The Benefits of Marketing Automation

The Benefits of Marketing Automation

by | Jul 13, 2018

Marketers say that the biggest benefits of automation are saving time (74%), increased customer engagement (68%), more timely communications (58%) and increased opportunities including up-selling (58%) (Adestra).

While marketing automation has been a legitimate business solution for more than five years now, it’s not until recently that’s it’s gathered more interest from small- and medium-sized B2B businesses. And why not, it’s a proven tool for your sales process – producing an average of 14.5% increase in sales productivity and reducing overall sales and marketing overhead by an average of 12.2%.

And these gains are realized even when most SMBs fail to leverage the true power of marketing automation to take care of the early stage sales funnel/buyer’s journey customer education. Because unfortunately, most SMBs only use marketing automation tools to send newsletters. In fact, more than 60% of marketers limit the use of their platform for email blasts to stay in touch with existing customers, and only 13% are using automation software in more advance ways (Autopilot).

Marketing automation platforms produce the best return on investment when they are used to run lead development campaigns, to score leads and to capture information about your potential customers to make your sales staff more productive. Marketing automation can make your sales and marketing operations more effective and efficient by attracting leads, educating them about your products and solutions, identifying and measuring their interest, and providing their level of real interest in your product or services. Sales may then cherry-pick the leads that express the most interest and are most likely to buy.

Here are five ways marketing automation can help you grow your sales at a lower cost.

Marketing Automation enables you to nurture not-yet-ready-to-buy prospects.

It takes an average of between 7 and 13 touches to develop a buyer before a sale is made. Marketing automation can become a stand-in for a junior level sales and marketing person, sharing company information and knowledge directly with your potential buyers. For those leads that are already aware of your solution, but aren’t yet ready to buy, marketing automation allows you to stay top-of-mind and build trust with your leads by offering educational content about industry trends and developments. It allows you to further boost your online presence, highlight product enhancements, and establish industry-leading influence. And it works: nurtured leads produce an average of a 20% increase in sales opportunities versus non-nurtured leads (DemandGen Report).

Research has shown that only 5% of B2B prospects are ready to buy at any given time. And 50% of qualified leads are not ready to buy either (Gleanster Research). And yet, many B2B companies today do not have a strategy to develop these opportunities; so sales reps simply discard them as ‘not interested.’ However, by nurturing your leads with light, educational content on a regular basis, you can stay top-of-mind and over time, develop real active interest (and deals) from leads you generated 6 to 12, to even 18 months ago.

Marketing automation allows you track and manage your early stage prospects and their content engagement on an ongoing basis as they go through the buyer’s journey over and extended period of time. The tool then reports data back to your team about their overall interactions, rather than by each individual campaign. This data is pushed to your CRM and used to more accurately identify and communicate to sales what leads need attention.

Lead nurturing works: 67% of B2B marketers say they see at least a 10% increase in sales opportunities through lead nurturing. And 15% companies report seeing an increase of 30% or more (Demand Gen Report). The top companies that excel at lead nurturing, generate 50% more sales ready leads at a 33% lower cost (Forrester Research).

Marketing Automation allows you to track content engagement by prospect.

96% of visitors who come to your website aren’t ready to buy (yet) (Marketo). And only 25% of those leads are legitimate and should advance to sales (Gleanster Research).

One of the greatest features of marketing automation is the ability to measure each piece of content a prospect has consumed throughout their interaction with your emails and website. These measurements help you monitor and analyze the buyers journey, allowing you to better understand customer buying behavior, identify your most engaging content, and pinpoint the preferred and most active distribution channels.

Marketing automation allows you to score prospects according to the type of content they’ve engaged with. Different types of content are scored based on how predictive they are in relationship to a buyer stage in your sales cycle. Basic educational content is not as highly scored as video webcasts about a specific buyer pain/need or demo videos relating to a specific solution. Each email sent within an automation campaign is scored to identify what content is interesting to buyers and how frequently they are engaging with it.

This type of data allows you to see when specific prospects have shown enough interest, so it makes sense for a sales rep to reach out with a personal email or phone call to move the deal forward. By using this type of dynamic lead scoring, you will have the ability to rank and score formerly unquantifiable implicit digital activities and take the appropriate sales action. The use of explicit data – higher scores for different lead criteria – allows you to grade your prospect compared to your ideal customer profile, making your sales team more armed and effective when they make first contact. These sales automation efforts seamlessly pass top scoring prospects over to well-prepared sales reps with background information on the leads interest in real-time.

