by Glen Springer | Dec 16, 2015
Outsourcing sales and marketing is not “one size fits all” engagement. Because of the dynamic and involved nature of sales and marketing execution, it is important that you identify what gaps you are looking to fill within your current processes before looking to an outside partner for help. Alternatively, many times this potential outside partner can help you identify these gaps on the front-end as well.
The purpose of this blog will be to outline 5 final considerations you should make when considering using an outside partner, as well as what information you should be sharing with your potential B2B sales outsourcing and marketing partner:
Is reducing my time to market critical?
Outsourcing sales and marketing is more than just soliciting a business to make cold calls. You are plugging into a fully functional sales engine. Innovative technologies are in place to help you execute and processes are built to ensure success. Now you have access to a sales and marketing team that already know how to work together and are ready to start closing business on day one. Recruiting, building, and training a team can take months, quarters, even years to finally end up with a solid core group that “plays well together.” Do you have the time to bring that team together? If not, an outsourced partner is an ideal solution.
Am I looking for operational expertise?
It takes time to develop operational expertise because it is driven by measurement and verification against feedback loops. You can’t rush a good thing. To truly drive operational expertise you have to effectively benchmark performance against historical data. How can you tell whether your premature sales force is performing at the highest level possible when you are working with a brand new solution? One of the major benefits of plugging into an outsourced partner is that they already have an existing sales machine in place – you just have to jump in the driver’s seat. Feedback loops and historical data are in place to define actionable KPI’s, and you can start smarter and learn faster.
Do I want to build operational expertise and then bring it in house?
This isn’t a question you need to have an answer to up-front, but it’s important to keep it top of mind throughout this process. Once the code is cracked and the machine is running, you can heavily reduce costs if you bring the sales engine in-house. If you think you may consider doing this down the road, it’s important to share that with your partner early on. We have found that when done effectively, we often times can transition all or parts of the process at strategic times so that everyone wins more business.
Is Scalability important to me?
One benefit of being an established outsourcer of marketing and sales is that we have the ability to increase and decrease the scale of our operations fluidly. All of the necessary infrastructure and processes from the technology platforms, phone systems, and recruiting/training systems are already in place. Headaches associated with adding and decreasing headcount are no more. You have to ask yourself, can I benefit from getting rid of these headaches?
Do I really need to add full time executives (and the long term fixed costs) to my management team?
The kiss of death for any company in today’s market is employing too many strategists and not enough soldiers. Outsourced providers can bring long-term strategic expertise to the table at the right time to astronomically reduce costs. Getting the initial sales efforts running takes strategic insight and leadership from senior executive talent on both the sales and marketing fronts. Appropriately aligning the technological strategy takes advanced expertise as well. All of this requires a heavy investment. This is where the beauty of an outsourced partner comes into play. Once you invest in the engine, the fixed costs you would have had to carry otherwise with staffing internally fall away. The senior team moves to the background and the machine and sales reps continue to generate revenue.
For more information on how outsourcing sales and marketing can help accomplish your goals, please feel free to take a look at our previous blogs in this series “Should I Outsource Sales and Marketing” and “Is My Company a Good Fit to Outsource Sales and Marketing.”
If you would like more information, or would just like to chat with us about issues you may be having or how we can help, please contact us.
by Glen Springer | Dec 9, 2015
It is becoming more and more a commonplace business practice to outsource sales and marketing. However, with so many solution providers out there and the high level of complexity involved with outsourcing sales and marketing, it’s important to have a high level of transparency with any partner you are considering working with. This short blog will present 4 different questions that you should discuss with any potential outsourced provider. Remember that discussing these items should help you gain insight into the areas that outsourcing can help you the most, as well as bring to light where you are succeeding the most.
Does sales need to be a core competency?
This question can only be answered by the owners, executives and Board of Directors/Investors of our clients. This is the question that we typically work with and sweat over the most. Many times when we integrate into an organization for an engagement, we encourage that our clients retain product specialists, sales engineers, client service leads and professional servicing as their core responsibility. We want to focus our efforts on managing and executing the sale. When our clients effectively own that core competency, everyone wins. Most importantly, control of the business and long term customer relationships stay with you, the client. Once the engine is in place, decisions can start to be made towards where you should be focusing effort to close as much business as possible. The question then arises, does it make sense to have a team dedicated to generating new business and closing pilot deals while your internal team can focus on cherry picking the pipe for low hanging fruit?
Do I need to focus on my core business?
