Preface

This article will eventually detail why we believe a Sales Ready Lead Campaign is the best way to implement a sales and marketing automation engine for first-time users. Before jumping into that business case, we wanted to share some facts and figures that explain why automation systems are now a requirement for sales success. 

Automation Facts & Figures

Marketing Automation Systems are quickly becoming standard best practices for sales and marketing success. Here are some recent statistics:

• Best-in-Class companies are 67% more likely to use a marketing automation platform. – Aberdeen Group “State of Marketing Automation Processes that Produce”
• 63% of companies successful in marketing automation plan to increase their marketing automation budget. The companies with successful marketing automation programs will invest in further success in the coming year. – Marketo & Ascend2“Marketing Automation Strategies for Sustaining Success” (2015)
• 63% of companies outsource all or part of marketing automation strategy planning. With t. 37% using in-house resources only. – Ascend2 “Marketing Automation Trends Survey” (2016).
• 79% of top-performing companies have been using marketing automation for more than 2 years. – Gleanster “2016 Marketing Automation Benchmark”

Automation and lead scoring are critical because more and more products and solutions are first bought through digital education, and then sold when your buyer is ready to be sold. And you need automation systems to address this shift in buyer behavior.

Over time marketing automation helps you win more business faster and at a lower cost.  But the time delta for success ranges between 3 months to well over a year depending on your existing sales cycle.

And according to Ascend2, “Marketing Automation Trends Survey” (2016), the most significant barriers to marketing automation success are:

• Lack of an effective strategy (52%)
• Complexity of the system (42%)
• Inadequate contact data quality (38%)
• Lack of employee skills (32%)
• Lack of relevant content (31%)
• Marketing and sales alignment (30%)
• Budget constraints (27%)

With those types of barriers and timelines, this makes proving that marketing automation will work for your business and getting it right the first time is at least as equally critical as hiring the right sales reps the first time to avoid sunk costs with no results. But what makes getting this marketing automation team hire right even more difficult than finding and hiring the right rep is the fact that marketing automation is just starting to become mainstream. There is simply not enough talent out here with the requisite experience (with the bumps and bruises and wins and losses) to ensure your initial success.  Bottom line, demand for talent and experience is not keeping up with the supply of talent to ensure success.

Most marketers that are in-house talent only have one or two implementations under their belt. We believe that working with an outsourced sales and marketing company like Gabriel Sales is worth strongly considering for four reasons:

1. We have multiple implementations under our belt across multiple verticals selling multiple solutions with varied sales cycles so we can cross-pollinate best practices.
2. Outsourced sales and marketing companies appreciate marketing metrics but understand the only metric that counts is closed revenue.
3. We understand how to create and use content to automate the sale and leverage the technologies to score leads.
4. We can build your engine and sales automation process faster at a lower cost and then transition the engine when it is fully productive.

How Gabriel Sales Outsourced Sales and Marketing Capacity and a Sales Ready Lead Campaign Can Help

Gabriel Sales has more than 40 Marketing Automation implementations under our belt. We bring both the capability and capacity  you need to get it right the first time with a blended team of:

• Strategists
• Systems integrators across most automation platforms and Salesforce
• Our own low-cost tools if you are not initially ready to commit 20k+ annually for a full marketing platform like Pardot, Hubspot, or Marketo
• Content producers
• Marketing coordinators
• Database marketers
• Trained business development reps

More importantly, we can have you to market in weeks with Sales Ready Leads flowing so you avoid the quarters it takes to build on your own.

And once the engine is built and functioning we can continue to sustain or scale indefinitely or you can take over in-house with a seamless transition of your engine and systems.

To learn more about our approach and how it all works check out this short 3-minute educational video and educational microsite. Watch the embedded video below. Or contact us for a free readiness assessment that evaluates how large a market you can target, your content readiness and a preliminary result forecast.