How AI Is Changing the Way You Need to Build Emails to Reach the Inbox

How AI Is Changing the Way You Need to Build Emails to Reach the Inbox

by | Jun 9, 2026

A practical look at what and how AI Previews being used by the major mailbox providers have done to impact deliverability.  And what you need to do to make sure your campaigns actually reach the inbox.

Short Summary of What You Will Learn: We wrote this article to help you with email deliverability. We explain the impact of AI Previews and how this impacts how to build emails.  We explain how/why its important to lead with real text and a strong subject line. We recap how to pass SPF, DKIM, and DMARC. And finally we discuss other ways to keep your spam-complaint rate under 0.10% to 0.30% and the benefits of data hygiene and well segmented lists.

We have also summarized the action items from our learnings in a full checklist. You can access this checklist in two ways. You can download a PDF for easy access at any time. Or you can reference online in this supporting blog post Checklist for AI Era Inbox.

Background

We just attended the Salesforce Connections conference in Chicago.  At the conference nearly every session addressed new AI capabilities across the Salesforce and Marketing Cloud family (including Sales Cloud, Account Engagement, Slack and  Marketing Cloud Next). There is a great deal to be excited about especially what will be possible with native AI tools in Marketing Cloud Next.

But what stood out as immediately useful/actionable is this: the major mailbox providers have used AI to quietly change what it takes to consistently land your emails in your target’s inbox. There are three main issues that every team needs to immediately address to maintain and ensure successful delivery:

  • AI previews and how they change the way you need to build an email
  • Authentication and sender reputation
  • List quality

As positive news, even with all the changes occurring with AI , Salesforce data continues to confirm that email marketing and lead nurturing still produces one of the best and most cost effective ROIs for B2B companies. In this short article we will explain what has changed and what needs renewed strategic attention/focus to ensure email deliverability.  We will also explain why it matters so you can make the right strategic decisions for your organization.

AI Previews: Build for the Machine That Reads First

Before a single human sees your email, an AI may have already read it and decided what it’s about. Apple Mail uses Apple Intelligence to write a short summary from the first few hundred words of your email and shows it in the inbox in place of your preheader. As an email marketer you can’t override it or turn it off. Gmail offers Gemini-generated summaries as well. These tools also help decide what’s most important inside the message, which means structure, content hierarchy, images, alt text, and the placement of your key information all matter more than they used to.

One useful detail from the sessions: Apple’s summary is built from your live body text and largely ignores your subject line, your preheader, and any text inside image alt tags. So how you assemble the top of your email now shapes the preview your reader sees before they decide to open. The encouraging part is that the same choices that help the AI also make your email more accessible to screen-reader users and easier for busy people to skim. Five practices make the difference. For more, see Salesforce’s tips for navigating AI email summaries and Litmus’s breakdown of what AI summaries mean for marketers.

1. Put the key message in the first few sentences

Lead with the single most important takeaway, such as the offer, the value, the reason to act, in your opening lines, not after a greeting and a paragraph of warm-up.

Why this matters: Apple Intelligence builds its inbox summary from the first few hundred words of your body copy. If those opening lines are “Hi there, hope you’re having a great week” or housekeeping text, that’s what the AI summarizes and that becomes the preview your subscriber judges before opening. Front-load the substance and the AI has something worth showing.

2. Use real text rather than text embedded in images

Keep your core message in live, selectable text. Don’t bake your headline, offer, or key copy into a graphic.

Why this matters: AI can only summarize text it can actually read it. Text trapped inside an image is invisible to it, just as it is to screen readers and, often, to spam filters. Image-only emails give the summary engine almost nothing to work with, and testing shows summary quality drops sharply for them. Don’t lean on alt text as a safety net, either: AI summaries frequently ignore it. Live HTML text is what carries your message.  Alt text remains critical for accessibility, but today’s AI inbox summaries appear to rely primarily on the visible email content rather than the alt text attached to images.

3. Use a clear preheader

Write a specific, benefit-driven preheader that extends your subject line, however, your subject line needs to stand alone in case some never see your preheader.  Do not use “View this email in your browser” or a string of empty filler.

Why this matters: The preheader is still the preview line in many inboxes and for every recipient who isn’t seeing an AI summary. A clear preheader earns more opens, and where AI summaries do appear, a focused top-of-email keeps your signal consistent. It’s a small field that quietly shapes a first impression.

4. Don’t stuff the top of the email with legal text, navigation, or “view online” links

Move boilerplate nav menus, legal disclaimers, “view in browser” out of the opening. Lead with the message; let the housekeeping sit lower or in the footer.

Why this matters: AI reads top-down and weights what comes first, so if the top of your email is a navigation bar and a disclaimer, that’s what can end up in the summary and that will be reader’s first impression. Clearing the top lets both the AI and your reader get to the point.

5. Use semantic structure: headings, bullets, and concise paragraphs

Organize the email with real headings, short paragraphs, and scannable lists rather than one dense block of copy.

Why this matters: Clear structure helps the AI understand your hierarchy and identify what’s most important, and it helps human readers skim and act. It’s also the foundation of accessibility. Screen-reader users navigate by headings so good structure serves the machine, the assistive technology, and the busy reader all at once.

