by Glen Springer | May 31, 2017
Successfully Outsourcing Sales for Start Ups and SMBs
Successfully outsourcing sales as a business strategy can provide benefits and cost-savings for your company with process improvements, expanded talent pools, cost containment, improved focus on core business, and reduced time-to-market, to name a few.
However, there are risks in an unsuccessful sales outsourcing engagement that can diminish the benefits. How do you minimize those sales outsourcing risks? First, don’t expect a magic bullet at the beginning of the engagement. Number two: make an informed decision.
If your company is initiating an outsourcing strategy for the first time, the following set of five steps will help you to minimize the risks and maximize the opportunities for outsourcing success.
Define clear objectives. Successfully outsourcing sales strategy starts with clearly defined objectives and measurable goals. Objectives state the reasons for a sales outsourcing program, define its business value, and provide a functioning framework for making decisions about which outsourcing company to work with, which model to use, what stage of the funnel development to outsource, and what levels of risk to assume. Measurable goals are the events and functional metrics by which management can monitor progress, take corrective action, and project future performance.
Count the true costs. Just as important as setting realistic expectations is, your expectations reflect all related costs if you both build and internal sales and marketing organization, or go with an outsourcing marketing and sales firm. These hidden costs and savings need to be evaluated:
- Selecting an outsourcing partner vs. building one on your own: Selecting a vendor could take 5 to 40 hours depending on how long it takes to find the right fit – but this pales in comparison to recruiting a team of sales reps and marketers.
- Transitioning work and sales processes: Knowledge transfer can take time. Make sure your outsourcing sales company has a process well defined to transition sales from your team and/or organization to theirs.
- Technology costs: A CRM and marketing automation platform are now critical for success. Understand who will implement, integrate, and manage those technologies.
- Managing: How will the engagement be managed on both sides? Does your outsourcing sales partner make reporting and managing the engagement easy? The costs of maintaining a finished contract can be surprisingly high.
Manage Risk. Another critical factor in executing a sales outsourcing program is deciding how much of your sales process you want to immediately shift to your outsourcing sales process. For companies with mature products and a mature sales process, it may make more sense to outsource your sale from lead generation to closed deals. The sales process and the marketing process will already be well defined with a script, technologies, and content to support it. But for many small businesses and start-ups, it may make more sense to focus on filling the pipe and developing qualified leads before staffing a team of closers, because closers are the most expensive resource to staff both internally, or with an outsourcing sales partner.
Lead Generation and Content Marketing Outsourcing: this function is often the most effective way to manage risk for a small business, as it can be executed with a fixed start date and will include hard and measurable results. It will also include a hard and tangible process, as well as the construction of modern sales and marketing operations that will be a valuable asset for years to come. Most importantly you will have hard data and success metrics to measure on a monthly and weekly basis to track progress.
About Us
Gabriel Sales builds modern sales and marketing operations including, sales outsourcing of your lead generation and lead development. We have been successfully outsourcing for SMBs and Start Ups for 20 years. We provide both full service solutions and point solutions. To learn more visit our approach to successfully outsourcing sales page.
by Glen Springer | May 29, 2017
Dealing with the new digital buyer is now a requirement for most businesses. And keeping your sales and process flowing daily is now critical to a sustained flow of sales opportunities. So a wise choice now may be to look for an outsourced sales and outsourced marketing automation service provider.
This article will address what you can expect by combinining outsourced sales and marketing automation company.
Top four issues addressed by an outsourced sales and marketing automation service provider to help you get started
Issue #1 Sales and marketing automation technologies are constantly evolving. Marketing automation is designed to generate leads and develop leads not ready to buy. Some campaigns can take more than six months to develop the digital buyer, so it takes both time and experience to learn how to do both well to optimize the tools and campaigns. An outsourced sales and marketing automation service provider will have both experience and skills to boost sales while nurturing leads throughout the buying process.
Issue #2 Sales and marketing automation technologies come in multiple product stacks and many price points. Some technologies are better for B2C campaigns. Other technologies are designed for B2B campaigns. Some tools are designed more for inbound lead generation and others are designed for sales development. Finally, tools are now offered at a wide variety of price points and some features of the pricier tools are overkill for a small business, while other, larger companies with large sales teams can use additional features. If you are not familiar with the landscape, you could under spend or over spend and not get the results you need at the right ROI. You’re not familiar enough with the ecosystem of solutions to assemble a seamless optimized revenue engine.
Issues #3 You and your team have your hands full already. You could be developing product, serving customers, creating content and recruiting. If you are too busy to implement the technology, run the technology, build the database or run campaigns and even following up with the leads, an outsourced sales and marketing automation company can do this for you if are too busy to do all the legwork that goes into campaigning and lead development.
