Trade Show Marketing – Sales Ready Leads Best Practices [White Paper]

by Carol Springer | Jul 26, 2017

80% of trade show leads are ignored. Make Leads Count!

Enterprise companies expect a 4:1 return on their trade show marketing because 92% of trade show attendees say they are looking for new products. But 70% of SMBs exhibiting at trade shows don’t have any trade show marketing lead gen strategy. As a result, 80% of leads that are generated during a trade show are ignored after the show. Download this trade show marketing white paper to see how to:

— Drive more booth traffic

— Identify immediate sale opportunities

— Score leads to prioritize and automate follow up

For companies that lack the internal team and capacity for short term lead generation and sales pipeline, we invite you to watch our Turnkey Trade Show Support video here.

Outsourced Sales and Marketing

by Glen Springer | Jul 1, 2017

Why Build an Integrated Sales and Marketing Engine?

Because More and More Products and Services are “Bought” then “Sold”

Consider how you buy. Do you try to self-educate first? Once educated, are you more open to talking with a rep to understand the people behind the product and how the company can help you specifically? If this process well-executed, does it turn you into a buyer? If it’s done wrong, do you buy from a competitor or pass all together? When your buying criteria is met, do you become a customer?

The rules of selling and buying have changed. Sales is now about openness, transparency, authenticity and trust. First, you make it easier for the buyer to buy, then you close.

The buyer now runs the show and this creates both longer and shorter sales cycles for your sales reps. To close sales, you need inbound and outbound lead generation, SEO, Social Media and Email Marketing. The sales conversation requires digital content designed to educate and sell to the buyer the way the buyer wants to buy. B2B Sales and Marketing teams need the right technology to measure results and increase sales and marketing efficiency. To win business and close revenue now requires aligned sales and marketing. We make your success easier and faster.

We provide sales and marketing outsourcing for:

Companies taking new products to market
Companies/firms that need to build a repeatable and scalable sales process
Mature sales organizations looking to outsource staffing

For Companies Looking to Take a New Product to Market

Gabriel Sales is an Outsourced Sales Company and Marketing Firm that helps you to plan, build and execute an integrated and scalable B2B Sales, Pipeline Development and Lead Generation engine. We make the complex simple by combining your thought leadership and your knowledge of your customer along with our sales and marketing expertise to create a B2B sales engine. We follow a systematic framework over the initial 90-180 days (depending on the length of your typical sales cycle) to plan, implement and get deal-flow started.

This program is typically leveraged by B2B software, hardware, IT and managed services firms just getting started or professional services firms trying to expand growth beyond their core consultants or professional services leads. Your initial outsourced sales program will include the following:

Go-To-Market and Market Validation Strategy Consulting
Lead Management and Pipeline Development Program
B2B Lead Generation Program

All with the ability to start to forecast results.

For details on all the features of these programs and pricing, please visit our services home page.

For Companies Looking to Scale Sales

If your company already has established deal and revenue flow predominantly built on the back of strong sales executives or professional service leads, Gabriel Sales can help you frame, document and digitize a repeatable sales process. We simply clone what already works and within a quarter, we can provide:

Abridged Go-To-Market Strategy Consulting
Content Production
A Lead Management and Pipeline Development Program
A B2B Lead Generation Program

All with the ability to start to forecast results.

For Mature Sales Organization

If you have a documented and scripted early stage sales process, lead management and pipeline development program, and all the B2B lead generation and content marketing tools required for success, Gabriel Sales can help you scale and improve your sales results by augmenting gaps with the staffing of:

Lead Gen and Demand Gen Reps
Inside Sales Reps to Close Business
Marketing Coordinators and Database Managers to Increase Your Inbound
Technical Experts for Marketing Automation Management

How B2B Sales Outsourcing Lead Generation Works in 2017

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 wouldn’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 lead generation and sales appointments. In fact, when surveyed at the end of 2016, my Marketing Profs concluded that lead generation 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 reasons at most small businesses:

Buyers have so many lead generation 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 lead generation 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 six steps you need to take to generate more leads on your own or with a B2B sales outsourcing partner.

Lead Generation Success starts with

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

The Unique Challenges of Professional Services Sales

by Glen Springer | Dec 30, 2015

The world of professional services sales is changing rapidly. Changing with it are the challenges faced by the members of your team. This blog will talk about several challenges and the opportunity they present in selling professional services to clients in today’s environment.