Authentication and Sender Reputation: Now a Gate, Not a Best Practice

SPF, DKIM, and DMARC used to be the kind of technical hygiene that lived on someone’s “we should get to that” list. Not anymore. In plain terms, these are the records that prove an email actually came from you and wasn’t spoofed by someone else. Gmail, Yahoo, and Microsoft now treat them as baseline requirements. And now for higher-volume senders, mail that fails authentication is rejected, not just filtered to spam. A great campaign that fails authentication simply never arrives.

What these terms actually mean

SPF (Sender Policy Framework): a public list of the mail servers allowed to send email on behalf of your domain, so a receiving server can confirm your message came from an approved source. Google’s SPF overview.

DKIM (DomainKeys Identified Mail): a tamper-evident digital signature added to each message, letting the receiving server verify the email genuinely came from your domain and wasn’t altered in transit. Google’s DKIM overview.

DMARC (Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting & Conformance): the policy that tells receiving servers what to do with mail that fails SPF or DKIM — deliver, quarantine, or reject — and sends you reports showing who is sending under your domain. Google’s DMARC overview.

Missing or misconfigured authentication is the single most common gap we see, and it’s usually invisible until deliverability quietly erodes. If you haven’t confirmed your domain is passing all three, that’s the first thing to check. See Google’s email sender guidelines and Microsoft’s requirements for high-volume senders (enforcement began May 5, 2025).

For a clear breakdown of the new bulk-sender rules and why this matters, see Validity’s guide.

List Quality Protects Everything Discussed Above

All of the above rests on list quality. Because providers reward engaged senders, consistently mailing inactive or invalid contacts actively drags down deliverability for your entire list — your engaged subscribers included. List hygiene has moved from housekeeping to strategy requirement. Regularly removing dead addresses, suppressing chronically unengaged contacts, and segmenting by real activity isn’t about a tidier database for its own sake; it’s about protecting the inbox placement of the people who do want to hear from you. This is also where clean, well-organized data in your CRM and marketing platform pays off directly. Data governance and data hygiene are becoming more important.

The 60-Second Deliverability Checklist

If you only do four things, do these. The rest of this guide explains the why behind each one.

  1. Confirm your domain passes SPF, DKIM, and DMARC (this is now a hard requirement, not a nice-to-have).
  2. Build every email with real text and a clear, standalone subject line.
  3. Write a deliberate preheader — don’t let the platform invent one.
  4. Mail engaged contacts; suppress and remove the rest on a regular schedule.

For a longer more comprehensive checklist download our PDF here or visit our blog post  Or you can reference online in supporting blog post Checklist for AI Era Inbox.

The Bottom Line

AI is changing how people consume email, but deliverability is still won or lost through authentication, sender reputation, engagement, and list quality.

The encouraging part: most teams already own the tools to do all of this, and it’s usually a matter of operationalizing how you build emails, your authentication and DMARC monitoring, and your list hygiene, rather than buying anything new. If you’d like a second set of eyes on where your email program stands today, that’s exactly the kind of behind-the-scenes work we help our clients put in place at Gabriel Sales. We’re always happy to talk it through and staff the resources to help you if necessary.

About the Author 

Carol Springer is a Founder at Gabriel Sales.  She has been working at the inflection point of Marketing an Sales Operations implementing an optimizing Salesforce and Marketing Automation for the past 15 years.  Carol has multiple Salesforce certifications leads the Denver Colorado  Salesforce Marketers User Group and is a frequent Salesforce Speaker.  Prior to focusing on Sales and Marketing Ops Carol was an award winning enterprise sales executive. 

Contact Us to Learn More

 

 

Sources & further reading

The Build vs. Buy Decision: A Business Leader’s Guide to Outsourcing Salesforce and Marketing Automation Support

The Build vs. Buy Decision: A Business Leader’s Guide to Outsourcing Salesforce and Marketing Automation Support

by | Jun 5, 2026

Overview:

This guide is crafted and organized to help B2B business leaders that have invested in Salesforce and Marketing Automation decide if outsourcing Salesforce and marketing automation support makes sense for their organization.  After the introduction the framework is divided into 7 sections. We are also including videos from our Educational Series: Marketing Operations Full Funnel Mandate for deeper dives if additional education is required in any one area.

 

Guide Sections Include (Quick Links):

Introduction

You’ve invested in Salesforce. You’ve invested in Marketing Cloud Account Engagement (Pardot) or your considering Marketing Cloud Next, Agentforce and Data Cloud. And somewhere between the promise of what those tools were supposed to deliver and the reality of what your team can consistently manage, optimize and execute on any day (week or month) there’s a gap.  And this gap is costing you pipeline, improved spend and revenue at every stage of your GTM and Customer Funnel.

At the same time, leadership is pushing for more. More leads. More qualified opportunities. More automation post close.  More from the technology you’re already paying for. And now, the question isn’t just about marketing and sales output it’s also about implementing AI. Everyone from the board down is asking when your marketing and sales operations will be AI-ready. The honest answer for most mid-market companies is: not yet, and not without significant work on the data foundation that sits underneath everything.

This is the moment most marketing and sales leaders hit the same inflection point: do we build this capability and capacity in-house, or do we buy it, or is it a combination of the two?

This page is designed to help you answer that question honestly with a balanced framework.  If building in-house is the right answer for your situation we will share those conditions too. But if the math points toward outsourcing, you’ll have the business case to make it to your leadership and internal teams with confidence.

Overview: Marketing’s Shifting Role and the Full Funnel Support Mandate 

(5:00 minutes) A quick summary why marketing roles have transformed more in the past five years than the previous fifty, and what it takes to compete with a fully automated, AI-ready ops model. This is also the introduction to our 12 part video series Marketing Operations Full Funnel Mandate. 

