by Glen Springer | Jun 21, 2017
2017 has gotten off to a solid start for most B2B companies and the economy is continuing to gain momentum quarter after quarter. So what company would’t want to have more qualified sales opportunities every month. Even with the economy headed the right direction, almost every sales executive and sales rep we speak with can still handle more quality sales appointments. In fact, when surveyed at the end of 2016, my Marketing Profs generating and setting appointments with qualified opportunities continues to be the number one focus of most small businesses trying to scale. It’s also become one of the most challenging parts of the sales process for similar reason at most small businesses:
- Buyers have so many lead gen reps approaching them daily, it’s harder and harder for a sales person to break through and connect.
- Sales reps don’t have the time required for generation leads on a daily basis
- Prospects require sales reps to share quality content once they do connect
- More and more buyers are educating themselves online, trying to avoid talking to a sales rep until they are well educated – prospects are doing so much of the fact-finding on their own. They are looking for ideas, suggestions, and resources online, and not even involving a sales person at that stage of their journey.
What would happen to your revenue growth if you had a consistent flow of leads coming into your organization on a monthly and weekly and basis? And what if these leads were prioritized, so if your closers or Sales Development Reps had limited bandwidth, they could call the buyers most likely to be interested first.
This is now possible by integrating sales and marketing functions to run sales and marketing campaigns. It is not a magic bullet; it takes hard work, but the idea is simple. A B2B sales outsourcing can help you do the hard work. A B2B sales outsourcing and marketing company can help you take the information that used to be exclusively be shared by a sales rep and a sales engineer early in the sales process and create digital content that in effect clones that sales process. You then need to share the content with your buyers in multiple ways. In doing this, buyers can find your information online, or you can share it in email campaigns, or your sales development reps can share with the buyers early in the sales conversation.
Granted the concept is not a new one. You use marketing to attract buyers, but the way you now have to put all the pieces together is more important than ever. . Here are 5 steps you need to take to generate more leads on your own or with a B2B sales outsourcing partner:
Map Your Sales Process and Your Buyers Journey – Document every step in your sales process. Document each step in your Buyer’s Journey. Create a content map of the questions and information you share at every stage of the buyer’s journey.
Create Content to Share Your Expertise. Commit to creating digital content that replicates the information needed for the buyer journey. Use a combination of head shot videos, screencast videos, short webcasts, blogs and checklists. A B2B Sales outsourcing company like Gabriel Sales can run a content production workshop to help you create enough content for three to six months of your initial effort over a quick several day period. Long-term (after you get through your first wave of content), you will need to be prepared to continue to create two to four additional pieces of content per quarter.
Share the Content through a Marketing Automation Platform – Start sending content on a regular basis with a marketing automation platform.
Score the Leads – Use the marketing automation to score lead engagement with the content you send and any other content they find on their own on your website.
Share Content as Part of Your Calling Efforts – Have a piece of content to share when you cold call. Sharing is caring and you will generate more early stage leads this way.
Share it in social media – You can publish directly on LinkedIn, and push through Twitter, as well as host videos on your website and in your YouTube channel. And don’t forget about Google+.
When your prospects see you as an expert who can add real value, they will be happy to take your call and meet with you. And with scored leads, you can prioritize the buyers most likely to buy.
About Gabriel Sales B2B Sales Outsourcing
Gabriel Sales helps companies transform their sales and marketing with:
- Sales Consulting
- Outsourced Sales and Marketing
- Sales Automation Systems Implementation
To learn more about our philosophy and how we may be able to help we invite you to visit our About Us page. Or you can check out our outsourced sales and marketing services here
by Glen Springer | Jun 12, 2017
B2B lead generation is one of the top sales challenges facing many small business that want to grow their sales revenue. And generating a consistent flow of leads is critical in a competitive market. To grow the sales of a solution, establish or maintain a competitive advantage to thrive in today’s sales environment, which requires innovative approaches and hard work.
This is where a B2B sales outsourcing solution may be able to help. A B2B sales outsourcing company can assist you in framing and executing the most current and effective campaigns using modern sales and marketing operations. This will allow you to move faster, implementing the right research, lead generation techniques, and technologies. Your sales team can focus on selling, while your B2B sales outsourcing partner can focus on sustained and consistent lead generation to improve your sales results and help you meet your sales revenue targets.
With so many possible tactics available right now, your B2B sales outsourcing team will help you select the best direction for your business.. The following lead generation tips are some of the options that will now be at your company’s disposal.
