Outsourced Sales to Gain Sales Capability and Capacity

by | Feb 28, 2017

According to the 2016 study by the Outsourcing Institute the top two reasons for outsourcing any function is:

  • To reduce & control operating costs
  • To improve company focus

The next three reasons companies outsource are:

  • To gain access to capabilities you don’t already have
  • Free internal resources for other purposes
  • Give you access to resources that are not available internally

We have addressed how an outsourced sales and marketing company can help reduce costs in this blog post here so this article will quickly list how, what and where an outsourced sales company can increase your capability and capacity.

Increasing Capability

With the recent requirement of email marketing, content marketing and the addition of marketing automation and CRMs, outsourced sales is now becoming an accepted part of this overall outsourcing trend.  Your new digital buyer now buys using both digital content, emails and working with sales reps.  An outsourcing sales company will understand how your buyer now buys and will help to customize a sales process that works for your buyer.

An outsourced sales  company will have both the experience and expertise to manage all of these different tactics and tools.   More importantly a sales outsourcing company will have the expertise to help you implement these tools and tactics with aligned sales and marketing campaigns to help you generate sales qualified leads.  Including the timing and best practices to execute a repeatable sales process.

Capacity

An outsourced sales company will have the sales and marketing team you need to quickly run campaigns.  This includes:

  • The marketing talent to target the market, create the copy and content you need to run effective lead generation campaigns and the technology experts to automate large parts of your sales process.
  • And once the lead is generated they will have the sales reps, buyer education reps and in some cases closers to help you fill your sales funnel and generate more revenue faster.

Clearly some sales reps are better at telephone introductions than others but the talent required to share content and do a basic introduction early in the sales process is neither complex nor uncommon.  An outsourcing sales company that knows how to market your product will be able to staff the resources to help you generate your sales leads as well, especially if they are supported by quality content.  They will also know how to probe for your prospects pains and objectives.   So you will immediately be able to free up your own internal team to focus on later stage deals.

As an outsourced sales and marketing company Gabriel Sales specializes in helping companies build modern sales and marketing operations to generate more sales qualified leads.    To learn more about our sales outsourcing and marketing services visit our outsourced sales services page.

5 Quick Outsourced Sales Projects to Accelerate Sales

by | Feb 26, 2017

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Q1 should now be kicking into high gear and if you feel like you could use a little extra push to help put more sales qualified leads into your closers funnel, here are five quick projects an outsourced sales and marketing company could take on to quickly accelerate your sales funnel.

Make those extra calls

Most companies don’t wait to follow up on inbound leads because you want to call the best and most active prospects first – especially if you are in a highly competitive industry.  And getting there first improves your closing % by as much as a 100%.  As a result most inside sales teams will prioritize inbound leads as they come in and if your inbound volume is high enough your internal team will often give up on leads after 1 or 2 calls if they don’t connect.

If you have at least 400 dormant inbound leads most outsourced sales company can staff a rep to make those 3rd, 4th and sometimes 5th attempt to mine your previous investment.  Odds are if you were not able to connect quickly neither were your competitors and there are opportunities sitting in your dead lead file.

Run an educational eMail marketing campaign

sales outsourcing lead generation

As Q1 is moving into full gear most companies have started to set budgets and are starting to work on their business priorities for 2017.  Now is a perfect time for you to introduce your solution and build awareness for companies looking to prioritize your solution in 2017.  An outsourced sales and marketing company can help you quickly pull the trigger on an email marketing campaign using educational content you already have  to build awareness to a market of up to 75,000 new decision makers to generate as many as 5000 early stage leads for as little as $6000.

Automate your initial product demo or senior executives answering frequently asked questions  

Most senior buyers are interested in learning more about businesses solutions. But if it’s not one of their immediate priorities they may not want to invest the 30 plus minutes it takes to sit through a full product demo or to meet with one of your senior leaders.  An outsourced sales and marketing company can make it easier for your buyer by running a quick one day video production work shop.  You can leverage this type of workshop to:

  • Create a series of short demo videos that allow buyers to get a quick taste of how your solution works and what problems it solves for them.
  • Have your executives answer some of the most frequently asked and business critical questions on camera.

This content can be used by your internal sales team to make it easier for buyers that are on the fence get off the fence and generate that first critical sales call.

Gain a competitive advantage and finally pull the trigger on a marketing automation platform

Everyone knows that automation is the future.  In fact 85% of B2B technology companies and most retailers and CPG companies have already adopted marketing automation technologies into their mission critical sales technology.  But in some industries adoption is still well below 30%.   This gives your business the ability to gain a competitive advantage other businesses in your industry may not have, but most companies don’t pull the trigger because they don’t have the core expertise in house to do it effectively and/or they don’t have the internal capacity to do the heavy lifting to set these systems up.  An outsourced sales and marketing company can help with both in as little as 30 days.