Overall, lead scoring allows your sales team to focus on the most interested buyers and allows you to prioritize buyers that are the best fit for your company’s solution.

Marketing Automation allows you to use analytics to refine and improve your content and sales process.

One of the most valuable things marketing automation provides is data. Using the platform’s analytical features, you can track and monitor engagement at a more detailed level in order to understand when and how to improve. For example, platforms provide data for when a video is watched. This allows you to identify which pieces of content are being consumed, and which are not.  Your marketing team can create more of what works, making pivots to making the right marketing investments easier to understand and execute.

Real-time lead alerts via email allow your sales team to follow-up faster when buyers are actively engaged in your content and submit a request.  And we all know, time is money: there’s a 10x drop-off in lead qualification when sales waits longer than five minutes to respond to a lead – and a 400% decrease when sales waits 10 minutes or more (HBR, Insidesales).

With these alerts and summaries sales reps can more easily:

  • Prioritize their day with the most active prospects
  • Call buyers when they know they are sitting at their desk
  • Click on links to trigger CRM profile lookups for buyer insights
  • Send custom emails to active prospects with a few quick clicks

Additionally, marketing automation provides buyer intelligence for your marketing team. It shows what topics/pains buyers are most motivated by.  And many of these reports are available in your CRM. Information like original lead source, specific page views, how long they spent on the page, webinar attendance and video views can also be tracked and analyzed. This type of data allows sales and marketing to work effectively together to drive sales as a team.

Marketing Automation Improves Lead Generation

Demand Gen’s State of Demand Generation study shows, 77% of buyers want different, targeted content at each stage of their research. Marketing automation allows you to send certain messages at designated times to your database Nurturing campaigns communicate with buyers through every step of the buyer’s journey – staying in front leads not yet ready to buy.  This lowers cost dramatically  and reduces lead churn rate, and helps you get the most from your lead generation efforts because it enables your company  to stay in touch with buyers over a long period of time without the expense and time of regular check in phone calls by sales reps. With lead nurturing, sales reps don’t waste time chasing leads not yet ready to buy, while the marketing team prevents cold leads from slipping through the cracks.

Marketers using automation software generate 2x the number of leads than those using blast email software and are perceived by their peers to be 2x as effective at communicating with buyers (Autopilot, 2015; Hubspot Marketing Statistics). Enough said.

About Us

Gabriel Sales specializes in helping SMBs and Startups grow their business with modern sales and marketing operations.

Our team can augment gaps in your existing sales and marketing operations or we can be leveraged for full-service campaigns that include:

  • Integrated Sales and Marketing Strategies
  • Database Research and Targeting
  • Automation and CRM Systems Best Practices Implementation
  • Inbound Lead Generation
  • Outbound Lead Generation and Lead Scoring
  • Sales Qualification
  • Closing

To learn more about how we can help you grow your business (or decide if we are the right fit for you), we invite you to visit our page that details our integrated approach to sales and marketing outsourcing. Or feel free to contact us for free initial consultation and discovery session to see if our approach is the right fit to help you hit your revenue targets.

 

 

The Team You Need for Modern Sales and Marketing

The Team You Need for Modern Sales and Marketing

by | Jan 18, 2018

Today, SMBs ready to expand sales and marketing efforts beyond their current capacity often consider hiring an outsourced sales and marketing team to assist in scaling the business. These days, organizations can hire an experienced team of marketers and sales people for a fraction of the cost of recruiting, hiring, training, and managing its own internal team. But, keeping your sales and marketing process flowing daily is more critical than ever to deliver a sustained flow of leads and opportunities. Therefore, it’s more important than ever to have the right members of your modern sales and marketing team to ensure all the bases are covered.

Many companies are now realizing how effective (and expensive) forming a modern sales and marketing team can be to increase sales. The right team makes all the difference and can have a significant impact on the growth of a company’s bottom line. But assembling the right team of heavy-hitters can come at a cost.

Many SMBs that are just getting started don’t quite grasp how modern sales and marketing operates, therefore, they don’t understand the pieces needed to effectively build and run a modern sales and marketing team themselves. As a result, some look to outsource sales and marketing efforts to learn modern sales and marketing best practices and exactly what tools and efforts it takes to run successful campaigns that keep the funnel flowing.