Content Marketing
Content marketing is now a requirement for lead generation success. Over 70% of buyers now prefer to learn about new products or solutions with educational information shared through email. You can share this content through social media campaigns, email-marketing campaigns, and with cold callers on first calls.
Over time, a bonus effect of quality content will enable you to slowly start moving to a higher and higher position in search engine results. A B2B sales outsourcing lead generation company like Gabriel Sales will be able to help you craft educational content that your buyers will enjoy in a short, one to two day content workshop.
Social Media Marketing
Once you have your quality content, you can share that content on social media. For most B2B companies, we recommend starting slowly and saving your best content for social media. The two most effective tools for B2B campaigns are LinkedIn and Twitter (in that order). It is also helpful to share that same content on Facebook and Google +. Google+ is very helpful to improve search engine results.
Email Marketing to Generate a New B2B Leads
Email marketing is all about communicating through a structured email to generate leads and establish a relationship with potential clients. A B2B sales outsourcing lead generation company will be able to help you navigate through multiple vendors to target as many as 75,000 potential targets for about the fully-loaded costs of one sales development rep for one month. This will typically generate 2000 to 4000 early stage leads.
Email Marketing to Develop and Prioritize B2B Leads
One of the most significant developments in sales and marketing over the past decade is marketing automation platforms. Marketing automation allows you to share your thought leadership to develop trust and stay top of mind with consumers that are not quite ready to buy. These same tools also allow you to score leads and predict their readiness to buy based on the content they are engaging with. A B2B sales outsourcing company will be able to help you implement these campaigns and technologies the right way the first time.
B2B Sales Outsourcing Calling Team
Finally, a lead is only valuable if it turns into an appointment. The days of old school smile and dial and throwing bodies on the phone to generate more leads is over. A B2B sales outsourcing company will be able to help you immediately staff a trained team of sales development reps that understand how to use content and marketing automation the most effective way possible to set appointments for your closers.
About Gabriel Sales B2B Sales Outsourcing Lead Generation
We specialize in helping SMBs and start-ups build modern sales and marketing operations. To learn more about our outsourced sales and marketing services and how we now view the sales challenges B2B companies now face and how we solve them we invite you to check out our new approach to outsourced sales page or visit our B2B sales outsourcing lead generation starter campaign page. Contact Us to learn more about how we can help your business.
by Glen Springer | Jun 12, 2017
Having useful B2B lead generation tactics is one of the top sales challenges facing many small business that want to grow their sales revenue. And generating a consistent flow of leads is critical in a competitive market. To grow the sales of a solution, establish or maintain a competitive advantage to thrive in today’s sales environment, which requires innovative approaches and hard work.
This is where a B2B sales outsourcing solution may be able to help. A B2B sales outsourcing company can assist you in framing and executing the most current and effective campaigns using modern sales and marketing operations. This will allow you to move faster, implementing the right research, lead generation techniques, and technologies. Your sales team can focus on selling, while your B2B sales outsourcing partner can focus on sustained and consistent lead generation to improve your sales results and help you meet your sales revenue targets.
With so many possible tactics available right now, your B2B sales outsourcing team will help you select the best direction for your business.. The following lead generation tactics are some of the options that will now be at your company’s disposal.
Content Marketing
Content marketing is now a requirement for lead generation success. Over 70% of buyers now prefer to learn about new products or solutions with educational information shared through email. You can share this content through social media campaigns, email-marketing campaigns, and with cold callers on first calls.
Over time, a bonus effect of quality content will enable you to slowly start moving to a higher and higher position in search engine results. A B2B sales outsourcing lead generation company like Gabriel Sales will be able to help you craft educational content that your buyers will enjoy in a short, one to two day content workshop.
Social Media Marketing
Once you have your quality content, you can share that content on social media. For most B2B companies, we recommend starting slowly and saving your best content for social media. The two most effective tools for B2B campaigns are LinkedIn and Twitter (in that order). It is also helpful to share that same content on Facebook and Google +. Google+ is very helpful to improve search engine results.
Email Marketing to Generate a New B2B Leads
Email marketing is all about communicating through a structured email to generate leads and establish a relationship with potential clients. A B2B sales outsourcing lead generation company will be able to help you navigate through multiple vendors to target as many as 75,000 potential targets for about the fully-loaded costs of one sales development rep for one month. This will typically generate 2000 to 4000 early stage leads.
Email Marketing to Develop and Prioritize B2B Leads
One of the most significant developments in sales and marketing over the past decade is marketing automation platforms. Marketing automation allows you to share your thought leadership to develop trust and stay top of mind with consumers that are not quite ready to buy. These same tools also allow you to score leads and predict their readiness to buy based on the content they are engaging with. A B2B sales outsourcing company will be able to help you implement these campaigns and technologies the right way the first time with planned lead generation tactics.
