by Glen Springer | Nov 9, 2011
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.
by Glen Springer | Oct 28, 2011
Does it seem like you are spending a ton of time talking to prospects, and your company isn’t growing at the speed you expected? Are your professional service sales inconsistent and spikey, or your revenue projections often wrong? Do you know what sales tactics, conversations and content are your best performers? Maybe your sales reporting and metrics need some fine-tuning.
A strategically-designed sales reporting plan is critical for your company’s success, because you can’t improve what you don’t measure. This is especially true for professional service sales, because so much time can be spent educating the market and scoping projects that don’t close. A first step we take, when we work as a professional service sales outsourcing partner, is to help establish Key Performance Indicators that improve our client’s sales productivity.
Identifying key performance indicators (KPIs)
- KPIs need to reflect more than just revenue figures
- They need to include data about your sales process
- They need to include data about what messages are working
- They need to include data about what markets are the best performers
- They need to address how fast or slow specific decision makers move through the pipe
- They need to include how much time is spent educating prospects and scoping business in each market
- They need to be split between time invested with the technical buyer and the business buyer
Sales reporting and solid KPIs have many benefits. They give your company and team a consistent view of progress daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly and annually. KPIs can be used to create a scoreboard to keep your team engaged and motivated towards a common goal. The KPI scorecard keeps sales, professional service leads and lead generation reps moving towards that common goal, and also ensures everyone knows what specific tasks they are responsible for in achieving this end. This is especially critical when the sales process get passed between a professional service lead to develop and then back to a sales lead to close. Using KPIs to establish benchmarks and analyze results allows you to identify sales trends, including what high-value activities to optimize (usually with digital content) and what new tactics to leverage. Overall, you learn why you win and when you lose.
In this economy, with the new rules of engagement, professional service sales need to use sales reporting to make informed and timely decisions. We use sales details and patterns because they help us to discover insights to generate revenue and grow your business. As a professional services sales outsourcing partner, we recommend that you:
- Evaluate how many touches it should take to qualify a prospect
- Identify the most important business pains your solution fixes
- Identify what content is shared internally by your champion to move the deal forward
- Understand what Return on Investment argument makes the most sense to specific markets
- Evaluate how much time is spent educating a prospect
- Evaluate how much time is spent scoping a project
- Manage more efficiently by focusing on what’s working best and eliminating unproductive activities
- Target markets that are ready to buy and nurture markets (and decision makers) that are still educating themselves
Effective sales reporting can help you get the most out of your existing professional services team and allow you to introduce sales reps into your complex sales process. Sales reporting will help you to clearly identify what messages and presentations can be digitized to spare your senior resources from attending meetings with prospects that don’t transact. It will also help you to more accurately predict when you need to hire more client servicing team members, decrease costs and strengthen customer upsells.
Professional Sales outsourcing can link you with the expertise necessary to establish a constructive sales reporting process, and provide you with the appropriate tools and metrics for your company. With over 12 years of experience as an outsourced sales operations company working with professional services firms, we can work with your team to monitor your data, leverage our historical data to benchmark you against the competition and identify areas for increased efficiencies and insights. Overall, we have found great sales reporting can lead to great insights, which yield great sales results. Feel free to contact us for a free pipe velocity consultation to see what sales reporting and strategy can do for your business.
by Glen Springer | Oct 24, 2011
Our job as a sales outsourcing company for professional services is not to replace your top producer. Our job is to augment what they do to increase their capacity. We will keep drilling on this point throughout this Series on Building Sales Machines for Professional Services because it’s important to remember that if you are considering outsourcing sales for professional services, no one can replace your Top Producing Professional Service Person. They are the product and they are required to close business.
In this blog we want to discuss two other unique challenges faced when outsourcing sales for professional services. They are:
- The Professional Service Sales industry is often highly complex and time needs to be spent educating the buyer. The buyer needs to be educated to reduce their perceived risk.
- Educating the Buyer is often when the Top Producer sells their intangible value like personality, leadership style, thinking style and communication style. You need to sell your intangibles to close business and increase margins.
The two issues above are discrete issues and so we will address them separately. In the end, what we hope to inspire are some new ways that you can leverage digital content and an inside rep to increase your sales pipe velocity. These techniques will also reduce the amount of time your most highly valued resources spend educating your customers.
The professional service sale is a highly complex sale. Time often needs to be invested in educating the prospect. Your prospects become intrigued and you love solutioning around what you do, so your top producers can end up investing several hours and several meetings educating the prospect. This is not cheap. Even worse, there is no guarantee that the deal is even qualified. Until you have done the education, in more complex sales, the prospect in many cases cannot evaluate if you are a fit. The math here is simple. Spend just 90 minutes educating the technical buyer and then another 90 minutes educating the business buyer (to establish if they are actually qualified) and you have 3 hours sunk in a sale before a deal is qualified. If only 25% of these sales leads are end up being sales qualified you can have 12 hours of your Top Producers time invested in direct dialogue and another 12 hours in preparation and follow up work. This means you have a sunk cost of 3 full working days to get one qualified deal and you haven’t even started selling. Addressing this issue is probably the single quickest bang for your dollar that you can get leveraging an outsourced sales company. When outsourcing sales for professional services, we integrate reps and digital content.