Section 1: What Mature & Successful B2B Marketing and Sales Operations + AI Readiness Actually Requires

Before you can make the build vs. buy decision, you need a clear picture of what you’re actually deciding to build. Most leaders underestimate the scope and volume of all the skills, tasks and technical expertise required for mature and authentically competitive marketing and sales operations. That underestimation is where the gap starts.

This gap is ultimately driven by the changed expectations of the B2B buyer. Buyers now expect to be able to educate themselves digitally online across multiple channels. Once they demonstrate interest, they also expect marketing to continue to support their buyer journey with continued digital education. Increasingly they expect messages and content to be personalized with additional in person or virtual events to support their buying process and education around their specific use cases.  They also expect a seamless hand off from marketing to sales when they are ready to buy.  And more recently they also expect a seamless digital and personalized experience once they become a customer around customer service, adoption, training and personalized marketing if cross sell and upsell campaigns are leveraged.

How & Why Marketing Has Full Funnel Sales Responsibilities

(2 minutes) How and why did marketing become responsible for 70% of the GTM sales cycle

Why Marketing Leaders Are Now Automating Full Customer Lifecycle

(2 minutes) Why will marketing ops need to take on additional responsibilities for the entire customer lifecycle

As a result of these new expectations the B2B buyer has permanently changed the job descriptions and requirements for marketing and sales operations. According to Gartner, 67% of B2B buyers now prefer a rep-free buying experience. This is a number that has increased every time Gartner has measured it and once again it has jumped six percentage points in the past year.  Buyers now only spend only 17% of their total purchasing time in direct contact with potential vendors, meaning 83% of their journey happens before your sales team is ever involved. And according to 6sense, 81% of buyers have already picked a winner before they talk to a sales rep.  AI is predicted to increase this even more.

What this means operationally is that marketing now owns the first and most critical phase of revenue development. Not just lead generation, but sustained digital education, lead nurturing, lead scoring, and the handoff to sales at precisely the right moment. Meanwhile, the average B2B purchase involves 6 to 10 decision makers, each doing their own independent research across multiple channels and content formats.

What’s Now Required for Success

The scope, consistent effort, tech expertise, talent and skills it now takes to support this reality includes:

  • Great Content
  • Personalized Content
  • Marketing Automation Platform Management (Marketing Cloud Account Engagement, Marketing Cloud NEXT, Pardot, Hubspot in some cases for GTM)
  • Salesforce configuration and administration (Sales Cloud)
  • Sales Enablement skills
  • Data integrations
  • Third party SaaS integrations
  • Campaign strategy
  • Campaign execution,
  • Lead Nurturing Workflow Development
  • Lead Scoring
  • Lead Grading 
  • Dashboards
  • Attribution and ROI Measurement
  • Marketing-to-Sales Hand-off Design and Processes
  • Training and Adoption Support
  • Database Management and Data Governance
  • AI data infrastructure (with increasing urgency building and maintaining the data infrastructure required to deploy AI in a trustworthy way)
  • Generative AI
  • Salesforce Native AI
  • Additional Agentic AI

In addition to the list above you also have the increasing native capabilities that you can leverage with Salesforce’s three major platform release cycles per year. Technology is moving fast. And this increased Salesforce firepower can provide a tremendous competitive advantage. But capturing this value (that can set you apart) demands constant attention and expertise just to keep pace to ensure you get all the firepower you have paid for.

This is support is no longer just a role. It requires a team of interconnected disciplines that can collaborate effectively.  Sales and marketing alignment becomes critical because your teams, strategy and tech stack now needs to function as a coordinated system that focus on creating seamless customer experiences.

The decision to build this coordinated system with all the requsite skills sets completely in-house is now also a decision to staff, manage, train, retain and carry the fixed expense of that entire team (or parts of that team) on a sustained basis.

What Type of Support Is Required for Successful Automation and Sales Enablement

(5 minutes) Learn why 70% of companies struggle to find the technical expertise and professional experience needed to maximize their automation and CRM investments and what a fully supported team looks like in practice.

Section 2: The True Cost of Building In-House

Most in-house build decisions are made with incomplete math. The salary line is visible. The recruiting fee is visible. Everything else including the ramp time, the turnover cycle, the burnout risk, the opportunity cost of the months between hiring and productivity is harder to see, which means it rarely makes it into the ROI calculation. Here is an itemized list the more complete calculations. 

The budget pressure is real and documented.

Marketing budgets have fallen from 11.2% of company revenue in 2018 to 7.7% in 2025, representing a 30% reduction in proportional spend. And at the same time output expectations have grown significantly. 64% of CMOs now report they don’t have the budget to hit their stated strategic goals. This is the environment in which you’re trying to build and retain a specialized team. The additional cost and competition for proven marketing automation specialists, Salesforce admins, and data ops professionals was already difficult and is now even more difficult in this do more with less environment.  And the market knows it.

Your team is already stretched and lack of support technical capability and capacity increasingly compounds those challenges.

65.3% of marketers report feeling overwhelmed in 2026, up from 58% just a year earlier. 55.1% have experienced emotional exhaustion in the past twelve months. 83.5% of marketers say they are expected to produce more content without a proportional increase in resources. This isn’t a morale problem it’s a structural one. When the professional responsible for creating great strategies, creating great content and increasingly taking over more and more of the early stage sales functions are already at capacity are also being asked to take on responsibility for implementing, optimizing and managing technology then adding technical complexity doesn’t solve the problem. It accelerates it creating multiple challenges for your existing team.

