by Glen Springer | Sep 2, 2012
Marketing Automation Implementation is a fantastic way to align sales and marketing. As company that provides marketing automation consulting, we have multiple educational resources to help your team navigate and implement best practices. Unfortunately, if you are growing fast and adapting to the new rules of sales engagement you don’t always get it right. The purpose of this blog is to provide a discrete example of why it’s critical to make sure that you don’t neglect training your sales team (especially your outbound sales team) on the tools being leveraged in support of their efforts, once they are in place. Hopefully, this cautionary tale will help you learn some Best Practices and What to Avoid.
Backstory
We are using an example of how we blew a deal with lack of diligence. The names have been deleted to protect the innocent. After setting the backstory, we will talk about Best Practices, What is arguably a Worst Practice, the result (cost us a deal), the Lesson We Learned and what you can do to avoid learning the hard way.
Best Practice
So lets paint the picture: a potential buyer comes onto your website. In this case, your offer is an educational White Paper (in our case, Selling Smarter and Selling Faster, which is a solid producer for us because its purely educational).
The content is offered up talking about the customer using word like “Your Team” (see our supporting blog post, “Your Customer Is the Center of Your Universe” for that best practice).
Your buyer is looking for some education. Your marketers’ job and your sales reps’ job is to help educate. So as part of your marketing automation program you send a follow up with:
From:
Sent: Wednesday, August 29, 2012 10:03 AM
To:
Subject: A Couple Other Recent Best Practices from Gabriel Sales
Hi XXXXXXXXX,
Hope you find some tips your team can leverage from the “Sell Smarter, Sell Faster” White Paper.
Here is a quick blog post on some Best Practices you can leverage to keep your Email Marketing aligned with your buyers’ goals and your sales team’s efforts Keep it Conversational – Best Practices for B2B E-Mail Marketing that the team put together after receiving some questions from sales and marketing professionals that liked the White Paper.
Also in case you missed it, here is 4-minute video How to Accelerate Your B2B Demand Generation Engine that describes how your team can start to align your sales and content marketing to lift your results for both.
Look forward to connecting to see how else we can help. If you have any questions about any of the educational resources we are sending across don’t hesitate to reach out.
Regards,
Once again you are keeping your Customer at the Center of the Universe. Keeping the contact helpful and educational as well as following the correct sales content framework.
The sales rep that has been incredibly productive for you as an outbound cold caller, is a valuable member of your team, with a track record as a closer, and does what they do best: “sell”. They get on top of the leads and reach out.
Worst Practice
Here is what they send:
From:
Date: Wed, Aug 29, 2012 at 10:06 AM
Subject: Your Inquiry to Gabriel Sales
To:
Hi XXXXXXX,
Thank you for your inquiry regarding outsourced sales. Gabriel Sales has been helping companies bring their products to market via lead generation, lead nurturing, closing deals as well as managing the entire sales team for over 10 years. We have worked with many offshore companies, U.S. start-ups as well as the Fortune 100. We have deep domain experience selling Marketing Services and Technology. Our most recent success has been bringing an Indian data analytics firm from $500K-$12M in revenue in 3 years. They then sold for $65M.
We are very process oriented. We will develop the best way to sell your product, (messaging, packaging and pricing if necessary), begin selling, track all the ratios related to the sale, and create a repeatable forecast-able sales system and Marketing plan for you to then to run yourself or continue to outsource with us. We will cold call, buy lists, or manage a marketing campaign to get leads; or work leads provided by you.
In regards to selling similar products, we have sold many marketing solutions to VPs of Marketing in the SMB and Fortune 1000 markets.
Our model is based on a retainer and consulting fees. We believe in automating the sales process as much as possible to reduce the human resource requirements. We do this through creating landing pages and content that can “sell” as much as possible as well as utilizing Marketing Automation software.
We look forward to your response.
All sales focused, nothing about the customer and totally narcissistic and self centered (once again, for best practices here, read Your Customer is the Center of Your Universe).
The Result
Here is what we get back:
From: XXXXXXXX
Sent: Wednesday, August 29, 2012 3:38 PM
To: Glen Springer
Subject: Fwd: Your Inquiry to Gabriel Sales
Yuck! You blew it!
We lost the deal.
Lesson Learned
We had already psych profiled this rep with our internal culture tool from RoundPegg so we know that this rep is wired to be really productive following up on inbound, as well as cold calling outbound, which is why we promoted them to a role where they can also follow up on inbound leads,. We are confident they will produce. See Tips for Migrating Outbound to Following Up on Inbound Leads.