First, building a team – or hiring an outsourced team – must have the same focus and goals, including:

  1. Shifting sales and marketing efforts to making it easy to build trust and drive value for your buyers digitally before you “sell.”
  2. Building trust through shifting your organizations messaging from what your product/service does and how awesome it is, to helping the buyer understand how it fits within the market and what problems it solves.

A modern sales and marketing team rigorously communicates about these goals and the status of the messaging, lead development, and failures and successes in the particular areas of interest. Marketers and sales people collaborate and discuss data points and information each is hearing from the industry, which can be used to educate users, while establishing thought-leadership and trust. Developing trust with your buyer early in the buying and selling process is one of the top reasons for forming (or hiring) a modern sales and marketing team.

Here’s the team we’ve found success with and what that team looks like.

Account Coordinator

A sales and marketing account coordinator (AC) is responsible for all the project management and reporting for accounts, including all modern sales and marketing team efforts. Deploying and managing drip campaigns and coordinating one-offs, follow-up emails and micro-campaigns dominates the ACs time. Most importantly, the account coordinator is in charge of transitioning all qualified leads to the sales reps or internal closers, and share what they have learned from the buyer – digital content engaged with and what they have learned about the buyer’s needs. Communication is key, as it saves time and ensures the collaboration of data and the accuracy of reporting.

Main Duties:

  • Project Management
  • Deploy Email Campaigns
  • Manage Drip Campaigns
  • Oversee Nurture Campaigns
  • Report Conversions
  • Manage Weekly Meeting

Content Producer

Content is king for modern sales and marketing, so a content production specialist (in-house or contract) is an essential part of a modern sales and marketing team. The content producer creates and manages content designed for various campaigns and different stages of the buyers’ journey. Producing thought leadership content and explaining how an organization approaches industry trends and issues is necessary to fuel the automation engine and move consumers through the stages coherently. The content producer will be able to integrate frameworks to help you create thought leadership content in the form of webcasts, videos, blog posts and checklists and present it logically on landing pages and microsites. This digital content can act as a surrogate for your senior reps early in the sales process, while scoring the content users engage with most and measuring their interest. Your “digital thought leader” will demonstrate and share educational content and expertise early in the sales conversation to display solutions and build trust.

Main Duties:

  • Produce Educational Assets
  • Write blogs, emails, white papers, case studies, etc.
  • Produce Screencasts and Webcasts Videos
  • Build Microsites and Landing Pages

Database Analyst

Successful modern sales and marketing requires campaign performance analysis to measure best practice KPIs such as click-through rates, click-to-open rates, etc. Look for high performance click through rates (CTR), click-through percentages and unsubscribe rates and adjust your campaigns accordingly. If a particular piece of content is triggering an above-average unsubscribe rate, remove it from the campaign and monitor the updated flow of buyers through the journey. If there is an email that has a high CTR, optimize the corresponding landing page and consider using it as part of an inbound campaign. There are many ways to interpret the provided data and make the appropriate changes to campaigns, the key is having a marketing database expert to ensure the system is set up correctly to capture the coveted data sets.

Main Duties:

  • List Acquisition
  • List Management
  • List Suppression
  • List Appending
  • List Delivery

Automation Expert

A modern sales and marketing team needs an automation expert to manage the execution of your drip and nurture campaigns, and to ensure your database is moving through the appropriate buyer’s journey. A marketing automation expert will implement best practices and provide expertise to help build trust with buyers not ready to buy digitally. A marketing automation expert will set up the automation system to allow you to track a buyer’s digital footprint, so when they are ready to buy, your closers will be notified, never missing an opportunity.

Main Duties:

  • Implement Systems
  • Integrate Systems
  • Manage Systems

Business Development Reps

Depending on your needs, your modern sales and marketing team may include callers, acting as business development reps, to generate interest and manage the early stage education of buyers. Effective callers will execute light discovery to qualify lead interest (from no interest to sales accepted interest) and set appointments with reps or closers responsible for managing the completion of the sale. How your team is staffed will depend on the size of the market you’re targeting and the volume of revenue you need to generate. This will also determine if you should hire a fully dedicated modern sales and marketing team internally for your organization or if it’s more cost-effective to hire a blended team of outsourced of resources.