 What Challenges Do Most Teams Face Without Proven Marketing Automation, Sales Enablement, Data and AI Support

(5:00 minutes) Get an honest look at the tactical barriers that keep most teams from realizing the ROI they were promised, and why adding one more hire rarely solves the underlying structural problem.

The single point of failure problem.

In most mid-market organizations, one person, often a marketing manager or a Salesforce admin (or over time a series of marketing managers or admins) is the single point of accountability, success and failure for everything in the tech stack. When that person is out, on leave, or leaves the company, campaigns stop running, automations break, data quality degrades, and nothing in Salesforce gets updated correctly. This isn’t a personnel issue. It’s a structural fragility built into the lean in-house model at mid-market scale. It is not solved by hiring one more person. It is solved by building redundancy. This requires either a larger in-house team or a different model entirely.

The opportunity cost of ramp time.

Even a strong hire takes time to become productive in your specific Salesforce environment, with your specific data model, your specific campaign history, and your specific integrations. This is typically measured in months, not weeks. During that window, the execution gap you were trying to close is still open. Pipeline is not accelerated, insights are not produced, data hygiene is not addressed and AI deployments are delayed.

Section 3: What Happens When You Underinvest and The Strategic Consequences

The barriers described above are predominantly tactical. They are manageable in isolation. But when they persist, or when the technical execution gap goes unfilled and/or processes are not transitioned methodically, and or frontline end users are not trained the challenges compound and the strategic problems are much harder to solve.

When marketing teams are not fully supported by technically experienced marketing and sales operations professionals the consequences show up at specific points in the revenue funnel. Lead quality drops because lead scoring models are configured once and never tuned so sales gets a flood of low-quality contacts and loses trust in the system. The marketing-to-sales alignment you paid for is only theoretical because the automation connecting both teams isn’t properly configured, which means the handoff is manual, inconsistent, and frustrating for everyone. And your technology investment fragments into silos, Salesforce Sales Cloud is doing one thing, your Marketing Cloud Account Engagement (marketing automation platform) is doing another, with no unified view of the customer. This means every claim you make about marketing’s contribution to revenue is difficult to prove.  It also becomes impossible to extend these tools, automation and even AI deeper into the customer funnel because you lack the earlier stage foundations that you need to build toward later stage funnel success.  And for companies now considering Marketing Cloud Next and Agentforce for truly competitive automation and seamless customer experience  are even more at risk. 

 Strategic Complexities Leaders Create When They Underinvest in Automation, Sales Enablement, Data & AI Support

(3:30 minutes) Learn how underinvestment in marketing ops creates compounding strategic problems from lead quality failures and broken sales handoffs to data conditions that make AI untrustworthy.

Gartner research found that 74% of B2B buyer teams experience a disconnected “unhealthy conflict” during their purchasing decision process which can negatively impact who they short list and/or decide to purchase from. The right solution is to provide personalized communication/education and a a seamless, data-rich handoff from marketing to sales at the right moment in the buyer journey. This requires systems that are properly built and maintained with accurate information shared across both sales and marketing teams so they are working together to service the buyer. Organizations that can deliver that experience win business.  Organizations that can’t lose deals to competitors who can.

The Emerging AI Challenge

And then there is the AI problem, which is different from all the other challenges your team and organization faces.

Every major technology vendor, Salesforce included with Agentforce, (its current AI agent platform) and Marketing Cloud Next (its emerging solution)  for automating marketing, sales, account management and customer service workflows are now delivering AI capabilities directly into the tools you’re already paying for. The competitive advantage available from those tools is real. But the tools only work well when the data feeding them is clean, consistently mapped, and syncing correctly across your entire tech stack. Most mid-market companies’ data is not in that state. Field mapping inconsistencies, duplicate records, broken syncs between marketing automation and Salesforce, incomplete contact records become the norm, not the exception. And they are the precise conditions that make AI outputs unreliable.

The companies that will be positioned to deploy AI effectively in 2026 and 2027 are not the ones buying the newest tools. They are the ones that have maintained strong data governance as an ongoing practice because within the next 18 months everyone will have access to same publicly available data.  In the future the main competitive advantage sales and marketing will have will be driven by the quality and volume of their proprietary data. This means connected clean data and data governance is not a one-time project.  It is a systematic process.  For mid-market companies It is maintenance work that requires sustained attention, specialized expertise, and someone who is accountable for it every week/month.

How Can Leaders Quickly Plan for Success Using an Automation Maturity Model to Address 7 Critical Strategic Question

(3:40 minutes) We use Gabriel Sales’ proprietary automation maturity model to quickly benchmark where your organization stands across sales ops and automation technology, data, and AI readiness. We then provide a clear and prioritized roadmap to help you understand where and how to close the gaps.

Section 4: The 7 Business Advantages of Outsourcing Marketing Automation, Data Governance and Sales Operations

If the analysis in the sections above is familiar and/or if you recognize your organizations gaps in any of the discussion areas then the case for outsourcing deserves a serious look. Here is what outsourcing some or even specific area means for you in business terms.

1. Speed to Competency with No Ramp/Learning Curve

An outsourced marketing operations support team brings tested frameworks, proven campaign structures, and certified platform expertise to your organization on day one. There is no onboarding period during which they are learning how to connect and leverage your tools. There is no learning curve during which they are building confidence with the features and possibilities of your Salesforce systems. The execution gap closes immediately rather than over a period of months.

