Outsourcing Lead Generation and Lead Qualification for Network SaaS Security Software
The Challenge
A Series A funded network security risk and policy compliance software had multiple channel partners. After two solid years channels were becoming less productive and growth was slowing. Company made strategic decision to build a direct telemarketing and inside sales team to; decrease its reliance on the channel, increase its support of the channel, target key verticals in Fortune 1000, and understand it’s sales ratios and direct sales business model prior to Series B round to increase valuation for founders.
Selling To: IT Directors, Network Engineers, IT Managers, CTOs for Mid-Market Inbound Leads and Network Security Directors, Network Engineers and IT Directors for Outbound Telemarketing to Fortune 1000.
The Solution
Targeting Strategy – Crafted a go-to-market plan to target market.
Content production- Created early stage content and screencast demos of the the product to streamline buyer education
Outsourcing Lead Qualification – Staffed part time inside sales rep to qualify inbound leads and manage logistics of the sale.
Outsourcing Lead Generation – Staffed part time telemarketer targeting Temporary Sales Staffing – Gabriel Sales staffed temporary staff to make 10,500 follow up calls to 1500 inbound leads.
Marketing Operations Outsourcing – Took over Direct Marketing and Nurturing.
Sales Analysis and Consulting – Identified pipe velocity ratios and top market pains.
The Results
Lead Gen Rep made 3200 outbound calls to 49 Appointments – resulting in 11 Sales Qualfied Leads including 7 Fortune 200 Companies.
Built additional Nurturing Database of 2300.
Identified top 7 pains in the market.
Produced 7 short videos integrating company pitch with product demos addressing specific pains. Established distribution platforms.
Integrated digital content into the sales process removing the requirement of the product specialist in the sales process until both the technical and business qualification of the prospect was complete. This saved company one full day a week of products specialist time.
Company was acquired post execution of Gabriel Sales pilot program. Sales pipeline, analysis and insights were leveraged in final negotiations.
We Are Passionate About Helping Entrepreneurs Committed to Sustained Sales Growth
We Specialize in Building Outbound Marketing Engines To Consistently Fill Your Funnel with Real Sales Opportunities
Contact our team and evaluate in detail if our solution can help drive your success and remove barriers to growth.
Marketing Consulting & Outsourcing for a Security Middleware and Hardware Company
The Challenge
A Fortune 500 hardware and software provider was launching a new security middleware solution. Two divisions were merging. Sale was very complex requiring the participation of product specialists and a great deal of buyer education. Company was integrating a marketing automation platform and needed to establish marketing work flows and set baseline call metrics as part of implementation. Additionally company wanted to test scripts and messages without disrupting the existing inside sales team.
Selling To: Directors of Security, IT Directors and Database Architects following up on inbound leads from 3 media campaigns
The Solution
Temporary Sales Staffing – Gabriel Sales staffed temporary staff to make 10,500 follow up calls to 1500 inbound leads.
Sales Consulting – Gabriel Sales tested multiple scripts, content and messages.
Sales Pipe Analysis – Tested a 7 call campaign (vs. previous 3 call campaign) and measured the result of every call.
Lead Scoring – Scored 3 sources of inbound leads for value by vertical and decision maker type.
Document Process – Documented all calls with verbatim and audio recordings.
The Results
Inbound lead performance lift from Marketing Qualified to Sales Qualified of 35% with 2 additional calls in sales process.
Profiled 1,200 accounts for future lead nurturing.
Scored most successful messages and business pains for educational content focus to reduce involvement of product specialists early in sales cycle.
Recommended increasing outbound follow up from 3 calls to 5 calls for optimal return on marketing investment
Scored 3 lead sources by vertical and decision maker type to increase the performance of future media buys
Process Transitioned – Scripts and process transitioned to existing sales team at end of engagement.
Were able to test without disrupting existing staff during the reorganization.
We Are Passionate About Helping Entrepreneurs Committed to Sustained Sales Growth
We Specialize in Building Outbound Marketing Engines To Consistently Fill Your Funnel with Real Sales Opportunities
Contact our team and evaluate in detail if our solution can help drive your success and remove barriers to growth.
