by gabriel_sales | Apr 2, 2014
Why cold callers cannot- and should not-have to handle all of marketing on their own
At Gabriel Sales, we have not needed to staff a fully dedicated cold caller in over 12 months.
While there are many factors at play, we see this as an indication of the success you can experience when you make it easy for your buyers to self educate with an integrated sales and marketing strategy.
Long before we began offering integrated sales and marketing outsourcing services to our clients, we made a commitment to implementing the approach ourselves. On the technology side, we were early adopters of marketing automation and CRM systems. On the marketing side, we have been publishing relevant content and executing eProspecting campaigns and nurturing programs for over three years.
We didn’t get there over night. After committing to this integrated approach for about eighteen months, our dependency on cold callers was dramatically diminished.
This is because the integration of content and technology has allowed us to take our early stage sales messages and turn them into digital content—blogs, white papers, webcasts, etc.—that can be shared one-to-many. Because our marketing automation platform tracks content engagement by prospect, we can start interacting with our prospects early in their buying cycle digitally with our calling resources simply stewarding them through their educational process.
The result is a win-win situation: Our prospects are now able to take themselves through their own discovery and education, on their time frame based on their own business drivers. Our calling resources can then watch this engagement, and they are able to see when it makes sense to reach out.
Now, instead of placing endless follow up calls to companies that may or may not be ready to buy, we are able to use marketing automation and digital sales tools to see what prospects are interacting with what content. We then have a better idea of not only what people are interested but also what they are specifically interested in. Additionally, our calling team is able to be helpful as opposed to disruptive to the buyers’ day-to-day business activities.
When we do see sufficient interest to indicate that it makes sense to follow up with prospects, enough trust has been established digitally that the experience on both sides is about deepening the relationship and moving towards a common goal.
On our end, we know who the prospect is and what title he/she holds (e.g. admin vs. executive). We also know what webpages he/she has visited, what videos were watched, what social media posts were clicked on, etc. This makes us much more effective in helping them to buy or not buy the right solution.
On the prospect side, he/she knows who we are and what we do and also has a general feel of the company culture (e.g. brand attributes). The prospect has also been given the chance to educate himself/herself enough to speak intelligently about our solution. Typically, they have a much greater grasp of what their needs and priorities are.
So now, when we call a prospect for the first time, instead of hearing:
“Who are you? What is this about? Sales and marketing? Oh, I’m not the right person to talk to about this.”
We hear,
“Oh yeah, that white paper on marketing automation was really helpful. I was looking on your site and see that you guys offer marketing automation consulting, could you tell me more about that?”
By allowing our content marketing campaigns to do the work before we get on the phone, both the tone and content of the initial calls are radically different from the typical disruptive calling experience. Whereas the best response you can expect to get from a cold call is, “Sure, send me some information,” calling someone who has already been through a fair amount of your content is generally a ten-minute qualifying conversation right out of the gate.
Rather than pitching ourselves, the call is spent understanding the needs of the buyers.
Continue reading.
by gabriel_sales | Mar 28, 2014
This is part two of a series on creating a cohesive sales and marketing relationship. To read part 1, click here.
2. Establish open communication.
If open communication between sales and marketing is established during the creation of content, this point may not be necessary. However, in cases where marketing creates content independently of sales, it should be marketing’s responsibility to inform sales of its purpose or goal and how it fits into the overall sales process.
For example, let’s say you publish a new white paper. Marketing should explain to sales what stage of the sales cycle it is most appropriate for (discovery vs. verification) and what its intended audience is (technical buyer vs. executive). Similarly, if a blog was written to address an objection from an HR perspective, sales needs to know that, so they don’t send it to someone in IT. This way, marketing is enabling sales to use the content as effectively as possible, and both sides are able to succeed.
3. Learn to rely on each other to make incremental improvements.
While the initial content strategy is usually marketing’s job, it is a good idea to source content ideas from sales as ongoing campaigns take place. In the day-to-day work of cold calling and qualifying, sales reps may have experiences that were not expected in the initial strategy session and could be used to inspire valuable sales collateral. For example, if your cold callers hear the same objection over and over, sales should ask marketing to write a blog that can be shared to help overcome it. Similarly, sales might find that while your value prop focuses on quality, the real pain your prospects are expressing on the phone is related to speed. By communicating that information to marketing, marketing can make more effective content that speaks directly to buyers’ objections and needs.
