by Carol Springer | Nov 9, 2016
“Buyers now complete two-thirds of their purchase journey online before ever contacting a vendor or seriously engaging with sales.”
(Forrester Research)
The seismic shift we are seeing right now in how buyers buy using digital content requires that marketing now needs to remain accountable for the prospect much deeper into their buying process and your sales funnel. The line between sales and marketing as it applies to demand generation and engagement is getting blurred and this trend is not going to abate any time soon. So when outsourcing sales you need to consider who is going to do this work? Do your marketers understand sales outsourcing success? And do sales appreciate marketing? This is where an outsourced sales and marketing company may be able to help.
Sales outsourcing success is no longer about hiring reps to bang the phone and then hard close. You cannot expect sales outsourcing success without substantial marketing support. Below are the basic marketing competencies and blended sales outsourcing and marketing team you should expect any sales outsourcing partner to provide.
- Content Strategist: You can no longer depend solely on sales outsourcing reps to move leads through your sales funnel. Sales success now requires a content marketing strategist that can clone what works for your best sales reps – who are the buyers they want to target, what are the best early offers, and what are the most frequent objections or questions in the early stage sales cycle. You then need to create content that replicates that story digitally and create a content calendar to to create and distribute that content. We have developed a simple to use set of tools to help with this process.
- Sales Automation Content Production: It’s cliché but content is king in early stage selling. Content builds trust with your early stage leads and converts leads into prospects. Quality content production should make it easier for your buyer to buy without the need of a sales rep for a buyer to understand what problems you can solve for them and how. Your content does not to be produced with “Clio” award winning production value but it does need to be done professionally and it does need to be done consistently. You need to commit to 1 webcast per quarter (and you can typically turn that webcast into a white paper), and you need to create at least 2-3 shorter pieces of content per month (videos or blog posts). Your sales outsourcing company should have the resources or partners to help you take care of this if you do not have your own production team or resources. You should expect your sales outsourcing team to have a clear vision of the content they will need for success.
- Content Management: The ability to use a CMS like WordPress is just one step in the content management process. You should expect your sales outsourcing partner to have at least a part time resource to maintain your content calendar, to add and edit content and to publish that content for your sales reps. You also need to have the capability and capacity to create landing pages at will for specific verticals and decision makers. You should expect your sales outsourcing partner to have a strategy to organize content for their own campaigns.
- Email Management: Learning the rules, regulations and best practices of email marketing and management is now critical. A “Ready Fire Aim” approach doesn’t work for leveraging email to generate leads and is even less productive when using a marketing automation platform to develop leads. Proper messaging, design (e.g. mobile compatibility), list segmentation, spam regulations and rules, auto-responder optimization and more are all major factors in successful email marketing and deliverability.
- CRM Integration: Making sure that your automation and lead scoring information is synchronized with your CRM correctly and spot checking on a regular basis is critical for lead scoring success. Correct sharing of information in your systems can be the difference between converting a hot lead or losing a deal. Your sales outsourcing partner should take ownership of the quality of this integration.
- Database Management: Keeping your database clean and optimized on a weekly basis is critical to maximize the effectiveness of your sales outsourcing team’s calling efforts. Companies spend incredible amounts of money for automation tools and lists but lose a great deal of the ROI by not investing in the staff and education to actually utilize the tools and demonstrate meaningful insights for the sales reps. You should not rely on sales reps to manage the database. You should expect your sales outsourcing partner to have a resource that over sees the quality output of the tools.
- Social Media Management: Your content should be shared in social media channels. It is a simple step that takes a little extra effort and it will maximize your exposure and brand with content that is already being deployed as part of other sales and marketing efforts. Interested buyers may look in social media channels even after engaged even if it is to simply prove that you are at least addressing younger buyers.
- Marketing Automation: These tools are now critical to score leads to prioritize who callers should spend their time calling. Aside from investing in one of these tools you also need the human resources to optimize your marketing automation. The added intelligence gained by lead scoring, real-time visitor analysis, notifications and drip campaigns will transform your lead generation and sales prospect prioritization beyond anything you’ve done before. If you are unfamiliar with marketing automation that’s ok. Your sales outsourcing partner should be able to completely carry the load.
- Phone Resources: Lead generation, nurturing and selling still require business development reps to pick up the phone. But what is accomplished on the phone changes based on the buying stage your buyer is in. Educating buyers now requires more of a customer service approach. This is now a science. When a buyer wants to buy is when you should start to be more aggressive and break out the art of the close. Having both types of phone resources available from your sales outsourcing partner is now critical.
