by Glen Springer | May 21, 2017
The digital buyer’s new best friend is the outsourced sales company
If you are like most companies, you have probably noticed that the days of simply cold calling buyers to generate leads is no longer as effective as it once was. In fact, most buyers now prefer to learn about new products by searching on the web or, in the case of 70% of buyers, to get an educational email that is then followed up by thoughtful reps with additional content. An outsourced sales company could help you navigate these tasks, saving you time and energy that could be spent on other projects.
Here are several challenges the new digital buyer presents followed by ways an sales outsourcing company may be able to help you address them.
Challenge #1 – Your buyers want and expect to be educated first. Buyers want to understand what you do without always relying on a sales reps to explain it. This means you may need to develop some new tactics and commit to content marketing. Marketing needs to support sales with content that shares your thought leadership digitally. If your marketers can leverage your thought leaders, they can optimize support of your sales team and keep them focused on selling while your content explains what you do. Marketing can take care of early stage sales engagement with the right content.
An outsourced sales campaign from Gabriel Sales will include creating content that can be leveraged by the sales rep and by your lead generation team to make it easier for the buyer to buy.
Challenge #2 – Sales and marketing need to work together with one goal of creating qualified sales opportunities through buyer education. The days of hard selling and simply marketing the features and benefits of your solution are over. For many businesses, this is the biggest hurdle because it’s cultural. Sales and marketing both need to work together toward the goal of educating the customer. To do this you are going to need to align sales and marketing with the tools, content, and processes you need to support your inside sales reps with the content you need to demonstrate your thought leadership and differentiators. There needs to be mutual respect between sales and marketing because the buyer no longer cares who educates them they just care about being educated. And in most cases as the graphic above demonstrates they expect it to be both sales and marketing with a consistent story.
An outsourced sales and marketing campaign can help you run an integrated sales and marketing campaigns that has both callers and content marketing tactics keeping you in front of and top of mind with your customer.
Challenge #3 – Using automation technology correctly. With the advent of marketing automation platforms, Google Analytics, and CRMs, you can now define and implement a repeatable sales process that uses technology to manage and score the effort. The right technology stack provides complete transparency and accountability throughout your entire sales and marketing process. It also helps sales and marketing keep score together.
This isn’t astrodynamics. Just head out to any Little League or Soccer Field on a Saturday during a game and compare it to what happens during practice. During practice, the energy level and focus waxes and wanes. Put them on the field when they are accountable for a score and measured on the results and everything changes.
An outsourced sales and marketing company will have the experience and expertise to help you set the right benchmarks in your automation platforms and CRM immediately.
Summary – The line between sales and marketing is getting blurred
- Your buyer now wants to be educated digitally and by reps
- They want access to your thought leadership on their time and not yours
- Your buyer does not want to engage with sales until they are educated and ready to buy
- You need to demonstrate you understand their situation and pain before your prospect will engage with sales
Sales and marketing now need to work together for sale success. Modern sales and marketing operations means your entire team needs to educate buyers.
If you want to learn more about what gaps in your sales and marketing operations, we invite you to visit this page that address what gaps outsourced sales can help you cover in your sales and marketing operations
by Glen Springer | May 18, 2017
How Does Sales Outsourcing Use Marketing Automation to Generate Qualified Leads?
Marketing automation is at almost full adoption in most B2B technology companies. Larger companies will see as many as 20 new technologies in the marketing department. But many other small businesses are just getting started or do not yet understand how automated tools can make their sales and marketing operations modern and more efficient. Sales outsourcing and marketing automation combined is one way to quickly create modern and more effective sales and marketing operations.
In this blog post, we will touch on how a sales outsourcing company will use marketing technology to produce better results. We will touch on the following areas:
- Capturing Sales Leads
- Lead Scoring
- Email Automation
- Lead Intelligence
- Sales Lead Prioritization and Notification
Lead Capture
One feature of a marketing automation platform is an integrated form builder that allows you to capture leads. You can embed these forms and customize them anywhere on your website. This includes landing pages on your main website and even within HTML code in your emails.
Lead Scoring
There are two main ways to qualify leads:
- Using implicit behaviors and activities
- Explicit data and demographics
Using implicit information allows you to rank and score activities like opening emails, click through and also seeing what content the buyer is reading. It is very valuable especially if they are visiting pages that predict purchase intent. You can also use explicit data like company size, title and business vertical.
When these two are combined, it becomes very powerful in helping your sales reps to decide who they should prioritize to call first. This makes your sales process much more effective and also helps you save thousands to hundreds of thousands of dollars a year not calling buyers that are not interested.