Main Duty:

Follow up with inbound lead immediately – Senior sales resources and executives are busy, in meetings, running operations, managing accounts and leading the company. Your business development rep will ensure you’re focused on potential needs when the buyer expresses them with an inbound request. Your rep will help you get to the buyer faster – if he/she follows up in a timely manner. And as multiple studies continue to explain, the first person back to the buyer has a 50% advantage closing that deal over competitors.

Executive Oversight

Finally, you will gain access to a senior executive and strategist. This resource will be a peer that can help you to steward your sales strategy and your marketing strategy and will ultimately be accountable for your overall success.

An outsourced sales and marketing company can work with you to understand your Ideal Customer Profile. They can then help you acquire the databases, phone numbers and email addresses of these buyers and load your CRM with buyers to target that have the need for your product or solution so you are focused on selling to the right buyer.

About Us

Gabriel Sales specializes in helping SMBs and Startups grow business with modern sales and marketing operations. Our team can augment gaps in your existing sales and marketing operations or we can be leveraged for full service campaigns that include:

  • Integrated Sales and Marketing Strategies
  • Database Research and Targeting
  • Automation and CRM Systems Best Practices
  • Systems Implementation
  • Inbound Lead Generation
  • Outbound Lead Generation and Lead Scoring
  • Sales Qualification
  • Closing

To learn more about how we can help you grow your business (or decide if we are the right fit for you), we invite you to visit our page that details our integrated approach to sales and marketing outsourcing. Or feel free to contact us for free initial consultation and discovery session to see if our approach is the right fit to help you hit your revenue targets.

What is Modern Sales and Marketing

What is Modern Sales and Marketing

by | Nov 10, 2017

There’s been a lot of buzz lately about adjusting sales and marketing techniques, tactics and alignment to meet the needs of the modern B2B buyer. But what are the needs of this new type of buyer as they search and move toward purchase? What is Modern Sales and Marketing?

Before the days of the internet, people became aware of products in the physical world – traveling to a tradeshow, answering calls from and engaging with a sales person to gather information and learn about a product or service. And if the sales person was knowledgeable about the solution features and benefits, then they bought it.

Obviously, those days are gone, and now the internet gives people the opportunity to self-educate about products and services before communicating with a sales person. Now, if the buyer can avoid a sales person completely (which occurs frequently with SaaS products), they will. If a buyer does need to work with a sales person to complete the transaction, the buyer now expects that sales person to understand their needs and to customize a solution that meets their needs.

The paradigm has shifted and now products are bought first – with digital content that proves you understand your buyers’ needs and pains – then sold by closers or sales reps who take orders, once buyers feel educated enough to engage in deeper discussions.

The numbers continue to prove the acceleration of this trend: CEB Global finds, 77% of B2B buyers say they don’t talk with a sales rep until after they perform independent research. Sirius Decisions says, 67% of the buyer’s journey is now done digitally as today’s modern buyer self-evaluates the value of a product or service on websites, social networks, review boards and other digital resources of choice. And when they’re ready to engage with a sales rep, they’re already more than half way through the traditional journey. So, businesses must now embrace content marketing, marketing automation, content distribution and social posts to keep up with the demands of the modern consumer.

In essence, modern sales and marketing bridges the gap between sales and marketing and aligns the sellers sales process with the buyers’ journey, to sell solutions, not features and benefits. The goal of modern sales and marketing is to map your sales process with the contemporary buyers’ journey to make it easy for the buyer to purchase at each stage of the process.

Aligned Sales and Marketing

Today, a company that wants to succeed in the modern marketplace, must demand its sales and marketing departments work together collaboratively, get along and partner for one goal – increase the bottom line. With the multiple moving parts involved in the modern sales and marketing machine, both entities must work together to bring in an audience, educate that audience and move that audience towards a purchase decision. Equally important, they must also remove segments of that audience that are not interested in purchasing to maximize the time of the sales rep. It seems like an arduous task, but the effort is worth it because the rewards are tangible: Marketo finds that companies with an aligned sales and marketing strategy are 67% better at closing deals.

In order to align the two departments, sales must talk to marketing and clearly articulate the types of people (targets) who are most likely to buy and which ones are the right fit for the company. They also need to be able to clearly convey the problems these buyers need to solve. Then, marketing must take those items and craft a strategy, produce content (both educational and content that facilitates easier transactions) and distribute it in an organized, timely manner.

On the flip side, marketing needs to craft powerful sales stories and value propositions for the products or services, so the sales team can be consultants and offer solutions to consumers, rather than pushing product features and benefits.

