Sales Funnel Results With Lead Nurturing

Sales Funnel Results With Lead Nurturing

Sales Funnel Results With Lead Nurturing + Demand Generation

(Watch Time – 4:00)

Summary

In this video we explain sales funnel results with lead nurturing, how long it takes to launch a demand generation and lead nurturing engine, and the sales funnel results you should expect running a campaign to 5,000 well targeted buyers.

 

Transcript

Introduction

When you examine the entire sales funnel, lead gen is the first step in the sales process and in the buyer’s journey. Lead gen’s job is to move buyers into the top of the sales funnel by creating awareness and curiosity about your solution. And then demand gen and lead nurturing takeover. Demand generation and lead nurturing automate the pre-sales education process as the buyer goes through their second step of consideration and their third stage of preference. This process keeps the seller top of mind as the buyer moves deeper into the funnel.  And when the buyer’s ready, sales takes over to help them make a decision.

As discussed in other videos in much greater detail, Digital Demand Center specializes in demand gen and lead nurturing to put well educated buyers into your CRM for your sales team to develop and close. And as part of our service, we also support your initial go-to-market strategy, awareness, and lead gen campaigns if you don’t already have a database built or a lead gen vendor or process you trust.

Time to Launch

To fully launch a demand generation engine, including our solution Digital Demand Center, typically takes about three months. In the first month, you can craft your go-to-market strategy, implement your automation systems, and deal with cleaning, augmenting, and building your database. In months two and three, you can run your initial awareness campaigns to generate early stage leads, augment gaps in your sales education content production, access your marketing automation and sales dashboards, start your reporting, and start the ongoing optimization of your marketing tech and campaigns. By month four, you are starting at execute, lead nurturing, and you’re starting to see your initial flow of sales ready leads in your CRM.

Projected Sales Funnel Results

How long does it take to start seeing the results?  So to make the math easy, let’s assume we start your awareness campaign with 5,000 targets. These 5,000 targets will be sent three different messages for the equivalent of 15,000 impressions. So, early in your campaign, you should see about 200 to 400 early stage marketing qualified leads by month four.  Marketing Qualified Leads are defined by demonstrating initial engagement with your content.  They know who you are and the basics of what you do. And if you need to be aggressive, you can start calling these early stage leads.

Then typically by month five, the marketing engine is doing what it was designed to do as the lead nurturing campaigns continue to target your buyers three to four times a month for and additional 15,000 to 20,000 impressions a month. And as a direct result of this pre-sales education, by month five, you should be producing 5 to 10 sales-ready leads a month.  Sales Ready Leads are defined by potential buyers that are engaging with multiple pieces of content, watching videos and visiting key pages that predict that they are getting ready to short list and make a decision.   This number of “Sales Ready Leads” should increase to 7 to 12 by month six. That hat number should hold steady or grow to 10 to 15 sales ready leads by month eight.

Cost Per Sales Ready Lead and Cost Per Conversion

This means that by month eight, with your steady state investment of about $3,200 a month and your launch fee is over, your engine should be producing between 7 to 15 well-educated buyers a month indefinitely. So, this means not counting your startup costs in any additional content costs that by month eight you should be generating sales ready leads at a high-end cost of $450 per sales ready lead, and a cost of $1,000 per opportunity to a low-end of $210 per sales ready lead in a cost rounding up of about $500 per opportunity.

With a closing rate of 33%, this means you should be paying between $1,500 to $3,000 per closed deal. And probably the best news for companies that are committed to lead nurturing and leveraging Digital Demand Center is that once you’ve launched your engine, the only thing that will prevent you from scaling your sales funnel and lowering your cost of sales is your ability to add more targets to the front-end of your engine. Because doubling your targets from 5,000 to 10,000 will eventually over a year or two and into year three, double your sales ready leads, which over time will cut your cost in half after about a year to 18 months of sustained lead nurturing.

Reasons to Consider Outsourcing Sales and Marketing Operations

Reasons to Consider Outsourcing Sales and Marketing Operations

outsourcing sales and marketing

For many businesses ready for growth, it’s fairly typical to consider outsourcing sales and marketing operations along with other various business functions including: human resources, accounting and IT. Historically, when it comes to scaling sales and marketing operations, most companies initially consider building a team of dedicated in-house sales and marketing professionals.

