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 24, 2012
How a B to B sales team can accelerate education, verification, and convincing of potential prospects.
In Part One we discussed the difference between “Sales” Content Marketing and Marketing. In Part Two we covered the framework we use to listen to the customer. This blog is Part Three of that three part series. It discusses how you can approach creating a successful B to B Demand Generation Outsourcing Solution in a systematic and cost effective way.
To summarize: in B2B Sales and B2B Content Marketing – the Sales Conversation, the Digital Conversation and the Social Media Conversation should and need to be the same conversation. Sales and Marketing have the same job with different methods of delivery. Below is our best practice road map for scaling that conversation. As an outsourced b to b demand generation company we recommend the following five steps in the following order:
- Have your B2B demand gen team listen to the customer and provide feedback to sales marketing team.
- Have your “sales” content marketing team create inexpensive digital content that pushes the deals forward and do some small direct marketing tests.
- Have your senior sales reps close those deals to prove concept.
- Have your demand generation team, sales operations, or marketing operations team implement a Marketing Automation Platform to score your content and give sales and marketing a shared sales quota.
- Once you have the ability to score leads and content (and digital content that works and is market tested) give it to your “Marketing” team to scale.
As discussed in Parts 1 and 2, when clients engage with Gabriel Sales in a new product launch or a demand generation campaign our two primary objectives are:
- Fill the sales pipe
- Move deals from Marketing Qualified to Sales Qualified
As a sales outsourcing company our objective is to:
- Close business
As a value add we also function as an outsourced sales marketing company and our objectives are to:
- Test assumptions about ideal target markets to find verticals that will scale
- Craft the right messages and scripts that will help move those deals through the pipe faster in that market
- Create the right digital content and establish the right marketing platforms to support moving a deal from marketing qualified to sale qualified with increased volume.
- Track the b to b digital content’s contribution to a sale by implementing a Marketing Automation Platform (for full disclosure we are a Denver CO Pardot Partner).
This type of roll out, team organization and team orientation drives tremendous accountability. Your sales team needs to document the “Sales Conversation” and provide that feedback to marketing. Your “sales” marketing team is responsible for helping sales create content that closes business. With this simple approach you are focused on filling your pipe, closing business and driving intelligence that closes more business.
Where this alignment really pays off long term is the exponential lift and efficient spends you get out of your “Marketing” Teams – both internal and your agencies. Your external teams may include Direct Marketing, Media Buyers, Publishers, and Social Media Agencies. When executed in the right order:
Your B to B demand generation team’s marketing alignment job is to map the “Sales Conversation” and provide inputs to sales marketing about what the customer wants and needs to discuss:
Your “sales” marketing team’s job is provide content that helps your customer get the right information at the right time in the “Digital Content Conversation”:
Your designated sales or marketing operations team job is to implement a platform like Pardot to Automate and Score Conversations.
With Sales, B to B Demand Generation, Sales Marketing and Sales Operations teams aligned, your marketing teams’ job, (your creative agency, your media buyers and your publishers) is to take that “Sales Conversation” to the masses. It’s their job to turn the “Sales Conversation” and “Digital Conversation” into a “Social Media Conversation” to ramp the volume of the pipe.
As the conversation merges across all functions this approach is just common sense. When you get it right digital strategy in place it can drive large chunks of the sales cycle. Of course the options you have still remain the same but we feel that the new rules of sales engagement dictate that your sales team becomes more active in the marketing function because it results in more deals, faster at less upfront sunk costs.
- You can pay an MR firm for an MR study or listen to your sales team as they to listen to the customer and fill the pipe at the same time.
- You can pay a creative agency to guess at what content the market wants. Or you can have an integrated sales content team and inside sales team. You can test that initial content and then pass those insights on to the creative agency to improve and polish
- You can have a publisher create a white paper for you or you can test a series of blogs that address your customers top objections and then have the publisher write that white paper (this is what major film studios do now…they test on YouTube before they green light a film project or TV pilot).
