by Glen Springer | Sep 17, 2012
As a sales outsourcing company, we are now quickly becoming sales marketing automation outsourcing specialists as well. As an outsourced sales company, we have a unique perspective how marketing automation helps sales because we specialize in leveraging content marketing to engage prospects as much as we use marketing automation to generate and nurture leads. And by engage we mean helping to convince your buyer to buy from your company. This blog addresses the top 10 advantages of putting sales and marketing automation tools in your sales reps hands. (If you’ve never seen a Marketing Automation Software here is a quick link to 5-minute demo so the points below make a ton more sense.)
How Does Marketing Automation Outsourcing Help Increase Sales Reps Production?
Lead scoring
For companies that are lucky enough to have a steady stream of leads marketing automation prioritizes where your sales reps should invest their time. Marketing automation tools uses realtime scoring to see who is most engaged. With this point system, you are no longer need to guess “where to start”.
Your buyer tells your rep their interests
Marketing automation identifies what content your buyer is most interested in. This essentially gives your rep night vision goggles into your buyers biggest interests and concerns.
Help your sales champion to champion
A sales rep can be sold by their prospect. If you, as the rep, have a hot one on the line and it’s going great, utilizing a Marketing Automation tool is key. You can see if your prospect is actually opening your emails, clicking on the content you are sending and going to your site. If the content is not engaging or not being shared, you can raise that as an issue and ask “how can we improve our performance to make it easier for you to sell.” We find that the prospects that transact, typically engage with at least 12 pieces of content. If a prospect is not engaging, chances are they are not serious about buying.
Saves time and provides feedback
Email templates programmed in the Marketing Automation Tool can be measured in their effectiveness (essentially you can now do in the micro what you do with your bulk email blasts). If emails are not working you know. Streamlining great emails that work keep follows up simple while also keeping your rep on the phone.
Saves more time by automating follow up emails
Using drip campaigns set up by marketing “from” the rep allows the reps to stay engaged with non-active prospects. No more worrying about wasting time and precious phone time on cool prospects. We never know when a cool lead will now be ready to buy and drips ensure prospects will think of you when that time arrives and they are ready to engage.
Quick access to all past communications
With streamlined integration between a marketing automation software (we use Pardot) and your CRM, all the rep needs to do is use their Outlook Pardot connector and their email history will automatically be entered into Pardot and Salesforce. This keeps updating the CRM simple.
Reduced headcount
With marketing automation, reps can now “work” more prospects, requiring less reps and more time for reps to work on closing deals, not nurturing non-ready to buy leads.
Prevents lead and deal leakage
Typically sales reps will abandon leads if not ready to buy within a given time period, depending on the sales cycle. Reps need to work closest to the dollar. To close those deals on the horizon requires nurturing, and most reps do not have the time to do this even with the best of intentions. They are incentivized to close this quarter. Marketing automation lets them close this quarter and continue to build a healthy pipe for next quarter. Marketing Automation cures that sickness.
Model the top performers
Automation and CRM tools allow a view into top performers secrets of success What leads do they pursue? What scoring attributes commonly lead to a sale? How do they engage prospects? When do they engage prospects? Periodic and systematic analysis of rep performance relative to the attributes and activities that are captured by demand generation tools and CRM can provide invaluable insights for struggling reps.
Call at the right time
A lead deck is a live feed that is part of the tool that notifies your rep the minute your prospects are active on your site. When your prospects have your company top of mind, and your buyer is sitting at their desk (or on their PDA checking you out) your rep has it’s a great time to pick up the phone or hit them with an email.
To see a quick demo of a Marketing Automation Tool Click Here. To see if we can accelerate your B2B demand generation with better and faster technology integration and getting your sales team up to speed please feel free to reach out for a quick conversation and we will let you know if we can help. We guarantee what we are sharing here is simply the tip of the iceberg.
by Glen Springer | Sep 14, 2012
Content Marketing is now required as ground cover for your sales team. If you haven’t started you need to start now. As a sales outsourcing company working to successfully launch sales content marketing efforts for multiple clients we often hear that “it take to much time, or I am not ready to commit.” Our position:
- Content marketing does not need to be complicated for B2B marketers to meet the needs of sales. As a thought leader you have tons of little snippets of value to share on a regular basis.
- You don’t have a choice if you want your sales reps to successfully compete and win.
As a sales outsourcing company we understand that, especially for company’s new to content marketing, it may seem daunting. But it’s easier than you think. We are experts and thought leaders in sales and marketing tactics and strategies. You are experts and thought leaders in your product and solution area. One of the values we bring as a sales and marketing outsourcing company is that we have a methodical system to quickly turn your thought leadership into tools that will empower your sales and marketing efforts.
