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.
by Carol Springer | Sep 29, 2016
Over the past 3 years, we have seen a dramatic shift in the way buyers buy. With the adoption of digital content marketing, automation tools, and social media – sales have become an integrated process that requires both sales and marketing to contribute to generating, engaging and developing real sales opportunities.
Sales outsourcing success is no longer about picking a list of leads to call setting appointments, doing a feature and benefits, show and tell meeting, and closing business. Below are a handful of questions for you to consider when deciding what type of sales outsourcing or outsourced sales and marketing engagement to pursue.
What part of the funnel do I need to outsource right now?
There are multiple sales and marketing functions that can be outsourced. When we speak to companies, we often discover that they don’t need to outsource all of it at once. Here are some of the questions we will ask them to pose to themselves:
- Do I need more top of funnel leads?
- Do I need more sales qualified leads?
- Am I generating enough leads to hand to an outsourced closer?
- If I hired a sales engineer internally could they be supported by a strong outsourced sales and marketing team?
- Do I need automation specialists to reduce time spent developing leads?
With sales being increasingly process driven, not all companies need to hire a full sales outsourcing team. Smart outsourced sales and marketing with solid integration into your existing team can save you time and money, decrease risk and increase your speed to market. Often starting at the top of the funnel is the best way to initially engage. You can start to generate deal flow without the six figures a full engagement will typically cost. The relationship can then scale as a sales pipeline is developed and deals start to close.
Do I have access to the talent I need to ramp my sales and marketing efforts?
Sales has gotten more complicated. With the buyer now controlling the sales process you need to have an aligned sales and marketing effort. This requires the talent to execute campaigns, manage lead generation efforts, develop messages, manage technology platforms, perform the required ROI analysis, train reps and most importantly, have the talent required to close the sale. From Gabriel Sales’ sales outsourcing perspective, the more complex the sale, the more processes you are going to need to manage. An outsourced sales provider can ensure that you focus and drive excellence in every discrete phase of your sales cycle with specific tactics. You need to be clear what talent you have in house already so your outsourced sales and marketing company can fill the gaps you need filled.
Do I have the technical knowledge and team required to execute in this new buyer driven sales landscape?
Sales execution is no longer just about making or scheduling meetings, making presentations, writing a proposal, and then closing the deals. The combination of more decision makers and influencers on the buyers’ side, the expectations that your company will be bringing experts to the table, and the advent of the sales technology stack that allows these teams to communicate fluidly means you need to know how to manage processes and technology. Understanding of the technologies and how they can be applied are more critical than ever to controlling. Does hiring a full-time staff member make sense to manage these processes and systems?
Am I looking for Operational Expertise?
Operational expertise takes time to develop because it is driven by measurement and verification against feedback loops. To truly drive operational expertise, gathering data and benchmarking against it is critical. One of the major benefits of plugging into your outsourced sales partner’s existing sales machine is that the system has already built for you and ready to go. There is a machine, feedback loops and historical data already in motion. By starting smarter, you learn faster.
Do I want to build Operational Expertise and then bring it in-house?
The reality of outsourced sales is that once the system is built and fully implemented it is possible to bring this process in house. If building a system and then transitioning this system is something you may be interested in long term, discuss this with your partner upfront. We have found that if this is done effectively, we can often transition all or parts of the process at the right strategic time for our partners so everyone wins.
Do I need to focus on my core business?
All of your talent needs to be focused where they can create the most value. So ask yourself these questions:
- Do my executives and management team need to focus on client satisfaction and product development?
- Do they need to generate business or can they simply focus on closing business?
- To grow the company, do we need to grow our delivery along with sales?
- Is time better spent in business development?
- Can I staff sales engineers to do the deep technical part of the sale and leverage an outsourced sales and marketing partner to source business and develop business?
- Can I simply hire one closer internally for the 10% that is now the art of the close and use sales outsourcing for the day to day grind of generating new sales qualified opportunities?
Do I really need to add full-time executives (and the long-term fixed costs) to my management team?
The kiss of death to any company is too many strategists and not enough employees to execute. Outsourced service providers can bring strategic expertise to the table at the right time and then eliminate the costs. This allows you to focus more budget on execution. Getting the initial sales efforts off the ground takes strategic insight and leadership, and often requires senior executive talent on both the sales and marketing teams. Pulling technologies together also takes some advanced technology expertise. All this requires a significant investment. The beauty of going to an outsourced provider is that once this investment is made, you don’t need to continue to carry these fixed costs.
Conclusion
With the buyer taking control of the sales process outsourced sales and marketing and sales outsourcing now looks much different than it did even 3 years ago. Being clear on what talent you have, what talent and skills you need in the short term and what talent skills and team you want to build internally in the long term will help your sales outsourcing partner provide the best return on your investment.
