by gabriel_sales | Dec 17, 2013
A few weeks ago, we published a blog suggesting that you not slow down your B2B marketing efforts this holiday season. Software Advice recently released data collected from more than 6,000,000 unique visitors that supports and reinforces that Christmas advice.
Looking at the data, it seems the commonly held belief that ‘no one is in the office during the holidays’ may no longer be true. Or perhaps, it is all of the new mobile devices allowing businessmen to keep up with business from home while their kids are unwrapping presents.
Whatever the reason, the takeaway is clear: if other people are working during the holidays, you should be too.
We are not suggesting that you have your entire sales and marketing team come into the office on Christmas Day, but Software Advice’s research found that in terms of both web traffic and conversion activity, the days before and after Christmas see higher averages than one may expect:
(Source: Software Advice)
This graph shows that just four days before Christmas, the average web traffic is 7% higher than the monthly average. Additionally, web traffic is only slightly below the monthly average in the days following Christmas, showing that even if people are out of the office, they are still doing research on work-related purchase decisions online.
In terms of conversion (which is defined in this survey as submitting contact information via web form), the averages vary in the days before Christmas but are much higher than one would expect on the holiday itself as well as the days following. This suggests that Christmas Eve or Christmas Day are great times to send out nurture emails or a ‘holiday gift’ like an eBook download to initiate conversion. Additionally, because the B2B sales cycle is now typically three to six months, the more prospects you can convert in December, the better your sales pipeline will look at the end of Q1.
The data also shows that in terms of lead qualification, rates only deviate slightly from the monthly average in the week surrounding Christmas. Both three days before and three days after Christmas see a 12% higher conversion rate than the December average. This reinforces one of our own findings discussed in a previous blog: people who are in the office during the holidays have less work to do, and are therefore more likely to pick up the phone and be open to sales/marketing messages.
Summary:
- When it comes to B2B sales and marketing during the holidays, Software Advice’s research shows that companies stand to gain an advantage by putting in a little bit of extra effort.
- While many companies believe it is ineffective to staff sales reps and run marketing campaigns during the week of Christmas, average web traffic, conversion rates and qualification rates during this time suggest otherwise.
by gabriel_sales | Dec 13, 2013
Building an emotional connection matters. While most people would assume that in terms of emotional connections with brands, B2C companies’ connections with their customers would be far stronger than those with B2B brands.
However, in a 2013 study by Google and CEB’s Marketing Leadership Council, the exact opposite was found:
“Of the hundreds of B2C brands that Motista has studied, most have emotional connections with between 10% and 40% of consumers. Meanwhile, of the nine B2B brands we studied, seven surpassed the 50% mark. On average, B2B customers are significantly more emotionally connected to their vendors and service providers than consumers.”
Google explained that while these findings may be initially surprising, the inner workings of B2B and B2C purchases give a clear explanation of why building an emotional connection matters: B2C purchases generally carry much less risk for the buyer than B2C purchases.
Most B2C purchases (a vacuum, a toothbrush, a pair of jeans, etc.) are returnable, and if they are not, the cost of a poor B2C product purchase is unlikely to affect someone’s overall wellbeing in any significant way. The same cannot be said for B2B purchases , which are generally much higher cost (i.e. a multi-million dollar software deal) and carry additional personal risks for the buyer:
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Losing time and effort if a purchase decision goes poorly
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Losing credibility if they make a recommendation for an unsuccessful purchase
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Losing their job if they are responsible for a failed purchase
~Google
Because these personal risks carry a lot of emotional weight for the buyer, anything B2B companies can do reduce the level of perceived risk will strengthen the likelihood of a purchase being made. By highlighting the personal and emotional benefits of the B2B purchase (i.e. no more management headaches, opportunity to grow your career, etc.) in your early stage marketing content, you can help alleviate some of the emotional tension your prospects feel in their buying process. This is why this emotional connection matters so much.
To read more on reducing the perception of risk in B2B sales and why connection matters, click here.
Feel free to contact us with any questions.
by gabriel_sales | Dec 13, 2013
There comes a time for every B2B business owner where they must decide how to approach their sales and marketing. There are many different routes you can take: hiring part-time or full-time staff, purchasing consulting services, outsourcing to a third party or some combination of these.