Today’s economy is fickle, at best. It’s becoming increasingly important that you have your talent focused on where they can create the most value and have the most success. This includes both closing deals and solution delivery. Do you need to grow delivery alongside sales? How focused will your executives and management team be on client satisfaction and product development? How much time should be spent on biz dev? Keep these questions top of mind while discussing with a potential outsourcer.
Do I have access to the talent I need to ramp up my sales and marketing efforts?
Sales and marketing are evolving rapidly and no longer live in their own silos. Buyers now control the sale. You have to have your sales and marketing efforts aligned to effectively capture the market. This means the right talent needs to be in place to execute campaigns, manage lead generation efforts, develop messages, manage technology platforms, complete the requisite ROI analysis, train reps, and MOST IMPORTNANTLY close the sale! In our opinion, the more complex the sale the more processes you need to effectively manage. An outsource sales provider ensures that you focus and drive excellence in each individual phase of your sales cycle. We can bring a dedicated, dynamic team to the table from day one.
Do I have the knowledge to execute?
Sales execution used to be simple. All it involved was making or scheduling meetings, giving presentations, scoping and closing deals. There are now more decision makers and influencers on the other end of the deal. The expectation is that your company will bring experts to the table and be educated on relevant technology platforms. They need to know you can communicate fluidly and manage process and technology effectively. Understanding the adjacent technologies and how they can be applied is more critical now than ever. Do you have the time to commit fully to stay current and knowledgeable?
For more information on how to outsource sales and marketing can help accomplish your goals, please feel free to take a look at our previous blog.
If you would like more information, or would just like to chat with us about issues you may be having or how we can help, please contact us.
by Glen Springer | Dec 2, 2015
Over the past 10 years over a dozen of our virtual sales and marketing engagements have been supporting the sophisticated sales efforts of call centers, business process outsourcers and knowledge process outsourcers. This has been invaluable in helping us learn how to best provide our clients with operational excellence. We keep our finger on the pulse of innovation, and it has given us a unique perspective of what is necessary to consider on the front end in order to ensure successful engagements.
Outsourcing sales and marketing is unlike any other form of outsourcing or professional service. If done properly, the result looks like a blend of customer service, business process, and knowledge process as well as the creative “art of the close.” It’s our position that sales strategy has shifted, and the focus is on the science and the process, with the art coming second. With that being said, one thing we have learned from working in outsourced models for as long as we have is that there is no universally successful approach. The more you share with your potential partner upfront, the more successful you will be.
So, to kick start this dialogue, we want to focus on the following areas to help those of you considering to outsource sales come to understand our strategy and approach on the front-end:
What am I looking to change about sales and marketing, and how well are they aligned?
More leads, closed deals and more revenue is just the beginning. Am I taking a new product to market? Do I need to improve my margins? Do I want clients that can scale? Do I want to be in a growth vertical? Do I want to sell to the budget makers or the budget spenders? Do I want to be in a new geography? Do I want to empower my channels? Is it about pipe velocity or pipe quality? – All of these questions should already be buzzing about your thought process.
Are my sales team and management currently viewed as a strength or weakness?
It’s tough to bridge the gap between sales and marketing. Everyone likes to sit in their own silo. Sales people especially are often overly optimistic, and marketing has a hard time matching this measurable success and enthusiasm. If you ride them too hard though, they lose confidence and drive. If you don’t hold them accountable than the pipe can’t be expected to bear fruit. A question emerges: does it make sense to delegate that management to a partner that is contractually bound to hit targets and service levels from day one?
Will outsourcing help me to manage my risk?
This is a loaded question, but we find the answer will almost always be yes. Organizations that outsource sales are bound contractually to target, metrics, reporting requirements and feedback requirements most organizations rarely get from their employees. Outsource sales organizations reduce fixed costs and migrate to a variable expense on your P&L’s. Outsourced sales and organizations get rid of your need for hard infrastructure and capital investments in technologies and marketing platforms. With an outsourced team you get a Senior Sales and Marketing Talent, Executive Talent, a functioning sales machine and marketing support for generally the same cost as a senior enterprise rep. For new product launches, outsourced partners provide real time market intelligence right off the bat due to their combination with lead gen activities. You get instant impressions and insight into the marketplace.
For more on Gabriel Sales or B2B sales outsourcing, please contact us.
by Glen Springer | Nov 11, 2015
This is a guide to five ways that marketing automation and sales technology can quickly shift your internal culture and help your sa
les team be more effective, and most importantly, win more deals.