Whether you are considering outsourcing services sales or further developing your own internal services sales team, the challenges that all of us face in selling professional services and solutions are the same. Gone are the days of discretionary or experimental budgets. If they still exist, they are typically dramatically reduced. You have to sell to both a technical buyer and a business buyer in every organization. Companies are running leaner at top levels, and as a result the decision makers that you need to sell to are picking up the phone 30% less. Once you do connect and start to engage the prospect in your sales cycle and with your content, their schedules are so tight that it takes much longer to move them through your sales funnel.

Here’s the bottom line: lead generation, lead qualifying and sales engagement can take twice the time and energy they did in the past. Markets are flooded with buyers and sellers of all types, and it’s your job to weed through it all. For the professional service firms that we provide services sales outsourcing and lead generation services to, it’s more important now than ever that we sell smarter and do our best to maximize top producer’s sales efficiency and effectiveness. We also have to help make the process easier for the buyers we are selling to. They have less time and demand a more efficient way to buy.

When a professional service firm comes to us (as opposed to product sales companies) to have a discussion about outsourcing sales, they often voice additional unique complexities that they are now facing in the professional service market:

1. The roles of seller and deliverer are often merging. More time spent selling means less time dedicated to delivery and/or available for sales pipe development efforts.
2. The professional service sale is growing increasingly complex, and requires an investment in education and solution selling.
3. Education is required because professional services engagements are perceived as high risk investments for buyers, since they can’t hold the product in their hand. Consequently, buyers take longer to make decisions and often want to break up adoption so that there is a pilot or proof of concept stage.
4. Professional services selling requires communication of intangible benefits – character, thinking style and personality of lead consultants and top producers – to effectively close deals.
5. Top producing professional service executives are predisposed to “solutioning” and solving customer problems, rather than “selling” and sales management.
6. Professional service sales are high risk for the Seller due to the need to acquire real return and margins that only stem from long-term engagements, beyond initial pilots

If you take all of these emerging complexities into account, they point to “time” as the single, largest issue. Time is still quite literally money, as they say – and this is especially true for the professional service business model. For us at Gabriel Sales, the challenge in outsourcing the professional service sale lies in identifying how best to customize a program to make your top producers operate at their highest levels of effectiveness and efficiency.

Gabriel Sales has been providing outsourced sales and lead generation services successfully to professional service providers across a wide variety of verticals and target markets – for over 15 years. In the last few years we’ve seen a large market shift in the approach buyers take to engage and make decisions surrounding professional service solutions. This has led to the creation of a viable opportunity for increased efficiency and effectiveness in designing a sales engine and cloning your top producers.

The Opportunity:

Sales and marketing interactions have changed drastically due to the proliferation of the internet and digital communication. Buyers have always actively leveraged content, but now it is being digested specifically through digital and social media. Buyers are streamlining their process on their own time. You now have the ability to leverage lead generation and sales reps that are skilled in communicating your solutions effectiveness and value in the digital space. These reps can manage more of your sale and replicate larger pieces of what was previously required of your top producer. Professional service firms can make it easier for buyers to buy by alleviating the buyer’s time constraints, while simultaneously opening up bandwidth for their top producers. Sales productivity skyrockets by as much as two times within a year, and as high as three times within eighteen months.

This opportunity is significant. But what is even more significant is that taking advantage of this shift does not require completely changing your existing sales process. However, it does require that you effectively align your sales and marketing teams, and get them to stop living in the silos that is typically tradition. This allows for you to be able to engage in a one-to-many dialogue as you generate leads and communicate effectively with both the technical buyer and business buyer. Your sales reps will need to be trained and managed effectively in using these new tools.

Please feel free to contact us or visit “Why Professional Services Firms Use Outsourcing Sales and Marketing” for more information.

How to Build a Winning Ideal Customer Profile

by Glen Springer | Aug 19, 2015

This blog is the second on our series and outlines the steps we take to build a successful outsourcing lead generation strategy and the sales consulting options we provide, as well as the steps you may be able to take on your own if you have the sales bandwidth.

In What is an Ideal Customer Profile, we talked about why the sales consulting step is critical to our success as an outsourcing sales company. To recap – It allows us to find and target your potential customers based on a number of hard criteria related to both the company and the specific decision maker type.

During launch, the first step we generally advocate as part of our initial sales consulting (especially when selling Professional Services or launching lead generation for a highly complex sale) is to apply Pareto’s Principal to your existing customer list. Also know as ‘the law of the vital few”, or the 80:20 rule, it states that 80% of your revenue is going to come from 20% of your customers. These are the customers we want to go after. You can then score the customers based on the hard criteria discussed in What is an Ideal Customer Profile with a specific focus on

Title and Level of Contact
Functional Area
Annual Revenue and Number of Employees
Vertical Market

We also recommend that you look at the customers that you don’t want, which means looking at your failures. Who makes up the 80% of your customers who are driving 20% of your revenue? Here we recommend that you look at:

Functional Area
Level of Contact

If there is a trend here, as an outsourcing sales and outsourcing lead generation company, we will avoid them like the plague and label them WCP (Worst Customer Profile). You then make a decision about what you want to replicate and don’t want to replicate when you do your new lead targeting.

