by gabriel_sales | Dec 13, 2013
Building an emotional connection matters. While most people would assume that in terms of emotional connections with brands, B2C companies’ connections with their customers would be far stronger than those with B2B brands.
However, in a 2013 study by Google and CEB’s Marketing Leadership Council, the exact opposite was found:
“Of the hundreds of B2C brands that Motista has studied, most have emotional connections with between 10% and 40% of consumers. Meanwhile, of the nine B2B brands we studied, seven surpassed the 50% mark. On average, B2B customers are significantly more emotionally connected to their vendors and service providers than consumers.”
Google explained that while these findings may be initially surprising, the inner workings of B2B and B2C purchases give a clear explanation of why building an emotional connection matters: B2C purchases generally carry much less risk for the buyer than B2C purchases.
Most B2C purchases (a vacuum, a toothbrush, a pair of jeans, etc.) are returnable, and if they are not, the cost of a poor B2C product purchase is unlikely to affect someone’s overall wellbeing in any significant way. The same cannot be said for B2B purchases , which are generally much higher cost (i.e. a multi-million dollar software deal) and carry additional personal risks for the buyer:
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Losing time and effort if a purchase decision goes poorly
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Losing credibility if they make a recommendation for an unsuccessful purchase
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Losing their job if they are responsible for a failed purchase
~Google
Because these personal risks carry a lot of emotional weight for the buyer, anything B2B companies can do reduce the level of perceived risk will strengthen the likelihood of a purchase being made. By highlighting the personal and emotional benefits of the B2B purchase (i.e. no more management headaches, opportunity to grow your career, etc.) in your early stage marketing content, you can help alleviate some of the emotional tension your prospects feel in their buying process. This is why this emotional connection matters so much.
To read more on reducing the perception of risk in B2B sales and why connection matters, click here.
Feel free to contact us with any questions.
by gabriel_sales | Dec 13, 2013
There comes a time for every B2B business owner where they must decide how to approach their sales and marketing. There are many different routes you can take: hiring part-time or full-time staff, purchasing consulting services, outsourcing to a third party or some combination of these.
The best option for your company is going to depend on your resources, your specific situation and your goals. If your goal is to dramatically increase revenue through your sales efforts, an outsourced sales team might be your best option. By leveraging a B2B outsourced sales team, you gain access to sales talent that you generally could not afford to hire internally. Additionally, the experience and expertise that comes with an outsourced sales team will help support and optimize your marketing efforts for greater effectiveness and efficiency.
Here are 5 ways an outsourced sales team can help your marketing team:
1. Content development
There have been a few articles recently that talk about the need for B2B companies to act like publishers in terms of their marketing content. For many companies, coming up with fresh content on a regular basis (that provides real value for prospects) is an extremely time consuming task.
At Gabriel Sales, one of the ways our sales outsourcing services support marketing teams is by providing detailed feedback from prospects on the value or effectiveness of different pieces of marketing content. Based on our analysis of phone calls with prospects and marketing analytics data, we provide recommendations for content that your prospects will find engaging and valuable (we can also produce the content for you if you have the need).
2. Augment your under staffed sales team
In recent years, budget limitations and other factors have left many B2B sales teams understaffed. In addition, cold calling just isn’t as effective as it used to be—making it much more expensive to succeed with this tactic. By going with an outsourcing option, you can gain access to an entire sales team for approximately the cost of one internal rep.
Despite how incredible an individual may be in terms of talent and skill, that person can never match the combined training, experience and established relationships that an outsourced sales team can provide. So, instead of spending money internally to hire someone new, it may be more cost-effective to outsource a whole team.
3. Leverage your investment in CRM and MA software
For many B2B companies, technologies like marketing automation and customer relationship management (CRM) software may still be relatively new and confusing. For an outsourced sales team like we have at Gabriel Sales, navigating these technologies is now second-nature. By leveraging an outsourced team, you can therefore bypass months or even years trying to figure it out on your own.
Additionally, one of the top two reasons for dissatisfaction with marketing automation is poor integration with sales. By leveraging an outsourced sales team with over 10,000 hours of marketing automation experience, you gain access to best practices and tips for better sales and marketing alignment. In other words, you let the experts show you how to succeed and what to avoid without having to go through all the headaches of learning on your own.
4. Provide qualitative and quantitative feedback on all tactics.
Every outsourced sales team needs to provide evidence of the value of their work. At Gabriel Sales, we provide our clients twelve different types of reporting on our efforts—from data on conversion ratios to verbatim transcripts of cold calls. We also have weekly meetings with each of our clients to discuss our successes and areas for improvement.
This much transparency and visibility allows your marketing team to easily understand how best to support sales with content and determine what campaigns would be most effective. With the detailed reporting of an outsourced sales team, determining how and where to optimize is greatly simplified.