The best option for your company is going to depend on your resources, your specific situation and your goals. If your goal is to dramatically increase revenue through your sales efforts, an outsourced sales team might be your best option. By leveraging a B2B outsourced sales team, you gain access to sales talent that you generally could not afford to hire internally. Additionally, the experience and expertise that comes with an outsourced sales team will help support and optimize your marketing efforts for greater effectiveness and efficiency.
Here are 5 ways an outsourced sales team can help your marketing team:
1. Content development
There have been a few articles recently that talk about the need for B2B companies to act like publishers in terms of their marketing content. For many companies, coming up with fresh content on a regular basis (that provides real value for prospects) is an extremely time consuming task.
At Gabriel Sales, one of the ways our sales outsourcing services support marketing teams is by providing detailed feedback from prospects on the value or effectiveness of different pieces of marketing content. Based on our analysis of phone calls with prospects and marketing analytics data, we provide recommendations for content that your prospects will find engaging and valuable (we can also produce the content for you if you have the need).
2. Augment your under staffed sales team
In recent years, budget limitations and other factors have left many B2B sales teams understaffed. In addition, cold calling just isn’t as effective as it used to be—making it much more expensive to succeed with this tactic. By going with an outsourcing option, you can gain access to an entire sales team for approximately the cost of one internal rep.
Despite how incredible an individual may be in terms of talent and skill, that person can never match the combined training, experience and established relationships that an outsourced sales team can provide. So, instead of spending money internally to hire someone new, it may be more cost-effective to outsource a whole team.
3. Leverage your investment in CRM and MA software
For many B2B companies, technologies like marketing automation and customer relationship management (CRM) software may still be relatively new and confusing. For an outsourced sales team like we have at Gabriel Sales, navigating these technologies is now second-nature. By leveraging an outsourced team, you can therefore bypass months or even years trying to figure it out on your own.
Additionally, one of the top two reasons for dissatisfaction with marketing automation is poor integration with sales. By leveraging an outsourced sales team with over 10,000 hours of marketing automation experience, you gain access to best practices and tips for better sales and marketing alignment. In other words, you let the experts show you how to succeed and what to avoid without having to go through all the headaches of learning on your own.
4. Provide qualitative and quantitative feedback on all tactics.
Every outsourced sales team needs to provide evidence of the value of their work. At Gabriel Sales, we provide our clients twelve different types of reporting on our efforts—from data on conversion ratios to verbatim transcripts of cold calls. We also have weekly meetings with each of our clients to discuss our successes and areas for improvement.
This much transparency and visibility allows your marketing team to easily understand how best to support sales with content and determine what campaigns would be most effective. With the detailed reporting of an outsourced sales team, determining how and where to optimize is greatly simplified.
5. Convert quality inbound leads to qualified prospects
Even when inbound leads come in with a high level of perceived interest, they still need to be qualified. By using an outsourced sales team, you can follow up on inbound leads and nurture them until they are sales qualified for a much lower price than handling it internally.
With a dedicated and experienced outsourced sales team at your service, your marketing team gains the data, technological skills and overall expertise they need to do their jobs as efficiently and effectively as possible.
You can learn more about the value of a B2B outsourced sales team here. To learn about the outsourced sales solutions we offer, visit our services page. Feel free to contact us with any questions.
by gabriel_sales | Dec 6, 2013
How social proof and marketing are inexplicably linked
While social proof is not a new phenomenon, its manifestation in the digital world has interesting effects and implications in terms of commercial attitudes and behaviors.
Evidence of the new power of social proof in commercial situations is everywhere—take Yelp! or Rotten Tomatoes for example. Millions of people now use social and interactive sites like these to help them make decisions about the products and services they buy. What is significant is that these digital opinions now have the power to upset the impact of traditional marketing and sales techniques.
Let’s look at Rotten Tomatoes. They have a score system that gives movies ratings by percentages. Having 75% positive reviews from registered movie critics makes a movie “Certified Fresh”. From a small startup in 1999, Rotten Tomatoes’ reviews and ratings are now “known to substantially affect the commercial success of many films,” and “Certified Fresh” stickers are now placed on the packaging of DVDs as a marketing tactic (Ross W. Martin).
