How Marketing Automation Helps Sales Reps

How Marketing Automation Helps Sales Reps

by | Jan 3, 2019

Marketing automation helps sales reps increase their productivity in multiple ways.

Marketing automation tools are used by companies of every size to increase the value of their online presence. Whether a business needs better lead generation or an improvement in the number of sales successfully closed, automated marketing can dramatically extend your online reach, allowing you to drum up a much higher number of leads, and in turn find more good leads that will turn into sales.

However, sometimes sales departments don’t use these tools correctly. Often this is the result of misunderstanding what these tools are capable, of, and becoming overly reliant on them for help in every facet of the job. Marketing automation is powerful, but in the end still just a method for enabling a live person to do more than would otherwise be possible.

In the interests of helping people understand how to maximize the value of these automated systems, here are ten ways that marketing automation assists sales reps.

Lead scoring. If you have a good number of existing leads and a steady stream of new leads always coming to you—a fortunate situation, to say the least—you still need to know which of those leads are most likely to result in sales. Lead scoring tracks a potential buyer’s activity to determined who is most engaged. This gives sales reps an easily accessible list of priority customers, requiring no guesswork as to who should be contacted first.

 

Buyers indicate their interests before speaking with a sales rep. Related to lead scoring, automated marketing systems track what products and services your engaged leads are checking out. When your sales rep is ready to make contact, they can do so knowing the customers’ interests and thus what to target with their sales pitches.

 

Sales reps can see how effective their contacts are. Every sales rep knows the feeling of having a customer that they’re sure is interested, the customer will buy soon, it’s pretty much a lock, and so on. What helps more than a good feeling, even for the best rep, is hard data. Marketing automation tells you how often leads open your e-mails and click on the links you send. If they are, wonderful; if not, this lets you know that you need to devise a new angle for selling the ‘hot’ lead on your product, rather than continue sending the types of e-mails they’ve been ignoring.

 

Automated e-mail templates save your reps time and give them feedback. Once e-mail templates are programmed into the automated system, they can be put to wide scale use and their effectiveness thus gauged on a large quantity of data. If a certain template does not do enough to trigger further engagement from leads, you know and can try something else. And if you find a template that is super effective, the automated tools make it easy to streamline its use.

 

Automated follow-up e-mails. Follow up contacts are important for maintaining a lead’s awareness of your company and the sales rep with which they’ve spoken; you never know when a lead that is unlikely to buy now will change their mind. However, the effort takes time that could be spent pursuing different leads instead. With the ability to set up a drip campaign ostensibly coming ‘from’ the sales rep, marketing can make sure the effectiveness of follow-up contact is maintained while freeing up the rep to speak with different leads.

 

Quick access to past communications. Any good marketing automation software (Pardot, for example) can integrate with your CRM. Once the rep uses software that connects the two (often Outlook), their e-mail history will be loaded into the automated software, making access a swift and painless matter.

 

Reduced headcount for your company. Marketing automation allows each rep to handle many more potential customers than they would without those tools. No matter how many leads your company is capable of generating, it requires fewer sales reps to deal with that number than would be the case without marketing automation tools at your disposal.

 

Tracks top performers with statistics that can help everyone. If you have a decently-sized sales force, some reps will struggle and some will shine. Rather than let the struggling reps muddle along, or worse, firing them when they might have potential, you can find the differences between how top reps and struggling reps approach their jobs. Which leads do top reps pursue? What lead scores most commonly lead to sales? Automated marketing systems can collate this data and make sure all your reps know how to get the most out of their work hours.

 

Allows for timely contact. Automated systems tell you more than where or how often leads visit your site; they tell you when the leads are there. The lead deck points out to your sales rep that a lead is on your site, meaning that’s a good time to send an e-mail or make a phone call. Catch leads when they’re already thinking about your products, rather than risk doing so at a time when you’ll be easier to ignore.