Issues #4 If your company’s sales team has never sold to leads that have been generated by marketing automation, your sales reps may lack the skill and the training to deal with well-nurtured leads. Well-nurtured digital buyers do not typically have the same needs in the sales journey that cold leads and inbound leads require. Well-nurtured leads need to be treated with a softer touch, while at the same time more aggressive touch. A company that provides both outsourced sales and marketing automation sales talent will have the skills and/or the ability to train your team in the best practices of both using the software to find scored leads, and how to best qualify and develop those leads.
If these issues are familiar, you may already be thinking about an outsourced sales and marketing automation company. If this is the situation you find yourself in, an outsourced solution on a temporary basis may be worth exploring.
About Gabriel Sales’ Outsourced Sales and Marketing Services
Gabriel Sales builds moderns sales and marketing operations for small businesses and technology companies that execute a solution sale and requires a closer to manage the close of a deal. To learn more about how we help you address the new digital buyer to close more business faster we invite you to check out our new approach to outsourced sales and marketing.
by Glen Springer | May 26, 2017
There are multiple reasons to consider an outsource sales company for lead generation and lead qualification to help you grow your revenue and shape your company’s growth strategy.
For example, a tech start up that has a proven product may need to accelerate its sales efforts prior to a round. Or an established business may need to test a new market. Employing an outsource sales company will help you get to market faster – an experienced sales outsourcing and marketing firm enables the startup to hit the ground running with an experienced sales team, rather than wait six months or longer to recruit and train an internal team.
Another typical reason involves testing a new solution or a new process or strategy. An outsourcing team can take on the blocking and tackling of generating leads and sales opportunities for the new product. This allows your existing sales force to stay dialed in on the established product line. With an outsource sales team, you can fine-tune your process for the new solution, document the process and lay the groundwork and infrastructure for a full-scale roll out with your existing team.
Sales outsourcing can also immediately improve a company’s targeting capacity, cold-calling efforts, email marketing tactics and inbound lead generation approach. All this will increase your capability and capacity to identify qualified leads and drive deals into the sales funnel.
So once you’ve decided hiring an outsource sales company makes sense for your company, here are 3 tips to help ensure you make an intelligent decision about which company is right for you:
Evaluate the outsource sales team’s credentials
When choosing any vendor, it’s important to understand who they have successfully worked with in the past. Most sales outsourcing companies will have case studies online and will also have testimonial videos available. And before you make the final purchase, they should be OK with you checking references from other clients. Ask questions about the specific sales and marketing gaps you would like them to cover.
Determine if there is a strategic fit
A solution only works if the vendor’s capabilities meets your organization’s needs. When you outsource sales this means different things to different companies. Ask direct questions about their areas of strength. Some focus primarily on lead generation. Some focus end-to-end sales services. Others, like Gabriel Sales, build modern sales and marketing operations that can be transitioned over to the company. It’s also important to consider a firm’s flexibility in adapting to changes in your sales needs. Will they transition teams or systems to you?
Examine processes expertise
Take a close look at what they are best equipped to service. Can they help you implement a process for pure transactional sales? Are they experts in solution sales where a senior rep needs to manage the close of the transaction? Examine how they report on sales metrics and if they can help you forecast. Will they share data or hide data? Do they help you grow your business? Or do they just put deals into your pipeline? Do they do both?
Assess the sales outsourcing and marketing technology stack
An outsource sales firm’s technology capabilities and expertise is now a key factor in the selection process. What type of demand-generation technologies does the firm employ? Are they using marketing automation? How will it make use of CRM and analytics to achieve your objectives? Are they tied to a set of platforms or are they flexible?
Other factors when selecting an outsource sales company
Other issues evaluate a potential an outsource sales company:
- Experience in your industry
- Experience with your decision maker type
- What type of feedback do they provide?
About Gabriel Sales Outsource Sales Solution
Gabriel Sales helps companies build modern sales and marketing operations to help small businesses and start ups build a consistent and sustained flow of qualified leads. To learn more, please visit our outsource sales approach page.
by Glen Springer | May 24, 2017
Telemarketing has been around almost half a century and remains one of the oldest forms of generating leads. And over the past decade, with the growth of inbound lead generation tactics like Google AdWords, Facebook Ads, and outbound lead generation tactics like social media and email marketing, cold calling has lost its luster. Now more than ever, telemarketing makes sense.
