by gabriel_sales | Apr 4, 2014
Cold callers on their own are no magic bullet for marketing success
This is part two of a blog series. Read part one here.
At its most basic, we believe this approach has been successful because today, buyers don’t like to be sold products; they like to buy solutions that solve their problems. Our integrated approach simply makes this easier.
Sales reps supported with strong and authentic content enable buyers to educate themselves and buy on their own terms and on their own time line. The sales professional now adds value to the buyer’s day as opposed to being another disruptive interruption (such as cold callers). Because once a prospect feels educated on a product or service, the sales pitch is no longer intimidating or overwhelming. It is providing value and helping them to reach a decision.
For example, you may want to buy a guitar amplifier but know little about electronics. A salesman going on and on about transistors and capacitors and signal conversion is not going to get you any closer to making an informed decision. However, reading a brochure titled, “5 Things to Look For When Choosing a Guitar Amplifier,” may help you (the buyer) understand what capacitors and signal conversion acutally are. You then feel more educated and can evaluate the pros and cons of the capacitors and their impact on the type of music you want to offer as your service to the world. Then, you and the salesman can have an intelligent dialogue around guitar amplifiers and you can leave feeling truly satisfied with your purchase decision.
Knowledge is no longer a tool for the salesperson. Knowledge is a tool to create wins for both the buyer and the company.
By offering valuable, educational content to early stage prospects that does not try to sell anything, prospects are able to engage with your company in a nonthreatening way. This digital engagement helps to slowly build trust, so when your prospect has a real need and real budget, they are willing to take a call from a sales rep, and no one feels that the call is ‘cold’.
Getting to this point in your sales and marketing process takes some time and requires a fair amount of patience. But after a year to 18-month commitment to the approach, your whole sales process changes for the better. Your cost of sales percentage decreases, your margins increase, and your deal flow accelerates exponentially.
Rather than searching through thousands of people at a multitude of different companies to try to find those in need of help, you can look at a dashboard, see who is interested and have specific topics to talk to them about.
If you would like to learn more about how sales and marketing have changed or our integrated sales and marketing process, read, “The Shift to Bought then Sold”. If you would like to learn more about our integrated sales and marketing outsourcing services, you can visit our services page.
Feel free to contact us with any questions.
by gabriel_sales | Apr 2, 2014
Why cold callers cannot- and should not-have to handle all of marketing on their own
At Gabriel Sales, we have not needed to staff a fully dedicated cold caller in over 12 months.
While there are many factors at play, we see this as an indication of the success you can experience when you make it easy for your buyers to self educate with an integrated sales and marketing strategy.
Long before we began offering integrated sales and marketing outsourcing services to our clients, we made a commitment to implementing the approach ourselves. On the technology side, we were early adopters of marketing automation and CRM systems. On the marketing side, we have been publishing relevant content and executing eProspecting campaigns and nurturing programs for over three years.
We didn’t get there over night. After committing to this integrated approach for about eighteen months, our dependency on cold callers was dramatically diminished.
This is because the integration of content and technology has allowed us to take our early stage sales messages and turn them into digital content—blogs, white papers, webcasts, etc.—that can be shared one-to-many. Because our marketing automation platform tracks content engagement by prospect, we can start interacting with our prospects early in their buying cycle digitally with our calling resources simply stewarding them through their educational process.
The result is a win-win situation: Our prospects are now able to take themselves through their own discovery and education, on their time frame based on their own business drivers. Our calling resources can then watch this engagement, and they are able to see when it makes sense to reach out.
Now, instead of placing endless follow up calls to companies that may or may not be ready to buy, we are able to use marketing automation and digital sales tools to see what prospects are interacting with what content. We then have a better idea of not only what people are interested but also what they are specifically interested in. Additionally, our calling team is able to be helpful as opposed to disruptive to the buyers’ day-to-day business activities.
When we do see sufficient interest to indicate that it makes sense to follow up with prospects, enough trust has been established digitally that the experience on both sides is about deepening the relationship and moving towards a common goal.
On our end, we know who the prospect is and what title he/she holds (e.g. admin vs. executive). We also know what webpages he/she has visited, what videos were watched, what social media posts were clicked on, etc. This makes us much more effective in helping them to buy or not buy the right solution.
On the prospect side, he/she knows who we are and what we do and also has a general feel of the company culture (e.g. brand attributes). The prospect has also been given the chance to educate himself/herself enough to speak intelligently about our solution. Typically, they have a much greater grasp of what their needs and priorities are.
So now, when we call a prospect for the first time, instead of hearing:
“Who are you? What is this about? Sales and marketing? Oh, I’m not the right person to talk to about this.”
We hear,
“Oh yeah, that white paper on marketing automation was really helpful. I was looking on your site and see that you guys offer marketing automation consulting, could you tell me more about that?”
By allowing our content marketing campaigns to do the work before we get on the phone, both the tone and content of the initial calls are radically different from the typical disruptive calling experience. Whereas the best response you can expect to get from a cold call is, “Sure, send me some information,” calling someone who has already been through a fair amount of your content is generally a ten-minute qualifying conversation right out of the gate.