By keeping the lines of communication open with regular meetings—rather than working separately in silos—sales and marketers can work together to simultaneously create a better experience for your buyer and increase revenue.
Getting sales and marketing on the same page is probably never going to be easy; there are inherent differences to each function that will always create tension of some kind. However, by simply starting from the same place, communicating regularly and relying on each other’s input for improvement, much of that tension can be resolved.
To learn more about getting sales and marketing on the same page, read Holding Sales & Marketing Responsible with a Shared Quota. Feel free to contact us with any questions.
by gabriel_sales | Mar 27, 2014
Like other epic dramas of our time including Yankees vs. Red Sox and iPhone vs. Droid, the battle between sales and marketing is real, and it is not likely going away any time soon.
As a sales outsourcing company, we this is something we experience on a daily basis. And, our experience has shown us that while getting sales and marketing to work together is always going to be a somewhat cultural issue, there are several practical things you can do around content strategy and development to help create a team atmosphere, which will help alleviate some of the tension overall.
1. Start from the same place.
The first stage in getting sales and marketing to play nice is to make sure everyone is working from the same playbook. Above everything sales and marketing does, there should be your company’s sales story, which clearly explains the value prop and main selling points of your product/service. Everyone in both sales and marketing should commit the story to memory, and all sales scripts and marketing content should use the story as its backbone.
By making sure everyone’s work in the sales/marketing process begins from the same starting point, you help to ensure your prospects are getting a consistent and unified experience of your company—whether they engage digitally or on the phone. And, by establishing clear agreement between sales and marketing about ‘the big picture’ upfront, there is less of a chance for disagreement when the details are getting worked out later on.
To continue reading, click here.
by Glen Springer | Mar 25, 2014
This year was the first time I ever filled out an NCAA bracket.
I like basketball, but I’m more of an NBA girl. To be perfectly honest, the only thing I knew about the tournament going in was that my team (Colorado) didn’t have much of a chance after losing its star player to an ACL injury earlier in the season.
So, not knowing anything about the teams in the tournament, I decided I would get creative with my bracket. I narrowed down my choices of how I would make my picks: base them off of school colors or team mascots. I couldn’t decide, so I flipped a coin.
Mascots won.
This meant that I had North Carolina Central (Eagles) beating Iowa State (Cyclones) in the first round. It meant that I had Saint Louis in my final four because I thought a Billiken, a good luck figure that represents, “things as they ought to be,” was way cooler than Michigan’s Wolverine. It also meant that I had the Orange (Syracuse) winning the whole thing, purely because of the novelty of having a fruit for a mascot.
As of today (after the 2nd round), my bracket is destroyed. I am now in last place in the office pool, and my co-workers are laughing at me.
What did I learn from my first Final Four failure?
You can’t replace a strategy backed by logic and data with guesswork and expect success.
My bracket picks—despite the creative enthusiasm that went into them—were not based on the realities of the world today. As cool as I think the Billikens are, it does not change the fact that Saint Louis has never made it past the third round in tournament history, and the odds weren’t stacked in their favor to make it happen this year.
Picking my NCAA bracket based off of mascot preference is like executing sales and marketing campaigns without a strategy and data. Without conducting market research and leveraging analytics to discover your ideal customer profile and determine what tactics are most effective, your sales and marketing campaigns lack any sort of intelligent direction. You might as well pick who to target based off company logos.
So, while it is nice to think that you can succeed at something without having any real knowledge or skill, it’s not generally how things work.
Whether picking sports brackets or running content marketing campaigns, having a data-based strategy that supports your decisions is the clearest path to victory.
If you want to know more about the value of conducting market research and creating a go-to-market strategy prior to campaign launch, read 3 Things You Can Learn From Go-To-Market Strategy Consulting. Feel free to contact us with any questions.
by gabriel_sales | Mar 14, 2014
In this digital age, it is a buyer’s world.
