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.
by Glen Springer | May 21, 2017
The digital buyer’s new best friend is the outsourced sales company
If you are like most companies, you have probably noticed that the days of simply cold calling buyers to generate leads is no longer as effective as it once was. In fact, most buyers now prefer to learn about new products by searching on the web or, in the case of 70% of buyers, to get an educational email that is then followed up by thoughtful reps with additional content. An outsourced sales company could help you navigate these tasks, saving you time and energy that could be spent on other projects.
Here are several challenges the new digital buyer presents followed by ways an sales outsourcing company may be able to help you address them.
Challenge #1 – Your buyers want and expect to be educated first. Buyers want to understand what you do without always relying on a sales reps to explain it. This means you may need to develop some new tactics and commit to content marketing. Marketing needs to support sales with content that shares your thought leadership digitally. If your marketers can leverage your thought leaders, they can optimize support of your sales team and keep them focused on selling while your content explains what you do. Marketing can take care of early stage sales engagement with the right content.
An outsourced sales campaign from Gabriel Sales will include creating content that can be leveraged by the sales rep and by your lead generation team to make it easier for the buyer to buy.
Challenge #2 – Sales and marketing need to work together with one goal of creating qualified sales opportunities through buyer education. The days of hard selling and simply marketing the features and benefits of your solution are over. For many businesses, this is the biggest hurdle because it’s cultural. Sales and marketing both need to work together toward the goal of educating the customer. To do this you are going to need to align sales and marketing with the tools, content, and processes you need to support your inside sales reps with the content you need to demonstrate your thought leadership and differentiators. There needs to be mutual respect between sales and marketing because the buyer no longer cares who educates them they just care about being educated. And in most cases as the graphic above demonstrates they expect it to be both sales and marketing with a consistent story.
An outsourced sales and marketing campaign can help you run an integrated sales and marketing campaigns that has both callers and content marketing tactics keeping you in front of and top of mind with your customer.
Challenge #3 – Using automation technology correctly. With the advent of marketing automation platforms, Google Analytics, and CRMs, you can now define and implement a repeatable sales process that uses technology to manage and score the effort. The right technology stack provides complete transparency and accountability throughout your entire sales and marketing process. It also helps sales and marketing keep score together.
This isn’t astrodynamics. Just head out to any Little League or Soccer Field on a Saturday during a game and compare it to what happens during practice. During practice, the energy level and focus waxes and wanes. Put them on the field when they are accountable for a score and measured on the results and everything changes.
An outsourced sales and marketing company will have the experience and expertise to help you set the right benchmarks in your automation platforms and CRM immediately.
Summary – The line between sales and marketing is getting blurred
- Your buyer now wants to be educated digitally and by reps
- They want access to your thought leadership on their time and not yours
- Your buyer does not want to engage with sales until they are educated and ready to buy
- You need to demonstrate you understand their situation and pain before your prospect will engage with sales
Sales and marketing now need to work together for sale success. Modern sales and marketing operations means your entire team needs to educate buyers.
If you want to learn more about what gaps in your sales and marketing operations, we invite you to visit this page that address what gaps outsourced sales can help you cover in your sales and marketing operations
by Glen Springer | May 1, 2017
The top goal of modern sales and marketing operations for small business needs to be: build a repeatable sales process that can generate a steady stream of sales opportunities.
One of the critical tenants of modern sales and marketing operations needs to be specialization. For most small businesses, this means that closing and developing opportunities now need to be different functions. Outsourcing sales help your senior sales specialize on closing business by keeping their sales funnel full.
First lets discuss why your senior sales reps should not be focused on prospecting. Then we will discuss how sales outsourcing and marketing can help them to become more productive.
Why Senior Sales Reps Should Not Prospect
They are not effective – Experience sales reps hate to prospect. They love to close. They are also your most expensive resource. Does it make sense for them to cold call?
Sporadic focus – Prospecting is like the grind of training for any sport. There are tasks you need to do on a regular basis like running, stretching and strength training. If you don’t do them on a regular basis results will suffer. If a closer is working on getting a deal done the first thing to get tossed aside is prospecting. They end up with a great quarter and then have no new deals to work on. Closers need to focus on closing not training.
Unclear metrics – Sales reps are compensated by closing business. Not hitting top of funnel metrics. It is difficult to get sustained performance for something as minimal as daily new lead flow from a seasoned sales rep.
Closing is an Art – Closing is expensive because it’s an art. And like any art it takes creativity, attention to detail and complete focus. It takes a great deal of energy. It does both the rep and your business a disservice to deplete this energy.
Outsourcing Sales to Build a Steady Flow of Leads
Conversely here is why you should consider outsourcing sales to build a steady stream of sales qualified opportunities.