It’s also marketing’s job to attract and nurture prospects with quality and authentic content that makes it easy for buyers to understand the company story, what makes them unique, and what makes them different. Additionally, marketing must track the buyers consumption of this content to pass the most qualified leads to the sales reps, so they can convert those prospects into customers.

At Gabriel Sales, we make it mandatory for the sales and marketing teams to meet weekly to review results and provide feedback regarding processes, content campaigns and other sales and marketing tactics. We often go through call verbatims, to learn what works and what does not work to adjust and fill gaps in both the sales process and marketing process where needed. This type of open communication and collaboration ensures our content is customized to our target audience – which the sales team knows best – and is being utilized in the correct stage of the buyers’ journey. In addition, this open communication and collaboration aligns our marketing and sales efforts, which helps generate inspirational and creative ideas for new content and sales and marketing tactics to attract qualified leads. Finally, it allows us to provide our target audience with incredible value and a clear understanding of our clients’ products or services. This level of collaboration accelerates our ability to hit sales goals and to generate the results our clients need.

Content Production, Curation and Distribution

As content marketing matures, the ROI is now becoming established. Demand Metric finds that content marketing costs 62% less than traditional marketing and generates about 3-times as many leads. But content marketing only works if you aim to educate your buyer and allow them to move towards a purchase. And again, the numbers support this approach as a Demand Metric study reports, 60% of buyers are inspired to seek out a more information on a product after reading about a business approach to the solution.

So, what type of content should you produce for the modern sales and marketing process to move a buyer towards a purchase? It’s important to create several types of targeted content for all phases of the new buyers’ journey, which is broken into three parts:

  1. Awareness phase: to help buyers realize their need for a product or service to fix their problem
  2. Consideration phase: to help buyers research solutions for their problem and to compare and contrast a solution they’re interested in
  3. Decision phase: to help assure buyers the product they’ve identified as a solution is the right choice

Any content device is useful, blogs, videos, webcasts, product demos, case studies, white papers, checklist, etc. But not all buyers like the same type of content. A Demand Gen report notes 95% of B2B buyers choose solution providers that offer relevant types of content at every stage of the buying process. So, it’s good to use several pieces for each stage. It’s also important to not over spend on content production. In many cases authentic communication at a lower cost works just as well as highly produced, expensive content. Blogs articles work just as well, in many cases, as expensive white papers. In fact, a Demand Metric study shows, companies that have a blog platform produce 67% more leads per month than those that do not have one. And video works too: Hubspot finds 70% of B2B buyers watch a video sometime during their buying journey.

The most important criteria is not expensive production, but aligning your content pieces to your buyer’s journey process, so you ensure each consumer interested in your solution is receiving the right message at the right time. As content is pushed out, it turns outbound leads into inbound leads that help your buyers decide if they are the right fit, while at the same time, either qualifying them as prospects for your sales team or disqualifies them (a no is as good as a yes) according to your target identification within your strategy. Remember, unqualifying leads is just as important as qualifying them, as it mitigates time wasted on people who will eventually fall out of the buyers’ journey themselves. This ensures you’re speaking to the right people and increases effectiveness and conversion rates, which, Aberdeen finds are nearly 6x higher for content marketing adopters than non-adopters – 2.9% vs 0.5%.

Marketing Automation and Lead Scoring

Content marketing takes commitment to ensure steady production. But simply churning content to increase your volume of marketing assets no longer makes sense. Creating the right content and using it as effectively as possible to maximize your investment is now critical. To do this, a company needs to leverage the right marketing automation tool to execute a systematic automation and digital communication plan that includes lead scoring. Marketing automation allows you to implement your buyers journey content strategy, roadmap, or digital sales process (whatever you want to call it) within a system that automatically sends messages at a desired cadence. Lead scoring then allows you to identify what buyers are most interested and actively considering buying a solution by assigning a score to the buyers’ digital activities and engagements. Leads are ultimately scored by correlating a buyer’s digital conversation to a buying stage. For example, form fills and pricing pages demand higher scores than educational blog pages. As a user self-educates, it continues to compile points and bubbles buyers most likely to buy to the top of the lead funnel.

When a buyer hits a certain threshold, they are then prioritized by the sales team for follow-up calls and discussions.

And because the automation software keeps a history of the pages visited, a sales rep can jump into that digital conversation and already understand the pains and problems a buyer is trying to solve. This allows a sales rep to become more of a consultant, rather than one that “feature dumps” and/or highlights the benefits of the solution.