Email Automation
You can stay top of mind by sending email to buyers on a regular basis. This ensures you remain top of mind with the buyer not ready to buy. And when they are ready to buy, their lead score will increase. This saves you time and money and also makes sure a lead does not slip through the cracks.
Lead Notifications Alerts
The automation system can be set up to send daily email digests to help buyers prioritize who they should call. Lists can be set up to score:
- Most recent activities
- Highest scores
- Best fits
With these lists and summaries a Sales Development Rep can:
- Prioritize their day with the most active prospects
- Perform quick lookups of anonymous visitors in LinkedIn or Jigsaw to identify potential new prospects
- Click on links to trigger CRM profile lookups
- Send emails to active prospects with a few quick clicks
- Filter out unwanted activity
Lead Intelligence
Once you transition the lead you will have a record of all the activities of the buyer. This digital footprint is valuable to the sales rep as they start to develop the deal and set themselves up to both be helpful to buyer and to close the sale. Activities like original lead source, specific page views, webinar attendance, etc., can all be tracked. This allows the sales rep to profile and frame the content for conversations, voicemails and follow-up emails based on those specific prospect activities.
About Gabriel Sales Sales Outsourcing
Gabriel Sales helps companies build modern sales and marketing operations. We are committed to marketing automation as one of the critical tools for sales success. We have over 50 marketing automation deployments under our belt. And we have implemented over a half dozen different email marketing and lead scoring technologies so we can help you decide on the best fit at the right price to meet your sales goals and stage of sales maturity.
by Glen Springer | May 16, 2017
Staged Process to Get the Most from an Outsource Sales Outbound Campaign
One of the challenges facing most businesses trying to scale their sales and revenue is having too few leads in there automated nurturing campaigns. This is especially true for small businesses where cold calling and Google Adwords is extremely competitive or simply too expensive. This is why we often create leads with an outsource sales email campaign to help ramp our client’s sales funnels.
In most cases, email can be the fastest way to ramp a sales funnel. But simply buying a list and then blasting that list is no longer effective. Can-SPAM laws and Google blacklisting make this a high risk tactic.
Below are six steps you can take on your own or steps an outsource sales company will take to fill your top of funnel with a successful email lead generation campaign.
1) Define your goals
An outsourced sales company will help you define your goals. How many leads do you need? How many leads can you handle? They will also work with you to understand how quickly you need these leads and set the proper expectations of what you can expect a campaign to produce:
- In the short term – immediately after the campaign
- In the mid term – with nurturing
- In the long term – once outsourced sales reps start to follow up
2) Target Your Ideal Audience
After defining your goals, an outsourced sales company will be able to approach multiple third-party vendors to develop a campaign that hits the right audience at the right price. In most cases, this will include both decision makers and influencers because the best email marketing campaigns target the widest audience possible. This is because more and more decisions are now not make by a single decision maker but by decision making units that include:
- A business buyer
- A technical buyer
- An end-user
3) Build your campaign engagement plan
After you identify your target audience, an outsource sales company will help you prepare the copy and create the landing pages for the educational content offers you will be using as part of your campaign. The most effective campaigns are typically run in a series of three messages that will resonate with all the different types of buyers and influencers in your target audience.
4) Deploy your email campaign
An outsource sales partner will then deploy the campaign through the third-party vendor. This includes managing the tests and the best times to deploy. Typically the best campaigns includes testing messages on the first two parts with A/B split tests and then using the best performing offers and messages in the final campaign.
5) Measure KPIs
Identify the most relevant KPIs for each campaign and be sure to track results and performance. This also includes prioritizing what are the best leads to follow up with first if you do not have a nurturing campaign or if you are under immediate pressure to bubble up some early stage opportunities.
6) Move them into a nurturing campaign
In most cases, an eProspecting Email campaign is only the first step in a lead generation campaign. Once you have generated the lead, you will need to move them into your marketing automation campaign. An outsource sales company can help you with this as well.
About Gabriel Sales Outsource Sales Services
Gabriel Sales help companies generate a sustained flow of leads using multiple tactics as part of modern sales and marketing operations. To learn more about our approach we invite you to check out our page that discusses our integrated sales philosophy and our 20 years of history of helping companies scale sales with outsource sales services.
by Glen Springer | May 16, 2017
Staged Process to Get the Most from an Outsource Sales Outbound Campaign
One of the challenges facing most businesses trying to scale their sales and revenue is having too few leads in there automated nurturing campaigns. This is especially true for small businesses where cold calling and Google Adwords is extremely competitive or simply too expensive. This is why we often create leads with an outsource sales email campaign to help ramp our client’s sales funnels.