Not just calling anymore – The days of throwing bodies on the phone to call are over. Prospecting still requires calling but it also requires creating content and sharing that content with prospective buyers via email. Outsourcing sales will help you gain immediate access to the skills you need for effective prospecting.
Regular tasks on a regular basis – To be repeatable means you have to repeat tasks like emailing, cold calling, follow up calling and creating content on a regular basis. A sales outsourcing company will take over the daily grind required for success.
Tools and team for success – A sales outsourcing company will have the technologies’ and team required for success. This includes marketers, callers and sales automation technology experts.
Prospecting is a Science – Effective sales prospecting requires building a repeatable process. More importantly it requires constant measure and analysis to improve campaigns and results.
About Gabriel Sales Sales Outsourcing
Gabriel Sales helps companies build modern sales and marketing operations to help closers specialize in closing while we fill the top of the funnel utilizing a team of experts in driving leads with integrated sales and marketing campaigns. To learn more about how our team can help you, visit our page on modern sales and marketing operations and sales outsourcing.
by Glen Springer | Nov 30, 2016
This article will address five indicators that may suggest that it could be a good time to consider sales outsourcing and marketing.
Outsourcing different functions to service providers is becoming more and more accepted. Companies can now outsource a variety of tasks like HR, staffing, product development and finance. But companies are often more cautious when outsourcing sales and marketing. But when executed correctly by an experienced provider, sales outsourcing can have a meaningful impact especially in helping you to build a modern sales and marketing organization.
Here are several reasons you may want to work with a modern sales outsourcing and marketing company:
Feature selling is not working – You need to start selling against pains with solutions. A sales outsourcing and marketing company will be able to help you quickly shift your early stage messages and process to focus on the buyer instead of your product.
Your Rolodex Reps have stopped producing – A fair amount of companies are able to grow their business through their founders or the early sales hires’ set of relationships. At some point this runs out of steam. A sales outsourcing company can provide a process that generates a more consistent flow of leads.
Sales model must change – Startups and small businesses grow markets in different ways. But most companies reach a stage where they need to go after a new market quickly. A sales outsourcing and marketing company can help you quickly shift:
- Selling to the enterprise to selling to SMB
- Generating leads for larger enterprise companies
- Transitioning your sales process from an outside sale to an inside sales
- Using content marketing to do your early stage sales education
You need to build a repeatable sales process – After a company has closed their initial 6 to 12 deals there you will have enough information and experience to build a repeatable sales process. A modern sales outsourcing and marketing company will have the frameworks to quickly help you build a repeatable and integrated process that can be scaled.
You have gaps in your internal team – A sales outsourcing and marketing company will be able to help by supplying:
- The right marketing talent and a sales talent to execute parts of your sales process
- The right automation and CRM systems experts
- Access to a database to market to and the talent to help you manage that database
- Content marketing and content production specialists
The right strategist and consulting experts for marketing, lead generation, lead qualifying and closing assistance are also typically part of any sales outsourcing and marketing engagement. These strategists will be able to provide a fresh perspective to help you remove barriers to your sales.
Conclusion
Sales outsourcing and marketing provides a number of benefits, like controlling costs, providing access to highly skilled sales talent, sales and marketing strategists, technologists and marketing professionals. You also avoid the costs and delays of building on your own. You get a team up and running faster that will be aligned around enabling growth.
Gabriel Sales specializes in helping Start Ups and Small and Mid- Sized Business build modern sales and marketing operations. To learn more about our approach we invite you to check out our About Us page or you can also check out our Sales Outsourcing and Marketing Case Studies to evaluate if we may be able to help
by Carol Springer | Nov 2, 2016
Digital marketers have an analytical issue when it comes to video performance on platforms like YouTube, Vimeo, or Wistia. How many times have you asked yourself this question – ”How many views means my video is successful?”
The “scorecard” that your video is rated on is the number of views. Unfortunately, doing an analysis on just “views” is not always the best way to track your brand’s progress on the goals you are trying to achieve. This is especially true if your goal to drive real sales opportunities’ into your closers pipe (which is our top priority as an outsourced sales and marketing company).
So instead of asking yourself the previous question, ask yourself – “Which KPIs should we be tracking to understand if our video campaign is successful moving deals into the pipe?”
Question #1: How Do I Identify My Primary Outsourced Sales Video Goals?
Marketers typically want video advertising campaigns to increase awareness about their product and influence online sales. While buyers no longer have a simple experience with your brand anymore thanks to product reviews, mobile engagements, social media, etc.—most marketers and salespeople agree their target audience fits into one of three categories: unfamiliar, on the fence, or ready to buy.