Rather than pitching ourselves, the call is spent understanding the needs of the buyers.
Continue reading.
by gabriel_sales | Mar 28, 2014
This is part two of a series on creating a cohesive sales and marketing relationship. To read part 1, click here.
2. Establish open communication.
If open communication between sales and marketing is established during the creation of content, this point may not be necessary. However, in cases where marketing creates content independently of sales, it should be marketing’s responsibility to inform sales of its purpose or goal and how it fits into the overall sales process.
For example, let’s say you publish a new white paper. Marketing should explain to sales what stage of the sales cycle it is most appropriate for (discovery vs. verification) and what its intended audience is (technical buyer vs. executive). Similarly, if a blog was written to address an objection from an HR perspective, sales needs to know that, so they don’t send it to someone in IT. This way, marketing is enabling sales to use the content as effectively as possible, and both sides are able to succeed.
3. Learn to rely on each other to make incremental improvements.
While the initial content strategy is usually marketing’s job, it is a good idea to source content ideas from sales as ongoing campaigns take place. In the day-to-day work of cold calling and qualifying, sales reps may have experiences that were not expected in the initial strategy session and could be used to inspire valuable sales collateral. For example, if your cold callers hear the same objection over and over, sales should ask marketing to write a blog that can be shared to help overcome it. Similarly, sales might find that while your value prop focuses on quality, the real pain your prospects are expressing on the phone is related to speed. By communicating that information to marketing, marketing can make more effective content that speaks directly to buyers’ objections and needs.
By keeping the lines of communication open with regular meetings—rather than working separately in silos—sales and marketers can work together to simultaneously create a better experience for your buyer and increase revenue.
Getting sales and marketing on the same page is probably never going to be easy; there are inherent differences to each function that will always create tension of some kind. However, by simply starting from the same place, communicating regularly and relying on each other’s input for improvement, much of that tension can be resolved.
To learn more about getting sales and marketing on the same page, read Holding Sales & Marketing Responsible with a Shared Quota. Feel free to contact us with any questions.
by gabriel_sales | Mar 27, 2014
Like other epic dramas of our time including Yankees vs. Red Sox and iPhone vs. Droid, the battle between sales and marketing is real, and it is not likely going away any time soon.
As a sales outsourcing company, we this is something we experience on a daily basis. And, our experience has shown us that while getting sales and marketing to work together is always going to be a somewhat cultural issue, there are several practical things you can do around content strategy and development to help create a team atmosphere, which will help alleviate some of the tension overall.
1. Start from the same place.
The first stage in getting sales and marketing to play nice is to make sure everyone is working from the same playbook. Above everything sales and marketing does, there should be your company’s sales story, which clearly explains the value prop and main selling points of your product/service. Everyone in both sales and marketing should commit the story to memory, and all sales scripts and marketing content should use the story as its backbone.
By making sure everyone’s work in the sales/marketing process begins from the same starting point, you help to ensure your prospects are getting a consistent and unified experience of your company—whether they engage digitally or on the phone. And, by establishing clear agreement between sales and marketing about ‘the big picture’ upfront, there is less of a chance for disagreement when the details are getting worked out later on.
To continue reading, click here.
by gabriel_sales | Mar 20, 2014
This is the second half of a blog series on B2B content ideas to move your deal forward. For Part 1, click here.
2. Case studies/Testimonials
More and more, we are finding that engagement with content like case studies, reviews and testimonials is a prerequisite to purchase. In the B2C world, it is now almost second nature to check reviews before making a purchase (Yelp!, Rotten Tomatoes, Angie’s List, etc.). Search Engine Journal recently found that “nearly 63% of consumers indicate they are more likely to purchase from a site if it has product ratings and reviews.”
The behavioral impulse to check for social proof prior to purchase exists in the B2B world as well, and your buyers will appreciate you for providing them this type of content. Sometimes, hearing confirmation of your success from your customers is the final motivation needed for purchase, and your happy customers are generally more than willing to provide you with this type of content. While written testimonials and case studies work well, you may want to try a video or webcast format for increased engagement.
3. Demo videos
While not appropriate for every B2B solution, brief demo videos can be an extremely valuable sales asset. For more complex sales like enterprise software solutions, providing short videos that give overviews of the most important features or capabilities helps prospects both understand your solution better and visualize using the product themselves.
By keeping the demo videos short and relatively high level, you can create an incentive to ‘schedule a live/custom demo’ that goes more into depth. One thing to remember with demo videos is to keep the content focused on how you solve problems rather than a straight feature/benefit description. Especially for more complex technology sales, the technical jargon of feature/benefit selling can go over the head of some prospects without some grounding in day-to-day value.
While the right combination of content will vary from company to company, we have found these types of content to be effective in a variety of B2B contexts. For more on creating marketing content that achieves sales results, read our series titled, “7 Types of B2B Content for Ongoing Content Production.”
Feel free to contact us with any questions.
