Sales Operations Outsourcing and Sales Consulting Case Study

Sales Operations Outsourcing and Sales Consulting Case Study

by | Jul 26, 2017

The Challenge

A small company had two years of declining revenue. The original founders decided to part ways. Gabriel Sales’ client retained ownership of mid-sized business clients and the web technology software, architecture and engineering teams. The second founder spun off a graphic design company. The new entities executive’s core competency was sales but he needed to focus on rebuilding operations and maintaining strategic partnerships. Was looking for quick operational support.

Selling To: Directors of Marketing, Small Business Owners, Creative Directors of Small and Medium Sized Business

The Solution

  1. Lead Generation and Inside Sales Outsourcing-Gabriel Sales staffed lead generation and inside sales staff trained by founder to fill the pipe and close basic service offering.
  2. Sales Consulting and New Product Launch-Gabriel Sales examined existing infrastructure and service offering and identified an internal self-publishing tool that could be sold as a stand alone offering
  3. Part Time Inside Sales Staffing -Gabriel Sales dedicated a telemarketer to focus on the new product offering, packaged and staffed an inside sales representative to generate blended technology and service offering deals for founder to close.

The Results

New Prospects

%

Retention Rate

Deals in 4 Months

  • From a universe of 2,000 targets, Gabriel Sales contacted 500 new prospects and past clients to introduce the new entity.
  • Gabriel Sales provided an infrastructure including a cleaned and organized database, created a sales training manual then recruited and transitioned the team back in-house, once the founder had reorganized and built internal operations.
  • Company retained 90% of clients.
  • Gabriel Sales closed 3 new deals in a 4-month period and passed 20 plus prospects  for additional development by founder and transitioned team (7 closed within 6 months)

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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

Sales Outsourcing and Inside Sales

by | Jan 9, 2017

For decades the typical sales organization was comprised of sales reps cold calling and working in the field.  They set their appointments and then meet face-to-face with potential buyers.  And in recent years we have started to see a transition to those outside reps getting support from “inside reps” who assist in setting the appointments.  And once again typically a company would build this organization internally.

However over the past several years both CRM and marketing automation technologies have become technology staples of most modern B2B sales operations. These technologies enable companies to control visibility of each stage of their sales process.  These same technologies now allow companies to seamlessly consider sales outsourcing for their inside sales activities. Here are a few of the advantages to evaluate to help you decide if an inside sales outsourcing team is a good fit for your company:

Sales Training – There are multiple benefits that can be realized from shifting to an inside sales outsourcing model. One of the biggest advantages is that your sales training will become more effective with inside sales outsourcing.  When a company uses an outside sales model, sales reps do not come into contact with each other on a regular basis. But with an inside sales outsourcing team your reps will be working in the same office space. It’s much easier to quality control sales training for new reps, share “best practice” sales tips, and disseminate new information.  For smaller businesses that only have the need for one or two inside reps this advantage can be even more significant because your inside sales outsourcing team will be surrounded by other reps selling other products.  You will gain access to a part time sales manager that will keep your team on track and well trained without the expense of staffing a full time sales manager.

Scaling Faster – As an inside sales outsourcing company we believe when a company is just getting off the ground it makes sense to staff a closer on the client side to gain insights into the entire sales process start to finish. An internal sales executive also allow you to more effectively build the personal relationships a company just getting off the ground needs. In many cases this resource is also one of the executives in the company, often the founder.  And then as the company understands its sales process an inside sales outsourcing company can craft a repeatable sales process to generate the lead, develop the lead and qualify the lead using content and well trained business development reps. Switching to an inside sales outsourcing model may make sense, since it provides the ability to integrate new staff more effectively and allows for more rapid growth.

Complexity of the Sale Another highly influential factor that determines how to deploy an inside sales outsourcing team is the complexity of the company’s sales cycle – how many buyers and influencers are involved, deal size and value, and the complexity of the product itself.