The success of Rotten Tomatoes and similar sites shows us a couple of things. First is the growing distrust we have of traditional sources of information. Rather than listening to corporations who are always going to say their products and services are great, consumers are now starting to prefer to choose their purchases based on opinions they see as being more authentic and credible. This type of shift spans all industries and markets. In essence, consumers everywhere know they don’t have to listen to the industry equivalent of the ‘greasy car salesman’ anymore.
Consumers now want to feel educated and empowered when making buying decisions, and that cannot happen when they feel that they are ‘being sold’. As sociologists Gary Allen Fine and others have noted, “even when information becomes available from official sources, it will be believed only if people regard these sources as credible. When people view official sources as suspect or untrustworthy, they become increasingly likely to seek information from informal or unofficial sources.”
This brings us to the second thing sites like Rotten Tomatoes show us—the power of using social proof as a sales and marketing tactic. By letting other ‘indirect’ or ‘unofficial’ sources do the talking in your marketing content, you gain instant credibility. “Certified Fresh” stickers are a great example, and today’s smart companies are now finding many other new and inventive ways to leverage social proof through their sales and marketing campaigns.
Many companies who are using social proof in this way are doing so because they are seeing certain market trends develop:
- Over 70% of Americans say they look at product reviews before making a purchase. (Social Commerce Stats)
- Nearly 63% of consumers indicate they are more likely to purchase from a site if it has product ratings and reviews. (Search Engine Journal)
These statistics show that social proof is now a strong motivating factor in purchase decisions, and companies who demonstrate this through reviews and other means have an advantage over companies whose marketing tactics are purely promotional.
To learn more about how buyer’s digital behaviors are changing B2B sales and marketing, watch this quick overview video. Feel free to contact us with any questions.
by gabriel_sales | Dec 4, 2013
This is part-two of a two-part blog series on the advantages of hiring a B2B sales outsourcing company in 2014. Click here for part one.
Identify or Confirm Appropriate Market Segmentation and Ideal Customer Profile
Understanding who you are selling to and who your best customers are is much harder in B2B than it is in B2C—mostly because B2B products/services are generally more complex and abstract. In addition, there are generally now multiple decision makers involved in the buying process, each of whom often having different needs and concerns.
Coming up with the right combination of segmentation and messaging is a task that can overwhelm many B2B sales and marketing teams. Getting audience segmentation right often requires a lot of experimentation and small adjustments, and many teams simply do not have time for this. Leveraging a sales and marketing outsourcing company allows you to identify your ideal customer profile and perfect your market segmentation while keeping your top producers focused on revenue generating activities.
Leverage Proven Sales Methodologies and Years of Sales Experience
IT firms live and breathe IT. Real estate companies live and breathe real estate. The same goes for sales outsourcing companies—sales is what they know. By hiring a sales outsourcing company, you gain the years or experience and expertise of a team who spends their days fully immersed in selling.
A quality B2B sales and marketing outsourcing organization also keeps constant track of the changes and trends happening in selling and buying. The fast-pace of the internet and web technologies means changes now happen constantly, and being ahead of the curve can give you a huge edge on the competition. By hiring a sales outsourcing team, you don’t have to worry about keeping up with every trend and change happening in sales and marketing. Your outsourced sales team will take care of that for you—leaving you to focus on serving your customers.
Ability to Execute Quickly and Understand Results
By leveraging a sales and marketing outsourcing company, you not only gain the ability to quickly execute effective campaigns, but you also gain a clearer understanding of the impact of those campaigns. At Gabriel Sales, we use multiple measurement and analytics tools to help our customers get a clear picture of the effectiveness of all of their efforts and work with them to optimize everything we can.
By combining the insights from search data, marketing automation, sales technologies and website analytics, you can get a clearer picture of your market, your prospects, your competitors and your overall impact. By hiring a sales outsourcing company to help, you can derive insights from data more quickly in order to maximize efficiency and optimize ROI.
If you are interested in learning about the integrated B2B sales and marketing outsourcing services we provide, you can visit our services page. Feel free to contact us with any questions.