- You can have a direct marketing team drive traffic across multiple sources and platforms. Or you can get input of your sales to run AB tests so when you make that spend your opens and your conversions are stellar.
One solution we would recommend running in parallel if the budget permits is working with a social media analytics company to start mapping the social media conversation so you can map this to the sales conversation and prepare for outreach.
We hope you enjoyed this series. A year ago we were skeptical that “content is king”. That’s no longer the case. Once we experimented and attached hard metrics to digital content we were blown away by the results. We would love to share those learning with you. If you have any questions about any of our road maps or frameworks please don’t hesitate to give us a call. To see if a sales driven demand generation and sales content marketing effort may be valuable in helping you to increase your revenue and decrease your demand generation costs CONTACT US.
To read Part 1 Top B to B Demand Generation Requires Sales Content Marketing CLICK HERE.
To read Part 2 Top B to B Demand Generation Requires Sales and Marketing Alignment CLICK HERE.
by Glen Springer | Jan 22, 2012
This blog is the second part of a three part series that discusses the advantages sales content marketing and why B to B demand gen requires sales and marketing alignment. I then explains how you can approach creating a successful Demand Generation b to b solution (with or without outsourcing) by aligning sales and marketing. In this blog we provide a simple framework for driving success. CLICK HERE FOR PART ONE.
As an outsourced sales organization we firmly believe that every outsourced demand generation b to b effort needs “to start with the end in mind”. That “end” is closed business. Therefore, b to b demand generation requires sales. As a company we build High Velocity Sales Machines. The marketing services we provide to support the sales efforts are focused on improving two areas: Demand Generation and Overcoming Specific Sales Objections. Our focus when executing marketing services in these areas is to create the feedback loops required for the marketing team to create content (or in many cases to produce the initial necessary digital content ourselves) to ensure that the sales content meets the need of the buyer exactly where they are in their buying cycle. You need to match your sales function to the customer buying cycle. Typically:
- B2B Demand Generation – helping the customer define their problem and establishing your credentials as a thought leader to help them.
- Sales Engagement and Qualifying – helping the customer to compare your solution to other solutions in the market. And to evaluate their alternatives.
- Closing – sales starts when the customer says “No”. This content needs to overcome specific objections so that the customer can verify the ROI and confirm what you have already told them so they are comfortable committing to you.
For Gabriel Sales, sales content marketing is not strategic, it is tactical and measurable. The job of sales content marketing is measured. And when we make recommendations or create content that content starts by addressing a specific need or objection that we have heard directly from a customer.
Below is a simple framework we use when creating digital content or providing feedback loops to the marketing teams we work with.
We are giving our marketing efforts “A Sales Quota.” To do this you need listen and document the conversation with the customer. As part of our services we map the entire sales conversation to identify the objections, and then create authentic digital content that addresses those needs and objections specifically to get deals through the pipe.
To summarize, smart sales content marketing is a simple as:
- Getting everyone to agree that the Sales Marketing job is to close business
- Listening to the Needs and Objections of your customer to understand the “Sales Conversation”
- Creating Authentic Content that addresses the client’s needs for where they are in the buying cycle
As an outsourcing b to b demand generation company we are not delusional. We know what we are the best at, and what other solutions are more effective. We are the best at building outsourced demand generation engines that:
- Generate b to b sales leads with cold calling efforts
- Take cold call leads and inbound marketing qualified leads, listen to the customer and understand their needs and sales objections
- Move deals from marketing qualified leads to sales qualified leads by:
- Creating and distributing great “Sales” content that move the deals forward
- Training reps how to use that content
- Providing great feedback loops to marketing teams so they can expand on that effort once proven
With a full pipe we then transition to the close by staffing enterprise sales reps or inside reps as the need dictates.
The final blog will discuss how internal “marketing” teams and external agencies can build on smart sales driven demand generation and sales content marketing to put more qualified sales deals in the pipe.