For example – an enterprise sale is a long cycle involving multiple individuals at various levels of the organization. In these cases, external sales reps are required – again, because selling extremely high-value products over a long period of time is something that relies on the development of more personal business relationships.  If this is the type of sale you need we typically recommend using inside sales outsourcing for the initial lead generation and the early stage introduction of your solution to multiple buyers across the target organizations.  Once the buyer becomes engaged your outside sales rep should take full ownership of the sale.

On the other hand if you have a short and simple sales cycle this is where an inside sales outsourcing model can take the sale further.  Inside sales outsourcing can generate the lead, develop the lead and educate the buyer.  In some cases you can simply staff a sales engineer with technical or business domain expertise to answer technical or deep domain questions and your inside sales outsourcing team can manage the final close of the sale.

If outsourcing sales makes sense for your business then choosing the right inside sales outsourcing model is key to ensuring it sales outsourcing will help to grow your business. In many cases a hybrid model may make the most sense.  To learn more about how Gabriel Sales approach sales outsourcing and marketing feel free to visit our sales outsourcing services page.

Measuring B2B Marketing and Sales Funnel Effectiveness

by | Feb 24, 2014

Sales Funnel EffectivenessIt is imperative that your marketing team be data-driven. It’s also imperative your sales funnel effectiveness is turning into sales. Budget dollars are tight and need to be accurately spent.  Having clear data on how each of your marketing campaigns are performing is essential to being able to forecast sales, scale your campaigns/operations and re-allocate budget from low performing to high performing campaigns.

At Gabriel Sales, our entire organization is data-driven, including the marketing team, who manages quantitative reporting and scorecards for both clients and internally. The key performance metrics we traditionally measure are the following:

Sales Funnel Effectiveness KPIs

  • Inbound Traffic by source
  • Web form conversions and inbound calls by source (Total Prospects)
  • Prospects who want to talk (Sales Accepted Leads aka SALs)
  • Prospects who have a project need and budget (Sales Qualified Lead aka SQLs)
  • Proposals
  • Closed deals
  • Revenue

If you notice, we are accurately tracking the entire funnel to ensure the sales funnel effectiveness. We do this using a combined integration of web analytics, marketing automation software, CRM software and experienced data analysts. By calculating conversion rates from previous stage (e.g. what percentage of proposals close or what percentage inbound traffic converts to web forms), we can better forecast sales and allocate spend to marketing campaigns to best enhance our marketing and sales funnel’s performance.

Additionally, with marketing automation software at the crux of our marketing and sales operations, we can see what traffic/lead conversion sources are most likely to convert to proposal and closed deals. This helps us scale those marketing campaigns that have the best conversion performance and sales funnel effectiveness.

Lastly, we can see what sources have the poorest funnel performance and reduce or eliminate spending on those campaigns (as long as we’ve tested enough to be sure the campaign is not viable for the particular product/service we are promoting).

This level of reporting built-into your company is no longer just a competitive advantage, but is a key component to sales funnel effectiveness, and sustaining and growing your business in today’s market.

For more on increasing B2B sales funnel productivity, read “The Value of Marketing Automation in the B2B Sales Process”. Feel free to contact us with any questions.

B2B Marketing Automation Implementation Best Practices

by | Apr 30, 2012

So now you that you have purchased a marketing automation platform you are ready to implement and it’s not as simple as you were led to believe.   As an outsourced sales and marketing company we have already helped to implement several platforms (as well as implementing our own) and helped companies with several stalled implementations. Here are some best practices in marketing and sales automation because,  as one vendor recently told us,  ‘we can sell them the car but we can’t drive it for them’.  Here are some basic tips and some best practices to help you avoid some headaches and to learn from our mistakes and success. If you have not checked out what these platforms can do here is a quick overview from Pardot 5 Minute Overview of Marketing Automation and this post will make a whole lot more sense.

 

Think about your Content in a Different Way

 

The whole point of a marketing automation platform is to drive more business in a more effective way.  This starts with how you are speaking with your buyer.  If your content is still all about your product – tech sheets, features and benefits etc. its -time to think about being customer centric rather than product centric.”  Your drip campaigns will drive more business if you talk to your customers about their problems and their needs.  You may need to look at the “voice” of your messages and refine your language a bit.  As a starting point look at how may time you talk about “Our’ product, “our” team vs.   “your” needs, “your” business and “your” customers.  Stop being product centric and start being customer centric. Here is a series of blogs on how to shift your content approach and get sales and marketing on the same page.

