Do I Really Need An Outsourced B2B Demand Generation and Lead Nurturing Partner?
First – Why Demand Generation and Lead Nurturing is Required for Success
Why outsource lead nurturing? According to Forrester, your typical buyer now consumes 7-15 pieces of digital content prior to engaging with a sales rep. And 80% of buyers want to avoid scheduling time with a sale rep until they have completed their pre-sales research and are “Sales Ready”.
This change in modern buyer’s expectations and needs is so rapid that, according to a recent Adobe research project, 82% of marketing professionals stated that marketing has changed more in the past two years than it has over the past fifty years. With this buyer shift, and the proliferation of sales automation technologies and content marketing, buyers now expect sellers to provide their pre-sales education digitally. Buyers also expect sellers to deliver educational content marketing deep into their buyers’ journey.
With the exception of enterprise companies, most sales and marketing organizations lack the time, resources, experience, expertise and talent to properly manage a systematic marketing process that meets the new digital first needs of the modern buyer.
This new set of buyer expectations also means lead generation is now just the first step in a multi-step content marketing and lead development process. It also means that a successful marketing process is no longer as simple as writing a blog every week, sending sporadic emails, posting on social media every few days and running pay per click campaigns to generate the lead.
To produce a sustained sales funnel now requires a team to manage different processes and tactics systematically to generate demand for a solution. These processes include: lead generation campaigns, pre-sales education campaigns, lead nurturing and sales automation tactics to encourage conversions. Successful B2B demand generation cannot be executed with stand-alone tactics. Success now requires expert strategy, proven processes, the right tech stack and disciplined execution of integrated tactics to produce a sustained flow of well-educated “sales ready” leads.
Successful Sales and Marketing Starts with a Shared Mission
Mission: Your marketing team, sales team and company need to share the singular mission of making your marketing and sales process, easy, convenient and frictionless so it’s easy for your buyer to buy.
Objectives:
1 – Sellers need to leverage digital content in a frictionless process to replace many of the historical tasks the Sales Development Rep. This creates quality time in a Buyer’s In-Box and Social Feed well beyond initial lead generation.
2 – Sellers need to provide and enable Buyers with the automation technologies, process, ability and option to drive their own pre-sales journey so as Sellers we can win more business.
Demand generation, lead nurturing and sales automation are longer optional for sellers. They are now requirements driven by your buyers.
The Impact of B2B Demand Generation and Lead Nurturing (4 min video)
This short video details why lead generation is only the first step in successful sales and marketing operations
The Challenges Many B2B Sellers Face
If you are struggling to make this transition and cultural shift you are not alone. Most businesses, and especially small to mid-sized companies, are struggling to keep up with this digital first transformation operationally:
- Marketing has initial lead generations programs in place, but that program is not producing the results it used to, or it’s not producing to expectations.
- Most leads are not turning it sales opportunities
- In many cases, businesses struggle to craft a solid strategy deeper into the sales funnel/buyers journey, or they’re flying blind with scattered digital marketing tactics.
- Business owners and sales leaders lack the access to the data or the strategic bandwidth, analysis and insights they need to make decisions around the right marketing tactics, messages and sales tech to leverage.
- Marketing organizations lack the talent and resources to create quality content on a consistent basis.
And beyond the operational challenges and the primary need to drive a sustained flow of sales ready leads with budget constraints, the two greatest challenges companies now face according to Salesforce, Drift and HubSpot are:
- Hiring talent with experience and expertise
- Training staff in the technologies required for success
With all of this stated – there are seven definitive ways outsourced B2B Demand Generation and Lead Nurturing with Digital Demand Center™ may be the right solution to help you grow your sales funnel, your team, your expertise and your revenue.
Why Outsource Lead Nurturing — The Top Reasons for Outsourcing Your B2B Demand Generation and Lead Nurturing
Outsourcing your B2B demand gen and lead nurturing immediately provides your business with the team, tactics, technology and tools you need for sustained success.