With each new campaign, it’s important to know where your audience lies in these three areas. Which of the three possible brand goals is your #1 priority?
Question #2: What are the KPIs for that marketing goal?
The next stage after identifying your goal is to take a closer look at the data that is being mined for each video.
Here is a breakdown of what KPI to analyze for each goal:
Awareness goal KPIs:
- Views
- Impressions
- Unique Users
Consideration goal KPIs:
- View-Through Rate
- Watch Time
Action Goal KPIs:
- Clicks
- Calls
- Signups
- Sales
Question #3: Where and How do I properly analyze my data for my videos?
Now that you have identified your primary goals and your KPIs for those goals, you now need to identify the tools that you going to use to help you become more data-driven as a marketer.
Depending on the platform, analytics usually comes with these video platforms, and spearheading the Big Data field with its extensive metrics and capture points is Google’s YouTube. Vimeo and Wistia have great metrics platforms to run reports on analysis, and even heat mapping for what part of the video the viewer engagement was highest. Google Analytics will help you measure clicks and conversions for sales KPIs.
You can also use other platforms proprietary to the video service to measure clicks and engagement if they are not being seeded with an Adwords campaign. But nothing is more valuable than correlating videos viewed to what is occurring in your opportunity pipeline.
Question #4: Now that I have done the marketing analysis, how to I correlate videos to sales analysis – deals hitting the pipe?
Now that you have identified the KPIs for your video campaigns and where and how to measure them, the next step in this exercise is to identify what impact is video having on my sales pipeline. This is where automation software like Pardot that integrates into a video platform like Wistia is critical (and one of the reasons we love a company that specializes in outsourced sales and marketing).
One of the key features of the combined Wistia and Pardot Integration is the ability to see what videos are:
- Producing the most conversions
- Drill into that videos individual performance
- Drill into how early it is driving that conversion
This level of analysis allows to you do three things:
- Identify what videos you should consider pushing harder into the market
- Identify what content you should create more of
- Identify what videos are predictive of buying that need to have their score increased in your lead scoring engine.
Gabriel Sales specializes in aligning our outsourced sales and marketing efforts around driving more sales qualified opportunities’ into our client’s sales funnels. We can help with refining your existing programs with content production workshops, we can launch a full blown engine for companies just getting started or we can run a turnkey pilot lead scoring and sales automation starter campaign to help you decide if lead scoring is right for you. To learn more about our philosophy, what we believe and who we can help we recommend checking out our About Us page.
by gabriel_sales | Oct 24, 2016
Content is now a critical piece of the puzzle to drive sales conversations for your business development rep. In fact, buyers now typically engage with 7-12 pieces of content prior to engaging with a sales rep, and they continue to engage with content as they make their purchase decision. So you need to support your sales professionals with the following content to ensure maximum success. This is even more important when you are involved in B2B sales or B2B outsourced sales. Below is a table that details the type of content your sales reps will need to help move deals forward.
Prove You Understand and Empathize with Your Buyers’ Needs
When you are developing your buyer’s interest, you need thought-leadership content. This content takes the shape of blog posts, checklists, and short headshot video clips that are educational and easy to consume. Keep these short and easy to digest in two to three minutes.
Outsourced Sales Engagement
As a buyer starts to engage, you need to make it easy for them to understand your solution. If you are just getting started, you don’t need to break the bank creating this content. We find that most companies have the features and benefits content they need on their website already. So after most content audits, that we offer as part of our strategy consulting, we typically only recommend:
- A short animated power point presentation converted into a succinct video overview
- Video demo screencast of the product or solution
- Organized microsites that aggregate your thought leadership and solution oriented videos that make it easy for the buyer to buy.
Finally, we find that most companies have the content they need to convince clients to buy covered. Typically this content is found in existing PowerPoint decks, proposals, RFPs, and contracts. Or for professional services firms, it is found in the deliverables. In some cases, you may want to simply consider digitizing some of this content and making it accessible online.
Summary
As a B2B outsourced sales company, we are committed to supporting our business development reps with:
- Content that supports your B2B outsourced sales process
- The ability to score client engagement with that content to help you score and prioritize leads
As you can see from the content we described above creating this content does not need to be overwhelming. For a quick examples you can check out what we are talking about by checking out our own:
Sales Ready Leads Program
Tradeshow Support Package
It simply requires authentic thought leadership that is professionally produced (not over-produced). We find that we can typically create the content we need to be successful as a B2B outsourced sales company with a 1 to 2 day onsite content workshop. If you think we can help we make evaluating that for yourself easy. You can get started with a free assessment, and you can start that process by contacting us today.