Inside Sales Outsourcing and Sales Consulting for Technology Sales
The Challenge
A privately funded start-up company addressing Sarbanes Oxley compliance was facing better funded competitors. Series A funding required that sales process was documented with pipeline velocity ratios so potential investors could understand dollars in and dollars out. Senior Enterprise Sales Executive did not have the experience or the time to build and inside sales team and simultaneously close business.
Selling To: Publicly Traded Companies CFO, Corporate Compliance Officer, Audit Committee Chair Board of Directions
The Solution
Sales Strategy Consulting and New Product Launch-Gabriel Sales creates a target database, develops value propositions and tests multiple decision makers and and verticals targeting 800 companies and 2400 decision makers.
Sales Process Consulting-VM scripts, cold call scripts, value propositions and qualifying questions are created and finalized. Metrics and ratios for forecasts and quotas were created.
Outsourcing Business Acquisition-Every prospect contact measured as value proposition is defined and product is priced.
Results
Gabriel Sales closed 32 Web ASP clients with 2-year annual subscription at a monthly cost of $1500 to $3000
Identified and closed 2 beta enterprise software clients
Fully documented entire sales methodology and infrastructure
Transitioned team to client for internal management
Assisted in recruiting and transitioning team and process to internal full time VP of Sales
We Are Passionate About Helping Entrepreneurs Committed to Sustained Sales Growth
We Specialize in Building Outbound Marketing Engines To Consistently Fill Your Funnel with Real Sales Opportunities
Contact our team and evaluate in detail if our solution can help drive your success and remove barriers to growth.
Gabriel Sales has experience providing different types of outsourcing sales and outsourcing lead generation solutions for Professional Services firms. Below is a transcript of our quick overview of building a high velocity sales model for professional services firm.
Gabriel Sales is a top sales outsourcing solution provider that specializes in in building sales machines that can double sales for services firms.
Situation
For Professional Service Sales the Job remains the same. Targeting the right markets, generate qualified sales leads, close faster and upsell accounts. As a seller you are tasked with growth when both the seller and buyer are being asked to more with less. As a Services firm, you now have some additional challenges which makes this a great time to consider outsourcing sales.
Sales Challenges for Professional Services Firms
You have less access to decision makers doing more work which means you need to double your lead generation efforts. Your top producers need to sell and in this economy they need to spend more time servicing accounts. So your sales pipe peaks and valleys are more exaggerated. You now need to engage and close two decision makers and that doubles the time required sell. Education is even more critical in the buyer’s process to remove perceived risk. And you need to sell your expertise and thinking style harder than ever to drive rates and margins. Finally sales and marketing operations can drain focus and steal time from revenue producing activities.
Solution
You need to maximize your top producers sales effectiveness and efficiency. If you are still selling and marketing the same way you may feel like you are running to stand still. How do you sell faster, more effectively and grow your business? You build a sales machine that aligns sales and marketing that clones your top producer’s sales process.
Your sales and marketing operations need to embrace the new rules of sales engagement and integrate sales reps, pushing digital content and measuring the results with smart technologies. And you need to push and repurpose that sales content across platforms to make it easier for you buyer to buy and give your sales reps the ground cover they need to close deals.
Here is what a sales machine looks like. You put qualified deals in the pipe using reps and digital tools. You engage. You address one sales objection at a time. Push content and engage or nurture, until the deal is closed or out of the pipe.
You have two options. Take a year and a half to build a sales solution your own, or partner with an outsourcing sales and marketing provider to augment your gaps. With sales outsourcing you can be up and running is as little as two weeks, with a fully functioning sales and marketing operations execution team, leveraging a scalable sales process that is transparent and metric driven.
As an outsourced sales company we provide, speed to market, a managed sales process, digital content production and distribution, sales staff and marketing staff that executes seamlessly, sales tools and all the sales metrics to maximize ROI.
Sale services range from full time sales outsourcing and outsourced marketing operations, sales consulting, sales staffing and digital sales execution. Or you can test with a Gabriel Sales Spark™ Campaign – outsourced lead generation to boost existing efforts, Gabriel Sales Ramp™ – for New Product Launches, or Ignite™ – a fully integrated outsourced sales and marketing campaign.
Is it harder to put leads in your pipe? Are you spending more time educating and less time closing? Do you build a pipe and then abandon it, starting from scratch every quarter? Do you over or under forecast your revenue?