If you would like to learn more about how an outsourced demand generation solution can help accelerate this alignment and scale, please feel free to CONTACT US for a free initial strategy conversation. Or visit the B2B Demand Generation Resources section of our Website.
To review Part 1 Top B to B Demand Generation Requires Sales Content Marketing CLICK HERE.
To view the final blog in this series on Successful Demand Generation b to b please CLICK HERE.
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.
by Glen Springer | Dec 6, 2011
The purpose of this blog is to help our outsourced sales and outsourced marketing clients understand how we recommend they think about their B to B demand generation and sales content strategy and what we do as part of our consulting engagements to shape Sales Collateral.
What defines a “better” piece of b to b sales collateral? Well, in our opinion better b to b sales collateral moves a prospect further into their decision making process and does it at a faster rate. The goal: close more business, faster.
The first thing to remember is that to create better sales collateral it’s never going to be about you. It’s about your prospect’s specific sales information need and the type of information they need will depend on where they are in their decision making process.
As a sales and marketing outsourcing company, when we launch a new client we take them through our proprietary discovery process to establish the initial messaging and targeting strategy. Once this is complete we get on the phone and simultaneously accomplish the following functions:
- We execute immediately to start generating leads to fill the sale pipe
- We start collecting hard data and metrics
- We continue to consult creating a content and sales process strategy that aligns sales and marketing
This ongoing consulting based on hard data allows us to frame a repeatable sales process. Creating this process requires that we listen to and then meet the sales needs of the prospect. Without the correct sales process and the right content nobody wins. This includes our clients, their prospects and us. What most sales outsourcing organizations won’t tell you is that no ones content is perfect out of the gate. The idea here is to talk to the prospects, test, refine and become more efficient to fill the content gaps as quickly as possible. This is what helps us become more effective and more efficient closers. This is where we gain our advantage.
We realize that content creation can seem daunting. It does not have to be. It should be fun. What we generally find is that our initial immediate needs can be met quickly and created quickly as we are putting the first wave of deals in the pipe. In most cases we find that existing content just needs to be tweaked, reframed, repurposed and/or reformatted.
The chart you see at the top of this post is the simple framework we use as we create your long term content strategy during the consulting portion of our initial client launches. What drives the efficiency in this approach vs. a typical marketing firms approach is that we are not guessing. As we are filling the pipe we are measuring what is successful and what is not successful. We are learning when we lose and improving what works. We are making decisions based on real customer data and real customer feedback that creates a content strategy that fuels a sales process has a real impact. We are simply listening to your customers and giving them what they need to transact. This is not rocket science but it does require following a specific process, road map and framework, and then supporting the effort with proper tools. This approach creates a scalable sales machine.
Depending on your stage of sales and marketing maturity, there are multiple sales and marketing strategies and tactics Gabriel Sales can leverage to drive sales growth. A strategy or tactic is most effective when anchored in real numbers tied to realistic targets and measureable goals. The best sales and marketing operations outsourcing company will help you to create a unique plan to create this strategy and set real metrics if you are just getting started. If you have an existing sales history Gabriel Sales can fix what is not working and build on what is. Contact us for a free consultation to see what we can do to improve your sales performance and pipeline velocity in 2012.
by Glen Springer | Nov 9, 2011
Is it harder to put leads in your pipe? Are you spending more time educating and less time closing? Do you build a pipe and then abandon it, starting from scratch every quarter? Do you over or under forecast your revenue?
The professional services sales industry has its ups and downs. On the plus side, professional services sales are forecasted to grow at over 2.5X of the rest of the economy for the next 4 years. On the downside, it’s getting more competitive and there are new rules of engagement. Below is a quick outline of how you can build a sales machine that addresses those new rules and will double your revenue.