Summary
Gabriel Sales has been supplying both sales outsourcing and outsourced marketing services for SMBs and start-ups since 1999. To learn more about the tactics we use please check out additional educational Sales Outsourcing resources in our Sales Outsourcing Blog. Or to learn more about our philosophy and approach to sales outsourcing success please check out the About Us page.
by Carol Springer | Nov 7, 2016
In 2016 according to Forrester we witnessed the near universal embrace of content marketing with 93% of B2B “marketers” claiming that they have at least tested content marketing in some part of their sales and marketing efforts.
And as an outsourced sales and marketing company, we are fully committed to generating more qualified sales opportunities with content marketing and lead scoring. But as outsourced sales company, we understand that the C-Suite and owners of small to medium sized business remain skeptical going all in:
- 82% want to prove content marketing automation is tied to lead generation
- 52% want to ensure they can measure the ROI of their investment
- 35% claim lack of budget
And some of these executives may be correct. This article is meant to help them evaluate if they are right or they consider giving lead scoring with and outsourced sales team a shot.
How to Decide if Your Business Needs (or Is Ready) For Lead Scoring
While 99% of the both the B2B and B2C Fortune 2000 is fully committed to content marketing, lead scoring, and automation systems, small and mid-sized business remain skeptical.
The fact is that lead scoring and automation is not a must have for all businesses. To evaluate if lead scoring is right for your business, you need to ask yourself the following questions:
Do I spend money on leads monthly and then abandon after I get a fresh set of lead?
Is your business spending money on fresh leads every month? Does your sales team attempt these leads a handful of times and then wait for the fresh leads and stop following up with last month’s leads? If you are in a business where deals typically close in 30 days or less from initial interest you may want to continue doing what you are doing. If first touch to close is 30 days or more lead scoring may have significant benefits.
Do I have the minimum sized database and content to get started?
Because 70% of buyers now prefer to learn about new products and solutions by email (sharing educational content) most companies have at least tested content marketing. In fact, 90% of B2B companies now started content marketing in at least a small way. But content is not enough. At a minimum you also need a database of at least 3,000 to 5,000 buyers to get started. You also need to create enough basic educational content to touch these buyers at least 2 times per month for B2B sales and slightly more for B2B sales. If you do not have enough leads you will need to invest in a leads database first. The same goes for content. Content can be as simple as blog posts and short videos. Gabriel Sales offers cost effective packages to help with both.
Is my sales team or outsourced sales team educating buyers that don’t buy?
Is my market so large that I can target and sell to hundreds of thousands of buyers? Have I generated so many inbound leads that my sales team cannot keep up? Is my product so disruptive that everyone would be willing to take a call on the topic? If you have a broad market with tire kickers you should have been scoring leads 5 years ago.
Is my product/solution not an “If” but “When” decision?
Professional Services and software in areas like accounting, compliance, HR, IT, BPO and marketing, printing are not “If” but “When” decisions. Timing is everything. Staying top of mind with buyers so when they are ready to buy is critical so your sales team calls when the window is open. Automation and lead scoring make this possible.
Does my sales team complain about the quality of leads I send them?
Do your sales reps always complain about bad leads? Lead scoring will solve this problem but not on its own. Before launching your lead scoring engine you need to have both sales and marketing agree on what a scored lead is with concrete criteria. Once you agree to these criteria lead scoring will work. It is also a way for you to objectively and subjectively evaluate if you have a sales issue as opposed to a lead quality issue. When Gabriel Sales outsourced sales team set appointments scored leads can help your internal sales team embrace rather than reject leads.
Are my sales engineers and senior sales team educating buyers that don’t buy?
Do you have a great deal of leads that hit the early stage funnel that go through an introductory meeting and/or product demo that never transact? Chances are you have one of two problems. First, your business development reps are not qualifying correctly. Or tire kickers are going straight to senior staff because you don’t have the content necessary to do this initial early stage buyer education. Lead scoring and some basic content that demonstrates your solution can save you tremendous time, money and resources. If a buyer is not interested enough to educate themselves online prior to meeting with your senior resources the prospect is probably not worth their time sell to the buyers yet.
Is there more than one buyer involved in purchasing my solution?
If your sale requires a champion on the buyer side then that champion will need content to educate themselves about your solution so they can move that deal forward. They will also need to share that content with other people on the buying committee. If there are multiple buyers involved in the buying decision they will engage with content more frequently and have a larger digital footprint. Do you have more than one buyer?