Below is our framework for content marketing that will help empower your sales team with the tools they need to be successful.
Using our framework we help our clients to quickly determine what specific content is required at specific stages of the sales cycle. We implement Digital Demand Center™ our proprietary Content Management System to accelerate this process. As the survey below indicates the majority of the content required can be initially distributed with blogs. When combined with our expertise in sales storytelling, educational webcasting and sales video content production we can get your sales team (or our sales outsourcing and marketing effort on your behalf) to market with a winning sales content marketing strategy in a fraction of the time you may be able to achieve on your own.
Can Sales Outsourcing Help Your Company?
To check out what your peers are already doing check out this previous blog post. To discover how we can help accelerate your sales integrating multiple tactics and strategies please feel free to reach out for an initial conversation.
by Glen Springer | Sep 9, 2012
A Successful Outsourced Sales and Marketing Company can take Tips from a Rock Star?
As a successful outsourced sales and marketing company it’s important that we keep our outsourced sales reps and marketers up beat and motivated. Success in life no matter what your pursuit all take the same basic building blocks. This quote was particularly helpful in demonstrating that with our sales team so we felt like we would share it with a wider audience.
Bono In response to the question about U2’s drive for huge worldwide success:
“Be honest. Are you really telling me that you’d never contemplated failure before?”
Responded:
“I don’t remember it. I would get angry, I would get upset that we weren’t what we could be. I don’t remember thing that we never would be successful. I always thought we would. And as soon as we did, it would be clear. Doubt, self doubt, was about the current material we could improve, but the destination was never a doubt. See, there is a chasm between envy and desire, OK? Envy is like wanting something that’s not yours, not worked for. But desire is different. Desire comes out of wanting what is yours, and still wanting it even if it’s not yet there. When desire becomes envy there is a difference. And there is a difference between the point of view of the fan. When (a fan) looks up at desire they think I can be”
Great quote but what does this have to do with sales and marketing. We think the difference between desire and envy, where you are coming from in your heart and head is often the difference between success and failure. Obviously you can’t get much more successful then U2 has. And its clear from this quote that this was not an accident.
What does this quote demonstrate to help create a successful outsourced sales and marketing company?
- Success requires passion but not anger. A drive to push yourself and your team.
- Success requires knowing what your chief aim is. Visualizing it.
- Success requires never doubting that you are capable of it.
- Success requires coming from a place (desire) where you believe in what you are doing (selling, marketing)
- Success is about never forgetting that your success requires that you genuinely care about your fan (customer).
If your sales pipe could use a boost feel free to contact us to see if one of our programs can help.
by Glen Springer | Sep 5, 2012
The entire purpose of a demand generation engine is to align sales and marketing to put more Sales Qualified Leads in your closers hands. To do this requires your inside sales team helps with your marketing automation implementation. As part of this process Gabriel Sales typically executes a 90 day lead generation campaign that can fuel your initial Demand Generation Engine. Your campaign combines email marketing, outbound telesales reps and in some cases PPC and SEO campaigns. Your dedicated campaign helps to accelerate the production of your engine producing “Sales Qualified Leads” ready for your sales reps and increases your initial volume of earlier stage leads to support your telesales and sales team with earlier stage deals if necessary. These 10 tips for a productive marketing automation implementation will also help to accelerate your investment in your marketing automation platform and to help with the cultural shift to a more mature demand generation process. They should help you to avoid false starts and turn quarters of effort into months.
In Marketing Automation Implementation Best Practice – Agree on Lead Definitions we discuss how sales and marketing can quickly reach agreement on early stage pipe. We also discuss scoring criteria so your sales executive can help frame the engine without needing to be involved or distracted by the minutiae of the implementation. In this blog we discuss the simple steps and recommendations to make the effort as productive as quickly as possible and to give your sales team access to the increased lead volume sooner rather than later.
Don’t disrupt what already works – As you implement your demand generation engine we recommend that you don’t disrupt your existing lead flow to sales. If you have SEO, PPC or email campaigns in motion don’t stop that practice.
Involve Sales Executive Early – Get your sales executive involved in the Early Stage Pipe scoring criteria. See Agree on Lead Definition Blogs
Have Your Sales Executive Work with Telesales Team to Develop Smart Questions – By giving your outbound telesales reps the right probing questions, need assessment questions, open ended questions and leading questions you can script and accelerate your telesales ability to effectively score leads. We have a quick 1 hour process to make this seamless.
Use Leads Generated from One Designated Campaign to Initially Feed the Engine – It does not make sense to immediately take all your leads directly into your Marketing Automation Platform out of the gate. We strongly recommend you start with one source. Ideally a campaign dedicated specifically for this purpose. Gabriel Sales has several campaigns designed specifically for this purpose. This allows you to feed your demand generation and Marketing Automation tool in a methodical way with a clean set of leads.