But over the past several years, the requirements of B2B buyers have significantly changed. Buyers now expect to be able to educate themselves digitally online across multiple channels. Once they demonstrate interest, they also expect marketing to continue to support their buyer journey with continued digital education.

Buyers changed expectations, needs and desires which has blurred the line between marketing and sales functions. It has changed accountability and responsibilities for generating leads, developing opportunities and qualifying buyers ready to engage with sales. First, we will discuss how this has created multiple complexities for the historical model for sales and marketing operations.The rest of this article will then build on these complexities as we discuss:

Marketing operations and marketing automation

How do we decide if we should outsource

What functions can be outsourced

What are the advantages of outsourcing specific functions

 Why Marketing and Sales Operations Is Getting More Complex

The lines between marketing and sales operations are becoming increasingly blurred. Marketing is no longer limited to brand awareness and lead generation. During the pandemic, the Fortune 500 shifted towards a digital-first sales process, tasking marketers with generating leads and then developing them through a combination of content marketing and marketing automation.

As a direct result, B2B marketing organizations are taking on expanded tasks and responsibilities. Sales and marketing leadership, including Chief Revenue Officers (CROs), executives, and creative teams, are tasked with:

 

  • Creating content strategies
  • Creating lead generation strategies
  • Selecting media vendors
  • Continuing to generate leads across multiple channels
  • Creating quality content and developing thought leaders
  • Planning and running events
  • Generating leads
  • Nurturing leads
  • Crafting personalized journeys
  • Transiting leads to sales when they are educated and ready to buy
  • Selecting and managing tech platforms
  • Maintaining quality data
  • Expanding their volume of reports
  • Measuring ROI across channels
  • Making smarter decisions
  • Forecasting
  • Supporting existing customers
  • Cross selling
  • Upselling
  • Creating brand strategies

Marketing Operations and Marketing Automation

What is modern marketing and sales operations today?

Marketing and sales operations encompass the processes, technology, and human resources needed to execute strategies that support sales and marketing efforts with quality and consistency. Marketing operations serve as the backbone, leveraging people and technology to execute campaigns, manage the technology stack, and oversee databases, data governance and reporting. Marketing and sales operations enable:

    • Marketing leaders and managers to concentrate on high-value strategic tasks, creative development, and content creation
    • Sales teams to dedicate their time to advancing high-quality leads through the pipeline

Marketing and sales operations is an organizational approach that enables marketers to generate more demand for their products and services, support the buyer’s journey, guide buyers further into the sales funnel, and spend more time on analysis and continuous improvement. It establishes a foundation for excellence and growth, ensuring strategies are executed using best practices to drive growth and achieve both marketing benchmarks and sales targets.

The key to successful B2B marketing and sales operations is the effective daily use and integration of marketing automation and customer relationship management systems.

The growth of marketing automation makes it challenging to find proven talent

As of this year, 60% of B2B organizations intend to increase their spending on marketing automation in the coming year (Statista)

 

Between 2021 and 2024, the global marketing automation industry revenue grew by an estimated 22% to 5.86 billion U.S. dollars. The market is expected to more than double by 2030, surpassing 13.7 billion U.S. dollars (Gartner).

Additionally, 72% of marketing operations and marketing automation specialists have less than two years of experience, and 41% are learning on the job.

Finding quality talent with legitimate and proven experience will continue to be challenging.

How Do We Decide if Outsourcing Marketing is the Right Solution for Our Company?

As businesses continue to expand, invest in digital marketing and sales processes, create more content, and enhance productivity to all designed to help them survive, thrive and compete more effectively in the coming years, they will eventually face the following questions:

  • Should we build and staff digital marketing and sales operations in-house?
  • Should we consider outsourcing sales or marketing?
  • Should we consider outsourcing sales and marketing operations?
  • What areas or functions should we consider outsourcing?
  • What are the benefits of outsourcing?

It’s a difficult question to answer because there is no turnkey solution that works across all industries and for businesses of all sizes. The decision to outsource depends primarily on:

 

  • The existing internal resources of the business
  • The proven focus areas of current partners
  • The skill sets of employees and management
  • The technology experience and expertise of existing employees and management
  • Most importantly, where existing employees and managers can provide the greatest strategic value for the organization

What Functions/Parts Of Sales And Marketing Operations Can We Outsource

Most companies committed to a digital-first go-to-marketing and sales strategy have created leadership and management teams that are highly skilled and experience in:

  • Developing strategies across multiple channels
  • Creating content tailored to various channels
  • Generating the volume of inbound leads needed for success
  • Making intelligent decisions to maximize investments when armed with reliable data

But as discussed above, experienced marketing and sales operations talent and marketing automation technology experience is hard to find. And according to Robert Half finding skilled digital marketers and experienced marketing automation talent are two of the top three employees companies are challenged to find.