We failed as Managers. And it isn’t always about that when you boil it down. We were extremely busy with our lead volume and the success of a couple of programs. The rep was well trained to follow up with leads in 24 hours so we tossed them on this project without training him on the following…
…Best Practices
The Source of the Lead – They thought it was coming from someone we had already engaged with.
The Drip Program that Was Already in Place – The rep had no idea that the lead was already getting two emails within 24 hours.
How to Use The Pardot Lead Deck – The Rep had no idea they could leverage the lead deck to research the prospect in more detail.
The Lead Scoring Rules – The Rep had no clue that we had lead scoring rules to help him figure out where the Buyer was in their buying cycle.
Getting The Rep Some Online Training – Even a basic intro to Marketing Automation for Sales Peoplefrom Pardot or taking them to several of our back to basic blogs introducing the new rules of sales engagement. So here are a couple here for you on this topic:
B2B Sales Marketing Company – 5 Mistakes to avoid following up on Inbound Leads
B to B Demand Generation’s New Rules of Engagement
Selling is About Serving and Sharing First in the New Engagement Model
Big Lesson Learned
We took one of our better sales reps ,selling in the old paradigm of hard hitting beat-the-doors-down cold calling, and threw them into the new paradigm. We have a customer to thank for letting us know that this went sideways. We cut corners and we had someone slip through the cracks. So our lesson, which we are passing on to you, is never assume even your better reps will figure this out on their own. Invest the time it takes to get them trained. A couple hours and a couple of sessions can make all the difference in the world.
For more marketing automation consulting tips we invite you to download our white paper “Sell Smarter, Sell Faster”. To learn if we can help your sales and/or marketing team improve their performance (and to learn more about our experience) please feel free to reach out and contact us.
by Glen Springer | Sep 1, 2012
I am a huge fan of David Foster Wallace. In a commencement speech he tells the story of three fish:
“There are these two young fish swimming along, and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says, “Morning, boys, how’s the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes, “What the hell is water?”
The immediate point of the fish story is that the most obvious, ubiquitous, important realities are often the ones that are the hardest to see and talk about…A huge percentage of the stuff that I tend to be automatically certain of is, it turns out, totally wrong and deluded. Here’s one example of the utter wrongness of something I tend to be automatically sure of: Everything in my own immediate experience supports my deep belief that I am the absolute center of the universe, the realest, most vivid and important person in existence. We rarely talk about this sort of natural, basic self-centeredness, because it’s so socially repulsive, but it’s pretty much the same for all of us, deep down. It is our default-setting, hard-wired into our boards at birth. Think about it: There is no experience you’ve had that you were not at the absolute center of.”
Wallace’s insight is truly brilliant and something sales and marketing professionals in the world of online B2B marketing can never forget. Stated another way:
Your Customer IS the Center of Your Universe
In the new rules of sales and marketing engagement we need to always remember this universal truth and fight our hard wired biological drive to be the narcissistic self-centered creatures we were designed to be.
Here is a quick and easy test to see if your team is getting it right
Read your sales content and see how many times you use the words “We”, “Us”, “Our”, or your brand or product names and then compare it to how many times you use the words “You”, “Your” and your targets Title or Job Function. Below are two real world examples of a first emails that have gone out from our team.
How this slip occurred in our process is the topic of a second blog (and cautionary tale) entitled Best Practices Integrating Your Outbound Sales Team into Your Marketing Automation Program to be published in a couple of days.
Email 1
- Narcissistic and Self Centered Being The Creatures we Hard Wired to Be: -11
- Customer is the Center of the Universe Score +2
- Success Score – 9
From:
Date: Wed, Aug 29, 2012 at 10:06 AM
Subject: Your Inquiry to Gabriel Sales
To:
Hi XXXXXXX,
Thank you for your inquiry regarding outsourced sales. Gabriel Sales has been helping companies bring their products to market via lead generation, lead nurturing, closing deals as well as managing the entire sales team for over 10 years. We have worked with many offshore companies, U.S. start-ups as well as the Fortune 100. We have deep domain experience selling Marketing Services and Technology. Our most recent success has been bringing an Indian data analytics firm from $500K-$12M in revenue in 3 years. They then sold for $65M.
We are very process oriented. We will develop the best way to sell your product, (messaging, packaging and pricing if necessary), begin selling, track all the ratios related to the sale, and create a repeatable forecast-able sales system and Marketing plan for you to then to run yourself or continue to outsource with us. We will cold call, buy lists, or manage a marketing campaign to get leads; or work leads provided by you.