Organize your Content Ahead of Time  

For a marketing automation platform to run effectively it helps to do two things with your content.  First you should isolate all your webcasts,  white papers, blogs, videos on individual website pages. This allows you to easily understand what your customer specifics needs are which in turn allows you to score your leads more effectively as you track their digital interest.  Secondly, it really helps to also create landing pages that offers your customer content for all three stages of their buying cycle so you can track when your buyers are moving from educating themselves (kicking the tires) to being ready to buy (e.g looking at pricing or testimonials).  Gabriel Sales has created an easy to use sales content management technology – Gabriel Sales Digital Demand Center™ that can help you do this in a matter of weeks. The image on the right is an example of one of those lead scoring features.

Involve Sales and Invest the Time Integrating with your CRM

What we have found is that even a basic integration can take an IT professional too much time.  Most of the marketing automation platforms we have seen have huge volume of really cool features and bells and whistles so you can tend to over design before you know how you want to use them. Ultimately this is about empowering your sales team and recognizing your IT teams expertise is not sales.  Probably one of the biggest bottle necks we have seen is that IT folks get proprietary and a project that they thought would take weeks can take a developer three months or more . The challenges are not with the system’s API or stability; they were with our client’s requirements, process definitions and prioritization. Like most development work that starts “easy” it quickly gets complex when they don’t understand the underlying business processes. Unfortunately as the time line  expands it ends up being sales and marketing that are on the hook for results and not the developers. Salesforce.com has been the easiest integration for all the platforms we have seen.

Keep your Initial Drip Campaigns Simple

This is probably one of the biggest lessons we learned.  When we first started we came up with a very complex IF/ then workflow so if they opened this piece of content on a topic area we would send them another piece of content on topic area B and then if they didn’t open that we would send them content Z.  It was too much and just writing about it confuses me. What we found is about 80% of the value you are going to get from your initial drip campaigns is going to come from simply implementing them.  It takes time to learn a new software and the biggest value the software provided initially is simply keeping your brand and solution in front of your buyers over time so your reps don’t have to.  A simple five to seven touch campaign without any IF/then work flows was enough to get more deals flowing at less cost.  Don’t frustrate yourself.  You will quickly learn from your wins. If you are a smaller company, as a best practice, we recommend that you start by talking to your sales reps about their sales process and simply take that sales process map and create your initial drip campaigns for about three target markets.

 

Tap your vendors (and other vendors) knowledge centers

This industry is not that old.  Eloqua, Pardot and Marketo (to name a few) all have fantastic knowledge centers that can teach you the basics of lead scoring and nurturing etc. Our vendor Pardot has been a huge help but we have also found both Marketo and Eloqua’s knowledge centers to be valuable as well.  Obviously as an outsourced sales and marketing company we also recommend that you strongly consider working with an organization like ours.  We have the advantage of having worked in the space across multiple enterprises so we have made a great deal of the mistakes already so you don’t need to.

 

We hope this blog has been helpful.  Marketing Automation is a relatively new concept for most marketing teams and we have found that once you start to gain some momentum you will quickly realize that it’s clearly how business will be done for the next decade. We are just at the beginning of a new paradigm starting with marketing automation and then,  as we are quickly discovering, if your marketing automation implementation is done correctly this will  drift towards sales automation.  Ultimately this will begin to drive more deals fast at less cost.  We are experiencing some fantastic initial success reducing cost of sales percentages for both ourselves and our clients. The learning curve is exponential. So have fun.

 

If you have not checked out what these platforms can do here is a quick overview from Pardot 5 Minute Overview of Marketing Automation. If you have a stalled with your marketing automation implementation or if you would like to know more about best practices in marketing and sales automation, feel free to contact us for a quick consultative call.