Companies using marketing automation to nurture leads see a 451% increase in qualified leads compared to organizations that aren’t doing this effectively. That number is not the ceiling. It is what you should expect when your marketing team’s great content, smart strategies and hard work is supported by a team that can leverage your tools properly to enable what well executed automation and now AI can deliver. Most companies have already paid for all the tools they need for success. But not they do not  execution expertise required for the level of performance they were promised. The distance between where you are and where properly executed automation takes you can start to be addressed in weeks rather than months (or even years) when the team doing the technical work, data management and managing the processes already knows how to get all the jobs done. 

2. A Team for the Cost of a Headcount

Outsourcing does not buy you one person’s skill set. It can buy you a blended team based on your gaps: certified Salesforce administrators, marketing automation specialists, data management & data governance practitioners, sales enablement specialists, campaign managers, and strategic oversight each contributing the specific expertise their discipline requires, working as a coordinated unit. In most cases, this blended team costs less than a single senior full-time hire when you account for salary, benefits, recruiting fees, management overhead, and ramp time.

This matters because the scope of modern marketing operations exceeds what any single hire can cover because the task requirement in any single area are part time. When you hire one person to do the work of several disciplines, they will inevitably go deep on the areas they’re strongest in and leave gaps in the others. Outsourcing eliminates the gaps.

3. Proven ROI From a Verified Playbook

The ROI case for well-executed marketing automation is not theoretical. Nucleus Research found a 14.5% increase in sales productivity when marketing automation is properly leveraged for lead scoring and sales enablement. Sales teams using buyer-centric enablement content achieve 28% higher win rates than those working without it. For every dollar invested in marketing automation, companies see an average return of $5.44. And automated email sequences generate 320% more revenue than non-automated campaigns.

These results are available to any organization with the right tools and the right execution capability.

 How Does Achieving Successful Automation + Sales Enablement Impact the Productivity and ROI of Your Sales and Marketing Operations

(7:00 minutes) Learn about the concrete business outcomes that well-executed automation and sales enablement delivers, and understand what changes operationally when your tech stack is fully supported..

4. Variable Cost Structure and Financial Flexibility

Every full-time employee is a fixed cost. Once hired, they represent a budget line that requires justification regardless of whether the workload demands on their full capacity in any given month. Outsourcing converts that fixed cost into a flexible monthly engagement. You scale up during a product launch, a major campaign push, or a Salesforce implementation. You scale back during a slower period. This flexibility is structurally unavailable when you’re managing in-house headcount, and it matters especially for organizations already operating under tightened budgets.

5. Continuity, Resilience, and No Knowledge Loss

One of the most underappreciated costs of the lean in-house model is the knowledge that walks out the door every time someone leaves. When the person who knows how your Salesforce instance is configured, how your lead scoring model works, and why certain automation rules and workflows were built the way they were decides to move on, that institutional knowledge is gone. The next person starts typically from scratch, often without even knowing what they don’t know.

An outsourced team maintains that continuity as a structural feature of the model. The knowledge lives in documented processes, in systems, and in a team, not in a single person’s head. There is no single point of failure, no campaign emergency when someone is out, and no organizational reset when someone leaves.

6. Cross-Industry Best Practices and Cross-Pollination Means You Start Ahead

A team that has executed hundreds of implementations across multiple industries and verticals brings an understanding and a library of what works and what doesn’t. They have seen the campaigns that didn’t convert and understand why. They have seen the lead scoring models that created sales friction and know how to calibrate them differently. They have seen the data governance failures that made AI deployments untrustworthy and built the frameworks and connected the required fields to prevent them.

Most organizations that are building their marketing operations in-house are starting from scratch and experimenting, iterating, and learning at their own cost. Outsourcing eliminates the trial-and-error phase.  Your strategists can implement and innovate faster. You get to start where a mature team’s portfolio already landed, not where they started.

7. AI and Data Readiness as an Ongoing Practice

This is the advantage that is least discussed and most consequential in 2026 and 2027.

The marketing automation market reached $6.65 billion in 2024 and is projected to more than double to $15.58 billion by 2030, driven in large part by AI integration directly into the platforms you’re already using. The competitive pressure to deploy AI in your marketing and sales operations is real, and it is accelerating.

But the bottleneck is not the AI tools themselves. The bottleneck is the data foundation beneath them. AI outputs are only as trustworthy as the data flowing into the systems generating them. Duplicate records, broken field mappings, inconsistent data entry, unresolved sync errors between your marketing automation platform & Salesforce are just some of the conditions that make AI unreliable. Most of these issues are maintenance problems. They regenerate continuously without a governance framework and data hygiene managers and/or automation specialists  in place to prevent them.

After a one time clean up an outsourced marketing automation specialist and/or marketing operations teams maintains that data foundation as a continuous practice as part of their ongoing operational discipline. For organizations being asked by leadership to get AI-ready, this is often the fastest and most reliable path. 