In most cases, email can be the fastest way to ramp a sales funnel. But simply buying a list and then blasting that list is no longer effective. Can-SPAM laws and Google blacklisting make this a high risk tactic.
Below are six steps you can take on your own or steps an outsource sales company will take to fill your top of funnel with a successful email lead generation campaign.
1) Define your goals
An outsource sales company will help you define your goals. How many leads do you need? How many leads can you handle? They will also work with you to understand how quickly you need these leads and set the proper expectations of what you can expect a campaign to produce:
- In the short term – immediately after the campaign
- In the mid term – with nurturing
- In the long term – once outsourced sales reps start to follow up
2) Target Your Ideal Audience
After defining your goals, an outsource sales company will be able to approach multiple third-party vendors to develop a campaign that hits the right audience at the right price. In most cases, this will include both decision makers and influencers because the best email marketing campaigns target the widest audience possible. This is because more and more decisions are now not make by a single decision maker but by decision making units that include:
- A business buyer
- A technical buyer
- An end-user
3) Build your campaign engagement plan
After you identify your target audience, an outsource sales company will help you prepare the copy and create the landing pages for the educational content offers you will be using as part of your campaign. The most effective campaigns are typically run in a series of three messages that will resonate with all the different types of buyers and influencers in your target audience.
4) Deploy your email campaign
An outsource sales partner will then deploy the campaign through the third-party vendor. This includes managing the tests and the best times to deploy. Typically the best campaigns includes testing messages on the first two parts with A/B split tests and then using the best performing offers and messages in the final campaign.
5) Measure KPIs
Identify the most relevant KPIs for each campaign and be sure to track results and performance. This also includes prioritizing what are the best leads to follow up with first if you do not have a nurturing campaign or if you are under immediate pressure to bubble up some early stage opportunities.
6) Move them into a nurturing campaign
In most cases, an eProspecting Email campaign is only the first step in a lead generation campaign. Once you have generated the lead, you will need to move them into your marketing automation campaign. An outsource sales company can help you with this as well.
About Gabriel Sales Outsource Sales Services
Gabriel Sales help companies generate a sustained flow of leads using multiple tactics as part of modern sales and marketing operations. To learn more about our approach we invite you to check out our page that discusses our integrated sales philosophy and our 20 years of history of helping companies scale sales with outsource sales services.
by Glen Springer | May 3, 2017
In this sales outsourcing social media case study you will learn how a multi-channel demand generation solution helped a social media technology company scale faster at a lower cost of sales.
The Challenge
Technology Company developed a real time analytics technology had already launched into a non-marketing focused vertical with success but limited growth potential. The product worked well but the market was not big enough. Initially company needed more capital for growth. Series B investors required new vertical and marque client traction to close round. Company had no internal competency in market research, analytics, solution sales or ad agency sales.
Selling To: Fortune 500 EVPs and SVPs of Sales and Marketing, CMOs, Agency CEO, CIOs and Directors
The Solution
- Outsourcing Lead Generation – Staff three lead generation reps for first 120 days to fill the pipe
- Sales Consulting and New Product Launch – Simultaneously worked with client executives and took existing technology and sales repackaged new verticals
- New Product Launch – Staffed inside rep and sold initial low end intro packages.
- Outsourcing Sales – Cut lead gen team in half and staffed a full time enterprise sales representative to move into elephant hunting mode
- Sales and Account Management Recruiting – Trained two senior sales representatives hired directly by company as Gabriel Sales blended team filled their pipes. Recruited a Market Research PhD to manage client servicing
- Sales Process Consulting – Functioned as temporary SVP of Sales and Marketing
First 180 days
- 18 pilot deals closed.
- One of the top 3 players in; CPG, Entertainment, Beverage, Office Products, B2B tech, Management Consulting and Retail closed.
- 2 of the top 4 Advertising Agencies running pilots. 5 other smaller agencies piloting.
- Series B round closed
Helped to recruit a President to oversee entire business development, client services and sales operations.
Transitioned Gabriel Sales team over as employees of the company
- 12 additional pilots
- 2 Agency relationship scaled leveraging solution across 5 or more Fortune 500 clients per agency as recommended solution
- 5 Fortune 500 clients renewed and scaled from pilot to annual deals – 3 to 200K plus, 1 to 300K plus, 1-500K plus.
- Helped to recruit a President to oversee entire business development, client services and sales operations.
- Transitioned Gabriel Sales team over as employees of the company