Go to Part 1…
by Carol Springer | Sep 23, 2016
Gabriel Sales has provided both sales outsourcing and outsourced sales and marketing services since 1999. And over the past 5 years with the explosion of content marketing and automation tools, there has been a dramatic shift in what is required to align sales outsourcing services with our clients for a seamless experience for both our clients and the buyers they are selling to.
We believe that integrating digital education with content marketing and sales automation is now critical to long-term success. 5 years ago we would have stated that a successful sales organization required eighty percent science and twenty percent art. That has shifted to about 90% sciences and 10% art (primarily in the close) over the past 3 years.
The following article is Part 1 in a 2 Part series that is designed to raise some business questions to consider and discuss with a potential outsourced sales and marketing company to ensure a successful sales outsourcing engagement will drive the business results you are looking for:
Why am I considering outsourcing sales and marketing?
There are multiple reasons to consider sales and marketing outsourcing:
- Are you looking to change top line or bottom line results?
- Are you taking and testing a new product in the marketing?
- Do you want to target clients that can scale?
- Do you want to be in a new growth vertical for your product?
- Is this about pipe velocity – more deals faster, better, more profitable?
The clearer you are about the business reasons you are outsourcing sales the cleaner the strategic recommendation and approach will be from you outsourced sales and marketing partner. The more insight you can give your sales outsourcing partner the cleaner your goals will be. And the clearer your targets are the greater your chances will be of hitting those targets.
Is reducing your speed to market possible by outsourcing sales and marketing?
When you outsource sales and marketing you are plugging into turnkey machine. The technology stack and infrastructure you will need will not need to be built from scratch. Ask yourself; does the fact that the outsourced sales and marketing provider will have workflows and processes ready to scale have value? Is losing a little of the day to day control to access the bandwidth to recruit and train a team valuable? Do you have the time is required to recruit, train, and manage a sales team.
Will outsourcing sales and marketing help me to manage my financial risk?
The answer to this question is yes. Outsourced sales organizations are driven to hit targets, reporting requirements, and other performance metrics. With most outsourced sales and marketing companies, you will get a level of metrics, reporting, and accountability that will be difficult to get from internally hired employees without aggressive day to day management. More reporting and full transparency means less risk.
In addition, sales and marketing outsourcing gets rid of fixed costs and moves them to a variable expense on your P&Ls. This is especially beneficial to avoiding the infrastructure investments in sales technologies and marketing automation platforms now required for success.
Most importantly, especially when launching a new product — outsourced sales and marketing will provide real-time marketing intelligence immediately because outsourced sales companies have these sales and marketing technologies in place to provide real-time visibility.
If managing risk is important, be clear with your sales outsourcing partner that this is a consideration.
Is long-term scalability important to me?
Do I need to scale quickly? Building a team takes time. Once you get initial sales traction you will need processes, technology platforms, phone systems, physical space, managers, recruiting and training systems etc. Will the ability to add and subtract headcount as required be of value? Would it be of benefit to you to get rid of these headaches? Would it be of benefit to get rid of all these soft and hard costs?
Conclusion
Outsourcing sales is a great decision for some companies. But you should expect the sales outsourcing companies to do their homework in during your preliminary discussions. You should be prepared to have honest and direct conversations about your sales outsourcing goals to get the most from your partnership both in the short term and the long term.
by Carol Springer | Sep 19, 2016
B2B sales is always going to be about building relationships and creating trust. This has dramatically increased over the past three to four years. Social media, marketing automation, content marketing and other modern technology platforms have enabled a new and more efficient way of selling, while at the same time, making the process more complex for inside sales.
This new landscape of online education requires synergy between sales and marketing teams, and a steady flow of digital content and data analysis to track and measure your efforts. For some companies, making this transition can be difficult to implement and involves a steep learning curve. Many companies find an advantage in leveraging B2B outsourced sales and marketing companies to help them adapt to this new way of selling faster and more efficiently.
Here are three outsourced sales and marketing services that can help:
Amplify Your Use of Content in the Sales Process
Most B2B companies know that creating quality marketing content is essential in the sales process. Unfortunately, some companies struggle with creating content that is both relevant to the buyer, and contributes to moving prospects through the sales cycle.
An outsourced sales and organization has the experience to know what content works and what doesn’t. An outsourced marketing and sales company also knows how to create and deliver content that speaks directly to your buyers’ needs or pains. In the beginning, your content should prove to your buyer you understand their needs. Later stage content should then let your prospects decide whether or not they have any interest in how your solution helps them meet their needs. A sales outsourcing organization can help you create a content strategy aligned around this goal. This replicates the same process that an inside sales executes with a well-planned sales process.
