by gabriel_sales | Nov 18, 2011
Choosing to Outsource instead of hiring illustration design
This blog explains how you can use an outsourcing sales and marketing company to quickly increase sales, in order to secure investments for a new product or technology.
When trying to convince someone to invest in a new product or technology, businesses will likely be asked to show why the investment is worth the money. Investors are looking for sales metrics, often by specific target markets and sales verticals. In other words, an investor wants proof that you can deliver, so they can feel secure in investing. However, if your recent sales do not impress, you are unlikely to establish trust and secure investments.
So, what can you do when you have a great idea, and not enough sales traction to get solid investment terms? One solution to this problem is to turn your sales over to an outsourced sales team to quickly increase revenue and implement the use of sales and marketing tracking tools, and performance metrics that report and measure dollars in and dollars out.
Without extensive sales knowledge and sales experience, these tasks may seem daunting. An outsourcing sales company can help make this process much easier and less painful. An outsourced sales team can help you attract the capital you need and quickly get your product or service to market.
Benefits of Sales Outsourcing:
- Experienced sales professionals work to understand your specific business pains and needs
- Outsourced sales teams use their experience to quickly devise and execute business plans
- Outsourced sales teams understand what strategies and sales methods will work best for your business
- Experienced sales professionals work directly towards achieving your goals efficiently and effectively
- You can target your most successful markets, while simultaneously building new markets and securing new leads
When your sales process is running smoothly and effectively, turning out consistently closed deals at the end of your pipe, you should have no problem obtaining investments for a new product or service. The team at Gabriel Sales can help make that happen.
If you’d like to see how sales outsourcing could benefit your company, contact us for a free pipeline velocity review.
by gabriel_sales | Nov 11, 2011
Your company is ready to jump on your lead generation opportunities and use sales to quickly increase your revenue. The problem is, you don’t know how to make it happen.
As a sales outsourcing company that specializes directly in solving this problem, we can offer some insight as to how you should proceed. The new digital marketplace has changed the way business, especially the sales process, gets done. If you want to beat the competition, you need to understand how you can use this new way of doing business to work as effectively as possible. To do this, you first need to evaluate your current process to look for your strengths and the areas where you need to take action.
Sales outsourcing may be able to augment sales gaps and increase sales pipe velocity. Three things to look at when evaluating how to proceed are the efficiency of your current sales team, your strategy for marketing and your ability to execute.
Sales Team Efficiency
- Look at the structure of your team. Is it set up to achieve your goal of increasing revenue and developing new prospects? Can your sales manager organize and encourage your team to close deals in a time efficient manner? Does your team need extra training to make this happen?
- Evaluate your sales process. How do you monitor your sales process and evaluate its effectiveness? Do you use marketing automation or sales force technology? Do you have a way to understand changing market conditions and respond accordingly?
Marketing Strategy
- Look at how you spread information about your service or product. Are you using social media to your advantage? Do you have digital educational content available to customers to help in the sales process? Is your website capable of finding new leads for you?
- Evaluate your message. Is everyone at your company sending out a consistent message? Are your sales and marketing teams aligned? Do they work with each other to create an effective lead generation strategy?
Execution Ability
- Look at how you deliver your service or product. Is your team set up to make this process go as smoothly as possible? Do you have people who are constantly available for customer support? What might it take to make this happen?
If these questions expose some holes or deficiencies in your current business process, it may be time to look into possible solutions. If you are willing to devote time and resources to finding solutions and building a scalable sales machine, Gabriel Sales, as an sales outsourcing company, can provide you with tools, strategies and people to make it happen. Please feel free to contact us if you are interested in learning more.
by gabriel_sales | Nov 4, 2011
It’s almost 2017, and the economy is continuing to incrementally improve and show signs of picking up momentum. If you have not already started your sales planning, now is the time to start thinking about how to increase your sales performance in the coming year.
As a sales outsourcing company, here are our top outsourcing sales strategies you may want to examine in the coming year to increase sales.
- Build an ideal customer profile. Look at your current customer mix and decide what companies make you the most money and are the easiest to service and scale the quickest.
- Improve the quality of your lead targeting. Build on your ideal customer profile and improve the quality of your leads. Step one in building a pipe is to improve the quality of what you are putting into it.
- Analyze your sales process. Look at what worked for your top performers in 2016 and share those sales processes across your organization. As a sales outsourcing partner, a great deal of the outsourcing sales efficiencies we drive are replicating what works for top sales producers and sharing those both internally, and externally, with our sales clients.