Do you have a pricing page, case studies, product pages, demos or demo registrations online?
If these pages are not part of your website or content marketing strategy you should probably consider them. If a buyer hits any of these pages they are strong predictive indicators that your buyer is ready for sales engagement. Notifying your reps or outsourced sale reps when buyers hit these pages can put your team at the front of the line.
How Gabriel Sales Can Help
If you are considering lead scoring for your business, you can begin with us in two ways:
As a B2B Outsourced Sales and Outsourced Marketing company, we understand that ROI is important. Both of these packages include a free preliminary assessment to see if lead scoring and outsourced sales is the right solution for your business. To learn more about our approach you can also visit the About Us page.
by Carol Springer | Nov 4, 2016
As an inside sales outsourcing company that builds automation engines we understand there is a great deal of confusion about what lead scoring is and why it matters today. This article will address both of these topics.
What is Lead Scoring?
Lead Scoring is an objective ranking of one sales lead against another. Leads are ranked to prioritize what buyer targets are most likely to buy to determine where sales should focus their efforts first.
Until recently most companies did this at the front end of the sales cycle by identifying what decision makers had budget authority and what verticals and industries had the greatest need. A company would then buy this list, hand the list to sales and cold call.
But with the rise of automation software and content marketing, you can now engage a buyer with your online content and measure and analyze a buyer’s digital footprint. You can use this analysis to predict a buyer’s level of interest and where they are in their buying cycle. Combined with targeting the right buyers, you can now prioritize leads based on a buyer’s propensity to buy.
Lead Scoring ultimately gives your sales team a prioritized a list of leads for based on:
- Right Vertical Fit and Company Size
- Buyer Title
- Their level of interest based on their engagement with your digital content
As an inside sales outsourcing company prioritized leads are critical for successful delivery for our clients.
Why Does Lead Scoring Matter Today for Sales Outsourcing?
1. Lead Scoring Lowers Your Cost and Increases The Effectiveness of Calling
The mantra for most small business is to do more with less. Over the past several years we have experienced a major shift in buyer behavior that has turned selling with the conventional sales process of cold calling, qualifying a lead, presentation, and objection handling on its head. Sales still requires sales conversations. However, over the past several years buyers have stopped picking up the phone. Call-to-connect ratios have dropped from 18%-22% to 5%-10%. This means every connection you make now needs to count. Here is why:
- Five years ago every time a sales rep picked up the phone and called a prospect the prospect would pick up the phone 1:4 times or 1:5 times. So five years ago, making 100 calls a day you could expect to speak with 20 to 25 prospective buyers. If you typically converted 10% of your connections to next steps and you could you could move 1-3 deals forward per 100 calls.
- Today with a call to connect ratio. 1:10 to 1:20 you can expect a buyer to pick up the phone as little as 5 to 10 times per day if you are making 100 calls. So you can only expect to speak with 10 buyers a day. If you are not scoring leads and calling buyers cold you can still expect that 10% will convert. This means your success rate per 100 will be 0.5 to 1 deal moving forward per day at best. If you are scoring leads and call interested buyers you can expect 30% will move forward. This takes you back to the same conversion ratios we experienced when connection ratios were 1:4 to 1:5 five years ago. Lead Scoring does not solve the challenge of buyers not picking up the phone. Lead Scoring improves the results of the connections when they do occur.
Calling leads that are not interested in your solution is now counter-productive to your inside sales outsourcing efforts, causes enormous inefficiencies, and now dramatically impacts your cost of sales. Your sales reps work furiously to stay afloat while at the same time becoming less efficient in their daily tasks. If you are not talking to interested buyers you are running to stand still.
2. Lead Scoring Measures and Reports on Your Buyers Digital Engagement
The buying process for most solutions now starts with an initial phone call to share information, an inbound lead, or an outbound email campaign. Buyers then typically want you to educate them digitally before they will engage with a sales rep. In fact, according to Marketing Sherpa’s 2016 report, 70% of buyers want to learn about new products and solutions with an email that contains an educational article that they can share with others involved in the buying process. The buyer is then open to a meeting but expects you to continue to share additional content they can share with other decision makers and influencers.
| 90% of buying decisions now require at least two buyers or a committee.
