by Carol Springer | Oct 11, 2016
Gabriel Sales is an outsourced sales and marketing organization with a turnkey launch process poised to help you build a repeatable sales engine. We help you make your sales budget to work harder and smarter.
There are now many options and tactics for companies to drive sales other than simply building an internal team. When discussing outsourcing sales, we like to start the conversation with defining the word “outsourcing” itself.
Outsourcing involves the contracting of a business process – previously performed in-house – to an external provider.
Outsourcing = Process a previously performed task to be replicated and transitioned
With this in mind, very few companies are ready for or when we drill into actually looking for pure sales outsourcing. What companies are looking for is a combination of some or all of the functions below:
- An outsourced sales and marketing company to fill the pipe
- An outsourced sales management company to manage the sale
- An outsourced sales and marketing company to manage content development and automation systems to score leads
- An outsourced sales company to close deals
So to build a successful sales strategy you should expect an outsourced sales and marketing company to:
- Determine if you can outsource all or part of your sales function
- Determine if you should outsource sales and marketing
- Determine if you need full sales and marketing outsourcing or simply need to outsource part of your sales process
This blog is designed to help you understand what to expect during a preliminary assessment and what information you should be prepared to share to help an outsourced sales company craft successful outsourced sales and marketing program.
What to expect
During our initial preliminary assessment with potential clients looking we identify what is working and what is not working. We look at these issues separately and the areas you should be prepared to explore will include:
- Sales Scripting
- Outsourcing Lead Generation (Top of Funnel Leads)
- Outsourcing Lead Nurturing/Content Marketing Readiness
- Outsourcing Sales Qualifying and Lead Development
- Outsourcing Sales Closing
To help us help you best, you should also be prepared to answer some questions about your existing conversion metrics:
- What is the historical sales cycle?
- How accurate was last year’s forecast?
- How many meetings does a typical sale take?
- What is the material presented in each one of those meetings?
- What digital content is being consumed as part of the sale?
- How many cold calls does it take to put a prospect into the pipe?
- How many prospects are currently in your existing database?
- What is your typical conversion metrics?
- Do you have cold call scripts? First call scripts?
- Is the pricing model fixed? When was it last changed?
- Who are your top three direct competitors? Indirect?
- Why do you win? Why do you lose?
- What markets have you targeted?
- What decision makers do you sell to?
- What technology platforms are you utilizing and how?
Finally, we will need to discover what story you are telling the market:
- Do you have a buyer persona?
- Do you have a message map?
- Do you have a positioning document?
- Do you have a messaging document?
- How much collateral do you have and of what type?
We ask you to be patient during these initial discovery sessions and to be as transparent as possible. This ensures:
- The right sales outsourcing fit
- And saves you time and money, ensuring you get the best strategy possible, as soon as possible.
If you are interested in getting to the market with speed and would like to learn more about how we can help, please CONTACT US for a free assessment today.
by Carol Springer | Oct 4, 2016
In one phrase: A Sales Ready Lead Campaign helps you overcome the barriers of marketing automation and produce sales-ready leads faster and with less risk.
Risk 1 – Lack of an effective strategy (52%) – A Gabriel Sales’ Sales Ready Lead Campaign is designed from the best practices of over 40 marketing automation implementations. Your strategy should be proven and tested, and it can be with our historically successful deployments.
Risk 2 – Complexity of the system (42%) – An outsourced sales and marketing company like Gabriel Sales can implement a system in a matter of days with a focus on what is critical. We will not get distracted by all the bells and whistles that are not critical to the ultimate goal of generating sales ready leads for your sales reps.
Risk 3 – Inadequate contact data quality (38%) – Each Sales Ready Lead Campaign starts with a cost effective awareness and top of funnel lead generation campaign to ensure that your engine is fueled with enough volume of real targets from day 1.
Risk 4 – Lack of employee skills (32%) – An outsourced sales and marketing company like Gabriel Sales will bring a blended team of experts to the table including:
- Strategists
- Content Producers
- Systems Integrators
- Marketing Coordinators
- Database Managers
And once your engine is up and running you can lower costs downstream by hiring and training a coordinator to manage your engine.
Risk 5 – Lack of relevant content (31%) – If you do not have enough content to fuel your automation process we can run a quick and intensive content production workshop to create both sales automation and thought leadership content.
Risk 6 – Marketing and sales alignment (30%) – We understand that the digital conversation and the sales conversation are the same conversations with the same shared goal of putting sales ready opportunities into the hands of your closer.
Risk 7 – Budget constraints (27%) – With a sales-ready lead campaign you don’t need to commit to an annual software agreement with a marketing automation software company that will quickly run you $20K to $30K before you even get started. Your automated campaigns can start month to month, which allows you to use your budget for more content and more leads to fuel the funnel and not the software to develop the funnel.
by Carol Springer | Oct 4, 2016
What is Lead Scoring?