Challenge: Qualify the opportunity without taking Top Producers bandwidth
Solution: Script the initial intro presentation to be delivered by the inside sales rep. Leverage Webcasts moderated or led by your Top Producer, Video Taped Presentations showing your Top Producer, Blogs addressing early stage sales objections “written” by your Top Producer and White Papers to do the education for you. In some cases, we require the inside rep to understand their budgeting and decision making process before they have “live access” to the Top Producer. Bottom Line: You need to use Digital Content to maximize your Top Producers bandwidth.
Building on the point above, most professional service folks love educating the buyer because it allows them to problem solve by starting to engage in abstract and technical thinking. This is also a critical part of any professional services sale, because they need to sell their intangibles—critical thought, passion, personality and expertise—to the buyer. This builds trust. Trust is critical and required to get the deal done. What we find when working as a professional service outsourced sales provider, is the sharper the professional service person, the tougher it can be. This is because it is often difficult to stop him/her from educating buyers, because of the excitement generated by the solutioning on both sides.
Challenge: Selling the intangibles to build trust without crushing your Top Producer’s bandwidth.
Solution: You need to measure how much time your Top Producers are spending educating prospects and set limits on this investment. You need to leverage Webcasts, Video Blogging, and Whitepapers in your sale. This allows you to share the intangibles one to many, instead of one to one. You need to refuse to travel until you have a specific project on the table and scoped. You need to have a sales rep clearly accountable for the close of business and articulate that accountability to the prospect. This gives you the option to cut off access to the expert if the deal is not moving forward.
Outsourcing Sales and Marketing Operations for Professional Service Firms can help you increase the productivity of your Top Producers, increase the volume of deals in your sales pipeline, increase your margins by maximizing the revenue from closed deals and free up bandwidth to focus on serving your customers. Contact us to see if we can help you to build a professional services sales machine.
by Glen Springer | Oct 20, 2011
The Challenge
Principals in Latin American Call Center Company servicing all of South America, Central America and Spain were shopping their company. Organization needed to penetrate the US Market (brand awareness) and close at least 1 deal with the Fortune 500 to increase valuation. Maintaining profitability was critical to 3 year exit strategy, contracted brokers were not generating necessary business but founders did not want to invest heavily in building US sales operations.
Selling to: VP Ops, Marketing and Customer Service, COO and CFO
The Solution
- Outsourcing Lead Generation – Gabriel Sales dedicated telemarketer and inside sales representative to target 200 key Fortune 500 companies
- Outsourcing New Business Acquisition – As prospects were identified, Senior Sales Executive managed the development and closing of business.
- Senior Sales Executive remained involved in account management role until initial SLA’s were met and long term contracts were signed
- Closed and scaled 2 Fortune 500 deals in 2 years
- One Fortune 500 client scales to $4M in annual revenue in first 24 months exceeding businesses available capacity
- Organization acquired at end of Gabriel Sales engagement
We want to give you the “Red Carpet” sales experience your company deserves.
Contact our team now and evaluate in detail if our solution will help drive your success.
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by Glen Springer | Oct 20, 2011
Outsourcing Sales and Outsourcing Lead Generation for Online Technology Publisher
The Challenge
Sales were flat with core offering static or in decline as target decision makers were being flooded with a wave of new products and solutions. Sales Team had slipped into complacency as account managers focused on servicing existing accounts reselling same products and services. Through attrition existing team did not know how to generate new business (no entrepreneurial spirit).
Selling To: VPs, Product Managers and Directors of Marketing in Mid-Market
The Solution
- Sales Process Consulting – GS identified gaps in the business operations, human resources and training necessary to produce individual and organizational SWOT analysis.
- Sales Consulting – Gabriel Sales crafted an Ideal Customer Profile and conducted existing client interviews to discover and recommended areas for 3 new service and product offerings.
- New Product Launch and Outsourcing Lead Generation – Gabriel Sales targeted 1200 new companies hitting Ideal Customer Profile
- Outsourcing New Business Acquisition – Staffed Inside Sales Rep to close package deals and to sale qualify and set appointment for larger opportunities.
- 2 of 3 new product offerings gained traction producing one business unit generating 300K in revenue annually at a 50% margin and a second unit generating 500K annually at a profit margin of 21%.
- Priced, scripted and created marketing material for new products offers. Once methodology and offers built set quotas, forecast and trained existing sales force in new solutions without disrupting their workload.
- Re-invigorated – 6 existing clients once re-engaged with a customer centric and solutions based sales approach increased annual revenue engage 2X
We want to give you the “Red Carpet” sales experience your company deserves.
Contact our team now and evaluate in detail if our solution will help drive your success.
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