With the evolution of CRMs like Salesforce and the rise of marketing operations and Salesforce consultancies like Gabriel Sales, companies can now explore marketing automation support and outsourced sales and marketing operations to help take their organizations to the next level. These functions fall into two categories:

Outsourced Technology Implementation and Optimization – The technical delivery of specific marketing automation applications, marketing technology integrations, and Salesforce integrations ensures that your sales and marketing systems are customized to execute the strategic goals of the organization.

Marketing Operations Managed Services – Once your systems are optimized, they must be leveraged daily, weekly, and monthly to produce the desired results in specific areas such as campaign execution, content management, database management, project management, and reporting.

As discussed in detail above, different companies have different needs based on existing internal capability and capacity.  To learn more about how Gabriel Sales can help immediately augment your day-to-day execution capability and capacity visit our outsourced marketing and sale operations managed services page.

If you want to stop struggling with technology. Or want to maximize your tech stack investment so your current team can drive even more marketing value and higher quality leads for sales, you can learn more about how we support you with increased capabilities by visiting our Salesforce and marketing automation consulting services page.

9 Reasons to Consider Marketing and Sales Operations

1 – Immediate Access to Experienced Salesforce and Marketing Automation Specialists

Most companies utilize a variety of platforms and technologies integrated with Salesforce to bolster successful lead generation, guide buyer journeys, execute lead nurturing campaigns, and enhance sales enablement. However, if you’ve been procuring these software solutions for any length of time, you understand that in order to leverage the capabilities of these softwares they need to be built out correctly as well as continuously monitored and enhanced based on business changes and the latest updates and features.

When you entrust your marketing and sales operations to Gabriel Sales, the potential of Salesforce and Marketing Automation becomes tangible. We immediately provide you with access to certified Salesforce and Account Engagement (Pardot) specialists who seamlessly integrate into your organization.

These professionals are adept at utilizing and implementing the latest proven tools and features available within these systems for marketing, analysis, automation, sales enablement, and more. With our assistance, you can cease struggling with the technology, mitigate the risks of underperformance and system errors, all without the need to invest countless hours in recruiting and training talent or attempting to navigate these complexities independently.

2 – You Immediately Align and Bridge the Gap from Marketing to Sales

Most marketing teams, including conventional digital marketing agencies, excel in managing budgets, crafting strategies, brand management, and producing creative content to support top-of-funnel campaigns and retain existing customers.

Specialized agencies in marketing automation and lead nurturing immediately enhance your team’s capabilities, enabling the development of deeper buyer relationships further down the sales funnel.

One of the unique advantages of outsourced sales and marketing operations, particularly with Gabriel Sales, is the access to sales operations professionals proficient in lead nurturing, lead scoring, and effective lead management in Salesforce. Their expertise ensures seamless integration of technologies and processes, facilitating the transition of leads from marketing to sales funnels.

3 – Immediate Access to Best Practices

When you hire a team of specialists with experience across various industries, you can immediately benefit from tried and tested best practices. Implementing these practices from the outset and consistently executing them are essential for long-term success. These best practices encompass data management, governance, campaign workflows, reporting, lead scoring, and transitioning leads to sales.

4 – Strategy Improvements

“You don’t know what you don’t know.” Partnering with an agency proficient in sales and marketing operations ensures precise implementation and ongoing enhancements.

By engaging with an outsourced provider, you gain access to seasoned marketing and sales specialists with extensive experience in executing hundreds of implementations, overseeing thousands of campaigns and staying up-to-date on the latest technology changes. They offer the advantage of benchmarking your performance against competitors and diverse companies. This facilitates the integration of successful strategies and technological features across your organization as you scale and diversify campaign volumes and types.

5 – Fast, Reliable and Consistent Campaign Execution

Outsourcing provides immediate access to a fully-managed team of trained and experienced professionals specializing in Salesforce, Account Engagement, database management, and content management. This team handles all functions and executional tasks necessary for successful marketing and sales operations. Your chosen provider maintains a singular focus and accountability for timely and precise execution of day-to-day activities, ensuring a consistent flow of sales-ready leads.