More importantly, cold calling has decreased in efficiency, and consequentially its ROI, for one primary reason: buyers simply do not pick up the phone as often as they used to. As a sales outsourcing company that has been around for close to 20 years, we’ve slowly watched calls to connect ratios slide from 20 percent of calls resulting in a connection in 2009, to a call to connect ratio of between 8 and 12 percent in 2016. This means that front of the funnel calling is half as effective and twice as expensive as it was less than a decade ago.
However, if you look at telemarketing with a different perspective – as your competitors are abandoning calling – working the phone can turn into a distinct competitive advantage if approached in a more modern way. The ability of an outsourced sales company to help you build modern sales and marketing operations, while combining outbound marketing tactics with smarter calling, is why telemarketing makes sense.
Here are the three top reasons outsourced sales just makes more sense for using telemarketers to generate leads.
Outsourced Sales Company has Targeting Expertise
An outsourced sales company will live and breathe database acquisition and database management. Most companies will not have the subscriptions or relationships they need to build and construct a solid database. An outsourced sales company will have access to lists for both email marketing and/or straight cold calling.
Other Tactics Outsourced Sales Company Use to Generate the Leads
Many outsourced sales companies will have expertise beyond telemarketing. An outsourced sales company will have support staff with expertise in email marketing, social media marketing and PPC advertising to help you generate leads through multiple channels.
Marketing Automation Experience
Marketing automation is a great way to prioritize leads for telemarketers to focus. You can use a marketing automation technology to prioritize what leads are most likely to buy from email marketing campaigns and to prioritize leads after a cold callers first contact with a new lead.
Cost-saving and Cost Effective
When it finally comes time for you to staff callers, you can outsource intro sales calls on a month-to-month basis as needed. When carried on your own payroll, you will have more overhead costs. And when you hire an outsourced sales caller, the team will be well managed by executives with years of experience hiring, recruiting and training that team.
Outsourced Sales Maximizes ROI
Outsourced sales companies will have a track record to deliver a better ROI because they are hired on a contracted basis, so you will receive consistent, reliable and quick delivery without all the recruiting costs of hiring your own team. This is why telemarketing makes sense.
About Our Integrated Outsourced Sales Campaigns
Gabriel Sales builds modern sales and marketing operations for Small Businesses and Start Ups with complex B2B solution sales. To learn more about our approach to marketing and why telemarketing makes sense, we invite you to check out our services page.
by Glen Springer | May 22, 2017
When you are running a small business, time is your precious commodity. And generating leads and working the phone with smart and modern content can quickly suck your time and bandwidth. If you are reading this article you may be considering an outsourced sales and marketing solution. When you decide to outsource sales and marketing, you will gain several advantages:
Your lead generation won’t oscillate because of staff problems. One of the critical parts of successful lead generation is consistent effort. The challenge you face is that employees are not machines and they are not always reliable – especially if they are not full time and are not dedicated to the one task of generating sales leads. You can’t suddenly stop blogging for a few weeks or you will pay the price on Google. You cannot stop sending emails or you will feel the impact two months from now in your closing results. An outsourced sales and marketing company will not allow a gap in any tasks. Using an outsourced sales and marketing company will ensure the job will always get done.
You get a blended team of experts Employees have salaries, so instead of just paying one person with one set of skills, you will get a team of experts. This outsourced sales and marketing team will be able to research the right strategy, execute that strategy, manage that strategy and report on that strategy.
An outsourced sales and marketing company gives you outside insight into your business. Working on your company everyday gives you a deep understanding of your business, your sales process and your buyers. Sometimes it is helpful to gain an outside perspective to help you see the forest through the trees. Hiring an outsourced sales and marketing company can give you a new perspective on your business and provide the lift or simple nudge you may need to take lead generation to the next level.
Outsourced sales and marketing helps you keep up with new approaches Outsourced sales and marketing companies live lead generation and opportunity development every day. With all the automation and digital solutions being applied today, an outsource sales and marketing company will be able to help you decide what is right for your business and make recommendations on the most appropriate new techniques.
You get to focus on the core of your business An outsourced sales and marketing company can help you keep processes integrated with your company, yet remain independent from the core day-to-day activities of the company. With the right information and access to your key executives, your outsourced sales and marketing partner can help you plan, develop and execute strategies that yield results without taking your time away from your daily duties to manage this function. You can focus on account growth, sales growth and product development, while your outsource sales and marketing partner deals with the heavy lifting.
About Gabriel Sales’ Outsourced Sales and Marketing Services
Gabriel Sales builds moderns sales and marketing operations for small businesses and technology companies that execute a solution sale and requires a closer to manage the close of a deal. To learn more about how we help you address the new digital buyer to close more business faster we invite you to check out our new approach to outsourced sales and marketing.