Lead scoring provides the ability of marketing to predict based on a buyer’s digital behavior, title and function their likelihood of being a sales ready and sales qualified lead for your sales team.
When B2B Marketers were surveyed in 2016 the majority of marketers claimed that Sales Lead Quality was the most important metric to measure success
But, of the 35% of the B2B market that is using a marketing automation platform 59% state that their systems lack insights that indicate buying behavior. Why is this the case? Because ironically one of the most underutilized functions in most Marketing Automation Systems is the lead scoring tools for both scoring and organizing content for scoring.
What is Lead Scoring and why is it critical?
Lead Scoring is critical for major reasons:
Your buyers spend more time buying through digital education. In fact, implementing the use of Lead Scoring suggests that nearly 60% of your buyers are having a digital conversation before engaging with sales. You would expect your Business Development Rep to record and judge their conversations based on Need. You need to do the same thing with your digital conversations. Lead Scoring helps produce data that can guide these conversations. Especially if you have more than one decision maker and/or influencer involved in the sale. If your buyer does not have enough time or interest in learning about your product digitally chances are they are not that interested in buying your solution.
Why is it critical to know who your most interested buyers are. As a sales outsourcing company, we believe the answer is simple. You need to make every connection count! Calls to connect ratios are now half of what they were even three years ago. For simplicities sake – if your average caller dial 100 leads per day. They will only have 10 actual conversations a day. If you are not connecting with buyers that are demonstrating an interest in your product you are squandering your calling resources. Calling Scored Leads is now critical to lead generation success.
Lead Scoring is your number one tool to control the Cost of Sales percentage and increase the calling production of your inside and outside sales reps.
Gabriel Sales can help companies at any stage of maturity improve their lead scoring.
With over 40 Marketing Automation implementations under our belt, we bring both the capability and capacity to help you get it right in weeks.
- For companies using an existing system, we can help with turnkey nurturing campaigns including content production and our Content Management Tools.
- And for companies just getting started, we can allow you to pilot a lead scoring engine with our low-cost lead scoring technologies.
To learn more feel free to check out our educational Sales Ready Leads microsite or feel free to contact us for a preliminary assessment today.
Why is it critical to know who your most interested buyers are. As a sales outsourcing company, we believe the answer is simple. You need to make every connection count! Calls to connect ratios are now half of what they were even three years ago. For simplicities sake – if your average caller dial 100 leads per day. They will only have 10 actual conversations a day. If you are not connecting with buyers that are demonstrating an interest in your product you are squandering your calling resources. Calling Scored Leads is now critical to lead generation success.
Lead Scoring is your number one tool to control the Cost of Sales percentage and increase the calling production of your inside and outside sales reps.
Gabriel Sales can help companies at any stage of maturity improve their lead scoring.
With over 40 Marketing Automation implementations under our belt, we bring both the capability and capacity to help you get it right in weeks.
- For companies using an existing system, we can help with turnkey nurturing campaigns including content production and our Content Management Tools.
- And for companies just getting started, we can allow you to pilot a lead scoring engine with our low-cost lead scoring technologies.
Feel free to contact us for a preliminary assessment today.
by Carol Springer | Oct 4, 2016
This article will eventually detail why we believe a Sales Ready Lead Campaign is the best way to implement a sales automation engine for first-time users. Before jumping into that business case, we wanted to share some facts and figures that explain why automation systems are now a requirement for sales success.
Automation Facts & Figures
The Sales Automation Engine is quickly becoming standard best practices for sales and marketing success. Here are some recent statistics:
- Best-in-Class companies are 67% more likely to use a marketing automation platform. – Aberdeen Group “State of Marketing Automation Processes that Produce”
- 63% of companies successful in marketing automation plan to increase their marketing automation budget. The companies with successful marketing automation programs will invest in further success in the coming year. – Marketo & Ascend2 “Marketing Automation Strategies for Sustaining Success” (2015)
- 63% of companies outsource all or part of marketing automation strategy planning. With t. 37% using in-house resources only. – Ascend2 “Marketing Automation Trends Survey” (2016).
- 79% of top-performing companies have been using marketing automation for more than 2 years. – Gleanster “2016 Marketing Automation Benchmark”
Automation and lead scoring through a Sales Automation Engine are critical because more and more products and solutions are first bought through digital education, and then sold when your buyer is ready to be sold. And you need automation systems to address this shift in buyer behavior.
Over time marketing automation helps you win more business faster and at a lower cost. But the time delta for success ranges between 3 months to well over a year depending on your existing sales cycle.
And according to Ascend2 “Marketing Automation Trends Survey” (2016), the most significant barriers to marketing automation success are:
- Lack of an effective strategy (52%)
- Complexity of the system (42%)
- Inadequate contact data quality (38%)
- Lack of employee skills (32%)
- Lack of relevant content (31%)
- Marketing and sales alignment (30%)
- Budget constraints (27%)
With those types of barriers and timelines, this makes proving that a sales automation engine will work for your business and getting it right the first time is at least as equally critical as hiring the right sales reps the first time to avoid sunk costs with no results. But what makes getting this marketing automation team hire right even more difficult than finding and hiring the right rep is the fact that marketing automation is just starting to become mainstream. There is simply not enough talent out here with the requisite experience (with the bumps and bruises and wins and losses) to ensure your initial success. Bottom line, demand for talent and experience is not keeping up with the supply of talent to ensure success.