1 – You Can Quickly Craft a Proven and Tested Go-To-Market Strategy
As we have already mentioned above a digital marketing strategy is no longer as simple as writing blogs, posting on social media, sending standalone emails and running Pay-Per-Click campaigns. An effective digital marketing strategy that produces consistent results involves leveraging several tactics to tell your powerful sales story, episodically, for a sustained period of time. This requires:
- A proven marketing strategy to create brand awareness to generate the lead
- Sales story expertise to systematically move that buyer through you sales funnel in a methodical way leveraging content
- Experience implementing automation technologies
- Experience building and managing proven workflows to get the most from that technology to score and prioritize leads for you sales team
Outsourcing B2B demand generation provides you with both sales and marketing strategy expertise simultaneously. This experience allows you to craft a long-term strategic road map including:
- Targeting and building your ideal customer profile database
- Content for every stage of your funnel
- Lead gen, lead nurturing and lead conversion campaign playbooks
- Technology stack implementation and optimization
- Lead scoring and CRM optimization
2 – Immediate Access to a Team of Sales and Marketing Operations Experts
If you don’t already have someone in house or a vendor, most companies can find resources to build awareness or generate your initial leads. The market is currently overwhelmed with vendors selling stand-alone solutions and tactics. Exiting the pandemic, initial lead generation is now a commodity.
But it’s hard to find proven B2B lead nurturing and demand gen experts because this type of expertise requires both sales and marketing operations experience. Consequentially most of these experts are well compensated, sitting inside of larger companies.
Additionally, it’s harder (if not impossible) to hire and train these experts (especially if you are not an enterprise company with deep financial resources). And finally, it’s even harder to build a team that works together seamlessly with the singular goal of making it easier for your buyer to buy with a frictionless process at every stage of your sales funnel.
When outsourcing your B2B Demand Generation you get immediate access a blended team of professionals with the appropriate area of process expertise you need, when you need it, at a fraction of the time and cost of building that team on your own. This blended team of both sales and marketing talent will include:
- Database Managers
- Senior Strategists
- Marketing Operations Director/Analyst
- Marketing Manager and Campaign Specialists
- Automation and CRM Tech Specialist
- Social Media Manager (if necessary)
- Video Production (if necessary)
- Writers (if necessary)
- Designers (if necessary)
3 – Smarter, Faster, Cheaper and More Effective Marketing Automation and CRM Tech Stack Selection and Implementation
According to Gartner, most large companies fail to get marketing automation right on their first attempt. And most larger companies take over 18 months to begin to become satisfied with their implementation. Consequentially, small and mid-sized businesses, which usually need marketing automation the most, struggle to compete. They lack the experience, time and budget to select, implement and optimize their tech stack. Most overspend and many buy features they don’t need.
Outsourcing your B2B Demand Generation and Lead Nurturing helps you:
- Select the right tech stack
- Get the implementation right the first time
- Get the technology at the right price (plus often avoiding annual fees)
Getting it right the first time saves you time, money and increases your productivity in the market by as much as 3X.
Digital Demand Center™ eliminates this challenge. After over 150 implementations of dozens of tools, we have selected a proven stack for quick, affordable deployment and most importantly effective lead scoring and prioritization. Our stack delivers all the capabilities you need for seamless campaign management, sales automation, lead scoring and easy to understand dashboards that integrate seamlessly with Salesforce and other leading CRMs. And most importantly you own the system with no hidden fees or costs.
4 – Immediate Support for Full Funnel Content Production
Most companies know they need “awareness” content to generate leads, which includes: short explainer videos, blogs and social media clips to generate awareness and initial leads. But as discussed and illustrated above, this is no longer enough. Successful sellers need to create content that stewards buyers through their entire buyer’s journey. They need to digitally clone the pre-sales education process to replace many of the historical tasks of a Sales Development Rep.
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A B2B outsourcer with proven domain and sales process expertise (and their access to an assortment of creatives) will be able to manage and/or support your content production to motivate buyers deeper and deeper into the sales funnel.
When you work with Digital Demand Center™ we will be able to provide access to Gabriel Sales’ (our parent company’s) deep reservoir of production expertise with a focus on both lead nurturing videos link and videos that are crucial for lead scoring link.
5 – A Disciplined Focus on producing “Sales Ready” Leads…Not Unqualified Leads
Most conventional marketers and even most digital agencies have a singular focus on generating more leads. And more leads is great but it’s no longer enough.
