by Glen Springer | 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 Base Camp™ that can help you do this in a matter of weeks. Below 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.
by Glen Springer | Feb 1, 2012
The rules of sales engagement have changed and so has b to b demand generation for three reasons:
1. Over the past 18 months a wave of technology has hit the market that allows an in house marketing team or outsourced demand generation and marketing operations team take deals deeper and further through your sales funnel than ever before. Your buyers digest, on average, 10.7 pieces of collateral prior to buying.
2. Marketing Automation Platforms allow you to nurture your customers not yet ready to buy with increased volume and increased efficiency. The ability to track the consumption of that content saves your top producers and senior talent tons of time working with your customers to transact.
3. A sales driven marketing team can create content that helps engage the customer, close business and generate leads simultaneously.
Your sales content is now an extension of your sales team. The right approach to integrating inbound efforts and your sales teams outbound efforts anchored in a smart sales content strategy can meet your customer in their buying cycle with the right team, delivering the right message at the right time. This allow you to:
- close those “ready to buy” faster and cheaper
- not lose customer “not ready to buy” or without budget and close them when they are ready
One of the tricks in making this all work is the right b to b sales content strategy. It needs to be great and it needs to be driven by your sales team and supported by marketers.
Great b to b sales content is focused on moving deals forward to close. Sales content requires that you: listen to your customers, listen to your sales reps, listen to your product specialists, create content for specific stages in the customer buying cycle and then re-purpose and repackage around a specific segments’ needs. Your sales content needs to be:
- Designed to move Marketing Qualified Leads to Sales Qualified Leads and Sales Qualified Leads to Closed Business
- Designed to be used by Inside Sales Reps and Senior Sales Reps in the Close
- Designed to be “Authentic” dialogue…no CLIOs here
- Not designed for Mass Market
- Leveraged by Inside Reps to decrease the time Executives and Product Specialists spend in educational meetings to move deals forward
- Able to train and support a sales “champion” to internally sell complex solutions or technologies within their organization.
- Once created, re-purposed across multiple platforms.
This content can also be leveraged aggressively for long tail Pay per Click campaigns and long tail Search Engine Marketing. Once proven, creative agencies can polish and take to mass market.
You need to never forget that the customer needs to remain front and center. Each piece needs to be designed for a specific stage in the customer’s buying cycle. Below is our framework for creating sales content that gets the customer and the sales team what they need to transact.
For a full overview of why we feel it makes strategic and executional sense to have your sales team involved in your sales content marketing strategy and a road map for fluid communication we invite you to read the following blogs:
Top B2B Demand Generation Requires Sales Content Marketing
Top B to B Demand Generation Requires Sales and Marketing Alignment
5 Steps to Launch or Turn Around a B to B Demand Gen Team
If you have any questions or feel like a conversation makes sense to learn how Gabriel Sales can help you pull together a more effective b to b demand generation program whether you are mid cycle or building a new effort feel free to CONTACT US.
by Glen Springer | Jan 20, 2012
This blog discusses how Gabriel Sales thinks about B2B Demand Generation and the hybrid role it plays in sales, sales marketing and market intelligence. In short, Sales Marketing is always supporting the close of business. In this blog we will share how you can close more B2B customers leveraging the opportunities in the new sales and content marketing engagement model we now all face. This is Part 1 of a 3 Part Series.
To set some initial context to understand what Gabriel Sales means by “Sales Content” Marketing and how it supports B2B Demand Generation it’s important to understand that B2B Sales Content Marketing, at least from our perspective, is about moving a deal forward in the customer buying cycle so it results in a closed deal. Sales content supports the brand, but that is not its primary purpose. In a sales culture Demand Generation is not about Lead Generation and Marketing Qualified Leads. Who cares if a lead is Marketing Qualified. Demand Generation is about “Demand” meaning deals that are going to transact. Demand Generation means handing sales qualified leads over to sales reps that they can close.
A solid sales organization needs to be organized around an inside sales and marketing team that can generate Sales Qualified Leads and a team that can close business. As a sales outsourcing company we staff a team that can close business. As an outsourced B2B demand generation company, our goal, and the goal of any sales organization, needs to be creating a high velocity sales machines with a staff that does three things:
- Identifies and develops Sales Qualified Leads as quickly as possible so the sales team can engage
- Continues to nurture and develop Sales Accepted Leads (not ready to buy but worth investing inside reps time in) until they are ready to buy
- Profile Accounts – So you can score them for continued follow up by marketing efforts
This requires us to combine outbound sales efforts with inbound sales content marketing services (either creating digital content or creating the feedback loops for our client’s marketing team) because the goal is to move a customer through their buying cycle.
For a high velocity sales machine that integrates inbound and outbound efforts your inside sales team needs:
- To be experts in using sale marketing content to move customers from Marketing Qualified Leads to Sales Qualified Leads.
- To be accountable for driving insights and recommendations to the marketing team.
- To have the tools and technology to provide that feedback.
For true sales and marketing alignment, sales marketing efforts need to focus on generating closed business by supplying qualified deals and helping your buyer to transact. This means your marketing team needs to:
- Listen to the voice of the customer and the voice of the sales force
- Quickly create content or support the creation of content that moves deals forward
- Have their demand generation success scored on their contribution beyond simply putting MQLs in the pipe
As Forrester Research and the Society for New Communication Research has demonstrated (see graphic below) Sales Content is no longer a nice to have. It is a must have.
To summarize, B2B demand generation is about sales content marketing. In part 2 of this blog series we will cover Gabriel Sales’ simple framework for aligning sales and marketing and simple steps you can take to get sales and marketing to work together towards a shared vision. In part 3 we will discuss how smart sales content marketing can be re-purposed to provide an exponential lift by increasing your marketing teams ability to put better Marketing Qualified Leads into your Sales teams’ pipe; and the role of Marketing Automation Platforms.
If you would like to learn more about how an outsourced demand generation solution may be able to help accelerate this alignment please feel free to CONTACT US for a free initial strategy conversation. Or visit the B2B Demand Generation Resources section of our Website.
To Check out Part 2 in this Series B to B Demand Generation Requires Sales and Marketing Alignment CLICK HERE.
