by gabriel_sales | Apr 14, 2014
The 2014 B2B Content Marketing Report done by the Content Marketing Institute and MarketingProfs found that 93% of B2B companies currently engage in content marketing.
These companies have realized that today, buyers begin to interact with B2B companies digitally before engaging with sales directly. They know that in order for buyers to interact with their company digitally, they need to have digital content for buyers to interact with.
While it is great that so many companies are engaged in creating content, many B2B companies are failing to understand the true function and goal of marketing content in relation to the overall sales process.
Many companies are treating their content—blogs, white papers, webcasts, nurturing emails, etc.—like an extension of their sales pitch. They see every blog post as another chance to push their product or sell their service. They see every email as the perfect place to try to close the deal. The main issue with marketing content like this is that the focus is on the company, not the customer. The emphasis is put on the company’s goal (selling) rather than the customer’s goal (solving a problem).
There is always going to be a time and place to sell. However, many of the prospects that interact with your marketing content are nowhere near ready to buy. In fact, only about 5% of B2B prospects are ready to buy at any given time. The other 95% are at various stages of their buying cycle—discovery, education, verification, etc.
This means that if all of your marketing content is simply an ongoing sales pitch, only 5% of your audience is going to be receptive to it at any given time. The other 95% still want to be educated or compare their options, and your sales pitch is going to seem pushy or annoying.
While talking about your product or service is okay, try to keep the hard sales messaging on your product and service related pages only. In your marketing content like blogs, white papers and webcasts, your focus should be providing valuable information that your prospect can use in some way. By providing value prior to purchase, you help to build trust with your prospect, which is a prerequisite for most–if not all–B2B deals.
To make sure your marketing content is focused on helping the buyer solve problems (rather than selling the buyer a product/service), you should first work to clearly understand what those problems are. Then, create content that answers any and all questions your typical buyer may have in trying to solve those problems.
A simple rule for determining whether your content is company/selling-oriented or customer-oriented is to ask, “What does this piece of content do for the prospect?”
If your only answer is, “It convinces them that my product is the best” or, “It explains why they should buy my service,” you probably should go back to the drawing board. ”If your answer is something like, “It gives them information on the pros and cons of SaaS solutions” or, “It explains the five most important aspects of energy efficiency,” you are probably on the right track.
To learn more about creating compelling and engaging B2B marketing content, read The New Rules for B2B Customer Engagement. Feel free to contact us with any questions.
by gabriel_sales | Apr 10, 2014
During the course of our sales process, we often hear from early stage prospects who have not really thought about outsourcing to help outperform the competition in terms of lead generation. Many of these early stage prospects haven’t committed to outsourced B2B lead generation and often struggle to understand or grasp the enormity of change that can occur as a result.
What many companies fail to realize is that simply by freeing up the time that was once spent educating and qualifying, you are now able to provide a deeper level of service to your customers, which in turn can lead to higher retention, more upsell possibilities and more referrals.
By shifting focus to serving the needs of your prospects, you change the dynamics of the entire conversation. The prospect realizes you are there to help, rather than to just sell.
By leveraging outsourced B2B lead generation, you have a team of experts at your side to help with all of the heavy lifting. While your competitors struggle to figure out how to get more leads or implement a marketing automation platform, you are freed to focus on strategy, content, and closing that can help you outperform the competition.
The other major benefit to B2B sales outsourcing has to do with time. Sales and marketing have changed dramatically in recent years with the rise of digital technology, and adapting your sales process to this new digital environment is a task that is neither simple nor quick.
As B2B sales and marketing outsourcers, we have over 13 years of experience building scalable sales machines, and we have developed a proven and streamlined process for running integrated sales and marketing campaigns for our clients. We have found that using this process, we can achieve in 90 days what typically takes 9-18 months for a client to implement on their own. For startup companies looking to take a new product to market, this difference can be significant when attempting to outperform the competition.