 

Reduces or prevents lead and deal leakage. One of the unfortunate positions sales reps find themselves in is the necessity of closing enough deals to make their sales targets for the month or quarter, which can often require them to focus on more on leads who are ready to buy now and abandon contact with leads who may need more time to come around. While this can help them reach their numbers in the short term, it creates perverse incentives for the reps at the expense of the company. After all, your business needs every potential customer, both the ones buying now and those considering it down the road, and it does you no good if the reps don’t have time to nurture those long-term contacts. Automated marketing takes enough of the grind out of a sales rep’s job to allow them more time to develop a sales pipe for the future as well as for today.

Used correctly, marketing automation helps sales and is an incredible tool for maximizing sales and revenue across every rep in your company. If you’d like to know more about what marketing automation can do for you, contact us for more information.

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.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Outsourced Sales and Marketing

by | 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:

  1. Go-To-Market and Market Validation Strategy Consulting
  2. Lead Management and Pipeline Development Program
  3. 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:

  1. Abridged Go-To-Market Strategy Consulting
  2. Content Production
  3. A Lead Management and Pipeline Development Program
  4. 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

Combining Outsourced Sales and Marketing Automation Works

by | May 29, 2017

Dealing with the new digital buyer is now a requirement for most businesses. And keeping your sales and process flowing daily is now critical to a sustained flow of sales opportunities. So a wise choice now may be to look for an outsourced sales and outsourced marketing automation service provider.

This article will address what you can expect by combinining outsourced sales and marketing automation company.

Top four issues addressed by an outsourced sales and marketing automation service provider to help you get started

Issue #1 Sales and marketing automation technologies are constantly evolving. Marketing automation is designed to generate leads and develop leads not ready to buy. Some campaigns can take more than six months to develop the digital buyer, so it takes both time and experience to learn how to do both well to optimize the tools and campaigns. An outsourced sales and marketing automation service provider will have both experience and skills to boost sales while nurturing leads throughout the buying process.


Issue #2 Sales and marketing automation technologies come in multiple product stacks and many price points. Some technologies are better for B2C campaigns. Other technologies are designed for B2B campaigns. Some tools are designed more for inbound lead generation and others are designed for sales development. Finally, tools are now offered at a wide variety of price points and some features of the pricier tools are overkill for a small business, while other, larger companies with large sales teams can use additional features. If you are not familiar with the landscape, you could under spend or over spend and not get the results you need at the right ROI. You’re not familiar enough with the ecosystem of solutions to assemble a seamless optimized revenue engine.

Issues  #3 You and your team have your hands full already. You could be developing product, serving customers, creating content and recruiting.  If you are too busy to implement the technology, run the technology, build the database or run campaigns and even following up with the leads, an outsourced sales and marketing automation company can do this for you if are too busy to do all the legwork that goes into campaigning and lead development.

Issues  #4 If your company’s sales team has never sold to leads that have been generated by marketing automation, your sales reps may lack the skill and the training to deal with well-nurtured leads. Well-nurtured digital buyers do not typically have the same needs in the sales journey that cold leads and inbound leads require. Well-nurtured leads need to be treated with a softer touch, while at the same time more aggressive touch. A company that provides both outsourced sales and marketing automation sales talent will have the skills and/or the ability to train your team in the best practices of both using the software to find scored leads, and how to best qualify and develop those leads.

If these issues are familiar, you may already be thinking about an outsourced sales and marketing automation company. If this is the situation you find yourself in, an outsourced solution on a temporary basis may be worth exploring.

About Gabriel Sales’ Outsourced Sales and Marketing Services

Gabriel Sales builds moderns sales and marketing operations for small businesses and technology companies that execute a solution sale and requires a closer to manage the close of a deal.  To learn more about how we help you address the new digital buyer to close more business faster we invite you to check out our new approach to outsourced sales and marketing.

 

Why Outsourced Sales for Telemarketing Makes Sense

by | May 24, 2017

Outsourced Sales Integrated Campaign

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.

 

Reasons to Consider Sales Outsourcing

by | Nov 11, 2016

Outsourcing functions to skilled service providers is becoming more and more mainstream.  And in today’s business environment it is becoming common in areas like finance, HR, IT support and customer service.

