November 2016

When You Outsource Sales You Increase Visibility

by Glen Springer | Nov 21, 2016

Many small businesses are built on the backs and carried by their founders. They build the business through their professional relationships, hard work and skill as sales professionals and strong account management and customer service skills.

We also find that many successful early stage businesses are successful because the entrepreneur that founded that business touches every area of the business. We have found that when a founder starts to consider what happens when they outsource sales they are drawn by the speed to market and the infrastructure cost savings but they have some trepidation about loss of control. This article will address several areas where control of the sales process is actually enhanced when you outsource.

When You Outsource Sales You Can More Control of the Sales Process

Concern “When I outsource sales, I may lose control of my sales process.”

When a company has closed are there initial deals it is sometimes unsettling to hand the keys to an outsource sales partner. This will not occur especially if your outsource sales and marketing partner is committed to helping you build modern sales and marketing operations. Most successful outsource sales and marketing in 2017 are committed to helping their customers build a repeatable sales process. At Gabriel Sales we actually help our clients document each stage of their buyer process and their sales process. And in 90% of the cases we find that when our clients outsource sales and we document this process they actually have more control of the process itself. .

When You Outsource Sales You Can Gain Visibility

Concern- “When I outsource sales I will lose visibility.”

10 years ago this may have been the case. But with the advent of CRMs and Automation Technologies the opposite is now true. When you outsource sales and marketing you can expect your outsource sales partner to provide these technologies as part of their package and you will probably experience even greater visibility. You will know exactly:

How many calls are being made
How many buyers are entering the sales funnel
How many buyers are converting through cold calling, email marketing and content marketing
What content is helping them to convert
And what tactics and markets are working and what tactics and targets are now working

Technologies and the ability to measure customer engagement at every stage of the sales process has been put on steroids over the past several years and you can expect your outsource sales and marketing partner to be help to help with the implementation of these costs saving and intelligence enhancing technologies.

When You Outsource Sales You Are Fully Represented

Concern “Hiring an outsourcing company builds the sales outsourcer’s brand, not mine.”

This is probably the number one unspoken concern founders have. And it is completely valid. And an outsource sales and marketing company that helps our clients build modern sales and marketing operations this is the fundamental difference between we see between hiring an outsource sales and marketing company vs. hiring a rep company or a commission only solution.

When you hire a rep company their goal is to own that customer and sell them as many solutions as possible. Their goal is to brand their organization as a one stop shop for multiple solutions.

When you hire and an outsource sales and marketing company their goal is to build your brand and your sales operation and not theirs. When you outsource to Gabriel Sales your sales reps use your systems, your email addresses and act as your employees during all business calls and interactions. We define our success in terms of your success.

We hope this blog helps to answer a couple of questions about how an outsource sales and marketing organization can help you increase your executive control of your sales and marketing operations. If you have any additional questions please feel free to contact us.

Outsourced Sales and Marketing Can Help with Automation

by Glen Springer | Nov 18, 2016

Why Outsourced Sales and Marketing Makes Sense for Marketing Automation Implementations

So you have decided that you want to transform your sales and marketing operations. This means you need a lead scoring system and marketing automation platform. But you are still a little leery because of the sizeable investment in the software and team of marketers this commitment will represent. You have the following concerns:

You want to test a marketing automation platform but you don’t have the internal resource to run it
You want to limit your investment until you know it will work before you make that commitment to both talent and software
You have enough content to generate leads but not to nurture leads
You don’t understand the best practices or how to baseline that return

Essentially you want to get started and prove you can get a return on your efforts before you pull the trigger and build your own team.

Here are 5 ways outsourced sales and marketing can help with Marketing Automation as you execute this strategy.

Automation Platform Selection

Most outsourced sales and marketing companies will have deep expertise across the platforms. They will have preferred providers but you can expect them to make solid recommendations based on your needs, sales cycle and budget. .

Outsourced Sales and Marketing Allows You to Try Before You Buy

You can always contract directly with a marketing automation software supplier if you wish. And once you have decided that marketing automation works for you that is what we typically recommend. However almost all the software providers require at least an annual commitment and in some cases an annual payment. They want you to commit because it takes marketing automation about six months to a year if you are building a team on your own. Most substantial outsourced sales and marketing companies will be able to negotiate shorter commitments or in Gabriel Sales case will be able to provide solutions on a month to month basis until you prove concept. This frees up budget to spend on generating leads to help you produce an ROI from your marketing automation process faster.