Section 5: A Decision Framework: When Outsourcing Is the Right Call and When You Should Build In House

Outsourcing is likely the stronger strategic decision when:

  • You are just getting started implementing Salesforce and/or Marketing Cloud Account Engagement. Especially if you are migrating from an existing platform like Hubspot where and outsourced partner can help you seamlessly migrate what was already working and build the new enhancement faster with best practices.
  • You have Salesforce and marketing automation in place but aren’t seeing consistent, measurable ROI from the investment. The tools are there but the execution infrastructure to run them effectively isn’t. Or the person running them is stretched too thin to run them well.
  • You are ready to migrate from Marketing Cloud Account Engagement (Pardot) to Marketing Cloud Next to leverage Salesforce’s native AI solutions.
  • Your team’s workload has expanded to the point where strategic and creative work is being consistently crowded out by operational and technical tasks. If your best marketing people are spending significant time troubleshooting integrations, managing data quality issues, or trying to figure out why an automation isn’t firing correctly, you have a structural problem that adding one more hire won’t solve.
  • You need technical depth across multiple disciplines, Salesforce administration, marketing automation management, data governance, sales enablement configuration and AI readiness where it doesn’t make practical or business sense to hire full-time resources to plug specific gaps.
  • You’re under pressure to scale marketing output without proportionally scaling headcount.
  • You’re being asked to deploy AI and recognize that your data isn’t ready for it. The path from “our data is a mess” to “our AI is producing trustworthy outputs” runs directly through the data governance and system configuration work that outsourced operations teams implement and manage as a core competency.
  • You are concerned with compliance surrounding HIPPA and GDPR.

 

Building in-house may make more sense when:

  • You’re at enterprise scale where a fully-staffed internal marketing operations team is the industry standard, your budget supports it, and the competitive complexity of your organization genuinely requires deep institutional knowledge that an outside team would struggle to replicate.
  • Your marketing operations work involves highly proprietary processes, sensitive data environments, or regulatory requirements that make external access to your systems genuinely difficult to manage.
  • You have the time, budget, and infrastructure to recruit, train, and retain senior talent across multiple specialized disciplines simultaneously and your leadership has realistic expectations about how long that build takes.
  • If you have an industry leading brand or a compelling mission you should be able to attract certified ops talent that would have been inaccessible five years ago.
  • If you have a company where marketing ops and or sales ops capability is also you core product offering or you are a company where go-to-market sophistication is the product differentiator you should consider building in house.

Section 6: The Questions Worth Answering Before You Decide

If you’re at an inflection point where you need more capability and capacity and have decided that mature automation, sales enablement and a strong AI foundation are all critical here are the questions that will give you the clearest picture of which direction to go and what you should keep in house vs. outsource to a proven resource.  It is possible to run hybrids based on your needs, goals, specific gaps and situation.

 

  • What is our current fully-loaded cost to maintain marketing operations in-house including salary, benefits, recruiting fees, management time, and the cost of turnover when it happens?
  • Who is currently managing and executing the tasks required to meet and exceed or goals? Is this their core competency?  Are we distracting them from higher priority and/or higher revenue producing tasks?  Is this causing a retention issue for top talent?
  • What specific technical expertise are we missing right now, and what would it realistically cost to hire for it? Do we even understand what expertise we need?
  • How long would a new hire take to be meaningfully productive in our specific Salesforce environment? And what is the cost, in pipeline/insights/AI readiness, of that ramp period?
  • Are we actively using the Salesforce and marketing automation features we’re already paying for? If the answer is no, what’s preventing adoption? Is adding headcount the right solution to that problem? Is it training? Or is it a different kind of support?
  • Is our data clean enough and connected enough for AI deployment in the next 12 to 18 months? If we ran an honest audit of our Salesforce and marketing automation data quality today, would the results support the AI roadmap we’re communicating to leadership? How much pressure would data readiness relieve for our team?
  • What would our existing team accomplish if they weren’t carrying the operational and technical execution load? If we could give our strategists and creative people back the hours they’re spending on tech management, troubleshooting, feature education, what would they do with that time. What would that time and focus be worth?

    Section 7: Recommended Next Steps if the Math and Potential ROI Points Toward Outsourcing

    If this analysis points toward outsourcing and the question shifts from if to who, when and what Gabriel Sales can help.

    We can quickly help get you started answering the “who” and “what” with our free technology health check that is followed by our risk-free audits and tactical road maps.

    We make getting started easy because we know most leaders are already overwhelmed.  And we are confident that we can quickly build trust with measurable results.  Because after 15 plus years of helping companies build automated sales enablement and marketing engines we understand that the difference between for most organizations moving from mediocre to successful results is working with a partner that can provide the required certified technical expertise, sales and marketing operations experience and the proven track record collaborating with teams with support customized to align with your specific situation.

    We are not a generalist digital agency that also does Salesforce. We are not a solo consultant who becomes your single point of failure by a different name. We are fully managed team with certified expertise across the full stack and a proven methodology for getting organizations from where they are to where they need to be.  We love what we do and always lead with full transparency because when you win we win and that’s the easiest way to sell.

    See how we’ve done this for companies like yours →

    Learn what makes Gabriel Sales different →  

    More about us and FAQs →  

     Why Gabriel Sales Is the Right Solution for Companies Serious About Marketing Automation and Sales Enablement Success

    (8 minutes)  Learn how Gabriel Sales’ blended team model delivers certified expertise across the full stack from day one to make the complex simple, all with minimal ramp time, risk, or fixed cost of building in-house.