The professional services sales industry has its ups and downs. On the plus side, professional services sales are forecasted to grow at over 2.5X of the rest of the economy for the next 4 years. On the downside, it’s getting more competitive and there are new rules of engagement. Below is a quick outline of how you can build a sales machine that addresses those new rules and will double your revenue.
A high velocity sales machine for professional services requires a different approach to the typical professional service sales and marketing method. It takes commitment to continually improve the process. It takes a commitment to becoming a “digital publisher” and learning how to use new technologies. It takes a commitment to managing inside and junior sales reps on a daily basis, and most professional services professionals love solutioning and would rather not spend their time managing junior employees.
Make Your Product Accessible Digitally. Your Top Producers are Your Product! As a top B to B professional service sales outsourcing company, we map all the sales objections we get during the sales process. We measure what wins deals. Once we understand these objections, we work with our outsourced sales clients to create content that demonstrates their intangibles—their thinking style, their approach to solutioning, their character, their personality—and create content that is authentic, and allows them to enter into dialogue with the prospect one to many. With or without us you need to create content that clones your Top Producers. Once we start working with a client, we generally find that over 50% of the content we need is already lying around in one form or another in past presentations, RFPs and speeches they have given.
Use an Inside Sales Team. You cannot afford to have your high-end sales resources, or professionals, that could be billing clients instead generating leads and selling to early stage prospects. To make this work you will need a hands on VP of Sales who has prior experience running an inside sales team. The team needs to be able to sell strategically over the phone, qualify prospects and understand both their business need and how they will budget for the solution. Open ended questions and smart probing questions go a long way. Once the lead is engaged, bring in your senior resources and then pass back to the inside rep to manage the logistics of the close.
Start by Leveraging Digital Content on the Back End of Your Sales Cycle. Start with your close when creating content and then work backwards to share that content. This means you need to approach your B2B customer by taking more of a consumer approach to marketing. Once they are engaged, you need to sell to them digitally. Any presentation you give more than one time a quarter needs to be turned into a webcast. Any objection that comes up more than once a quarter, you need to write a blog about. You can then repurpose that same content for SEO and have your inside team use it for lead generation downstream.
Leverage Technologies. If you have a complex sale (and most professional services sales have some level of complexity) and the prospect is moving through your pipe, they will be actively looking at your content and will be sharing that content. You need to track when people are looking at your content. All the Fortune 1000 have these technologies in place, and they will win if you do not compete. Prices have come down dramatically in 2011 and you can now have equal footing.
Leverage Social Media. Once you have the content created, you simply need to push that same content into Social Media. This means YouTube, LinkedIn and Twitter. The average B2B customer goes out on the web looking for you once they are sales engaged. Make sure that they find you. This is ground cover for your inside sales team.
Nurture Prospects. Take the same digital content you use as part of our sales cycle to engage, develop and close prospects that are actively buying; and cut it up into much smaller chunks – 90 second videos—and use that same content to stay in front of prospects that are not ready to buy. Staying top of mind will win you deals when they are ready to buy. Let the longer term prospects engage in the sales cycle with your content, and use your inside reps to touch them so they know you care. Technologies like Pardot (our vendor of choice) and Marketo automate this process. Hit them with a monthly blog and a quarterly newsletter via these tools. Your inside team will be watching.
Metrics are Critical. Gabriel Sales top management executive team members are all endurance athletes. This approach is not a sprint. The high velocity sales model for professional services is an endurance sport, and you need to have your handle on every step of the process. You get stronger over time. This model is designed to get deals that are ready to move moving, and keep deals not yet ready to buy engaged until they are ready. With more content and more inside sales touches you get more results; and you need to measure what starts momentum, what sustains momentum and what builds momentum.You also need to understand what fakes momentum and what takes momentum. We build custom metrics for every client because generally a professional service sale (with both a business buyer and a technical buyer) is a 5 to 7 touch sale. Our experience is that about 70% of these touches can be done with inside reps.
SEO and SEM Focus. Within six months to a year, you will start to see a lift in Natural Search, Organic Search and SEO. You will have the metrics and the insights to start to give your Marketing efforts a Sales Quota. If the content is crafted carefully, you will be able to niche target and save a ton of money executing your SEO strategy.
For more information on B to B Professional Service Sales Outsourcing, please feel free to contact us. You can also visit our Knowledge Center for more tips for Professional Service Sales.