The five avenues through which adoption of marketing technology and sales automation will have an immediate positive impact on your performance are as follows:
- Lead Capture
- Lead Qualification
- Email Automation
- Lead Intelligence
- Real Time Lead Alerts
Below is a brief explanation of how each of these features will help boost the performance of your sales team and the success of your marketing efforts.
Lead Capture
Tools come onto the market and promise to help sales and marketing teams improve their efficiency. Pardot Marketing Automation Software, for example, allows you to identify companies and targets that are spending time on your site without the need for any information to be directly supplied by the prospect. The major value established here is through the ability to identify potential prospects without having the lag time of: contact info needing to be input or using a 3rd party data provider like Inside View, LinkedIn, one Source and SalesForceData. This method more quickly identifies the key players within a company, spending time digesting your marketing material. These 3rd party data provides are used to pull in additional data to fill in holes for contacts that are already established.
It is important to not downplay the necessity of being able to capture leads with landing pages and forms. That is not a new concept or strategy and will help increase your ability to hand over qualified prospects smoothly, when combined with strong lead management rules.
Lead Qualification
In today’s B2B markets, there are two main ways to directly and successfully qualify leads: using implicit behaviors and activities or explicit data and demographics.
By using implicit information and dynamic lead scoring, you will have the ability to rank and score formerly unquantifiable activities (email, web, social) variably by importance and then set up response actions. These sales automation efforts seamlessly pass top scoring prospects over to well-prepared sales reps in real time.
In using explicit data and lead grading, you gain the ability to qualify a prospect on who they actually are, and the habits they have exhibited – ex. a CEO versus a workaholic just trying to learn something new by requesting your content. You can also adjust grading up and down depending on industry, company size and other various metrics. Essentially, you are able to grade your prospects against an ideal customer profile that your sales and marketing team identifies.
These tactics will directly help your sales team avoid talking to bad prospects that won’t convert, and these grades and scores provide you with another way to dynamically pre-qualify and assign the best prospects to the best sales reps.
Email Automation
Email automation is a major facet in helping your sales reps take their knowledge about and performance with leads to the next level. Reps now have the ability to use email integration tools for programs like Outlook, Gmail, Apple Mail and Thunderbird to send personalized emails through the marketing automation tool. This integration results in a new way to personally track opens, clicks, and site time that comes with the option to receive real-time automatic notifications sent to reps.
Email automation also allows for new approaches to personalized email campaigns. The marketing team can craft a message or series of messages to the company’s entire pool of prospects, yet dynamically assign the various fields of the email as they apply to each prospect. This serves two main purposes: 1) reps are accredited by leads to having provided appropriate information with no effort (the marketing software and sales engine took care of everything) and 2) all replies to specific content go directly to the assigned rep, and can be analyzed to provide further insight for future targeting.
A consequential bonus of email automation is that sales reps can pass back “not-yet-qualified” leads to be furthered nurtured by the marketing automation program. This allows for continued exposure, lead qualification and reduced lead exit. Sales reps are notified if the lead “comes back to life” and the lead is automatically sent more digestible content.
Lead Intelligence
Through marketing automation and sales technologies, reps are able to track all online behaviors (email, web, social) and that data is put directly into any CRM (Salesforce) instead of requiring the sales rep to learn the ins and outs of the back-end functions of the marketing automation prospect tracking system and put the information in themselves. Actionable data including the original lead source, specific page views, keyword searches, webinar attendance etc. can all be tracked. This allows for sales reps to profile and frame the content for anything from conversations, voicemails and follow-up emails based on the prospects specific actions and activities.
Real-Time Lead Alerts
This function of sales technology and marketing automation is crucial if you want to compete effectively against competition in the market. Timing is everything, as any good sales rep knows. Real-time lead alerts allow sales reps to reduce response time almost entirely when companies or leads are actively engaged in the sales education collateral. Sales reps receive instant alerts via email, text, mobile applications, and desktop notifications – whichever medium they prefer.
With these alerts and summaries, reps can:
- Prioritize their day with the most active prospects
- Perform quick lookups of anonymous visitors in LinkedIn or Jigsaw to identify potential new prospects
- Click on links to trigger CRM profile lookups
- Send email to active prospects with a few quick clicks
- Filter out unwanted and distracting activity
All five of these features: Lead Capture, Lead Qualification, Email Automation, Lead Intelligence, and Real-Time Lead Alerts save your reps time and help them close more deals. An effective integration and strategy surrounding marketing automation and sales technology will help you to synthesize marketing and sales objectives and improve overall company success.
For more information on how to increase B2B sales volume and how you can adjust your B2B lead generation, demand generation and sales tactics, look for our 5th and final blog of this series, out next week.