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    Source Reference List

    All statistics cited in this page with direct source links:

    The Build vs. Buy Decision: A Business Leader’s Guide to Outsourcing Salesforce and Marketing Automation Support

    Reasons to Consider Outsourcing Sales and Marketing Operations

    by | Jul 15, 2024

    outsourcing sales and marketing

    For many businesses ready for growth, it’s fairly typical to consider outsourcing sales and marketing operations along with other various business functions including: human resources, accounting and IT. Historically, when it comes to scaling sales and marketing operations, most companies initially consider building a team of dedicated in-house sales and marketing professionals.

    But over the past several years, the requirements of B2B buyers have significantly changed. Buyers now expect to be able to educate themselves digitally online across multiple channels. Once they demonstrate interest, they also expect marketing to continue to support their buyer journey with continued digital education.

    Buyers changed expectations, needs and desires which has blurred the line between marketing and sales functions. It has changed accountability and responsibilities for generating leads, developing opportunities and qualifying buyers ready to engage with sales. First, we will discuss how this has created multiple complexities for the historical model for sales and marketing operations.The rest of this article will then build on these complexities as we discuss:

    Marketing operations and marketing automation

    How do we decide if we should outsource

    What functions can be outsourced

    What are the advantages of outsourcing specific functions

     Why Marketing and Sales Operations Is Getting More Complex

    The lines between marketing and sales operations are becoming increasingly blurred. Marketing is no longer limited to brand awareness and lead generation. During the pandemic, the Fortune 500 shifted towards a digital-first sales process, tasking marketers with generating leads and then developing them through a combination of content marketing and marketing automation.

    As a direct result, B2B marketing organizations are taking on expanded tasks and responsibilities. Sales and marketing leadership, including Chief Revenue Officers (CROs), executives, and creative teams, are tasked with:

     

    • Creating content strategies
    • Creating lead generation strategies
    • Selecting media vendors
    • Continuing to generate leads across multiple channels
    • Creating quality content and developing thought leaders
    • Planning and running events
    • Generating leads
    • Nurturing leads
    • Crafting personalized journeys
    • Transiting leads to sales when they are educated and ready to buy
    • Selecting and managing tech platforms
    • Maintaining quality data
    • Expanding their volume of reports
    • Measuring ROI across channels
    • Making smarter decisions
    • Forecasting
    • Supporting existing customers
    • Cross selling
    • Upselling
    • Creating brand strategies

    Marketing Operations and Marketing Automation

    What is modern marketing and sales operations today?

    Marketing and sales operations encompass the processes, technology, and human resources needed to execute strategies that support sales and marketing efforts with quality and consistency. Marketing operations serve as the backbone, leveraging people and technology to execute campaigns, manage the technology stack, and oversee databases, data governance and reporting. Marketing and sales operations enable:

      • Marketing leaders and managers to concentrate on high-value strategic tasks, creative development, and content creation
      • Sales teams to dedicate their time to advancing high-quality leads through the pipeline

    Marketing and sales operations is an organizational approach that enables marketers to generate more demand for their products and services, support the buyer’s journey, guide buyers further into the sales funnel, and spend more time on analysis and continuous improvement. It establishes a foundation for excellence and growth, ensuring strategies are executed using best practices to drive growth and achieve both marketing benchmarks and sales targets.

    The key to successful B2B marketing and sales operations is the effective daily use and integration of marketing automation and customer relationship management systems.

    The growth of marketing automation makes it challenging to find proven talent

    As of this year, 60% of B2B organizations intend to increase their spending on marketing automation in the coming year (Statista)

     

    Between 2021 and 2024, the global marketing automation industry revenue grew by an estimated 22% to 5.86 billion U.S. dollars. The market is expected to more than double by 2030, surpassing 13.7 billion U.S. dollars (Gartner).

    Additionally, 72% of marketing operations and marketing automation specialists have less than two years of experience, and 41% are learning on the job.

    Finding quality talent with legitimate and proven experience will continue to be challenging.

    How Do We Decide if Outsourcing Marketing is the Right Solution for Our Company?

    As businesses continue to expand, invest in digital marketing and sales processes, create more content, and enhance productivity to all designed to help them survive, thrive and compete more effectively in the coming years, they will eventually face the following questions:

    • Should we build and staff digital marketing and sales operations in-house?
    • Should we consider outsourcing sales or marketing?
    • Should we consider outsourcing sales and marketing operations?
    • What areas or functions should we consider outsourcing?
    • What are the benefits of outsourcing?

    It’s a difficult question to answer because there is no turnkey solution that works across all industries and for businesses of all sizes. The decision to outsource depends primarily on:

     

    • The existing internal resources of the business
    • The proven focus areas of current partners
    • The skill sets of employees and management
    • The technology experience and expertise of existing employees and management
    • Most importantly, where existing employees and managers can provide the greatest strategic value for the organization

    What Functions/Parts Of Sales And Marketing Operations Can We Outsource

    Most companies committed to a digital-first go-to-marketing and sales strategy have created leadership and management teams that are highly skilled and experience in:

    • Developing strategies across multiple channels
    • Creating content tailored to various channels
    • Generating the volume of inbound leads needed for success
    • Making intelligent decisions to maximize investments when armed with reliable data

    But as discussed above, experienced marketing and sales operations talent and marketing automation technology experience is hard to find. And according to Robert Half finding skilled digital marketers and experienced marketing automation talent are two of the top three employees companies are challenged to find.

    With the evolution of CRMs like Salesforce and the rise of marketing operations and Salesforce consultancies like Gabriel Sales, companies can now explore marketing automation support and outsourced sales and marketing operations to help take their organizations to the next level. These functions fall into two categories:

    Outsourced Technology Implementation and Optimization – The technical delivery of specific marketing automation applications, marketing technology integrations, and Salesforce integrations ensures that your sales and marketing systems are customized to execute the strategic goals of the organization.