At the same time, marketing can constantly study data and improve results with smarter reporting, in the forms of real-time content consumption, dynamic reporting of email activity and correlating campaign results to stages in the sales funnel. Ultimately, marketing automation allows for more accurate data, which allows teams to pivot when needed.

What is Modern Sales and MarketingDedicated Sales Consultants and Engineers

Top performing modern sales and marketing systems optimize workflows to make it easy for sales reps to follow-up with the right leads at the right time.

As Velocify finds, organizations with the fastest lead follow-up have the highest inbound lead conversion. In order to accomplish this, teams must dedicate sales consultants to qualify and contact high-scoring leads immediately, while understanding which “solution ballpark” the prospect is interested in, from the information provided.

Think of this as smart lead distribution – sending the right lead to the right sales rep to optimize the sales rep’s time. As Hubspot’s analysis of more than 2,200 American companies finds, those that attempt to reach leads within an hour of when a buyer looks ready to buy, are nearly 7x likelier to have meaningful conversations with decision makers than those that waited even 2 hours or more.

Summary

While this is a simplified synopsis of modern sales and marketing, there are key pieces SMBs can use to begin to build a process of making modern consumers aware of its products and solutions, while picking up some quick wins along the way.

The keys are to target the right decision maker units through communication and collaboration, set a strategy that clearly outlines the buyers’ journey and automate message delivery for a certain, decided cadence. Top performers solidify a consistent process and leverage technology to help execute it, while simultaneously mitigating wasted time and effort through insightful analytics. Another key is getting all teams on the same page for the same goal, to increase company revenue. Because when organizations achieve that, the results are astounding. Hubspot finds, when sales and marketing teams work together, companies see 36% higher customer retention and 38% higher sales win rates. Hubspot also reports, companies with good sales and marketing alignment practices, generate 208% more revenue from marketing efforts. And that’s good for everyone.

 

About Us

Gabriel Sales helps companies build modern sales and marketing operations. We are committed to marketing automation as one of the critical tools for sales success. We have over 50 marketing automation deployments under our belt. And we have implemented over a half dozen different marketing automation technologies so we can help you decide on the best fit at the right price to meet your sales goals and stage of sales maturity.

To learn more about the gaps we can help you in building modern sales and marketing operations with sales outsourcing we invite you to visit our sales outsourcing approach and philosophy page or our blog post about how we leverage sales outsourcing to build modern sales and marketing operations.

B2B Sales Outsourcing Lead Generation Tactics Explained

by | 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.

Selecting an Outsource Sales Company

Selecting an Outsource Sales Company

by | Jun 7, 2017

 

Many small businesses reach a point in their growth where the owner and/or founders of the small business have:

  • Established an effective business model
  • Have gained traction with a product or solution
  • Have run out of bandwidth to continue to both sell and run the company
  • Simply need capacity help and expertise to ramp their sales efforts

This is when many small businesses will start to evaluate if an outsource sales organization will make sense for their business and growth goals. They will measure this against the costs associated with hiring, recruiting, training, and managing their own team vs. going with an outsourcing company that can immediately build modern sales and marketing operations.

Once you have made the decision to outsource sales you will then have a variety of different types of companies to work with. This article will give you some less obvious tips to address what you should consider when making a final decision on what outsource sales company you should work with. In many cases, these issues are intuitive, but they should not be overlooked as a conscious part of your final decision.

Here are tips for selecting an outsource sales company

Decide what part of the sales funnel you want to outsource. Sales outsourcing can entail many functions. You can focus on new awareness campaigns, outbound lead generation campaigns, opportunity development, and appointment setting and closing.

Choose complementary sales partner. Once you have decided what stage of the sale funnel you want to outsource, it’s important to find the right fit. To short list, its important to understand what types of sales processes the outsource sales company has experience in. SaaS sales that can be completed online with no involvement from a sales rep requires a different type of expertise than more complex sales that require a sales rep to manage the transaction of the sale.  Short sales cycles function differently from sales cycles that are 90 to 180 days. Understand what type of experience the outsource sales company company has, to ensure you’re making the right decision on your sales partner.