B2B Sales Outsourcing Calling Team
Finally, a lead is only valuable if it turns into an appointment. The days of old school smile and dial and throwing bodies on the phone to generate more leads is over. A B2B sales outsourcing company will be able to help you immediately staff a trained team of sales development reps that understand how to use content and marketing automation the most effective way possible to set appointments for your closers.
About Gabriel Sales B2B Sales Outsourcing Lead Generation Tactics
We specialize in helping SMBs and start-ups build modern sales and marketing operations. To learn more about our lead generation tactics and how we now view the sales challenges B2B companies now face and how we solve them we invite you to check out our new approach to outsourced sales page or visit our B2B sales outsourcing lead generation starter campaign page.
by Glen Springer | Jun 5, 2017
Outsourcing your company’s sales and marketing efforts is now a more mature and viable decision for many businesses in many industries. An outsourced sales and marketing solution addresses the early part of your pipeline development. And for technology and professional services firms this is now more than a trend. Outsourced sales and marketing is now mainstream. Many business now understand when they outsource sales and marketing to generate qualified sales opportunities, their sales team will have a consistent flow of business, so they can focus their energy on closing deals and scaling account revenue. Here are some reasons for outsourced sales and marketing:
Outsourced Sales and Marketing Gets You to Market Faster
When you outsource your lead generation and development efforts, your outsourced sales and marketing company has all the best practices and resources available to get your team, your solution, and your sales story to market quickly.You save time because your team is hired and trained faster, which means your pipeline is growing.
Immediate Sales and Marketing Infrastructure
One of the keys to success in selling to the new digital buyer is technology to support revenue generation. This requires both experience and expertise – but it’s often overlooked by the decision makers. An outsourced sales and marketing solution provider will have both the experience and expertise of multiple implementations. More importantly, they will have professionals that run and manage these sales and marketing tools everyday. This means you will spend less time and money experimenting, and your team can focus on scaling your business and growing accounts.
Diverse Sales and Marketing Expertise
Companies who manage outsourced sales and marketing team will be able to supply a blended team of sales and marketing experts. They will also have experience selling multiple solutions with multiple sales cycles and sales processes, giving you access to a diverse experience set, that will allow you to innovate faster.
Sales Reps with Experience
When hiring and outsourced sales and marketing team, they will know who to hire, how to motivate, and how to train your team to use the tools and effective selling techniques. This results in a better return on investment and a reduced sales cycle as your closers are focused on buyers most likely to buy.
An Alternative Sales Growth Strategy
Like any outsourcing solution, when you outsource sales, it can be a great option to erase the need for additional office space, capital, and management layer. It will also remove the soft costs of hiring and recruiting an in-house sales team. You can focus your internal sales budget on closers and your outsource sales partner will take care of the rest.
About Gabriel Sales Outsourced Sales and Marketing
Gabriel Sales provides sales consulting & outsource sales and marketing services to companies to help them build modern sales and marketing operation that continues to produce results. To learn a little more about our approach, how we can help, reasons for outsourced sales and marketing and how we help you build a sales and marketing revenue engine from start to finish, please visit our new approach to outsource sales page.
by Glen Springer | May 31, 2017
Successfully Outsourcing Sales for Start Ups and SMBs
Successfully outsourcing sales as a business strategy can provide benefits and cost-savings for your company with process improvements, expanded talent pools, cost containment, improved focus on core business, and reduced time-to-market, to name a few.
However, there are risks in an unsuccessful sales outsourcing engagement that can diminish the benefits. How do you minimize those sales outsourcing risks? First, don’t expect a magic bullet at the beginning of the engagement. Number two: make an informed decision.
If your company is initiating an outsourcing strategy for the first time, the following set of five steps will help you to minimize the risks and maximize the opportunities for outsourcing success.
Define clear objectives. Successfully outsourcing sales strategy starts with clearly defined objectives and measurable goals. Objectives state the reasons for a sales outsourcing program, define its business value, and provide a functioning framework for making decisions about which outsourcing company to work with, which model to use, what stage of the funnel development to outsource, and what levels of risk to assume. Measurable goals are the events and functional metrics by which management can monitor progress, take corrective action, and project future performance.