About Gabriel Sales Outsourced Sales Solutions

We believe that calling efforts are still critical to sales success but that the new digital buyer now requires and integrated approach to sales and marketing.

Repeatable Outsourced Sales Process

Gabriel Sales works with start-up companies and small business trying to scale their sales and marketing efforts.  We specialize in helping build modern sales and marketing operations to build a sustained, repeatable and consistent flow in new sales opportunities.  We do this by helping companies implement integrated solutions or by simply and immediately plugging capacity gaps in our clients existing efforts.  This is not your father’s outsourced sales and marketing solution and we invite you to learn more about our new approach to outsourced sales to decide if we can help your business thrive in both the short and long term.

What Sales Gaps Can an Outsourced Sales Team Cover?

by | Feb 24, 2017

When many small businesses are ready to expand sales beyond the founders growing the business or a startup company’s product is ready to go to market, they often decide outsourced sales team is worth exploring.

This is primarily because the founders or business owners don’t have the time, experience, or expertise to recruit, hire, train, or manage the sales and marketing talent required for success in today’s buyer driven landscape. Many companies are now surprised by what an outsourced team sales and marketing team can now provide to increase sales. Below is a quick overview of the talent gaps an outsourced sales team and marketing company can cover to get you to market quickly.

outsourced sales team

An outsourced sales team will include both sales talent and the staff required to support that talent, and will include:

A sales and marketing account coordinator – This person will be responsible for all the project management and reporting on your account. This includes all sales and marketing efforts and most importantly, transitioning all leads to your outsourced sales team reps or your internal closers.

Depending on your needs, your outsourced sales team may include cold callers to generate leads, business development reps to manage the early stage education of your buyer, sales qualifiers to set appointments and to execute light discovery, and finally you may have closers responsible for managing the close of the sale. How your team is staffed will depend on the size of the market you are targeting and the volume of revenue you need to generate. This will also determine if you have a fully dedicated outsourced sales team or if you can be more effective with a blended team of part time resources.

Your outsourced sales team should also have a part-time automation expert and part-time database marketer staffed to manage the execution of your drip campaigns, and to ensure that your database is leveraged effectively and kept clean.

You should also expect to have a content production specialist assigned to your account if you do not have a content production specialist on your team. Content and content management is now critical to your outsourced sales team’s success.

Finally, you will gain access to a senior executive and strategist. This resource will be a peer that can help you to steward your sales strategy and your marketing strategy and will ultimately be accountable for your overall success.

Gabriel Sales specializes in building outsourced sales teams and modern sales and marketing operations for small businesses and startup companies committed to both aggressive and sustained growth. To learn more about how we help you build and staff sales team please visit our outsourced sales team and marketing services page.

Should We Outsource Sales?

by | Feb 21, 2017

You know that you need to increase your sales pipeline and sell more of your product and solutions but you don’t have the time, resource or the bandwidth to do it.  And you can’t justify the six figures in headcount to staff multiple marketers and sales reps or even one experienced  enterprise rep to get the job done.  When this happens you will start to wonder if “I should think about an outsource sales solution.”

Many companies then think it’s an all or nothing decision.  And they are surprised to learn that they can use an outsource sales solution for these different stages of the sales function.

  • Identifying and target buyers to generate leads
  • Developing those buyers and educating them about those solutions
  • Qualifying the buyer
  • Closing the buyer

What we discover when we are talking to many small businesses is that their real hurdle is not closing buyers.  Their challenge is the capacity and the talent to take care of the daily blocking and tackling to generate leads and turn them into sales qualified leads.  They are also surprised to learn that they can outsource sales and outsource marketing to accomplish these goals.

If all a business really needs is more sales qualified leads then there are three reason an outsource sales solution could be a powerful option for them.

Outsource Sales to Save Money

Expense is often the initial reason businesses consider sales outsourcing over hiring. In 2017 the average compensation package for even one mid-level sales rep was $8k – $10k per month and that rep will need the support of a marketing team to support their efforts.  In many cases you can get an outsource sales rep and a blended marketing team to support them and the sales automation tools you need for about the same price.  The question to be answered in this approach is will a team produce more for you than just one rep.  If your sales requires digital education of the buyer and the ability to generate leads beyond just cold calling the answer is probably yes – so an outsource sales solution will probably be more cost effective in both the short term and long term.

You Outsource Sales to Focus on Core Functions

There are three core functions in any business. Generating awareness, winning clients and adding value to those customers’ lives or business with your product or solution.