(Harvard Business Review – 2010) |
Decision Making Committees consume 5-7 pieces of content before engaging with sales
(Forrester -2014) |
Success now requires content that helps your buyers learn about your solution digitally. In most cases, this replaces sitting through intro pitches by business development reps. This is a great time savings for your business, but this also means you lose the insights that were gained by the sales rep during this early sales activity. Lead scoring allows you to capture information from that digital conversation by measuring what content the buyer is engaging with. This buying behavior can be reported to your sales team.
Lead Scoring Gives Your Sales Team
The Ability to Track the Digital Conversation
& To Notify Sales when The Buyer is Sales Ready
3. Lead Scoring Gives Sales a Faster Path to Revenue at Lower Costs
This data from Sirius Media demonstrates how lead scoring can impact your success rate at multiple stages of the funnel. The key metrics are how many connections you need to convert a cold lead vs. a warm lead and then a warm lead to a qualified opportunity. Better connections at the right time means more conversions with less calls at every sales stage.
And while you are connecting with targets that are not interested (if you are still calling cold leads), you are also missing dozens of hot leads and real opportunities—because you have not tracked their digital engagement and moved them to the top of your calling list. Ultimately, your inside sales outsourcing team are at least 4X less efficient.
With fewer deals available, your sales reps need every advantage to get in front of active opportunities and connect with them before the competition. To do that, they need to be working with prioritized leads. Especially since today, buyers start gathering information long before they have established things like budget and timeline. According to Sandler Sales Trainers the first mover still has a 60% advantage if they are the first seller in front of the buyer.
And this “Digital Body Language” reveals a great deal of honest information about a lead’s level of interest in your company and where they are in their buying cycle. It often serves as a more powerful and honest indicator than data collected over the phone or on a web form website. In addition, having this information ensures you will be engaged at the front of the buying cycle and not a late entry.
How We Can Help
Gabriel Sales builds sales automation engines for B2B companies and helps support our marketing efforts by also supplying insides sales outsourcing teams that combined both marketers and reps following up with highly scored leads. If you would like to learn about our approach visit our About Us Page or feel free to Contact Us to learn more about how we can help with your insides sales outsourcing and outsourced marketing needs.
by Carol Springer | Nov 2, 2016
Digital marketers have an analytical issue when it comes to video performance on platforms like YouTube, Vimeo, or Wistia. How many times have you asked yourself this question – ”How many views means my video is successful?”
The “scorecard” that your video is rated on is the number of views. Unfortunately, doing an analysis on just “views” is not always the best way to track your brand’s progress on the goals you are trying to achieve. This is especially true if your goal to drive real sales opportunities’ into your closers pipe (which is our top priority as an outsourced sales and marketing company).
So instead of asking yourself the previous question, ask yourself – “Which KPIs should we be tracking to understand if our video campaign is successful moving deals into the pipe?”
Question #1: How Do I Identify My Primary Outsourced Sales Video Goals?
Marketers typically want video advertising campaigns to increase awareness about their product and influence online sales. While buyers no longer have a simple experience with your brand anymore thanks to product reviews, mobile engagements, social media, etc.—most marketers and salespeople agree their target audience fits into one of three categories: unfamiliar, on the fence, or ready to buy.
With each new campaign, it’s important to know where your audience lies in these three areas. Which of the three possible brand goals is your #1 priority?
Question #2: What are the KPIs for that marketing goal?
The next stage after identifying your goal is to take a closer look at the data that is being mined for each video.
Here is a breakdown of what KPI to analyze for each goal:
Awareness goal KPIs:
- Views
- Impressions
- Unique Users
Consideration goal KPIs:
- View-Through Rate
- Watch Time
Action Goal KPIs:
- Clicks
- Calls
- Signups
- Sales
Question #3: Where and How do I properly analyze my data for my videos?
Now that you have identified your primary goals and your KPIs for those goals, you now need to identify the tools that you going to use to help you become more data-driven as a marketer.
Depending on the platform, analytics usually comes with these video platforms, and spearheading the Big Data field with its extensive metrics and capture points is Google’s YouTube. Vimeo and Wistia have great metrics platforms to run reports on analysis, and even heat mapping for what part of the video the viewer engagement was highest. Google Analytics will help you measure clicks and conversions for sales KPIs.
You can also use other platforms proprietary to the video service to measure clicks and engagement if they are not being seeded with an Adwords campaign. But nothing is more valuable than correlating videos viewed to what is occurring in your opportunity pipeline.
Question #4: Now that I have done the marketing analysis, how to I correlate videos to sales analysis – deals hitting the pipe?