What technology do they have experience using. One of the keys to long-term success is getting the right sales and marketing technology stack in place. At a minimum, this now requires a CRM and marketing automation technology to stay top of mind with buyers not ready to purchase immediately. It’s important to understand if the company will be:

  • Using systems
  • What systems they will be using
  • Will you have access to these systems during the engagement
  • What happens if the partnership ends – will they transfer the system or will the system go away?

Are they willing to start slowly and build gradually? Outsourcing all of your sales and marketing activity can be high risk immediately. Costs can quickly run into the hundreds of thousands of dollars if you staff marketers, lead gen reps and closers immediately. As discussed above, you should find out if the sales outsourcing company is willing to start with developing the front end of the funnel, and then as the volume of leads increases, are they willing to add resources as needed. This will allow your business to establish relationships and build the working rapport to grow the partnership organically within your organization.

How will you monitor and evaluate your progress? Once your sales outsourcing activities begin, depending on your sales cycle, it can take months or even a year to evaluate how many deals it produces to measure your true ROI. It is important to keep track of meaningful measurements prior to this to understand the relative short-term success or failure of your sales outsourcing strategy. It’s important to understand how and at what frequency your sales outsourcing will provide these metrics –  what they will be measuring and why?

About Our Outsource Sales Services

Gabriel Sales helps small business and start-ups build modern sales and marketing operations.

If you need assistance scaling your company’s revenue, building modern sales and marketing automation or just need to put more sales qualified leads in your closer’s sales funnel, Gabriel Sales may be able to help. To learn more about our approach to outsourced sales, we invite you to check out our sales outsourcing services page.

 

B2B Outsourced Sales Lead Generation Calling Tips

by | Jun 2, 2017

Gabriel Sales builds modern sales and marketing operations for B2B companies with solution sales that require a senior sales rep to manage the transaction of the sale. Over the past several years, we have seen the effectiveness of cold calling decrease substantially, but when executed the right way, it can still yield results. Here are some tips for companies that have worked for our B2B outsourced sales lead generation clients that you can implement on your own, or with our outsourced sales and marketing support.

B2B Outsourced Sales Lead Generation Tips

First, invest the time upfront to ensure you’re calling the right buyer. Spend as much time as you can, building databases of the right type of buyers at the right types of companies. A recent Gartner Group Study show that a typical business with less than 500 employees has an average of seven to ten people who are responsible for most buying decisions. Connecting with the right people is critical to your success – a simple, but sometimes overlooked, first step.

Try to start with calling at least a warm lead – ideally the phone call is a conversation. A conversation is much easier to have with at least someone that is slightly aware of your company. Whenever possible try to introduce yourself in advance. The most cost effective way to do this is with an email marketing campaign prior to the call.

Keep the first call educational, and share value first. Cold calling doesn’t mean that you are cold selling. The goal of the first call is to get your prospects attention, and you will only have 10 to 15 seconds to do that. When you call, be armed with something of value – it could be a webcast, a white paper, or a video to share. Sharing is caring and you will set yourself up for success downstream.

Use a marketing automation platform to prioritize leads. One of the most under-used feature of a marketing automation system is its lead scoring function.  You can use marketing automation platforms to see what content your buyers is engaging with. Calling time is precious time, so you can use a marketing automation platform to prioritize it.

Remember that the first two to three calls are not going to result in closed business, especially for more complex sales. Studies continue to show a typical sales cycle requires at least five to seven customer touches from the sales rep and engagement with at least that same amount of digital content. Use these calls to build value, not to sell features.

Qualify early. You should also use the first couple of calls to qualify the buyer. Is the company the right size? Do they have a need for your services?  You can be blunt and direct here as it saves both you and the buyer time – and a no is as good as a yes early in the sales process.

Ask questions, especially open ended questions. Sales relationships and qualified B2B sales leads are built through conversations, and conversations are started when you ask questions.  You should be asking questions at least three times more than you are pitching.

Do your homework for the second call. LinkedIn is now only a quick search away, and marketing automation systems will allow you to see what content interests your buyer most. Both these are invaluable tools for a second and third call to help you move your conversation forward.

About Gabriel Sales B2B Outsourced Sales Lead Generation

We specialize in building modern sales and marketing sales operations. We combine sales strategy and modern B2B marketing and sales best practices with a blended team of email marketing and content production specialists, marketing technology experts, and a team a sales development and market execution professionals to help with companies with B2B outsourced sales lead generation results. To learn more about our approach visit our outsourced sales case studies or our approach to B2B outsourced sales lead generation page.