Before the days of Yelp!, Rotten Tomatoes and Angie’s List, there weren’t many places for buyers to go for commercial information on the products and services available to them. Buyers were left to phone books, trade shows and traditional media outlets to find the information they needed, which meant that they were essentially at the mercy of flashy advertisements and pushy salesmen.
Since the advent of the internet, that is no longer the case. Daniel Newman, author of the newly published book The New Rules of Customer Engagement, 6 Trends Reinventing the Way We Sell, explains:
“Today the average buyer engages with nearly a dozen pieces of content before they pick up the phone or visit a retail store. This means businesses need to invest in being a part of that first 70, 80 or 90 percent and the old hiring more sales people to cold call just isn’t going to cut it.” (Forbes)
Because buyers are going through so much of the buying process on their own now, sales and marketing teams must meet the buyers where they are at and offer genuine assistance—rather than interrupting their day with annoying ads and cold calls.
In B2B sales, this is especially important, as most B2B sales cycles are 1.5X longer than B2C. There are a couple of reasons for this. First, B2B sales generally have higher price points and purchases often require multiple decision makers to agree and sign off, which can take some time. Second is that in complex solution sales (i.e. an enterprise software solution), the discovery and education process takes longer to get through.
With the sales cycle extended, it is imperative that B2B companies find a way to reach prospects earlier in their buying process. By creating digital content (i.e. blogs, videos, webcasts, white papers, etc.) that allows buyers to educate themselves on their own time, you can still guide your prospects through the first stages of the buying process without needing to interact with them personally.
By allowing buyers to take themselves through your sales process on their own time and in their own way, they will start to trust you enough to want to build a relationship.
You can learn more about how selling and buying have changed and the new rules of engagement in this brief video. Please feel free to contact us with any questions.
by gabriel_sales | Mar 5, 2014
Companies that are taking new products or services into the market, or existing products or services into new markets, have a distinct set of challenges. Solving the right pain for the right markets quickly can make all the difference between simply surviving vs. thriving.
By engaging experts to thoroughly analyze and research your space on both a qualitative and quantitative level, you can eliminate many of the obstacles companies usually face when going to market with a new product or service.
Here are three things you can learn from go-to-market strategy consulting:
1. You are targeting the wrong people/market.
Through quantitative analysis, go-to-market consultants can help you determine your overall market size. They also help you to then do market segmentation and database research to further analyze the market and determine how many people or decision makers are in each segment. These numbers help you create your ideal customer profile.
On the qualitative side, consultants can help you identify buyer pains by vertical and decision-maker and also analyze what verticals and decision-makers your competitors are going after. Using this information, consultants can help you to clearly identify your differentiators and then incorporate them into a sales story that is the basis of all of your sales and marketing content.
Going through this process gives you confidence that you aren’t just shooting in the dark and are actually targeting the people most likely to purchase.
2. Your content needs to be organized/segmented differently.
Most B2B sales are somewhat complex in nature. Many times, B2B solution sales require a well-strategized content marketing process with different pieces of marketing content for each vertical or decision-maker and each stage of the buying cycle. If you aren’t organizing your content in this way when you take your product or service to market, your buyers may end up abandoning the sale prematurely because they cannot immediately find the information they are looking for. Go-to-market consultants can help ensure your content is organized and articulated with the language of value, making it easy for your buyers to learn what they need to and make a purchase.
3. You are not meeting your audience where they are.
By going through segmentation exercises, database research and other analysis with strategy consultants, you will have a clear idea of where your buyers are looking for information on your product or service. For example, when you know the titles your prospects are most likely to have at their jobs, you can look for social communities or other online forums related to those jobs and post your content there. When you know who to look for, LinkedIn groups and Google circles can be a great place to start conversations and engage buyers.
Go-to-market consulting essentially shows you your entire landscape and everyone in it. It also allows you to better understand who you buyers are, how to talk to them, what type of content they want to consume, and where/how they want to consume it. Rather than guessing all the time about what to do, this gives your sales and marketing campaigns a well-designed and actionable strategy backed with logic and data.
To learn more about new product/service launches, visit this extensive resource page on the topic. You can also check out our Go-to-Market Strategy Consulting Page.
Feel free to contact us with any questions.