A team that understands the difference between lead generation vs. demand generation is now critical to your success. A company that specializes in demand generation will understand how to generate awareness. They will also understand how to create demand by nurturing leads until they are ready to buy.
Most importantly they will understand how to score those leads so your sales team never misses a qualified sales opportunity.
How Lead Scoring Works -Digital Demand Center™ in Action (3 min demo)
This short video shows you how DDC™’s tech stack scores leads to predict when a buyer is ready to talk to sales.
6 – Outsourcing May Help You Avoid Costly Errors
Building, hiring, training and managing your own team takes time and money. And after all that investment there is no guarantee that team will:
- Understand and execute the day to day grind of managing a funnel
- How to leverage the tech
- What tactics work at different stages in the buying cycle
- How to score leads
- How to transition leads
- Understand what metrics matter and what metrics don’t
7- Outsourcing Lowers Risk
When you hire demand gen outsourcers you get a blended team of part time professionals with specific areas of experience and expertise. They have already worked together as a team so they have already:
- Proven they know how to work well together
- Proven they know how to support sales
- Implemented multiple technologies, multiple times
- Experimented with tactics
- Been obsessed with the latest trends for years
- Worked with the data so they understand what metrics matter and what metrics don’t
Proven teamwork and specialists allow you build a highly productive marketing program from the ground up – so you get it right the first time.
8 – Outsourcing Ensures Continuous Optimization and Increases Sales Funnel Production
More experience also means insights. An outsourcer can provide more guidance and better analysis faster. An outsourced solution provider will be able to build and deliver:
- Relevant executive level dashboards
- Reports and analysis to explain the data
- Benchmarks against other programs so you know what the data means
- Compare and contrast your results with competitive benchmarks
This allows your business and your outsourced team to continuously optimize your messages, campaigns and budget allocations.
9 – Marketing and Sales Operations Experts Produce Faster Results at a Lower Cost and Superior ROI
As discussed above, outsourcing with a proven demand generation and lead nurturing solution will dramatically impact your marketing operations to ensure you:
- Increase your speed to market by as much as 3X
- Help you avoid the costly mistakes and the pitfalls of building on your own
- Ensure you get it right the first time
To learn more about the Return on Investment you can expect we invite you to watch the OnDemand video webcast below. This video is part three of our of four part of our OnDemand Educational Seminar The Digital First Transformation and Sales Automation.
Free OnDemand Webcast – The ROI of Lead Nurturing and Demand Generation
This 20 Minute On Demand Webinar does a deep dive into the ROI of lead nurturing and demand generation
Conclusion
The world has changed. Sellers that enable buyers to engage with digital content instead of depending on sales reps to learn about the seller’s solution:
- Increase their number of sales opportunities by 451% (Annuitas Group)
- Close 2X the amount of deals (McKinsey)
- And lead nurturing produces 17% to 47% more revenue per deal (Annuitas Group)
Outsourcing your B2B lead nurturing can help you transform your sales and marketing process/operations faster and more cost effectively so your business grows faster at a lower cost.
About Digital Demand Center™ and Gabriel Sales™
After Gabriel Sales helped build, launch and deploy more than 150 sales and marketing engines for companies ranging from the Fortune 100 to start ups, Digital Demand Center™ was developed as a turnkey demand generation and lead nurturing solution designed specifically for small a mid-sized B2B sales organizations with multi-step sales process. We are passionate about helping our clients compete for and win more business. You can learn more about how and why we designed this solution on our About Us page.
Digital Demand Center’s™ parent company Gabriel Sales continues to help companies of all shapes and sizes grow and flourish in this digital first environment with:
- Marketing Automation and Salesforce Implementations and Optimization
- OnDemand and Custom Pardot, Salesforce and Salesforce Marketing Cloud Training
- Go-to-Market Strategy Consulting
- Marketing and Sales Operations as a Managed Service
- Sales Automation and Deep Funnel Content Production
You can learn more about Gabriel Sales’™ team and our approach to help you grow sales and improved marketing operations on our About Us page. You can learn more about our services at www.gabrielsales.com