In regards to selling similar products, we have sold many marketing solutions to VPs of Marketing in the SMB and Fortune 1000 markets.
Our model is based on a retainer and consulting fees. We believe in automating the sales process as much as possible to reduce the human resource requirements. We do this through creating landing pages and content that can “sell” as much as possible as well as utilizing Marketing Automation software.
We look forward to your response.
Email 2
- Narcissistic and and Self Centered Being The Creatures we Hard Wired to Be: 0
- Customer is the Center of the Universe Score +9
- Success Score +9
From:
Sent: Wednesday, August 29, 2012 10:03 AM
To:
Subject: A Couple Other Recent Best Practices from Gabriel Sales
Hi XXXXXXXXX
Hope you find some tips your team can leverage from the “Sell Smarter, Sell Faster” White Paper.
Here is a quick blog post on some Best Practices you can leverage to keep your Email Marketing aligned with your buyers’ goals and your sales team’s efforts Keep it Conversational – Best Practices for B2B E-Mail Marketing that the team put together after receiving some questions from sales and marketing professionals that liked the White Paper.
Also in case you missed it here is 4 minute video How to Accelerate Your B2B Demand Generation Engine that describes how your team can start to align your sales and content marketing to lift your results for both.
Look forward to connecting to see how else we can help. If you have any questions about any of the educational resources we are sending across don’t hesitate to reach out.
Regards,
With this one simple approach to your outbound communication, from both your sales reps and your marketers, you will see a sales lift across the board.
As a little additional backstory we got this wrong at Gabriel Sales this week because we did not correctly train one of our sales reps when they were promoted. That’s another story for a blog that will soon follow. The incident was also a strong reminder that sales and marketing alignment is not always seamless. Hopefully this post makes it a little more seamless for your team.
For additional Best Practices regarding online B2B marketing, feel free to check out our White Paper – Selling Smarter and Selling Faster.
Also wanted to give a plug to David Foster Wallace and would highly recommend that if you are into literature and great story telling that you read Infinite Jest. Written in the 90s its an incredibly predictive future version of North America, and touches on competitiveness, aspiring to excellence, addictive and compulsive behavior, advertising, media, film theory and popular entertainment. Here is a link to his Wikipedia site. Have fun.
by Glen Springer | May 8, 2012
Can a Marketing Automation Software make your sales team more productive? Generally we find that the answer is yes. However with all the features offered in these software solutions the more important question from our perspective as a B2B sales and marketing company is where should you focus the software during the initial implementation to gain traction. With the right focus you can start to produce and ROI quickly. We recommend you look at your Sales Process and Marketing Automation in tandem. To decide where and how to prioritize your initial implementation it helps to consider:
- Where you can get the best lift by improving your current sales process
- Are there parts of your process you can automate quickly
That stated here are some questions you can ask yourself to start thinking about where to get started.
ROI around lead volume:
- How effective is your company converting inbound leads into sales qualified leads. How much time/bandwidth does your sales team devote to converting inbound leads? Do you follow up one or two times then drop that effort?
- Consequentially…how many dead leads are sitting in your database?
- How effective is your sales team in prioritizing your inbound requests. Are they pursuing leads and working opportunities that don’t convert.
If this is a challenge you can focus initially on automated drip marketing programs. You can score a leads engagement and prioritize much more effectively.
ROI around decreasing your reps time spent educating the buyer:
- How complex is your sale? Or an even better question how many problem does your solution solve for your customer?
- How much education is required for your customer to become a viable prospect?
- How strong is your brand? Do you even have a brand or do your sales reps need to establish your credibility and thought leadership position with your customers?
- How educated is your customer about your category and solution area? How much time do your senior reps spend educating the prospect?
- Does your sale require a champion on the buyer side to educate their internal team?
If this is your challenge you can focus on creating a series of Webcasts, short videos and if you are working with Gabriel Sales you can implement our Digital Sales Base Camp™ to decrease the amount of time your senior reps invest in educating the buyer while simultaneously watching how the buyer consumes your content by contextualizing your content (including blog posts) for specific customer segments.
ROI from understanding your metrics
- What percentage of your revenue comes from new leads?
- What percentage of total opportunities come from existing prospects?
- Does most of your business come from leads generated in the last 30 days?
- How much of your business comes from customers that first demonstrated interest 3 months ago? 12 months ago?
- What is coming in from cold calling? PPC? SEO?
- Do you offer free trials or evaluations? At what rate do those free trials convert to paying customers? What is the process a buyer goes through to convert post a free trial?