Now that you have identified the KPIs for your video campaigns and where and how to measure them, the next step in this exercise is to identify what impact is video having on my sales pipeline. This is where automation software like Pardot that integrates into a video platform like Wistia is critical (and one of the reasons we love a company that specializes in outsourced sales and marketing).
One of the key features of the combined Wistia and Pardot Integration is the ability to see what videos are:
- Producing the most conversions
- Drill into that videos individual performance
- Drill into how early it is driving that conversion
This level of analysis allows to you do three things:
- Identify what videos you should consider pushing harder into the market
- Identify what content you should create more of
- Identify what videos are predictive of buying that need to have their score increased in your lead scoring engine.
Gabriel Sales specializes in aligning our outsourced sales and marketing efforts around driving more sales qualified opportunities’ into our client’s sales funnels. We can help with refining your existing programs with content production workshops, we can launch a full blown engine for companies just getting started or we can run a turnkey pilot lead scoring and sales automation starter campaign to help you decide if lead scoring is right for you. To learn more about our philosophy, what we believe and who we can help we recommend checking out our About Us page.
by Carol Springer | Oct 31, 2016
As a sales outsourcing company, that specializes in building sales automation engines, we work remotely from our clients. One key ingredient of our sales engines is the ability to use content to prove to buyers that the product we are selling solves a problem for them. And over the past several years we have discovered that nothing is more valuable than video. And when creating videos, regardless if it is our team, or their team creating the content, we have one major rule.
Rule # 1 – Keep it Simple
People buy products and services because they want to solve a problem. That’s it.
Rule # 2 – Address Buyers Problems
We have found over the past several years of video production and distribution that videos that perform the best supporting our client’s sales outsourcing reps, our lead scoring, and our content marketing are the ones that offer solutions to a problem. This is especially helpful for lead scoring because if a buyer has watched the video you know they may have this pain.
The problem could be as simple as, “When launching an email campaign, I want to get notified when someone clicks a link in the email.”
Company X could make a short video that shows a marketing team launching an email campaign, and sales people are getting emails to follow up with leads.
Now, that sort of video documentation is way more interesting than a text explanation of the technology. Some other ideas for problem-solving with video marketing. Here is one that shows how lead scoring helps callers:
- Create video content with happy clients or customers (remember, they don’t have to be long to be compelling 1-2 minutes) offering short testimonials.
- Create easy to follow videos for each step of your product implementation, especially if it’s a software program
- Create a weekly webisode series that shows your company’s spokesperson running into daily life issues that are solved with your product or service. This could be the office “talent”, so someone that is camera-ready is preferable.
This leads in to my next point….
Micro-Video Strategy Applications
Let’s face it, there are moments in your daily experiences that people like to see. These are the most interesting and compelling content that you can capture, and the challenge is knowing how to identify it. Which we will get into later.
With attention spans plummeting, now is the time to begin developing a short-form content strategy that blends with your overall content strategy. This is very applicable to your micro-branded products or services.
At Company X, for example, John has started a new 3-minute video webisode series where he talks about everything marketing and sales. The great thing about Joe is that he is able to record each video on his iPhone, and no one expects anything more from the production value because it’s more about the thought leadership he provides.
Video content can also be used to automate the explanation of products, services, and customer problems to help make it easier for buyer to buy:
- For Example turn your sales reps initial intro pitch deck (that takes 10 15 minutes to present live) into a simple to produce explanation video that talks about the current situation in the market, the problems this creates and how you solve the problem. It’s mini webcast on speed – part educational and part quick intro to the solution. Here is one we crafted for our tradeshow support package
If you can identify all of the moments that might need explaining, and make a short video about each, you’ll be able to create a video strategy that is built specifically for that pain point.
Remember, people have different problems they need solved. It is your job as the marketer to identify those problems with your sales team.
They will love you for addressing their questions and/or problems quickly and succinctly, without having to sift through pages of blog content.
Remember the things to keep at the top of your mind to create the compelling video for your product or service is pain points.
Ask yourself these questions: “Is this something that someone else would find valuable? How long did it take me to figure this out, and will it help someone else reach this conclusion quicker?”
At Gabriel Sales, we have created a video production workshop that will help you create compelling content that will help amplify your sales tactics, support out sales outsourcing reps to share and to create a video library for your potential customers and clients that they will love.
To learn more about how Gabriel Sales can help you to tell your sales story powerfully to as many buyers as possible using our sales outsourcing and sales automation services please visit our strategy and sales outsourcing services page. To decide if our team is the right one for you please visit our About Us page.