If you would like to learn more about how we at Gabriel Sales can combine your product knowledge and thought leadership with our sales and marketing expertise to increase your success and beat out competition, please contact us.
by Glen Springer | Oct 28, 2015
In the first blog of this series we outlined how the buying process has changed dramatically over the past several years. The Buyer, not the Seller, now controls the entire purchase process as B2B sales are shifting to consumer based. We also discussed what it is you need to consider and be prepared for if you are eager to drive meaningful cultural change and increased revenue for your organization. Part 2 will cover how your culture, attitude and team dynamics can impact your ability to increase revenue growth, and the need to facilitate a shift in your customer’s buying process, not your B2B sales process.
Longer sales cycles = Be prepared
You have to begin by accepting that buyers have extended their purchase cycle by 1.5X-2X (Sirius, 2012) and revenue growth is going to be both a marathon and a sprint. Your sales team still needs to remain focused on hitting revenue targets, however you need to accept that as deals enter the pipe and buyers are going through the first few stages of their purchase, some of them are going to hit the pause button. What is crucial is that you have a plan for what occurs next when this happens. Does the lead stay with the rep or does it go back to the inside sales team? Is there a way to stay in front of them without wasting the time of sales reps? What content will they want to digest in the interim?
Buyers want and expect to be educated first
It may be necessary to embrace the need to develop new disciplines and fully commit to content marketing. This is arguably the most radical change that needs to be made and it is also your most significant opportunity. Your marketing team will have to take your buyer further through your sales process because it is what your buyers demand. The days of generating leads through marketing and tossing them over the fence to the sales team are over.
Hint: Marketers can’t do this alone! They will need the support and contribution of your executive team and product specialists, acting as thought leaders. If marketers can effectively leverage your thought leaders, they can support the sales team exponentially, keeping them focused on selling.
Sales and marketing on the same team
The days of compartmentalized offices are over. For many companies, this is the biggest hurdle as it has become a cultural norm. B2B Sales doesn’t always care about what marketing does as long as it leads to more leads, and marketers don’t think sales appreciates or understands the work they do (and they are often correct). As with any successful team, to compete and win you are going to need to align sales and marketing with the tools, content and processes necessary to support your inside sales reps with content that demonstrates thought leaders and differentiators effectively. Mutual respect is key.
Technology is king – embrace it
The advent of marketing automation platforms, Google Analytics and CRM’s has led to the ability to bring sales and marketing teams together like never before. These technologies allow you to implement a Sales Architecture, Infrastructure, and Technology Platform that provides transparency and accountability throughout your entire sales process. Keeping score helps teams flourish. This isn’t rocket science; just head out to any Little League or Soccer Field on a Saturday during a game and compare it to what happens during practice. During exercises, energy level and focus fluctuates. Put them on the field where they are accountable for and measured by their results and everything changes. It’s a great deal more interesting and fun as well.
Finally, budget appropriately
As was previously mentioned, sales is now both a marathon and a sprint. What this means is, while we appreciate the need and pressure to hit quarterly numbers, it’s unreasonable to expect an effective process to fall into place that quickly. You need to plan on investing in this new engine for at least 4-6 months until you will start seeing constant results. Remember the scale of the shift you are undergoing. As the process becomes imbedded into your culture and your teams align with this new train of thought and start firing on all cylinders, revenue will increase and cost of sales will decrease. This dual-benefit allows you to utilize your increased revenue and cost-savings to grow the engine and produce exponential results.
Summary – Sales and Marketing as one unit
- Your buyer demands education
- They want access to thought leadership and product specialists
- Thought leaders can’t waste time on prospects that just want education
- Your buyer does not want to engage with sales until they are ready to purchase
- You must demonstrate you understand their situation and pain before engaging a prospect with sales
Everyone can understand the social contract between salesperson and buyer. The Seller sells, and the Buyer buys. Pain, gain, and solution selling are still important, but it is becoming increasingly important for your sales team and your marketers to get prospects on the phone by sharing thought leadership from your product specialists and executives. Pressuring the buyer to buy and introducing a sales rep prematurely may lead to winning a couple deals in the short term, but it will drive more deals into your competitor’s hands in the long term.
So the question remains – what does my B2B sales and marketing organization need to look like to create the proper demand for my sales team now that marketing’s job is to take buyers beyond just awareness and drive leads into my sales funnel? Look for our next blog in the series that outlines “The Core Competencies I Need From My Demand Generation Team.”
If you would like to learn more about how Gabriel Sales can apply some of what we have learned for your business specifically, contact us today.