Count the true costs. Just as important as setting realistic expectations is, your expectations reflect all related costs if you both build and internal sales and marketing organization, or go with an outsourcing marketing and sales firm. These hidden costs and savings need to be evaluated:
- Selecting an outsourcing partner vs. building one on your own: Selecting a vendor could take 5 to 40 hours depending on how long it takes to find the right fit – but this pales in comparison to recruiting a team of sales reps and marketers.
- Transitioning work and sales processes: Knowledge transfer can take time. Make sure your outsourcing sales company has a process well defined to transition sales from your team and/or organization to theirs.
- Technology costs: A CRM and marketing automation platform are now critical for success. Understand who will implement, integrate, and manage those technologies.
- Managing: How will the engagement be managed on both sides? Does your outsourcing sales partner make reporting and managing the engagement easy? The costs of maintaining a finished contract can be surprisingly high.
Manage Risk. Another critical factor in executing a sales outsourcing program is deciding how much of your sales process you want to immediately shift to your outsourcing sales process. For companies with mature products and a mature sales process, it may make more sense to outsource your sale from lead generation to closed deals. The sales process and the marketing process will already be well defined with a script, technologies, and content to support it. But for many small businesses and start-ups, it may make more sense to focus on filling the pipe and developing qualified leads before staffing a team of closers, because closers are the most expensive resource to staff both internally, or with an outsourcing sales partner.
Lead Generation and Content Marketing Outsourcing: this function is often the most effective way to manage risk for a small business, as it can be executed with a fixed start date and will include hard and measurable results. It will also include a hard and tangible process, as well as the construction of modern sales and marketing operations that will be a valuable asset for years to come. Most importantly you will have hard data and success metrics to measure on a monthly and weekly basis to track progress.
About Us
Gabriel Sales builds modern sales and marketing operations including, sales outsourcing of your lead generation and lead development. We have been successfully outsourcing for SMBs and Start Ups for 20 years. We provide both full service solutions and point solutions. To learn more visit our approach to successfully outsourcing sales page.
by Glen Springer | May 24, 2017
Telemarketing has been around almost half a century and remains one of the oldest forms of generating leads. And over the past decade, with the growth of inbound lead generation tactics like Google AdWords, Facebook Ads, and outbound lead generation tactics like social media and email marketing, cold calling has lost its luster. Now more than ever, telemarketing makes sense.
More importantly, cold calling has decreased in efficiency, and consequentially its ROI, for one primary reason: buyers simply do not pick up the phone as often as they used to. As a sales outsourcing company that has been around for close to 20 years, we’ve slowly watched calls to connect ratios slide from 20 percent of calls resulting in a connection in 2009, to a call to connect ratio of between 8 and 12 percent in 2016. This means that front of the funnel calling is half as effective and twice as expensive as it was less than a decade ago.
However, if you look at telemarketing with a different perspective – as your competitors are abandoning calling – working the phone can turn into a distinct competitive advantage if approached in a more modern way. The ability of an outsourced sales company to help you build modern sales and marketing operations, while combining outbound marketing tactics with smarter calling, is why telemarketing makes sense.
Here are the three top reasons outsourced sales just makes more sense for using telemarketers to generate leads.
Outsourced Sales Company has Targeting Expertise
An outsourced sales company will live and breathe database acquisition and database management. Most companies will not have the subscriptions or relationships they need to build and construct a solid database. An outsourced sales company will have access to lists for both email marketing and/or straight cold calling.
Other Tactics Outsourced Sales Company Use to Generate the Leads
Many outsourced sales companies will have expertise beyond telemarketing. An outsourced sales company will have support staff with expertise in email marketing, social media marketing and PPC advertising to help you generate leads through multiple channels.
Marketing Automation Experience
Marketing automation is a great way to prioritize leads for telemarketers to focus. You can use a marketing automation technology to prioritize what leads are most likely to buy from email marketing campaigns and to prioritize leads after a cold callers first contact with a new lead.
Cost-saving and Cost Effective
When it finally comes time for you to staff callers, you can outsource intro sales calls on a month-to-month basis as needed. When carried on your own payroll, you will have more overhead costs. And when you hire an outsourced sales caller, the team will be well managed by executives with years of experience hiring, recruiting and training that team.
Outsourced Sales Maximizes ROI
Outsourced sales companies will have a track record to deliver a better ROI because they are hired on a contracted basis, so you will receive consistent, reliable and quick delivery without all the recruiting costs of hiring your own team. This is why telemarketing makes sense.
About Our Integrated Outsourced Sales Campaigns
Gabriel Sales builds modern sales and marketing operations for Small Businesses and Start Ups with complex B2B solution sales. To learn more about our approach to marketing and why telemarketing makes sense, we invite you to check out our services page.
