During those years, we have learned what works and what doesn’t in terms of B2B lead generation and conversion.
Here are 3 tips to improve your email lead generation:
- Offer value and make it highly visible.
The key to using email to turn prospects into leads is offering value. For B2B products and services, the value offered is usually some form of content. This is known as email content marketing. The content you send can vary greatly, but should generally be educational in tone. You can send short blog articles, important industry news, webinar invitations, video links, industry reports, white papers, etc. By sending your prospects content that has some type of value for them, they start to think of you as an expert in your field and will eventually turn to you when they are ready to make a purchase.
When offering value in your B2B marketing emails, make sure it is the focal point of the entire message. People love getting gifts, and that is essentially what you are doing by offering your content. Make this obvious, and your prospects will thank you in the form of conversion.
2. Think about how emails are viewed.
Think about your own inbox. It is likely that when you open many of your emails, a notice appears telling you the certain images have been blocked. Most email applications (including Outlook) now have the default setting to not display images, so you need to think about this when crafting your marketing emails. Make sure any information that is critical does not appear exclusively in an image.
It is also helpful to think about the display window you view your emails in. For most of us, we view our emails in a preview window, and therefore only see a small portion of the message at a time. Many people only scan the first line of an email before deciding whether or not to delete it, and if your prospect does not see anything of value immediately, you might end up in the trash. Make sure that the value you are offering in your email (whether it is an announcement about a sale, an educational webcast, a new blog post, etc.) is immediately obvious and is visible within the small preview frame of most email applications.
3. Analyze and refine constantly.
Once you have created your email for lead generation, make sure it stands out. Open it up and compare it side by side with your competitors’ emails that have similar goals or calls to action. Are your graphics sharp enough or do they look dated in comparison? Is your overall messaging aligned with theirs? Is your differentiator clear and immediately obvious? What is it about your email that makes it better than all of the others? If you don’t know, it is time to back to the drawing board.
If you would like more information on email lead generation or using email for B2B marketing, click here. If you would like to know more about content marketing in relation to the new rules of buying and selling in the digital era, you can download our white paper here.
If you have any questions, please feel free to contact us.
by Glen Springer | Sep 5, 2013
As experienced marketing automation consultants, here are our top 10 tips to increase effectiveness of marketing automation while simultaneously improving your overall productivity:
- Comprehensively configure your tools. Configure everything you can that is pertinent to you. Look at add-ons/connectors, search marketing and social settings, etc. to make sure you are getting the most out of your software.
- Explore all of your options within the tool. There are hidden gems in your software that are incredibly useful. Functions like “Prospect Audits” and “System Emails” are good examples of features that have become hugely valuable to our work that are buried in the high level set of software features.
- Create real-time alerts for the most critical events happening on your site. Someone fills out a form—fire alerts on all cylinders! Someone hits your pricing page—notify a sales rep by email.
- Set internal calls to action in the subject line of notification rules. In other words, if someone fills out a form, my subject line to my sales rep is “CONTACT NOW”.
- Schedule as many of your emails and social posts in one batch, aka time blocking to get into a rhythm and remove distractions.
- Do micro-targeting and split testing to get as much intelligence about your message as possible.
- Map out your drip campaigns and logic in collaborative campaign documents so you can work better with the necessary parties. Using a cloud content management service is one way to do this.
- Do weekly/monthly audits of rules, dynamic segments, auto-responders and any other automated tasks to make sure that they are still 1) accurately working for your campaigns 2) necessary (otherwise, clean out the clutter).
- Ongoing training. Make sure the people actively using the tools are continually learning how to most effectively use the tools. Software gets updated, best practices are established and your team needs to be informed.
- Staff a marketing technology specialist. A growing profession is the tech-savvy, marketing-minded professional. Both creative and technical, marketing technologists can help you get the most out of your marketing automation software.
For more tips on how to increase effectiveness of marketing automation, you can download our Marketing Automation Implementation Checklist here. If you have any questions, please feel free to contact us.
by gabriel_sales | Sep 4, 2013
In the B2B sales world, marketing videos are becoming more and more popular as a B2B sales tactic.
While there are many different types of B2B sales videos you can make, it is good to start by considering what you want the video to do (entertain, build brand awareness, etc.). As a B2B sales and marketing outsourcing company, we have found that “headshot” videos of your top executive/s can help move prospects through the sales cycle while simultaneously making your entire sales process more efficient.
