by Carol Springer | Oct 14, 2016
In 2014, as we shifted from pure sales outsourcing to a sales outsourcing and outsourced marketing company, we searched and found a framework that would help us to do 4 things:
- Continue to craft solution sales scripts to leverage inside sales rep
- Craft a powerful story that could be told using video for thought leadership
- Provide a framework for content producers to continue to support that story
- Most importantly – force alignment between sales and marketing around a consistent a value proposition that would drive deals forward to transactions.
That is when we came across Michael Skoks’ “4Us”. See the article on Forbes here. The framework was originally designed for Michael Skok to decide what companies to invest in as a venture capitalist.
But we felt like it had powerful implications for successful sales and marketing acceleration. It just made sense. If a product or solution was worthy of investment the same characteristics should also make it faster to scale sales. It will make the solution a “must have” not a “nice to have”. If you focus on the reasons it is a “must have”, you have a better shot of scaling quickly .
After using this framework for the past several years, it has become a valuable tool in our strategy consulting (especially when combined with a Buyer Persona exercise and a Message Framework). The reason it is so powerful is deceptively simple but worth stating -This framework forces both sales and marketing to focus on the real reasons buyers buy and move into the sale funnel (spoiler alert: it’s not technical features and benefits). Buyers buy because it will give them a personal win, a professional win or both. Here is how it works.
Is the problem Unworkable? Does your solution fix a broken business process where there are real, measurable consequences to inaction? Will someone get fired if the issue is not addressed?
You need to focus on fixing problems that do not already have an easy to fix or easy solution. If your solution is a commodity you need to look for another unique value or you will be out gunned by companies with more money to spend.
Is fixing the problem Unavoidable? Is it driven by a mandate with implications associated with governance or regulatory control?Not all solutions will be mandated but you should always look for them. However, there are tangential ways you can get the same flavor -most often by focusing on the customer in your area like your buyers’ customer satisfaction scores, increasing customer retention, and improving customer loyalty.
Is the problem Urgent? Is it one of the top priorities for a company? In selling to enterprises, you’ll find it hard to command the attention and resources to arrange a deal if you fall below this line. In our experience, (and this is putting on our sales hat) there are really only three key criteria that make a problem urgent for a buyer:
- It will help them hit their quarterly or annual bonus compensation
- It will help them get promoted
- It will keep them from getting fired
Matching this value prop to specific buyer’s personas becomes extremely powerful, especially for sales. If you can hit this hard, it will keep you from a stalled sales pipeline and help you avoid getting the dreaded “no” decision.
Is the problem Underserved? Is there a conspicuous absence of valid solutions to the problem you’re looking to solve? Focus your initial message on the whitespace or the gap between solutions. This is especially powerful if you are taking on incumbents, and gives you a wedge offering to pilot your solution if you can price effectively.
Exiting this exercise you should have 4 to 5 bullets that become your core value prop from there alignment becomes simple because you can craft a powerful sales story that both sales and marketing can work together on. You simply put your buyers personas into buckets and you have a clear understanding of what story you need to tell to move them through the sales pipeline. Here is an example of what that looks like.
How Gabriel Sales Can Help
Gabriel Sales specializes in helping companies committed to growth scale. Scaling starts by aligning both sales and marketing around a powerful sales story. We have found no faster path to this story than anchoring that story in repeatable and clear value propositions that can be supported by simple content and clear sales scripts.
To learn more about how we can help you identify and share this message with your ideal target markets and buyers you can contact us here. Please feel free to check out our sales consulting and sales outsourcing services page. Or if you have your process buttoned up and are simply looking for more sales ready leads we can help with that as well.
by Carol Springer | Oct 12, 2016
Since eMail is now preferred by 70% of buyers who want to learn about new products or services, eMail marketing is an important feature in our Integrated Outsourced Sales and Marketing Campaigns and Sales Automation Engines.
Over the next couple of weeks, we will publish several articles to help companies just getting started with sales automation and eMail lead generation, to improve results. The articles will address:
- Why using a Whitelisted Service Provider Makes Sense
- How to Design and Code Your eMails
- What Offers to Make
To kick it off, we will start with the basics of subject line writing to avoid filters, or if you are marketing to small businesses or consumers, Google’s Promotion Box. If you are not familiar with what this is, we have attached a screen shot below (and avoiding this box will also be addressed in articles down the road).
What to Avoid in Subject Lines
- Don’t use spammy and some not so spammy words like “Free”, “Urgent”, “Call”, “Marketing”, “Now”, “Income”, “Sale”, “Discount”, “Month”, and “You’re”. As an outsourced sales and marketing company, we have identified “words to avoid” when running campaigns for our clients. You can download a PDF of these words to use for future reference (and we have also included an image below). If you have a question about other words, you can also run it through spamassasin.com. This is a free online tool.
- DON’T WRITE IN ALL CAPS AND exclude MULTIPLE EXCLAMATION POINTS!!! Not only is this obnoxious, but you’re more likely to end up being flagged by a spam filter.
- Don’t worry about number of characters and try to keep subject lines impactful. Remember, email platform users may only see the first 40-50 characters, or even less, and your email subject lines are even more compressed on mobile devices. Despite all the information about subject line length, studies show that length doesn’t actually affect open rates. Below are two examples of how an email could look in Outlook and how much of the subject line a buyer could see on an iPhone.
Try and keep the first 40 characters of your subject lines as impactful as possible for visibility, not delivery.
- Don’t use symbols or strange characters – $$$, <>, ###, ??? and Emoji will hit the filter immediately.
- Finally don’t oversell in the subject line – The goal of your email campaign is to get the buyer to open and engage. Do not expect one open and buy. This is the first step in a process. You will get more opens and more conversions with education vs. selling.
How Gabriel Sales Can Help
Gabriel Sales specializes in Outsourced Sales and Marketing Campaigns that helps buyers buy through integrated digital campaigns and sales automation engine implementation. We make all this easy and you can learn more about our point solutions following the links below.
Top of Funnel eMail Marketing Campaigns
Lead Scoring and Sales Automation Starter Package
And Tradeshow Support Campaigns
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.