Designate One Person to Assign Leads Coming Out of Your New Program – Typically your SVP, VP or Director of Sales is already assigning leads to your sales reps that come from other campaigns. Its generally a best practice to keep that person designated to assigning leads the same and that this person gets trained in the use of Pardot to assign leads as well so the understand how lead scoring works. In some cases we understand that sales needs more leads faster and doesn’t always want to wait for leads to be Sales Qualified. In some cases Sales Accepted or even new leads to the pipe may meet your immediate needs. During your initial campaign designed specifically to feed your engine the SVP of Sales (or whoever you have designated to assign leads) can assign leads from the initial campaign effort at multiple stages noted above as A, B and C based on their short term lead volume needs. However we simply strongly recommend that you don’t take all the leads and assign them at stage A or B so the engine has time to do its job and marketing can learn how to optimize the engine.
Note – Telesales Engaged Leads typically have indicated they are not ready to speak with a Sales Rep yet as part of their qualifying process so these we would recommend you nurture with telesales reps and your automation platform.
Marketing Should Train your Sales Reps on the New Lead Scoring Criteria – Before handing leads to sales reps it’s important that they understand the new scoring criteria so they can maximize and intelligently approach the buyer in the most effective way.
Marketing Should Train your Sales Reps on the Source of the Lead and How to Use Pardot – Have your marketing manager train sales how to use the insights and tools a marketing automation engine provides. (e.g. how to find the buyer information in your CRM, how to use the lead deck, etc.) Pardot has great online training for this as well.
Execute a Wake the Dead Campaign from your Marketing Automation Platform – Once your marketing automation platform is working and you have your initial leads flowing from Gabriel Sales the first campaign we recommend your marketing team executes with your existing opt in database (leads not generated through Gabriel Sales initial campaign) is a “Wake the Dead” campaign. This is a drip campaign that your marketing team or Gabriel Sales will execute to leads that no sales reps have touched for a quarter or more and/or dead leads sitting in your database that are not currently assigned to a specific rep. Typically the Wake the Dead campaign will parallel the initial drip campaigns that are being created as part of your initial campaign with Gabriel Sales. Companies generally see a solid bump in volume with these campaigns and they are a great way to start to wrap up your initial implementation.
Don’t Over Complicate Your Initial Drip Campaigns – This is probably one of the biggest lessons we learned. When we first started we came up with a very complex IF/ then workflow so if they opened this piece of content on a topic area we would send them another piece of content on topic area B and then if they didn’t open that we would send them content Z. It was too much and just writing about it confuses me. What we found is about 80% of the value you are going to get from your initial drip campaigns is going to come from simply implementing them. It takes time to learn a new software and the biggest value the software provided initially is simply keeping your brand and solution in front of your buyers over time so your reps don’t have to. A simple five to seven touch campaign without any IF/then work flows was enough to get more deals flowing at less cost. Don’t frustrate yourself. You will quickly learn from your wins.
Use Existing Content or Quickly Produced Content to Kick Start Your Engine – The whole point of a marketing automation platform is to drive more business in a more effective way. This starts with how you are speaking with your buyer. If your content is still all about your product – tech sheets, features and benefits etc. its -time to think about being “customer centric rather than product centric.” Your drip campaigns will drive more business if you talk to your customers about their problems and their needs. You may need to look at the “voice” of your messages and refine your language a bit. As a starting point look at how many times you talk about “Our” product, “our” team vs. “your” needs, “your” business and “your” customers. If you are working with Gabriel Sales you can implement Gabriel Sales Digital Sales Base Camp Content Management System you can quickly create context for your existing content. This CMS allows you to immediately take your existing material to start being customer centric by recontextualizing existing offers and content with easy to construct landing pages. Finally we really love webcasts to kick start these programs because you can typically cut one webcast into several blog posts with graphics you have already created.
We hope you find these 10 Tips to align your sales and marketing efforts to accelerate the production of your marketing automation implementation. Hopefully these basic tips and best practices help you avoid some headaches and helps you learn from our mistakes and successes. If you have not checked out what these marketing automation platforms can do and the benefits to your company here is a quick overview from Pardot 5 Minute Overview of Marketing Automation and this post will make a whole lot more sense.
Please feel free to CONTACT US with any additional questions, more tips on your marketing automation implementation, and to see if we can help you as you ramp your sales pipe short term and build for long term success.
by Glen Springer | Sep 4, 2012
This blog is part of a two part series that discusses two marketing automation implementation best practices to accelerate your demand generation engine implementation using Sales Lead Definitions. These marketing automation implementation best practices allow marketers we work with to increase their initial lead volume from our initial Gabriel Sales Ramp™ Campaign (to keep the sales team happy) while we also help to build your engine.