If you are starting from scratch with no history you need to start making intelligent guesses. We recommend that you start with determining what percentage of someone’s budget your solution would qualify for. You then need to target companies that will produce large enough size revenue deals to cover the costs of sales and marketing and determine who in that company will own the P&L for your product or service.

The second step is to understand the size and scope of the market to see where the biggest opportunity is. Gabriel Sales we recommend the following three-part approach:

We take your internal Ideal Customer Profile and map it against our historical data to examine connect ratios. This helps us to determine how many calls it typically takes to get the decision maker. From this we can do a semi accurate forecast of how often the will to actually pick up the phone or open an email. This lets us determine the ease of reaching.
We do a deep dive leveraging Hoovers and other Database Research Tools to match SIC codes of your existing ICP to determine the target market size based on the hard criteria and get a hard decision maker count by vertical and determined ease of reach.
You look at Social Media including Linked In, You Tube and Influential Blogs to do a preliminary landscape of ancillary tactics to determine Social Media Adoption.

The third step (and the one often skipped) that we recommend is an honest assessment of where you are best equipped to Sell Money and provide Success Stories for these new targets. Essentially it’s about selling to the customers you are better equipped to service than anyone else. Where there is alignment is where you will win. So, ask yourself where does this customer alignment meet existing sales and marketing alignment too, so I can win and the customer can win faster. (Both of these tactics are detailed in other blogs). This step will make your outsourcing lead generation or internal lead generation more effective. It will also accelerate your ability to sales qualify and increase your pipe velocity.

Bottom line is that an Ideal Customer Profile is (in the words of Steven Covey) starting with the end in mind. It will drive sustained and exponential returns by helping you to:

Find deals faster
Close higher volume and higher deal size
Build a strong pipe to nurture for future deals
Eliminate customers that do not scale or take too much time to service
Increase your profitability
Create a focus that drives sales and marketing alignment

Visit our resources page for more helpful tips, tactics and strategies.

Sales and Marketing Operations Outsourcing Case Study

by Glen Springer | Apr 10, 2015

Sales and Marketing Operations Outsourcing

The Challenge

Management Consulting and Industrial Engineering Professional Services firm spun out of Fortune 250 Company and hit $4M in annual revenue within 18 months. The principals were mired in a cycle where they would sell, service and then need to start pipe from scratch. Over next 4 years they hired 3 enterprise reps with Rolodex’s and landed one additional deal outside their own network and remained flat at $4M. Sales cycle for enterprise deals was over 360 days for initial engagement of $20K to $50K, deals then scale to $250K – $500K in year two and $1M plus in year three. To inject new revenue stream with shorter sales cycle company acquired a smaller practice with entry level solution and sales for that product line also remained flat.

Selling To: Fortune 1000 and Privately Held Manufacturers’ SVPs and VPs of Supply Chain, Operations, Head of Engineering and Energy Manager

The Solution

Sales Consulting and Inside Sales – Scripted, created content and created an inside sales process for entry level solution. Took inbound leads from existing telemarketing partner, qualified, engaged and closed.
Sales Consulting – Simultaneously worked with client to create a repeatable high velocity sales process, ideal customer profile and collateral for enterprise professional service engagement.
Lead Generation Outsourcing – Client migrated telemarketing to Gabriel Sales for enterprise deals as entry level product sales transitioned back to business unit.
Digital Content Production and Digital Sales Execution – Cloned the sales process for Top Producers for enterprise deals with video, webcasts, blog and success stories.
Outsourcing Inside Sales and Marketing Operations – Gabriel Sales took over all lead generation, database management, software implementation and management of direct marketing efforts to target, engage, qualify and nurture enterprise prospects.
Outsourced Sales Staffing – Staff a blended team of lead gen rep, inside rep and senior enterprise sales rep to manage the logistics and close of deals.

The Results

First 180 days

4 entry level new business clients closed from with inside reps eliminating prior sales process which required extensive travel and face to face meetings.
Put 6 enterprise deals in the sales pipe.

Second 360 days

3 additional entry-level deals
8 enterprise deals closed
Internet Marketing Technologies scoped and implemented and blog launched
4 enterprise deals moved to upsell
Sale collateral digitized in webcast, blog, video and customer testimonials
Nurturing database of 2000 plus decision makers created and marketing automation implemented.

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