Most marketers that are in-house talent only have one or two implementations under their belt. We believe that working with an outsourced sales and marketing company like Gabriel Sales is worth strongly considering for four reasons:
- We have multiple implementations under our belt across multiple verticals selling multiple solutions with varied sales cycles so we can cross-pollinate best practices.
- Outsourced sales and marketing companies appreciate marketing metrics but understand the only metric that counts is closed revenue.
- We understand how to create and use content to automate the sale and leverage the technologies to score leads.
- We can build your engine and sales automation process faster at a lower cost and then transition the engine when it is fully productive.
How Gabriel Sales Outsourced Sales and Marketing Capacity and a Sales Ready Lead Campaign Can Help
Gabriel Sales has more than 40 Marketing Automation implementations under our belt. We bring both the capability and capacity you need to get it right the first time with a blended team of:
- Strategists
- Systems integrators across most automation platforms and Salesforce
- Our own low-cost tools if you are not initially ready to commit 20k annually for a full marketing platform like Pardot, Hubspot, or Marketo
- Content producers
- Marketing coordinators
- Database marketers
- Trained business development reps
More importantly, we can have you to market in weeks with Sales Ready Leads flowing so you avoid the quarters it takes to build on your own.
And once the engine is built and functioning we can continue to sustain or scale indefinitely or you can take over in-house with a seamless transition of your engine and systems.
To learn more about our approach and how it all works check out this short 3-minute educational video and educational microsite. Watch the embedded video below. Or contact us for a free readiness assessment that evaluates how large a market you can target, your content readiness and a preliminary result forecast.
by Carol Springer | Oct 3, 2016
Not all outsourced sales organizations are made the same. Below are 4 things to consider when interviewing a sales outsourcing group:
Will your outsourcing sales and marketing company assign a go-to-person to deal with day to day management of your dedicated sales representative?
Imagine you are a recently hired sales rep. You stroll into the workplace on your first day and nobody comes to welcome you. There’s no introduction or onboarding process and no exchange of objectives. From the looks of things, you don’t have an assigned supervisor. What is your shot of being successful?
An outsourced sales firm is no different. When seeking an outsourced sales relationship, you will need a sales manager to bolster the daily execution. In a perfect world, this individual should have prior and proven sales management experience and domain expertise in the verticals you will be selling to.
Does your outsourced sales company have domain expertise selling to your decision maker business function/buyer persona?
Not all decision makers are the same, simply because different types of decision makers have different personalities. Look at your own organization, does your technical group have the same personality as your marketing team and sales team? You should expect your outsourced sales organization to have experience selling to both technical buyers and business buyers. If your sale is highly technical you should expect to be able to supply a sales engineer to help develop and in some cases take over the sales process once a lead has been qualified.
Is your outsourced sales partner using the latest technologies?
As more and more products are first bought through digital education and then sold with a systematic process, following up with digitally scored leads now requires automation platform and other sales technologies to be successful. Here are a handful or question you can ask:
- Are they using a CRM to capture what happens on each call
- Are they using a lead scoring tool to help prioritize what buyers are ready to buy
- Are they using an email engine to automate lead development
If your outsourced sales partner is not using these tools they may not be optimizing your investment
Can your outsourcing sales company provide you with transparency?
Building on the point above, this new age of digital education and integrated sales and marketing processes metrics are now critical to successful results especially as you are are initially filling the sales pipeline.
Is your outsourced sales and marketing provider willing to share metrics:
- eMail conversion metrics
- eMail click through data
- Call to connect ratios
- Connect to conversion ratios
- Call verbatim reports
- Call recordings
- Weekly success scorecard
Your outsourced sales partner should be committed to your collective success. Success will require teamwork. Teamwork requires transparent and direct communication
Does your outsourced sales team see itself as a permanent fixture of your company?
Outsourced sales companies are a great solution for fast growing and stagnant companies. They help to accelerate revenue while minimizing the expenses associated with empowering internal sales reps.
However, all good things must come to an end at some point. As your business matures you may want to bring your sales or part of your sales function in-house.
If your outsourced sales partner does not have the automation tools mentioned above and has not been transparent throughout, your engagement transitioning will be difficult.
We recommend you address your provider’s willingness to transition prior to starting and engagement to avoid being held hostage years later.
Conclusion
Sales outsourcing needs to begin by level setting what you can expect in both the short-term and the long-term to ensure both short-term and long-term success. Make sure to ask these questions of your potential provider to ensure your success.
To learn more about how sales outsourcing can help you, read more here.