6 – Better Quality Data, Faster Analysis and Increased Insights

Salesforce and automation specialists are adept at establishing policies to enhance data governance, enabling more efficient data addition and collection. They excel in tagging and managing data across core systems and third-party integrations.

Their expertise, coupled with a wealth of experience in creating hundreds of automated dashboards, forecasts, and reports, results in heightened insights, expedited analysis, and more informed decisions.

7 – Boost Your Existing Team’s Focus and Performance

Many marketing teams juggle multiple roles, including brand management, creative design, media buying, analysis, and strategy development. They often have a backlog of new projects aimed at improving results.

In such scenarios, it’s more beneficial for your core marketing team to focus on high-value, strategic, and creative tasks. By outsourcing repetitive and technical tasks essential for daily operations, you can instantly free up their time for strategic activities.

8 – Reduced Stress, Overall Improved Performance and Higher Quality Leads Ready to Talk to Sales   

Enhance your team’s focus effortlessly, eliminate tech hurdles, implement proven best practices, ensure data accuracy, and access a turnkey support team to elevate your entire marketing team’s performance and outcomes.

With Gabriel Sales’ additional expertise in sales operations, swiftly translate this performance boost into an enhanced and expedited sales funnel. Leveraging our 20 years of Salesforce end-user experience, we empower you to enable sales effectively. Through reports, prioritized lists, lead views, and alerts, your sales team can concentrate on pre-qualified leads ready for engagement.

 9 – Lower Costs and a Variable Expense

Outsourcing marketing and sales operations can save you from the expenses associated with hiring, training, staffing, and managing full-time employees. Instead of bearing the fully-loaded cost of employing one manager, you gain access to a diverse team of specialists, helping you optimize your campaigns and technology investments at a fraction of the cost.

This approach offers the flexibility of a monthly variable expense, contrasting with the fixed headcount cost associated with traditional employment models.

About Gabriel Sales

Gabriel Sales™  has been successfully helping companies grow for over 20 years. We specialize in helping B2B companies with a multi-step sales process, build modern sales and marketing operations. We currently support sales and marketing organizations with 5 to 500 sales reps. We also work with startups or companies launching new products that are serious about growth. Learn more about our team, approach and proven track record on our About Us page and/or view our Customer Success Stories and ROI Case Studies.

 

Lead Nurturing Drives Sales Ready Leads Success Video

Lead Nurturing Drives Sales Ready Leads Success Video

Lead Nurturing Drives Sales Ready Buyers Success Video

In this short video Collective Goods’ SVP of Sales, Tony Gilio, discusses how lead nurturing drives Sales Ready Leads.  He explains how Digital Demand Center allowed him to increase his flow of sales ready buyers, doubled his closing rate and reduce his Sales Development Rep headcounts cost by over 50%.

(Watch Time – 3:00 Minutes)

Conversation with Collective Goods SVP of Sales, Tony Gilio

Collective Goods was struggling to deliver a full funnel of new business and qualified opportunities to their team of over 150 outside sales reps.  Tony explains how he had Gabriel Sales and Digital Demand Center increase the efficiency of his inside sales team by implementing a digitized pre-sales process supported by a marketing automation technology stack.   In this short video Tony explains:

  • How Digital Demand Center doubled his volume of Sales Ready Leads by 50%
  • How “Sales Ready” leads reduced his telemarketing team from eight to four reps reducing his cost by 50%
  • Why his New Business closing rate went from 10% to 50%
  • How this lead nurturing and demand generation solution provided his closer the volume they needed for success

Excerpts from Lead Nurturing Drives Sales Ready Buyers

“The, the reason why I believe that Digital Demand Center had so much success with us was because they’ve done it from all angles. They are sales professionals, they are marketing experts.  The understand and see the whole business cycle. And, well I guess now they are the whole business cycle for us, right. And they’ve just digitized it and made it more efficient for us to be able to succeed. Their expertise allowed us to be more efficient in our process.”

“So the first step that we had with Gabriel Sales and Digital Demand Center was just streamlining that Sales Development Process.  The reason why we had so much more success is that the buyers we started calling were warmed up. They had already watched videos, they had already seen the content. They had basically told us that they wanted us to call them.”