- Start measuring your sales pipe velocity. Part of analyzing your sales process is putting the metrics in place to measure the velocity of your pipe. Understand what message and content moves your prospect from one stage in your sales pipeline to the next stage faster.
- Look at marketing automation software. If you have not already implemented a marketing automation platform, you need to start looking at them now. As a sales outsourcing organization, the insights and efficiency gains are critical for us to compete in the new sales engagement model.
- Nurture your sales pipe. Do not ignore past prospects, especially for complex sales. From our own data and other studies, in some industries we have seen over 50% of purchases are coming from prospects we educated last year.
- Sell money. You need to be able to demonstrate the Return on Investment you can drive with your product or service. The more complex your sales, the clearer you need to be able to explain how your buyer can measure their return.
- Sales and marketing alignment is critical. You need to give your marketing “a sale quota’, and create a team environment. Don’t just measure what marketing puts into the pipe and then what sales closes. Create shared success metrics so everyone has their eye on closing business with customers ready to buy and also nurturing prospects that are not quite ready. Create content that supports the sale across its lifecycle.
- Collaborate with partners. With the advent of social media, digital content, marketing automation, webcasting and SEO tools, it might make sense to look at how a top sales outsourcing and marketing operations company can help you augment capability and increase capacity, to increase your sales in the coming year.
Depending on your stage of sales and marketing alignment, there are multiple sales and marketing strategies and tactics with the potential to drive sales growth. A strategy or tactic is most effective when anchored in an overarching strategy based on real numbers as well as targeting specific sales goals. The best sales and marketing operations outsourcing company will help you to create a unique plan to improve what is not working and build what is working based on hard sales targets. Contact us for a free consultation to see what we can do to improve your sales performance and pipeline velocity in 2017.
by gabriel_sales | Sep 15, 2011
A few weeks ago I was reading a forum thread on the Gym Jones Salvation Site, an excellent resource for training and stimulating intelligent discussion. The first post in the thread contained a list taken from a Prestressed Concrete Design Handbook, and was so thought provoking that I decided to share it with the inside sales and lead generation team here at Gabriel Sales.
Here is the list:
1. You cannot have everything.
2. You cannot have something for nothing.
3. It is never too late.
4. There is no progress without considered risk.
5. The proof of the pudding is in the eating.
6. Simplicity is always an advantage, but beware of oversimplification.
7. Do not generalize, but rather qualify the specific circumstances.
8. The important thing is how good, not how cheap, a product is.
9. We live and learn.
10. There is nothing completely new.
I have confidence this list can be applied to personal relationships, athletics and anywhere else you invest your time but for me, a Sales Executive tasked with managing outsourced sales and outsourced lead generation team helping drive growth and profitability for companies, the first connection that I personally made applied to sales strategy and accountability. Some of the questions that came to my mind about how I can improve results were:
- Is this sales team spreading itself to thin?
- Are we focused on improving the right areas of the sales process?
- Lead sourcing and lead generation, Sales Qualifying, Sales Engagement, Closing
- Where can the lead generation team become more efficient?
- What are the real sales objections that my process is raising?
- Are we staying ahead of the competition?
- Sales content strong enough
The great thing about what we do here at Gabriel Sales is that I have real time data and tools to provide sales insights to answers to these questions. We are able to take these insights and create sales and sales content strategies about how to most effectively tweak the sales messages and automate the process with digital content to move forward.
It struck me how much we treat our job like training for sport, the results can be recorded, measured and adjusted based on individual needs to move you closer to your goals. In sports you have aerobic, anaerobic, nutrition and rest. One slips and it all slips. In sales execution it’s lead generation, sales qualifying, sales engagement and closing. In sales strategy it’s targeting, sales content, sales message and sales execution. We treat sales as a sport so aligning sales and marketing strategy is anything but guess work. You can improve what you measure and focus on the gaps. All you need to do is invest some time looking at the data, adjusting strategy, and pushing through peaks and valleys. This gives you the ability to compete at your peak when race day comes.
Nick Fagan – Director of Sales and Account Management
by gabriel_sales | Sep 2, 2011
This blog is to help companies thinking about sales outsourcing to improve the long-term results and effectiveness.
Gabriel Sales is an sales outsourcing company in the truest sense of the word. Sales outsourcing is not necessarily cheaper (at least in the short term). It’s about making your investment work harder and smarter. Sales outsourcing should make you more effective. You get access to shared tools, sales and marketing expertise, sales management expertise and processes required for success.
Companies don’t generally come to us because they are wildly successful on their own. They come to us because they want to close more business faster. In most cases, that requires consulting upfront. This blog is designed to help you be as honest as possible about how much consulting you might need prior to starting a sales outsourcing relationship.