As background – as Gabriel Sales works with our clients building a repeatable telesales process and demand generation engine, we often discover that your company has great metrics and processes to move deals from “Sales Qualified Opportunity” to “Close” but limited visibility into the Early Stage Pipe metrics. Just like late stage pipe velocity, using Sales Lead Definitions to define the discrete stages of your early stage pipe is critical to success of any integrated content marketing and sales effort to put more sales qualified leads into the pipe.
The purpose of this blog is to introduce a marketing automation implementation best practice using Sales Lead Definitions to help accelerate agreement on how the early stage pipe can be scored so your sales team:
- Can quickly help marketing create the lead definitions and get back to selling
- Has the flexibility to successfully take early stage leads from the pipe in the short term to take advantage of the initial lead volume
- And as the engine reaches maturity, the sales team reaps the benefit of more sales qualified leads in the mid and long term
Starting with the End in Mind with your Marketing Automation Implementation
Building a Demand Generation engine does not happen overnight but once created it pays huge dividends. The top three short term benefits are:
- Turn buyers ready to buy into Sales Qualified Leads faster to increase your sales pipeline’s velocity
- Maximize your lead generation budget by effectively nurturing leads not ready to buy so when they are ready to buy they buy from you, (which will eventually increase the size of your sales qualified pipeline)
- Reduce the cost of time spent by your senior sales reps and product specialists educating and selling to buyers that are not ready to engage with sales yet (or buyers who are just kicking the tires and never plan on buying) so your top resources spend their time focused on “closest to the dollar” activities.
Once the engine is built the end goal is to take your increased revenue and the bottom line savings your demand generation engine is producing to:
- Put more even more leads into the pipe
To build an engine requires a telesales team and marketing team aligned with a singular focus of putting more sales qualified leads into the hands of your closers. Below is how this alignment works.
A Framework for Agreement on the Lead Stages is a Critical Marketing Automation Best Practice
Most clients we work with are generally great at defining what a “Lead” is and what a “Sale Qualified Lead” is. If a company has an active inside sales team in place already they may have some of the other sales lead definitions in place as well.
As part of our initial consulting work we work with the sales team to distill specific probing and open ended questions that can be used in the early stage sales process to define where the buyer is in their sales process. This is then used by both marketing and the inside team to support the sales team.
Ultimately the key driver to the organization is going to be how many deals actually close. What a combined telesales and marketing team can impact is how many “Sales Qualified Leads” get in the hands of the “Closer”.
There is no one right and wrong way to set the criteria below. What we are sharing is a starting point so your executives and your closers can evaluate the early stage pipe and make better decisions about what actions to take. For sales specifically it is meant to communicate where the buyer is in their buying cycle, if and when sales should engage and how sales should approach engaging your buyer (where is the buyer in their buying cycle). The criteria below allows your marketing automation to do its job and allows your inside team to move deals through the pipe more effectively. When properly executed you will:
- Save your closers and product specialist’s bandwidth.
- Allow your sales team to “cherry pick” leads from the pipe earlier if they see an opportunity they would like to pursue.
- Clearly communicates to your sales team where the buyer is in their buying cycle so they know how to best approach that buyer.
Lead Target – The decision makers and companies you are targeting. Ideally you are targeting an ideal customer profile.
Marketing Qualified Lead – Any lead that has expressed mild interest or raised their hand and opted into receiving content from your company. The source of the lead does not matter.
Telesales Accepted Lead – A lead where the company is the right fit (right account profile) and the buyer you are speaking with has the interest in learning more. May have the ability to influence or may have the ability to get you in front of the influencer or decision maker.
Telesales Engaged Lead – (a sub set of Telesales Accepted Lead). There is an agreed next step. Could be in a week, month or could be in a quarter. In some cases it could be at a specific point in time for next year’s budget cycle. Typically the buyer has been asked if they are ready to talk to sales and has declined “not yet but stay in touch”.
Sales Accepted Lead – You know the lead has the ability to influence or champion. Your product can solve a problem the buyer has articulated. May be willing to schedule an appointment. May require someone more senior to move forward.
Sales Qualified Lead – Meets one or more of the following criteria. Decision maker is involved. Path to budget or live budget is in play. A champion has expressed interest in moving the deal forward with you. Specific pain or need has been articulated by the buyer.
We generally find that reaching the initial agreement is simple to reach as part of our initial interview process. Once the questions and criteria are in place we are able to work with our client to keep lead volume up as we work with our clients to build the engine. For more marketing automation implementation best practices details check out our next best practice blog – How to Keep Volume Up as You Build Your Engine.
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