To learn more about the value of leveraging outsourced B2B lead generation to outperform the competition, read How an Outsourced Sales Team Can Help Your Marketing Team. You can learn more about the B2B outsourcing services we offer on our service page.
Please feel free to contact us with any questions.
by gabriel_sales | Apr 7, 2014
As technology advances, marketing tactics need to adapt to how people are getting and sharing information.
For many years, marketing has generally been split into two categories, Business to Consumer (B2C) and Business to Business (B2B). While these were effective ways to look at marketing in a business sense, these definitions can hide the fact that in either case, you are marketing to people. As Bryan Kramer wrote for Social Media Today, we should be focused on Human to Human (H2H) sales and marketing.
What does this mean for your marketing tactics? It is time to start connecting with your potential clients in a different way. Rather than ‘selling hard’ or feature/benefit messaging, H2H simplifies our language and puts an emphasis on empathy and personalization while connecting with people socially.
Here are four ways you can make your marketing more H2H:
1. Speaking Human
More and more, people use social platforms to communicate, get information and share what they learned. This means your messages should be simplified and easy to share. It is acceptable to write in a conversational tone and avoid big words.
2. Social Sensory Marketing
In order to grab and hold the attention of prospects, you need to appeal to and connect with the basic human sensory system. The best way to do this is to incorporate imagery and video into your day to day marketing. You may get a few views on your text only post, add a picture and your numbers will likely increase. Add a cartoon or a video and you’ll up your chances of getting shared.
3. Customer Relationships
People want to connect with you and your brand. It is important to start that connection early. One way to let your potential clients get to know you is through video. When a potential client can see who they’ll be working with, it starts to build trust, which will speed up the sales process significantly. To learn more about creating headshot videos, read 5 Basic Tips for Executive Headshot Videos.
4. Become a Better Storyteller
This is your chance to appeal to people’s emotions. Tell stories about the pains your current clients were experiencing and how you were able to help them. Use pathos to connect with your potential clients and let them know you understand and can lend a helping hand. Read 3 Ways to Incorporate Storytelling into Your Marketing Content for more on how to be a better storyteller in your marketing content.
H2H marketing makes you look at what people want in everyday life and how they want to feel. So what is it that people want? They want to be a part of something bigger; they want to feel, to be included and to understand. We are no longer just selling a product or service we are connecting with people.
To learn more about how to appeal to your customers, read What Do B2B Customers Want from your Branding and Marketing Content?
Feel free to contact us.
by gabriel_sales | Apr 4, 2014
Cold callers on their own are no magic bullet for marketing success
This is part two of a blog series. Read part one here.
At its most basic, we believe this approach has been successful because today, buyers don’t like to be sold products; they like to buy solutions that solve their problems. Our integrated approach simply makes this easier.
Sales reps supported with strong and authentic content enable buyers to educate themselves and buy on their own terms and on their own time line. The sales professional now adds value to the buyer’s day as opposed to being another disruptive interruption (such as cold callers). Because once a prospect feels educated on a product or service, the sales pitch is no longer intimidating or overwhelming. It is providing value and helping them to reach a decision.
For example, you may want to buy a guitar amplifier but know little about electronics. A salesman going on and on about transistors and capacitors and signal conversion is not going to get you any closer to making an informed decision. However, reading a brochure titled, “5 Things to Look For When Choosing a Guitar Amplifier,” may help you (the buyer) understand what capacitors and signal conversion acutally are. You then feel more educated and can evaluate the pros and cons of the capacitors and their impact on the type of music you want to offer as your service to the world. Then, you and the salesman can have an intelligent dialogue around guitar amplifiers and you can leave feeling truly satisfied with your purchase decision.
Knowledge is no longer a tool for the salesperson. Knowledge is a tool to create wins for both the buyer and the company.
By offering valuable, educational content to early stage prospects that does not try to sell anything, prospects are able to engage with your company in a nonthreatening way. This digital engagement helps to slowly build trust, so when your prospect has a real need and real budget, they are willing to take a call from a sales rep, and no one feels that the call is ‘cold’.