There are a multitude of options for companies to drive sales other than of building their own internal team. Wikipedia has great overviews of your options -from channel sales, to resellers, to manufacturer rep to outsourced sales companies. When discussing outsourcing sales, where we like to start the conversation is the word “outsourcing” itself:
Outsourcing involves the contracting of a business process – previously performed in-house – to an external provider.
Outsourcing = Process previously performed transitioned
By this definition very few companies are looking for pure sales outsourcing, which is why we define ourselves as a sales execution, sales consulting and sales content marketing company. We execute while we consult.
During our initial conversation with potential clients looking for “outsourced sales”, what we discover with a little back in forth is some of what they are currently doing works and some of it does not, so we separate the issues. We quickly discover what they really need is a combination of 2 to 5 of the areas below:
- Sales scripting
- Outsourcing lead generation
- Outsourcing lead nurturing
- Outsourcing sales qualifying
- Outsourcing sales closing
- Sales Consulting
- Commission only reps
- Contracted Sales Reps
When someone is looking for a contracted rep or commission only, they are not really interested in a repeatable sales process which means by definition it’s not outsourcing (at least our definition).
When we talk to most companies we work through a formal process to identify how much consulting they need, so we can figure out how fast we can start executing to fill their pipe. Generally we can start executing and consulting concurrently. We have a formal process called the Gabriel System™ that makes this easy for our clients. We can generally get through this discovery process within the first week of launch and be on the phone filling the pipe within two weeks. What follows below is an abridged overview of what we extract during Gabriel System™ discovery process. Unless you are a pure start up launching from scratch, something you are doing is already successful. It’s our aim to figure out what is working, so we can improve on that for exponential growth.
Our first set of questions surrounds how mature that sales function and process really is:
- What is the historical sales cycle?
- How accurate was last years 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 are part of the sale?
- How many cold calls does it take to put a prospect into the pipe?
- How many prospects are currently in their nurture pipe?
- What are their typical conversion metrics? (Including: lead generation to sales qualified prospects, sales qualified prospects to sales proposals, sales proposals to closed sales, closed sales to upsell)
- Do they have cold call script? Do they have first call scripts?
- Is the pricing model fixed? When was the last time it was changed?
- Who are there top three direct competitors? Who are there top three indirect competitors? Why do you win? Why do you lose?
- What markets have you targeted? What is the market size? What decision maker do you sell to in that market? Why do they buy your product? What is there Return on Investment?
- What technology platforms are you using for sales force automation, marketing automation, direct marketing, cold calling, database providers, list management, webcasting, video?
- Do you have a creative agency and how will we collaborate with them? Is marketing an internal function?
Our second set of questions (really just one question): How much of this is documented?
- If its fully documented you are ready to outsource
- If its not you need some sales consulting too
Our third set of questions is specifically about each stage of the discrete part of the sales process -happy, not happy, needs improvement- grouping them as follows:
- Lead Sourcing and Targeting?
- Lead Generation?
- Sales Qualifying?
- Sales and Marketing Alignment?
- Sales Engagement and Sales Pipe Velocity?
- Sales Metrics?
- Sales Closing and Sales Upsell?
Our final set of questions is about how message and content readiness:
- Do they have a positioning document
- Do they have a messaging document
- How much collateral do they have and what type of collateral
What does this all boil down to? The more honest you are upfront with an outsourcing sales partner the faster they will be productive. We encourage you to be honest and clear about what is broken that you need fixed:
- Be clear if you are happy with specific sales processes. If you you are happy your process and your process is documented, then you are completely ready to outsource with no consulting
- If you want to improve specific sales functions or specific tactics to compete more aggressively, then you may need a little consulting in specific areas
- If you are looking for an overhaul, you probably need full sales, sales process, and/or sales message and content consulting upfront
The value Gabriel Sales brings to the table as a sales outsourcing partner is that we don’t wait to start executing. We lead with execution and support with consulting. We execute to fill the pipe to shorten your sales cycle, while we simultaneously consult to improve your strategy. Doing both simultaneously gives everyone the hard data, metrics and qualitative insights required to create a winning and competitive sales machine without costing us valuable time getting to the market. We execute and consult simultaneously because Gabriel Sales generally works with teams that want to win and want to double sales growth year after year, so we understand:
- Unless you are on the field taking shots on goal you don’t get 2X growth and…
- If they are bad shots on goal you don’t get 2X growth
If you are interested in getting to the market with speed and would like to learn more about how we can get you into the market fast with the right sales strategy please CONTACT US for a free pipe velocity review.