And with the recent requirement for aligned sales and marketing to move deals through each stage of the funnel combined, sales outsourcing and outsourced marketing is now another area that many start-ups and small businesses are considering. Sales outsourcing can drive multiple advantages for a company looking to scale including; removing fixed costs, contributing trained and skilled reps immediately without the delays of recruiting and giving you executive sales oversight and strategy without the full time expense of hiring a sales executive.  But how can you tell if you should consider sales outsourcing?

Is Your Cost of Sales % too high?

Sales and marketing all boils down to how much it costs to take a lead from the top of the sales funnel through to closed business.  Success now requires you to invest in hard costs like technology, databases, floor space and phone systems.  There are also multiple soft costs like training, recruiting and daily management.  If you are a small business with only a handful of reps these costs can quickly become a substantial part of your budget.  The reality is that when building a sales team you have a great deal of fixed and soft costs that don’t change between 1 to 5 sales reps.   A sales outsourcing company will already have these fixed and soft costs covered as part of their operations.  If you have a small sales team sales outsourcing will absorb the costs and lower your cost of sales percentage.

Inconsistent Sales Results 

Many companies struggle to produce consistent sales results on a quarter by quarter or month to month basis.  This then creates a challenge for the executives leading the company.  They cannot forecast for sales growth.  They struggle to make intelligent forecasts to scale the operations of their business.  In many cases for small business this is the direct result of not taking care of the necessary blocking and tackling required to take care of the necessary tasks to move deals forward and generate new deals on a daily basis.  Often we see companies spend the first quarter focusing 80% of their energy generating new leads.  The next quarter developing leads.  And the final quarter spending 80% of their time closing leads.   A sales outsourcing company can level the pipe by providing the tools, team and talent allocated to all three tasks on a daily basis.

Not using all the Latest Automation Technologies   

99 % of the Fortune 2000 are using sales automation technologies because they work.   But many smaller or high growth companies do not have the experience or expertise to implement content marketing and lead scoring technologies on their own.   If your sales reps are not supported by these technologies they are spending time on daily tasks that can be automated.  They are spending their time working deals that will not close, and they are wasting their time on tasks that can be automated rather than working the phone.   A sales outsourcing company can provide the tools and the expertise to maximize the production of your sales reps by helping you to automate your sales process and buyer education whenever possible.

Sales Pipeline Blockage

A proportional flow of deals advancing through your sales funnel is a key driver of success. Having leads consistently move from one stage to the next will provide consistent deal flow but inconsistent performance at any stage will lead to ebbs and flows in deal closure. A sales outsourcing company can help you to determine where leads are getting stuck and why. Once that is determined the problem can be addressed immediately. A sales outsourcing company will be able to walk you through the sales techniques to move deals forward with scripts, improved closing questions and a repeatable sales process. This becomes very powerful when combined with outsourced marketing services to create the sales or marketing materials you need to nurture leads and engage them to push them to the next stage.

Summary

Sales outsourcing can be a powerful sales leadership tool for companies looking to scales their sales to the next level. A key to your sale success is for you to clearly communicate where you feel your sales and marketing challenges are when you have your initial discovery sessions with sales outsourcing companies.  Gabriel Sales makes this easy during our initial success criteria and discovery sessions prior to crafting a custom approach for every potential client.

 

Outsourced Sales and Lead Scoring

by | Nov 7, 2016

In 2016 according to Forrester we witnessed the near universal embrace of content marketing with 93% of B2B “marketers” claiming that they have at least tested content marketing in some part of their sales and marketing efforts.

And as an outsourced sales and marketing company, we are fully committed to generating more qualified sales opportunities with content marketing and lead scoring.   But as outsourced sales company, we understand that the C-Suite and owners of small to medium sized business remain skeptical going all in:

  • 82% want to prove content marketing automation is tied to lead generation
  • 52% want to ensure they can measure the ROI of their investment
  • 35% claim lack of budget

And some of these executives may be correct.  This article is meant to help them evaluate if they are right or they consider giving lead scoring with and outsourced sales team a shot.