A high velocity sales machine for professional services requires a different approach to the typical professional service sales and marketing method. It takes commitment to continually improve the process. It takes a commitment to becoming a “digital publisher” and learning how to use new technologies. It takes a commitment to managing inside and junior sales reps on a daily basis, and most professional services professionals love solutioning and would rather not spend their time managing junior employees.
Make Your Product Accessible Digitally. Your Top Producers are Your Product! As a top B to B professional service sales outsourcing company, we map all the sales objections we get during the sales process. We measure what wins deals. Once we understand these objections, we work with our outsourced sales clients to create content that demonstrates their intangibles—their thinking style, their approach to solutioning, their character, their personality—and create content that is authentic, and allows them to enter into dialogue with the prospect one to many. With or without us you need to create content that clones your Top Producers. Once we start working with a client, we generally find that over 50% of the content we need is already lying around in one form or another in past presentations, RFPs and speeches they have given.
Use an Inside Sales Team. You cannot afford to have your high-end sales resources, or professionals, that could be billing clients instead generating leads and selling to early stage prospects. To make this work you will need a hands on VP of Sales who has prior experience running an inside sales team. The team needs to be able to sell strategically over the phone, qualify prospects and understand both their business need and how they will budget for the solution. Open ended questions and smart probing questions go a long way. Once the lead is engaged, bring in your senior resources and then pass back to the inside rep to manage the logistics of the close.
Start by Leveraging Digital Content on the Back End of Your Sales Cycle. Start with your close when creating content and then work backwards to share that content. This means you need to approach your B2B customer by taking more of a consumer approach to marketing. Once they are engaged, you need to sell to them digitally. Any presentation you give more than one time a quarter needs to be turned into a webcast. Any objection that comes up more than once a quarter, you need to write a blog about. You can then repurpose that same content for SEO and have your inside team use it for lead generation downstream.
Leverage Technologies. If you have a complex sale (and most professional services sales have some level of complexity) and the prospect is moving through your pipe, they will be actively looking at your content and will be sharing that content. You need to track when people are looking at your content. All the Fortune 1000 have these technologies in place, and they will win if you do not compete. Prices have come down dramatically in 2011 and you can now have equal footing.
Leverage Social Media. Once you have the content created, you simply need to push that same content into Social Media. This means YouTube, LinkedIn and Twitter. The average B2B customer goes out on the web looking for you once they are sales engaged. Make sure that they find you. This is ground cover for your inside sales team.
Nurture Prospects. Take the same digital content you use as part of our sales cycle to engage, develop and close prospects that are actively buying; and cut it up into much smaller chunks – 90 second videos—and use that same content to stay in front of prospects that are not ready to buy. Staying top of mind will win you deals when they are ready to buy. Let the longer term prospects engage in the sales cycle with your content, and use your inside reps to touch them so they know you care. Technologies like Pardot (our vendor of choice) and Marketo automate this process. Hit them with a monthly blog and a quarterly newsletter via these tools. Your inside team will be watching.
Metrics are Critical. Gabriel Sales top management executive team members are all endurance athletes. This approach is not a sprint. The high velocity sales model for professional services is an endurance sport, and you need to have your handle on every step of the process. You get stronger over time. This model is designed to get deals that are ready to move moving, and keep deals not yet ready to buy engaged until they are ready. With more content and more inside sales touches you get more results; and you need to measure what starts momentum, what sustains momentum and what builds momentum.You also need to understand what fakes momentum and what takes momentum. We build custom metrics for every client because generally a professional service sale (with both a business buyer and a technical buyer) is a 5 to 7 touch sale. Our experience is that about 70% of these touches can be done with inside reps.
SEO and SEM Focus. Within six months to a year, you will start to see a lift in Natural Search, Organic Search and SEO. You will have the metrics and the insights to start to give your Marketing efforts a Sales Quota. If the content is crafted carefully, you will be able to niche target and save a ton of money executing your SEO strategy.
For more information on B to B Professional Service Sales Outsourcing, please feel free to contact us. You can also visit our Knowledge Center for more tips for Professional Service Sales.