“I was skeptical that digitizing this would be able to replace, um, all our portion of our telemarketing team. And the reality is really that’s how people want to transact nowadays. They, they are more digitally focused. They are less apt to pick up a call, especially because so many people are on their cell phones. They don’t want to listen to a telemarketer. So they’re transacting on a digital format through video. They’re watching as much as they want to watch. The buyer is learning about us and we are  watching and we’re learning, about their behaviors.   And then we can follow up accordingly”

Software Sales Lead Nurturing Success – A Customer Conversation

Software Sales Lead Nurturing Success – A Customer Conversation

Learn about the 300% Sales Impact Gabriel Sales’ Turnkey Demand Generation Engine drove for a Mobile App and Software Company

In this short video Digital Demand Center’s client – Entrepreneur and Founder Bryan Banks shares his software sales demand generation and lead nurturing success story.

(Watch Time – 5:00 Minutes)

Software Sales Lead Nurturing Success Conversation with Bryan Banks, Founder KipTraq

Bryan Banks is an entrepreneur that is focused on growing his mobile application and software business with no outside investors.  Bryan was committed to fueling that growth with sales and smart marketing decisions. In this short conversation Bryan discusses how Digital Demand Center:

  • Allowed Bryan to to focus on closing business and product development
  • Kept his funnel full with sales opportunities for his existing sales team
  • Educated his buyers so they were excited to talk to sales 

Excerpts – Software Sales Lead Nurturing Success Highlights

 “I didn’t really to focus on the sales side. I have sales reps for that, and they were doing a pretty good job, but I wanted to give them the tools that they needed to be successful. We wanted to be able to be able to scale this business in such a way that, that we could bring in leads digitally instead of having to go out sniffing for them.  And Demand Center filled that niche for us. We were able to really keep that funnel full.”

“Whenever I go buy something, whether it’s a car or a, a new microphone or, you know, from my computer or whatever it is, I do my research online. I think everybody does that these days.  I wouldn’t go to a,car dealership and, and talk to the salesperson and, and cold and say, – Hey, tell me about, you know, the, the pros and cons of these two vehicles, right? I want to come in as an educated buyer. So the thing that really stuck with me after working with Digital Demand Center is that that’s their goal as well. They want to create Educated buyers.”

“So there are three reasons that I would recommend Digital Demand Center. Number one is they’ve got a great technology stack. They helped us move it from an Excel type process into something where we could, we could scale. Number two is that their staff really work well with our team…, they know what it is, what we do, and they’re able to make recommendations in terms of how we should market this product to our potential customers…the third reason I would recommend them is because they’re really focused on educating our potential buyers. So by the time somebody is actually talking to one of our sales reps, they’ve probably seen a couple and read a couple of our blogs. They’ve watched some videos. And so when we are bringing leads in from the outside and moving them through a funnel where they’re educated, they learn what it is that we offer, they get excited about it. So by the time they actually come and are talking with us, our sales reps and myself, they know what it is they want, and they know that KipTraq is something that they need.”

Lead Generation vs Demand Generation Webinar

Lead Generation vs Demand Generation Webinar

Part 4 in our Digital First Transformation Series

The Differences Between Lead Gen vs. Demand Gen and the Impact on Your Sales Funnel

In this Lead Generation vs Demand Generation Webinar, the final in the series, we examine tie it all together to help business owners decide if Demand Generation, Lead Nurturing and Sales Automation is the right fit for their sales process. We discuss the difference between Lead Generation and Demand Generation.  We detail the impact of both on your sales funnel production and cost of sales.  We then explain when you can just use a lead generation process and when you need demand generation.   We explain what types of businesses are an ideal fit for Digital Demand Center™ specifically.  And provide projections our typical customer realizes over the course of 18 months.

(Watch Time – 15:00 Minutes)

 

Topics Covered in This Lead Generation vs Demand Generation Webinar Include:

  • Clearly define lead generation and demand generation
  • Explain the purpose and limitations of both process
  • Contrast the impact of both on your sales funnel
  • Explain when you should only invest in lead generation
  • Explain what type of sales process needs lead nurturing and pre-sales automation to survive and thrive
  • Clearly define what type of business and sales process gets the best return from demand generation and Digital Demand Center™ specifically
  • How long it takes to launch a demand generation engine
  • Concrete forecasts of the sales funnel production you should expect from Digital Demand Center
  • How to calculate your KPIs and Return on Investment