 

 

How to Decide if Your Business Needs (or Is Ready) For Lead Scoring

outsourced salesWhile 99% of the both the B2B and B2C Fortune 2000 is fully committed to content marketing, lead scoring, and automation systems, small and mid-sized business remain skeptical.

The fact is that lead scoring and automation is not a must have for all businesses. To evaluate if lead scoring is right for your business, you need to ask yourself the following questions:
Do I spend money on leads monthly and then abandon after I get a fresh set of lead?

Is your business spending money on fresh leads every month?  Does your sales team attempt these leads a handful of times and then wait for the fresh leads and stop following up with last month’s leads?    If you are in a business where deals typically close in 30 days or less from initial interest you may want to continue doing what you are doing.  If first touch to close is 30 days or more lead scoring may have significant benefits.

 

 

Do I have the minimum sized database and content to get started?

Because 70% of buyers now prefer to learn about new products and solutions by email (sharing educational content) most companies have at least tested content marketing. In fact, 90% of B2B companies now started content marketing in at least a small way.  But content is not enough.  At a minimum you also need a database of at least 3,000 to 5,000 buyers to get started. You also need to create enough basic educational content to touch these buyers at least 2 times per month for B2B sales and slightly more for B2B sales.   If you do not have enough leads you will need to invest in a leads database first.  The same goes for content.  Content can be as simple as blog posts and short videos. Gabriel Sales offers cost effective packages to help with both.

 

Is my sales team or outsourced sales team educating buyers that don’t buy?

Is my market so large that I can target and sell to hundreds of thousands of buyers?  Have I generated so many inbound leads that my sales team cannot keep up?  Is my product so disruptive that everyone would be willing to take a call on the topic?    If you have a broad market with tire kickers you should have been scoring leads 5 years ago.

 

Is my product/solution not an “If” but “When” decision?

Professional Services and software in areas like accounting, compliance, HR, IT, BPO and marketing, printing are not “If” but “When” decisions. Timing is everything. Staying top of mind with buyers so when they are ready to buy is critical so your sales team calls when the window is open.  Automation and lead scoring make this possible.

 

Does my sales team complain about the quality of leads I send them?

Do your sales reps always complain about bad leads? Lead scoring will solve this problem but not on its own. Before launching your lead scoring engine you need to have both sales and marketing agree on what a scored lead is with concrete criteria. Once you agree to these criteria lead scoring will work. It is also a way for you to objectively and subjectively evaluate if you have a sales issue as opposed to a lead quality issue.  When Gabriel Sales outsourced sales team set appointments scored leads can help your internal sales team embrace rather than reject leads.

 

Are my sales engineers and senior sales team educating buyers that don’t buy?

Do you have a great deal of leads that hit the early stage funnel that go through an introductory meeting and/or product demo that never transact?  Chances are you have one of two problems.  First, your business development reps are not qualifying correctly. Or tire kickers are going straight to senior staff because you don’t have the content necessary to do this initial early stage buyer education.  Lead scoring and some basic content that demonstrates your solution can save you tremendous time, money and resources. If a buyer is not interested enough to educate themselves online prior to meeting with your senior resources the prospect is probably not worth their time sell to the buyers yet.

 

Is there more than one buyer involved in purchasing my solution?

If your sale requires a champion on the buyer side then that champion will need content to educate themselves about your solution so they can move that deal forward. They will also need to share that content with other people on the buying committee. If there are multiple buyers involved in the buying decision they will engage with content more frequently and have a larger digital footprint.  Do you have more than one buyer?

 

Do you have a pricing page, case studies, product pages, demos or demo registrations online?

If these pages are not part of your website or content marketing strategy you should probably consider them.  If a buyer hits any of these pages they are strong predictive indicators that your buyer is ready for sales engagement. Notifying your reps or outsourced sale reps when buyers hit these pages can put your team at the front of the line.

 

How Gabriel Sales Can Help

If you are considering lead scoring for your business, you can begin with us in two ways:

As a B2B Outsourced Sales and Outsourced Marketing company, we understand that ROI is important. Both of these packages include a free preliminary assessment to see if  lead scoring and outsourced sales is the right solution for your business.  To learn more about our approach you can also visit the About Us page.