CRM Data Integration

Key to successful marketing automation is connecting the automation system to your CRM so you have one clean buyer record. This make it possible for your sales reps to see the value from the automation platform without needing to learn another system. An outsourced sales and marketing company will have processes to clean your data and will be able to connect all the data required. This makes the system useful to your sales team immediately. .

Outsourced Sales and Marketing for Campaign Deployment

An outsourced sales and marketing company will have the technical skills to deploy a campaign through your platform in a fraction of the time it would take to learn this systems on your own. This includes; customer and prospects segmentation, best practices for how to launch your campaign, how to scale, and the frequency of your email communications. .

Lead Scoring Best Practices

Lead scoring requires a combination of sales and marketing alignment, a strong content matrix and a strong definition of both implicit and explicit qualification criteria. An outsourced sales and marketing company will be able to work through these issues in a fraction of the time ensuring that your engine identifies buyers most likely to buy.

Sales Team Adoption

Your automation platform only has value if your sales reps follow up with leads. An outsourced sales and marketing company will be able to train your sales reps how to leverage the system and also provide appointment setting support if your team lacks the time to follow up with your new volume of leads.

Reporting

Many of the marketing automation platforms give you the ability to run hundreds of reports, Most executives only want to see dashboards and a handful reports that demonstrate how many contacts you’re marketing to, how they’re segmented and what scores are leading towards pipe velocity and sales conversions. An outsourced sales and marketing company will be able to cut through the noise and provide these reports to you for ROI measurement out of the gate.

Gabriel Sales help companies transform their sales and marketing operations by providing the team and tool you need to generate, score and qualify leads faster at a lower cost. To learn more about our outsourced sales and marketing approach and philosophy visit our About Us page. Or feel free to contact us for complimentary assessment.

Marketing Automation Helps Sales Outsourcing Team

by Glen Springer | Nov 16, 2016

Summary of 4 Benefits of Marketing Automation for Sales Outsourcing Reps

The goal of any sales outsourcing engagement for Gabriel Sales it to put a consistent flow of real sales opportunities into the sales pipeline of the companies we work with. Our aim is to do this at a lower cost. As we help our clients build a modern and repeatable sales and marketing process an automation technology is now a requirement for 4 specific benefits that are directly related to the productivity of your sales outsourcing team:

Email Automation
Lead Scoring
Lead Intelligence
Real Time Lead Alerts

Here’s a brief explanation of how each of these features will help your sales outsourcing team:

Lead Scoring and your Sales Outsourcing Team

There are two main ways to qualify leads using an marketing automation technology: using implicit behaviors and activities and explicit data and demographics.

Automation technologies allow you to rank a leads level of interest based on the content they are consuming on your website. Different types of content are scored based on how predictive they are as it relates to where a buyer is in their sales cycle. Basic educational content is not as highly scored as video demos relating to a specific solution. You can also score by what emails buyers are engaging with and how frequently they are engaging.

We also use explicit data to score leads. This is typically demographic data. A CEO gets a higher score than IT managers. A company with 1000 employees gets a different score than a company with 50 employees. You can also change grades up and down based on industry, revenue size and other factors. This is grading prospects against an ideal customer profile that your sales and marketing team identifies.

This scoring allows your sales outsourcing team to focus on the most interested buyers and allows you to prioritize on buyers that are the best fit for your company’s solution.

Email Automation

Email automation helps increase the volume of communication for your sales outsourcing team to a new level. Your sales outsourcing team can use emails send bulk emails that appear to be “personal” emails through your marketing automation tool. This allows your sales outsourcing team to personally track opens and clicks with automatic notifications.

Your marketing team can craft a message to segment prospects, and dynamically assign the “From” and “Email” field of the lead’s assigned rep. This serves two main purposes: 1) the sales outsourcing rep will get the credit for a pleased buyer being sent valuable content (yet the rep didn’t have to do anything – marketing and software took care of the touch for them) and 2) all replies to the content will go directly back to the rep.