5. Convert quality inbound leads to qualified prospects
Even when inbound leads come in with a high level of perceived interest, they still need to be qualified. By using an outsourced sales team, you can follow up on inbound leads and nurture them until they are sales qualified for a much lower price than handling it internally.
With a dedicated and experienced outsourced sales team at your service, your marketing team gains the data, technological skills and overall expertise they need to do their jobs as efficiently and effectively as possible.
You can learn more about the value of a B2B outsourced sales team here. To learn about the outsourced sales solutions we offer, visit our services page. Feel free to contact us with any questions.
by gabriel_sales | Dec 6, 2013
How social proof and marketing are inexplicably linked
While social proof is not a new phenomenon, its manifestation in the digital world has interesting effects and implications in terms of commercial attitudes and behaviors.
Evidence of the new power of social proof in commercial situations is everywhere—take Yelp! or Rotten Tomatoes for example. Millions of people now use social and interactive sites like these to help them make decisions about the products and services they buy. What is significant is that these digital opinions now have the power to upset the impact of traditional marketing and sales techniques.
Let’s look at Rotten Tomatoes. They have a score system that gives movies ratings by percentages. Having 75% positive reviews from registered movie critics makes a movie “Certified Fresh”. From a small startup in 1999, Rotten Tomatoes’ reviews and ratings are now “known to substantially affect the commercial success of many films,” and “Certified Fresh” stickers are now placed on the packaging of DVDs as a marketing tactic (Ross W. Martin).
The success of Rotten Tomatoes and similar sites shows us a couple of things. First is the growing distrust we have of traditional sources of information. Rather than listening to corporations who are always going to say their products and services are great, consumers are now starting to prefer to choose their purchases based on opinions they see as being more authentic and credible. This type of shift spans all industries and markets. In essence, consumers everywhere know they don’t have to listen to the industry equivalent of the ‘greasy car salesman’ anymore.
Consumers now want to feel educated and empowered when making buying decisions, and that cannot happen when they feel that they are ‘being sold’. As sociologists Gary Allen Fine and others have noted, “even when information becomes available from official sources, it will be believed only if people regard these sources as credible. When people view official sources as suspect or untrustworthy, they become increasingly likely to seek information from informal or unofficial sources.”
This brings us to the second thing sites like Rotten Tomatoes show us—the power of using social proof as a sales and marketing tactic. By letting other ‘indirect’ or ‘unofficial’ sources do the talking in your marketing content, you gain instant credibility. “Certified Fresh” stickers are a great example, and today’s smart companies are now finding many other new and inventive ways to leverage social proof through their sales and marketing campaigns.
Many companies who are using social proof in this way are doing so because they are seeing certain market trends develop:
- Over 70% of Americans say they look at product reviews before making a purchase. (Social Commerce Stats)
- Nearly 63% of consumers indicate they are more likely to purchase from a site if it has product ratings and reviews. (Search Engine Journal)
These statistics show that social proof is now a strong motivating factor in purchase decisions, and companies who demonstrate this through reviews and other means have an advantage over companies whose marketing tactics are purely promotional.
To learn more about how buyer’s digital behaviors are changing B2B sales and marketing, watch this quick overview video. Feel free to contact us with any questions.
by gabriel_sales | Nov 20, 2013
This is part-two of a blog series on five things you may be doing that hurt your B2B content marketing conversion rates. Click here for part one.
3. You aren’t offering multiple options for consumption.
In the past decade or so, the traditional mode of selling and buying was flipped on its head and now, buyers hold all the power when it comes to the game of sales. Because buyers now hold the keys in terms of when to view marketing material, how long to view and how to respond, you need to offer them as many options as possible to get them to convert.
For example, let’s say you send out an email with a link for a YouTube video attached. Now, if your prospect is on their mobile device and is taking the subway home, they may have the desire to interact with your content but don’t want to disturb the people around them by playing a loud video. By including a transcript of the video or a slide share presentation with notes attached, you can ensure that regardless of your prospects’ individual situations and preferences, you are offering relevant content they will want to engage with.
4. You aren’t telling people what you want them to do.
It is not likely that your prospects are going to convert if you don’t make it clear and easy for them to do so. Marketing content should always contain a call to action; the action itself can vary, but it should always be obvious to your viewer.
To increase conversion rates, you can use your call to action to help guide your prospect through their buying cycle by leading them from one piece of content to the next. For example, after an educational blog post, invite people to ‘learn more’ by watching your company overview video. Then, on the video page, invite prospects to ‘sign up for a custom demo’. When used in this way, calls to action are about more than just getting a prospect to click on something; they are about helping guide your prospects through their buying journey.