Getting to this point in your sales and marketing process takes some time and requires a fair amount of patience. But after a year to 18-month commitment to the approach, your whole sales process changes for the better. Your cost of sales percentage decreases, your margins increase, and your deal flow accelerates exponentially.
Rather than searching through thousands of people at a multitude of different companies to try to find those in need of help, you can look at a dashboard, see who is interested and have specific topics to talk to them about.
If you would like to learn more about how sales and marketing have changed or our integrated sales and marketing process, read, “The Shift to Bought then Sold”. If you would like to learn more about our integrated sales and marketing outsourcing services, you can visit our services page.
Feel free to contact us with any questions.
by gabriel_sales | Apr 2, 2014
Why cold callers cannot- and should not-have to handle all of marketing on their own
At Gabriel Sales, we have not needed to staff a fully dedicated cold caller in over 12 months.
While there are many factors at play, we see this as an indication of the success you can experience when you make it easy for your buyers to self educate with an integrated sales and marketing strategy.
Long before we began offering integrated sales and marketing outsourcing services to our clients, we made a commitment to implementing the approach ourselves. On the technology side, we were early adopters of marketing automation and CRM systems. On the marketing side, we have been publishing relevant content and executing eProspecting campaigns and nurturing programs for over three years.
We didn’t get there over night. After committing to this integrated approach for about eighteen months, our dependency on cold callers was dramatically diminished.
This is because the integration of content and technology has allowed us to take our early stage sales messages and turn them into digital content—blogs, white papers, webcasts, etc.—that can be shared one-to-many. Because our marketing automation platform tracks content engagement by prospect, we can start interacting with our prospects early in their buying cycle digitally with our calling resources simply stewarding them through their educational process.
The result is a win-win situation: Our prospects are now able to take themselves through their own discovery and education, on their time frame based on their own business drivers. Our calling resources can then watch this engagement, and they are able to see when it makes sense to reach out.
Now, instead of placing endless follow up calls to companies that may or may not be ready to buy, we are able to use marketing automation and digital sales tools to see what prospects are interacting with what content. We then have a better idea of not only what people are interested but also what they are specifically interested in. Additionally, our calling team is able to be helpful as opposed to disruptive to the buyers’ day-to-day business activities.
When we do see sufficient interest to indicate that it makes sense to follow up with prospects, enough trust has been established digitally that the experience on both sides is about deepening the relationship and moving towards a common goal.
On our end, we know who the prospect is and what title he/she holds (e.g. admin vs. executive). We also know what webpages he/she has visited, what videos were watched, what social media posts were clicked on, etc. This makes us much more effective in helping them to buy or not buy the right solution.
On the prospect side, he/she knows who we are and what we do and also has a general feel of the company culture (e.g. brand attributes). The prospect has also been given the chance to educate himself/herself enough to speak intelligently about our solution. Typically, they have a much greater grasp of what their needs and priorities are.
So now, when we call a prospect for the first time, instead of hearing:
“Who are you? What is this about? Sales and marketing? Oh, I’m not the right person to talk to about this.”
We hear,
“Oh yeah, that white paper on marketing automation was really helpful. I was looking on your site and see that you guys offer marketing automation consulting, could you tell me more about that?”
By allowing our content marketing campaigns to do the work before we get on the phone, both the tone and content of the initial calls are radically different from the typical disruptive calling experience. Whereas the best response you can expect to get from a cold call is, “Sure, send me some information,” calling someone who has already been through a fair amount of your content is generally a ten-minute qualifying conversation right out of the gate.
Rather than pitching ourselves, the call is spent understanding the needs of the buyers.
Continue reading.
The 2014 B2B Content Marketing Report done by the Content Marketing Institute and MarketingProfs found that 93% of B2B companies currently engage in content marketing.