Outsourced Sales and Marketing Can Help Get Technologies Productive Faster
Until about a decade ago, it was very difficult for marketers to measure their direct contribution to P&L. Today, technologies like customer relationship management (CRM) programs and marketing automation platforms make it easy track leads through every part of the buyer lifecycle, helping to measure marketing and sales efforts. This includes the buyer’s engagement with content and the buyer’s engagement directly with sales reps.
For companies that have yet to implement these types of technologies, the learning curve can be rather high. It can often take a year or more for B2B companies to see the results immediately because:
- The sales cycle will not change immediately (it will shorten over time)
- Using content requires a new systematic strategy
A sales outsourcing company that offers sales technology implementation and support services can help streamline the implementation process. And more importantly, they can integrate these technologies into a proven sales process faster.
Keep up with increasing demands for marketing content
Marketers today are increasingly expected to act like publishers; creating quality content for sales people to pass along to prospects. While content demands for the B2B universe may be slightly less than for B2C, they can still be quite overwhelming for the average B2B company with limited resources.
Outsourcing your B2B content creation can help you keep up with the increasing content demands your buyers place on your inside sales reps. It is easy for companies without a full-time content creation staff to get sidetracked on other initiatives. By leveraging an outsourced sales and marketing company, companies can continue to create quality content their readers will find relevant and valuable.
Conclusion
An outsourced sales and marketing company, with the right technology and content production expertise can help companies shift to the new buyer centric sales landscape faster and with less costs contact us today to schedule a meeting with one of our outsourcing specialists.
by Carol Springer | Sep 14, 2016
Starting with the down turn, and in combination with Tim Ferris’ (now almost classic) 4-Hour Work week, many small business are at least open to outsourcing most functions. However Tim Ferris’ painted a slightly rosy picture of how easy this could be. This is especially true when outsourcing sales. As any executive who has attempted sales outsourcing will tell you, outsourcing sales is not always a quick path to profitability or as straight forward as advertised. This is especially true when dealing with companies that have hung their shingles over the past 3-4 years.
Here are several perspectives to consider as you consider sales outsourcing for your company:
The One Eyed Man is Not Necessarily King in the Land of the Blind
As an outsourced sales company we are experts in sales processes, and all the tools required for successes. However if you do not have a sales process already in place it will take us at least one or two sales cycles (taking buyers through their buying process and your sales process) to refine our collective approach. Sales outcomes will not change overnight because buyers don’t change the way they buy overnight. We typically let our clients know that the more they can stay engaged through the initial 3 to 6 months the smoother and faster outcomes we will be able to collectively produce (more on this below). Most companies are successful for a reason and that typically starts with the sales knowledge that is out our clients’ executive’s brains.
If you do not understand why your buyer buys we can help you nail this down with some consulting workshops and then real time feedback from buyers. But it will take time before the path to growth becomes clear and concrete.
Can you stay engaged especially during the initial 90 days of launch?
Numerous entrepreneurs see outsourcing as a one time deal – you sign an agreement with an outsourced sales company, and afterward sit back while your new outsourced sales reps start closing deals. Obviously, as we all know, closing business is never that easy.
We have found that executives that stay engaged during the initial 90 days lead to our greatest success stories. You don’t need to stay hands on daily but we do recommend that you attend the weekly meetings and digest the data. There will be insights you will have and failures and rabbit holes you will be able to help your sales outsourcing partner to avoid.
We love the feedback, because they allow us to fix issues quickly to get the best results.
Embrace the Pareto Principle when Creating Content to Support Sales Outsourcing
As an outsourced sales and marketing company we are trying to build a repeatable communication process. What we find across 100% of our engagement is that 80% of your deals are going to care about the same 20% of the information. It could be the same objections that need to be overcome. It could be the same business pains you solve. You should expect your sales outsourcing partner to have a process to help document what 20% of information needs to be shared to drive that 80% of your engagement. You should then expect to create content that will give the buyers the ability to educate themselves digitally in these areas.
Embrace the Pareto Principle when Following Up with Leads
As a sales outsourcing company we have embraced automation technologies for one reason. Once an outbound lead has been generated (agreed to accept additional information either through an eMail campaign or cold call campaign) we use this technology to help us score a leads propensity to buy. Because what we typically see is – of the leads that do agree to engage only about 20% have an immediate need (next quarter or two) and the remaining 80% are interested but nowhere close to being ready to buy. Success in the age of digital buyer education requires that you use an automation technology to score leads. You should expect your sales outsourcing partner to be adept in the use of these tools.