- What ensure a trial implementation is successful?
- How deeply do they engage during a free trial?
A marketing automation software is also a great repository of all sorts of data sets. With a smart marketing and sales analyst you can really drill down into multiple different areas of your sales process in half the time or less it used to take to do serious deal flow analysis. Gaps and future areas of improvement are much easier to identify and get right from incremental and in some case exponential revenue gains. We have also found that this data is invaluable for clients that are getting beat up by Venture Capitalists. With hard data they are able to defend their valuations with hard data.
When approached the right way and asking the right questions of your sales process you can experience some quick wins with your marketing automation implementation. We are experiencing some fantastic initial success reducing cost of sales percentages for both ourselves and our clients. The learning curve is exponential. So pick a lane and get started.
If you have not checked out what these platforms can do here is a quick overview from Pardot 5 Minute Overview of Marketing Automation. If you have a stalled implementation or just want to get more out of your efforts and are curious if an outsourced sales and marketing company can get you on a faster track to sales results feel free to contact us for a quick consultative call.
For more information from Gabriel Sales on business to business marketing strategy, marketing and sales services, please visit our Knowledge Center. We also invite you to check out our White Paper that has several sections that give you some hard ratios on how you can calculate your hard ROI base on sales conversions.
by Glen Springer | Apr 30, 2012
So now you that you have purchased a marketing automation platform you are ready to implement and it’s not as simple as you were led to believe. As an outsourced sales and marketing company we have already helped to implement several platforms (as well as implementing our own) and helped companies with several stalled implementations. Here are some best practices in marketing and sales automation because, as one vendor recently told us, ‘we can sell them the car but we can’t drive it for them’. Here are some basic tips and some best practices to help you avoid some headaches and to learn from our mistakes and success. If you have not checked out what these platforms can do here is a quick overview from Pardot 5 Minute Overview of Marketing Automation and this post will make a whole lot more sense.
Think about your Content in a Different Way – 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 may time you talk about “Our’ product, “our” team vs. “your” needs, “your” business and “your” customers. Stop being product centric and start being customer centric. Here is a series of blogs on how to shift your content approach and get sales and marketing on the same page.
Organize your Content Ahead of Time. For a marketing automation platform to run effectively it helps to do two things with your content. First you should isolate all your webcasts, white papers, blogs, videos on individual website pages. This allows you to easily understand what your customer specifics needs are which in turn allows you to score your leads more effectively as you track their digital interest. Secondly, it really helps to also create landing pages that offers your customer content for all three stages of their buying cycle so you can track when your buyers are moving from educating themselves (kicking the tires) to being ready to buy (e.g looking at pricing or testimonials). Gabriel Sales has created an easy to use sales content management technology – Gabriel Sales Digital Base Camp™ that can help you do this in a matter of weeks. Below is an example of one of those lead scoring features.
Involve Sales and Invest the Time Integrating with your CRM – What we have found is that even a basic integration can take an IT professional too much time. Most of the marketing automation platforms we have seen have huge volume of really cool features and bells and whistles so you can tend to over design before you know how you want to use them. Ultimately this is about empowering your sales team and recognizing your IT teams expertise is not sales. Probably one of the biggest bottle necks we have seen is that IT folks get proprietary and a project that they thought would take weeks can take a developer three months or more . The challenges are not with the system’s API or stability; they were with our client’s requirements, process definitions and prioritization. Like most development work that starts “easy” it quickly gets complex when they don’t understand the underlying business processes. Unfortunately as the time line expands it ends up being sales and marketing that are on the hook for results and not the developers. Salesforce.com has been the easiest integration for all the platforms we have seen.
Keep your Initial Drip Campaigns Simple. 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. If you are a smaller company, as a best practice, we recommend that you start by talking to your sales reps about their sales process and simply take that sales process map and create your initial drip campaigns for about three target markets.
Tap your vendors (and other vendors) knowledge centers – This industry is not that old. Eloqua, Pardot and Marketo (to name a few) all have fantastic knowledge centers that can teach you the basics of lead scoring and nurturing etc. Our vendor Pardot has been a huge help but we have also found both Marketo and Eloqua’s knowledge centers to be valuable as well. Obviously as an outsourced sales and marketing company we also recommend that you strongly consider working with an organization like ours. We have the advantage of having worked in the space across multiple enterprises so we have made a great deal of the mistakes already so you don’t need to.