5. You aren’t tailoring your content for different audience segments.
Market segmentation is not a new concept anymore, so if you aren’t segmenting your content in some way at this point, you’re behind. By breaking apart your audience into different segments based on various demographic factors (title, geography, company size, department, etc.), you are able to then tailor the messaging of your content to match the different pains, needs and goals each segment may have.
Segmenting your content successfully requires in-depth knowledge of your customer base. The B2B sale now often involves multiple decision-makers and stakeholders (IT, HR, marketing, etc.), all of whom bring a different perspective to the table. By offering marketing content appropriate for each of those perspectives, you show your prospects you have taken the time to truly understand their needs and goals, which will help you earn their trust.
To learn more about B2B content marketing, you can read another educational blog post here. Please feel free to contact us with any questions.
by gabriel_sales | Nov 19, 2013
In the past few years, many B2B companies have started blogs and YouTube channels, joined social media networks, started hosting webinars and more—having been told that putting digital content out into the world would translate to increased revenue.
For most companies, B2B content marketing has now become an integral part of their overall marketing program. In terms of lead generation, nurturing and relationship building, content marketing has seen tremendous success. However, we believe content marketing is successful only if it leads to an impact on sales. At the end of the day, if your content isn’t converting prospects into leads or customers, it isn’t doing its job.
In order to help you create more effective and engaging B2B marketing content, here are five things you may be doing that hurt your conversion rates:
1. You aren’t thinking about content creation strategically.
You might have the ability to produce quality content. That quality content might even be read frequently. However, if that content isn’t backed by a strategy to guide prospects from one stage of the sales cycle to the next, it won’t help you convert leads.
In order for B2B marketing content to be useful for conversion, you need to map out the stages of your buyer’s buying cycle and then develop different pieces of content to match each stage. The purpose of this is to allow you buyer to take themselves through their buying cycle on their own. This means you need basic level, purely educational blog posts to help with discovery as well as highly technical product/software demos to encourage the close—and everything in between. By thinking strategically about content creation, you ensure that every piece of content you create has a purpose and end goal in mind, leading to dramatically increased conversion.
2. You aren’t talking in specifics.
A lot of B2B content marketing gets ignored because it doesn’t really say much. Everyone can say their solution “increases ROI” or “cuts expenses”, but that doesn’t actually tell your prospects anything about how you are different than your competitors. By avoiding specifics in your marketing content, your prospects are left wondering, “OK, but how does that work exactly?” or worse, “Does this person even know what they are talking about?”
While you don’t want to be overly technical and talk over the heads of your prospects, you do want your content to convince them of your expertise. By going into specific details when appropriate (i.e. when you are explaining your value proposition), your prospects feel like they are educated enough to make an informed purchase decision.
To continue reading, click here.
by gabriel_sales | Nov 18, 2013
In a previous blog post, we discussed that while many B2B companies think of holidays or vacation times as a negative thing, we believe you can use them to your advantage. This is especially true of the winter holiday season, when many companies choose to slow down on sales and marketing efforts until the new year. Instead, we recommend not slowing down your B2B marketing during the holidays.
Here are three reasons to keep up with your marketing efforts this holiday season:
1. Leverage an opportunity to take advantage of leftover budget.
Many B2B companies see the end of the year as a dead time—thinking that everyone is on vacation, people are too consumed with the holidays to think about business, etc. While it is true that more people will be on vacation during this time, it is also true that those who are stuck at the office may be tasked with figuring out what to do with the rest of this year’s budget. If your end-of-the-year email is in their inbox reminding them of the value you could bring to their company, you could be the one that gets that budget.
2. Get people on the phone when they are less busy.
Along the same lines, many companies slow down their cold calling/telemarketing efforts during the holidays, assuming that no one will be in the office to answer the phone. It is true that your call to connect ratio may go down this time of year, but those who do pick up will be less busy and will have more time to talk with you. Some executives actually work through the holiday season, and this may be the opportune time to get them on the phone—when they have less internal issues to deal with.
3. Inaction can lead to a decline in Q1 sales.
Especially in the B2B space, conversion can take a while—for 2/3 of B2B companies, conversion takes three months or longer. This means that dropping off your marketing efforts during Q4 may translate to a drop off in Q1 sales. In terms of both lead generation and lead nurturing, the holidays are a great time to get an edge on the competition who may not be marketing at this time. In addition, many of your prospects are planning for the new year in November and December. If you stay on top of your marketing during this time, hiring you might become a part of their 2014 plan.
For tips on how to succeed in B2B sales and marketing in 2014, click here. Please feel free to contact us with any questions.
Building an emotional connection matters. While most people would assume that in terms of emotional connections with brands, B2C companies’ connections with their customers would be far stronger than those with B2B brands.