Buyer Intelligence for Sales Outsourcing Team

Your outsourcing sales rep will be able to see all online behaviors and that information will be available in the CRM that the sales rep works from. Information like original lead source, specific page views, how long they spent on the page, webinar attendance and video views can all be tracked. This allows your sales outsourcing team to frame conversations, voicemails and follow-up emails based on those specific prospect activities and areas of interest and need.

Real-Time Lead Alerts for Sales Outsourcing Reps

Real-time lead alerts allow your sales outsourcing team to follow up faster when buyers are actively engaged in the sales education content. In some cases they can receive instant alerts via email, text messaging, mobile apps, and desktop apps, whichever they prefer.

With these alerts and summaries Reps can:

Prioritize their day with the most active prospects
Call buyers when they know they are sitting at their desk
Click on links to trigger CRM profile lookups for buyer insights
Send custom emails to active prospects with a few quick clicks

If you would like to see the tools reps will have at their disposal we invite you to contact us for a free demo of the tools in action.

If you want to learn more about how Gabriel Sales can combine your product knowledge and thought leadership with our sales and marketing automation expertise to get you in the lead scoring game faster, request a complimentary review.

Reasons Start Up Executives Should Consider Outsourced Sales and Marketing

by Carol Springer | Nov 14, 2016

Here are several reasons Start-Ups may want to consider outsourced sales and marketing:

You Don’t Have Time to Wait to Go-To-Market

As an entrepreneur launching a new business will require you to spread your time addressing multiple responsibilities including managing finances, human resources, account development, product development and sales and marketing. Hiring an outsourced sales and marketing company will help you to immediately maximize your sales and marketing operations. You will immediately have an executive peer that can make your vision for sales and marketing a reality. And this sales and marketing executive will also help you to avoid the pitfalls that have encountered to help you succeed faster. And you outsourced sales and marketing executive will already have a full team in place behind them to put soldiers on the ground quickly all armed with the tools and technology they need for immediate success. Most start-ups simply don’t have the runway and bandwidth they need to gain revenue traction fast enough to please their investors. An outsourced sales and marketing team can move from strategy to execution 4 times as faster than building on your own so you start selling faster.

Lack of Funds for Multiple Full-Time Hires

Finding the best individual marketers and sales people is hard and getting harder. And the reality is that the top talent in this business environment have their choice of where to work, and in many cases do not have the unique skill sets working in a start-up environment requires. To compound the complexities for start-ups, successful sales and marketing efforts now requires multiple skill sets to help the buyer the way they now buy. Success now requires having a database marketer, a content marketer, a marketing automation expert, someone to help with content production, a sales and marketing strategists, business development reps and a closer. Hiring even a handful of these professional full time would cost you a minimum of $250K annually and there would be no guarantee that they would work well together as a team. And odds are that you would not need most of these hires on a full-time basis.

An outsourced sales and marketing company can bring a blended team to your company overnight at a fraction of the cost. You will immediately gain access to all the talent you need at a fraction of the cost. And one of the things that we believe makes Gabriel Sales unique is that when we craft our outsourced sales and marketing solutions we remain open to transitioning some or all of this team over to your team as revenue grows and your sales maturity increases.

Lack of Core Sales and Marketing Domain Expertise

Most start-ups are founded and driven by incredibly competent and passionate professionals and leaders. But our experience has been, even when being founded by core sale executives, the founders of most companies have not been in the trenches of the daily grind of sales and marketing on daily basis for many years. So, especially with the advent of marketing automation, most Start Up companies simply can’t afford the learning curve of building a sales infrastructure and process that will produce day after day consistently. In addition, hiring a sales and marketing team, without having the recent experience of managing these employees (often part time) can be time-consuming. An outsourced sales and marketing company with a blended part-time and a full-time team will help you move faster with less of your executive’s team bandwidth. As a result, your executive team can spend their time on higher value activities.

Every entrepreneur should examine their own situation and decide whether or not it makes sense to outsource sales and marketing in some capacity. If you have the funds, time, and expertise, you should hire full-time employees. You should consider a consultant to help you grow your business if you are lacking in any of these key areas. Please contact us if you would like to talk and determine whether outsourced sales and marketing are right for your organization.

How to Generate Top of Funnel Leads Through Email Marketing [Webcast]

by Glen Springer | Nov 12, 2016

Watch the video below to see how to generate more sales ready leads through email marketing.

« Older Entries

Next Entries »