We hope this blog has been helpful. Marketing Automation is a relatively new concept for most marketing teams and we have found that once you start to gain some momentum you will quickly realize that it’s clearly how business will be done for the next decade. We are just at the beginning of a new paradigm starting with marketing automation and then, as we are quickly discovering, if your marketing automation implementation is done correctly this will drift towards sales automation. Ultimately this will begin to drive more deals fast at less cost. We are experiencing some fantastic initial success reducing cost of sales percentages for both ourselves and our clients. The learning curve is exponential. So have fun.
If you have not checked out what these platforms can do here is a quick overview from Pardot 5 Minute Overview of Marketing Automation. If you have a stalled with your marketing automation implementation or if you would like to know more about best practices in marketing and sales automation, feel free to contact us for a quick consultative call.
by Glen Springer | Apr 30, 2012
So now you that you have purchased a marketing automation platform you are ready to implement and it’s not as simple as you were led to believe. As an outsourced sales and marketing company we have already helped to implement several platforms (as well as implementing our own) and helped companies with several stalled implementations. Here are some best practices in marketing and sales automation because, as one vendor recently told us, ‘we can sell them the car but we can’t drive it for them’. Here are some basic tips and some best practices to help you avoid some headaches and to learn from our mistakes and success. If you have not checked out what these platforms can do here is a quick overview from Pardot 5 Minute Overview of Marketing Automation and this post will make a whole lot more sense.
Think about your Content in a Different Way
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 may time you talk about “Our’ product, “our” team vs. “your” needs, “your” business and “your” customers. Stop being product centric and start being customer centric. Here is a series of blogs on how to shift your content approach and get sales and marketing on the same page.
Organize your Content Ahead of Time
For a marketing automation platform to run effectively it helps to do two things with your content. First you should isolate all your webcasts, white papers, blogs, videos on individual website pages. This allows you to easily understand what your customer specifics needs are which in turn allows you to score your leads more effectively as you track their digital interest. Secondly, it really helps to also create landing pages that offers your customer content for all three stages of their buying cycle so you can track when your buyers are moving from educating themselves (kicking the tires) to being ready to buy (e.g looking at pricing or testimonials). Gabriel Sales has created an easy to use sales content management technology – Gabriel Sales Digital Demand Center™ that can help you do this in a matter of weeks. The image on the right is an example of one of those lead scoring features.
Involve Sales and Invest the Time Integrating with your CRM
What we have found is that even a basic integration can take an IT professional too much time. Most of the marketing automation platforms we have seen have huge volume of really cool features and bells and whistles so you can tend to over design before you know how you want to use them. Ultimately this is about empowering your sales team and recognizing your IT teams expertise is not sales. Probably one of the biggest bottle necks we have seen is that IT folks get proprietary and a project that they thought would take weeks can take a developer three months or more . The challenges are not with the system’s API or stability; they were with our client’s requirements, process definitions and prioritization. Like most development work that starts “easy” it quickly gets complex when they don’t understand the underlying business processes. Unfortunately as the time line expands it ends up being sales and marketing that are on the hook for results and not the developers. Salesforce.com has been the easiest integration for all the platforms we have seen.
Keep your Initial Drip Campaigns Simple
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. If you are a smaller company, as a best practice, we recommend that you start by talking to your sales reps about their sales process and simply take that sales process map and create your initial drip campaigns for about three target markets.
Tap your vendors (and other vendors) knowledge centers
This industry is not that old. Eloqua, Pardot and Marketo (to name a few) all have fantastic knowledge centers that can teach you the basics of lead scoring and nurturing etc. Our vendor Pardot has been a huge help but we have also found both Marketo and Eloqua’s knowledge centers to be valuable as well. Obviously as an outsourced sales and marketing company we also recommend that you strongly consider working with an organization like ours. We have the advantage of having worked in the space across multiple enterprises so we have made a great deal of the mistakes already so you don’t need to.
We hope this blog has been helpful. Marketing Automation is a relatively new concept for most marketing teams and we have found that once you start to gain some momentum you will quickly realize that it’s clearly how business will be done for the next decade. We are just at the beginning of a new paradigm starting with marketing automation and then, as we are quickly discovering, if your marketing automation implementation is done correctly this will drift towards sales automation. Ultimately this will begin to drive more deals fast at less cost. We are experiencing some fantastic initial success reducing cost of sales percentages for both ourselves and our clients. The learning curve is exponential. So have fun.
If you have not checked out what these platforms can do here is a quick overview from Pardot 5 Minute Overview of Marketing Automation. If you have a stalled with your marketing automation implementation or if you would like to know more about best practices in marketing and sales automation, feel free to contact us for a quick consultative call.