Here are three advantages to using headshot videos of your top executive/s as a B2B sales tactic:
1. It makes your prospect feel more comfortable.
Most executives are experts in one thing or another, and experts love talking to other experts to bounce ideas around and troubleshoot. Executives love talking to other executives because they share a certain type of understanding and perspective in regards to what really matters. For example, executives think about things like P&L and margins in ways that junior salesmen have not yet considered. When a prospect sees that they are in agreement with your executive’s way of thinking, you are one step closer to closing.
During your B2B sales cycle, you can offer an onDemand video of your top executive speaking about the problems you solve for your customers to facilitate that experience of understanding for your prospect in a digital format. Simply by watching a short video, your prospect feels like they have been able to pick your executive’s brain enough to speak intelligently about your product or solution.
2. You can address objections digitally.
Headshot videos of your executive are also valuable in addressing objections digitally. When selling any type of product or service, the same type of objections are likely to come up over and over again. By having your executives address these objections in onDemand videos, your prospect feels like you understand their concerns, and your salesperson doesn’t have to explain the same thing over and over again. This can be especially useful for high-level objections that require technical expertise or explanation beyond the knowledge of a junior salesman.
3. Everyone spends their time more efficiently.
The most important advantage of creating headshot videos of your executive is time efficiency. For most B2B business owners, their business is like their ‘baby’; they love it and could talk about it all day and night. Unfortunately, that is not an effective B2B sales tactic as your executive’s time is expensive and could be spent better elsewhere. By filming your executive’s pitch and sharing it with prospects digitally, your executive can instead have a one-to-many conversation—saving huge amounts of valuable time.
Using a marketing automation platform, these type of executive headshot videos can also make your entire sales process run more smoothly. When you send or share your videos with prospects, your marketing automation platform will tell you which prospects watched what videos. This way, you will know where each prospect is at in terms of discovery and education, so you know when to bring in the executive to help with the close. This saves both your executive and your salesmen from wasting time in meetings with prospects who are not educated or not looking to buy yet.
In summary, headshot videos of your executive can be extremely useful for your prospects, your executives and your salespeople. Your prospects love them because they get high-level education from someone who shares their business perspective. Your executives love them because they no longer have to give the same pitch or address the same objections over and over again. Finally, your salespeople love them because they help push prospects further along the sales cycle while also giving visibility into when to bring in the executive to close.
If you would like more information on using video for B2B marketing, click here. If you have any questions, please feel free to contact us.
by gabriel_sales | Sep 3, 2013
As a B2B sales tactic, email marketing can still be a highly effective strategy. However, there are good ways and bad ways to send B2B sales emails and things you can do to make your email content marketing more effective. This blog suggests the advantages of sending your B2B sales emails with marketing content from a “Marketing Team/Director.”
Less Sales-y=Less Threatening
Do you remember walking into the dealership to buy your first car and dreading the moment the car salesman spotted you? The dread you felt comes from a widespread and deep-seated dislike of being sold to. We simply don’t like experiences where we feel like we have no control of the outcome.
By sending your emails with marketing content from “marketing@companyX”, your prospects feel more like you are trying to educate them rather than sell to them—which will put them much more at ease and give them a reason to trust you. Sending emails this way also allows the prospect to educate themselves on your product or solution without feeling like they are obligated to talk to the salesperson later down the road.
Perception is Everything
Another good reason for having B2B marketing content come from your marketing team is with the nature of sales, whether you are doing it in-house or outsourcing it, you aren’t always going to have the same person doing exactly the same thing. For example, you may have someone start off in a cold calling role and then move up to a account management role.
Whenever you have shifts (from an HR perspective), you don’t want to have to keep rewriting emails to change addresses and signatures—making it appear that you are disorganized to your prospects by having emails constantly coming from different people. If all of your content comes from marketing, it makes you appear more organized even as you have people moving from role to role internally.
If you are a smaller company, this strategy can help make you appear larger than you are. You may not have a whole marketing department, but if you have emails coming from “marketing”, along with the right sales and marketing technologies in place to help with automation, no one ever knows that you don’t have 20-30 sales people behind you.
In summary, sending B2B marketing content from your “marketing team” or “marketing director” can help you appear to be less threatening and more organized. Ultimately, your customers will thank you in the form of repeat business if you allow them to dictate when they engage with the sales rep.
If you would like more information on B2B email marketing, click here. If you have any questions, please feel free to contact us.
As a sales and marketing outsourcing company with over 13 years of experience helping B2B companies jumpstart their sales and grow their revenue, we have been on the front lines of these changes and can therefore offer some insight into what has happened and how to proceed.