If you do not have the bandwidth to do all three you need to make a decision.  And in most cases the smart decision is for you to focus on your own product innovations and servicing and scaling your accounts.   You can use an outsource sales and marketing team to immediately give you the access to the sales and marketing capacity you need to build awareness and fill your sales funnel.

Outsource Sales to Gain Access to Specialized Skills

If you have not kept up seismic changes in sales and marketing over the past several years which include:

  • Content marketing
  • Marketing automation
  • Email marketing
  • Inbound marketing

then an outsource sales solution will give you this expertise you need across multiple skill sets.  These skills sets can be a combination of blended execution teams and strategists so you immediately get the sales and marketing tactics you need, deployed at the right time with the right budget.

Gabriel Sales specializes in helping companies cover gaps in their existing sales and marketing process. To learn more about Gabriel Sales’ approach to outsource sales we invite you to visit our outsource sales approach page.

Sales Outsourcing and a CRM

Sales Outsourcing and a CRM

by | Feb 20, 2017

Learn how your sales outsourcing company can advise you on your CRM

We work with many small businesses and one of the questions we get over and over again is: “What should we do with our CRM when sales outsourcing?”

When we talk to most small businesses without a CRM in place we typically get two responses:

  • The first is that “we tried a CRM and no one used it” or “it was too complicated”.
  • The second is that “we are using spreadsheets or some other basic system” and its working fine.

So they ultimately want to know if they will need a CRM for sales outsourcing to produce the best results. It really comes down to five issues:

  • What kind of lead volume are you working with, and are you using a marketing automation platform?
  • How many sales reps will we be passing leads to?
  • How far you want your outsource sales team to take the deals into the funnel?
  • What are your growth targets?

What kind of lead volume are you working with, and are you working with a marketing automation platform.

What kind of lead volume are you working with? If you are a small business and only need to close 6 to 24 deals a year, then you will probably need to generate approximately 100 to 200 Sales Accepted Leads (deals where you are engaging in conversations with next steps) annually. In many cases, you can manage these leads internally with spreadsheets.

This is especially true if you have a marketing automation solution that can be referenced to track the buyer’s digital footprint to score leads. It will also track the buyer’s engagement with emails as part of your sales outsourcing process. You can also leverage this automation system to manage and prioritize your early stage leads, and to capture inbound leads for your efforts. Once a buyer is getting serious, you can move them to your spreadsheet.

If you are typically only managing less than 10 active deals with concrete next steps at a time, and you only have owners or one rep managing the close, you don’t necessarily need a CRM.

If your products or services require heavy transactional sales efforts and you are closing multiple deals per month, the rule of thumb is that you will need 10 sales accepted leads for every deal you end up closing. This quickly leads to being able to manage and prioritize 500 to 1000 leads annually. A spreadsheet will quickly overwhelm you and your team with even the most diligent internal rep. If you are using a sales outsourcing team, reporting will become difficult. Therefore, identifying a CRM investment to support both your internal sales team and outsourcing team would be prudent.

How many internal sales reps will we be passing leads to?

If you are an owner of the company and are responsible for closing business, and have a tracking system that works for you, then you can stick with that system.

If you are not involved with sales on a daily basis, then you need to consider a CRM and enforce that your sales rep use that CRM to keep detailed notes.

You also need a CRM if you have multiple reps. You will be able to save at least 40 hours plus a year in pipeline management reporting. This alone will make up for the sunk time costs of a CRM.

How far you want your sales outsourcing team to take the deals into the funnel?

If you are hiring an outsourcing group to generate leads for you, they will have their own internal system to qualify leads. If they are transitioning these leads to your internal sales team and never touching them again, then you will not need a CRM if you have a system that works for your sales team.

However, if your team is developing leads, engaging in sales presentations and doing any type of solution discovery, you will need a system for them to document and record that information to make sure these sales conversations and their substantive content is captured and part of the sales record. In this case you will need a CRM.

In addition, if you will be passing leads back and forth with your outsource sales team, you will need a place to assign accountability and collectively schedule sales efforts. The CRM will then be leveraged to do what it is designed to do which is to Customer Relationship Management.

Do you have aggressive growth targets?

If you have aggressive growth targets and planning to add multiple sales reps over time, you will definitely want a CRM. A CRM will allow you to scale lead generation, lead development and build a database. It is far easier to add headcount and resources to scale a sales effort and get them productive when you have a CRM. You simply hand them their sales pipe with their new leads and buyer’s past history, and the new rep can be active in the sales process immediately.

Gabriel Sales helps companies build modern sales and marketing operations and provides outsource sales team and marketing solutions. Please visit this article to learn about how the marketing has changed and our new approach to sales outsourcing.