    Marketing Operations Managed Services – Once your systems are optimized, they must be leveraged daily, weekly, and monthly to produce the desired results in specific areas such as campaign execution, content management, database management, project management, and reporting.
    As discussed in detail above, different companies have different needs based on existing internal capability and capacity.  To learn more about how Gabriel Sales can help immediately augment your day-to-day execution capability and capacity visit our outsourced marketing and sale operations managed services page.

    If you want to stop struggling with technology. Or want to maximize your tech stack investment so your current team can drive even more marketing value and higher quality leads for sales, you can learn more about how we support you with increased capabilities by visiting our Salesforce and marketing automation consulting services page.

    9 Reasons to Consider Marketing and Sales Operations

    1 – Immediate Access to Experienced Salesforce and Marketing Automation Specialists

    Most companies utilize a variety of platforms and technologies integrated with Salesforce to bolster successful lead generation, guide buyer journeys, execute lead nurturing campaigns, and enhance sales enablement. However, if you’ve been procuring these software solutions for any length of time, you understand that in order to leverage the capabilities of these softwares they need to be built out correctly as well as continuously monitored and enhanced based on business changes and the latest updates and features.

    When you entrust your marketing and sales operations to Gabriel Sales, the potential of Salesforce and Marketing Automation becomes tangible. We immediately provide you with access to certified Salesforce and Account Engagement (Pardot) specialists who seamlessly integrate into your organization.

    These professionals are adept at utilizing and implementing the latest proven tools and features available within these systems for marketing, analysis, automation, sales enablement, and more. With our assistance, you can cease struggling with the technology, mitigate the risks of underperformance and system errors, all without the need to invest countless hours in recruiting and training talent or attempting to navigate these complexities independently.

    2 – You Immediately Align and Bridge the Gap from Marketing to Sales

    Most marketing teams, including conventional digital marketing agencies, excel in managing budgets, crafting strategies, brand management, and producing creative content to support top-of-funnel campaigns and retain existing customers.

    Specialized agencies in marketing automation and lead nurturing immediately enhance your team’s capabilities, enabling the development of deeper buyer relationships further down the sales funnel.

    One of the unique advantages of outsourced sales and marketing operations, particularly with Gabriel Sales, is the access to sales operations professionals proficient in lead nurturing, lead scoring, and effective lead management in Salesforce. Their expertise ensures seamless integration of technologies and processes, facilitating the transition of leads from marketing to sales funnels.

    3 – Immediate Access to Best Practices

    When you hire a team of specialists with experience across various industries, you can immediately benefit from tried and tested best practices. Implementing these practices from the outset and consistently executing them are essential for long-term success. These best practices encompass data management, governance, campaign workflows, reporting, lead scoring, and transitioning leads to sales.

    4 – Strategy Improvements

    “You don’t know what you don’t know.” Partnering with an agency proficient in sales and marketing operations ensures precise implementation and ongoing enhancements.

    By engaging with an outsourced provider, you gain access to seasoned marketing and sales specialists with extensive experience in executing hundreds of implementations, overseeing thousands of campaigns and staying up-to-date on the latest technology changes. They offer the advantage of benchmarking your performance against competitors and diverse companies. This facilitates the integration of successful strategies and technological features across your organization as you scale and diversify campaign volumes and types.

    5 – Fast, Reliable and Consistent Campaign Execution

    Outsourcing provides immediate access to a fully-managed team of trained and experienced professionals specializing in Salesforce, Account Engagement, database management, and content management. This team handles all functions and executional tasks necessary for successful marketing and sales operations. Your chosen provider maintains a singular focus and accountability for timely and precise execution of day-to-day activities, ensuring a consistent flow of sales-ready leads.

    6 – Better Quality Data, Faster Analysis and Increased Insights

    Salesforce and automation specialists are adept at establishing policies to enhance data governance, enabling more efficient data addition and collection. They excel in tagging and managing data across core systems and third-party integrations.

    Their expertise, coupled with a wealth of experience in creating hundreds of automated dashboards, forecasts, and reports, results in heightened insights, expedited analysis, and more informed decisions.

    7 – Boost Your Existing Team’s Focus and Performance

    Many marketing teams juggle multiple roles, including brand management, creative design, media buying, analysis, and strategy development. They often have a backlog of new projects aimed at improving results.

    In such scenarios, it’s more beneficial for your core marketing team to focus on high-value, strategic, and creative tasks. By outsourcing repetitive and technical tasks essential for daily operations, you can instantly free up their time for strategic activities.

    8 – Reduced Stress, Overall Improved Performance and Higher Quality Leads Ready to Talk to Sales   

    Enhance your team’s focus effortlessly, eliminate tech hurdles, implement proven best practices, ensure data accuracy, and access a turnkey support team to elevate your entire marketing team’s performance and outcomes.

    With Gabriel Sales’ additional expertise in sales operations, swiftly translate this performance boost into an enhanced and expedited sales funnel. Leveraging our 20 years of Salesforce end-user experience, we empower you to enable sales effectively. Through reports, prioritized lists, lead views, and alerts, your sales team can concentrate on pre-qualified leads ready for engagement.

     9 – Lower Costs and a Variable Expense

    Outsourcing marketing and sales operations can save you from the expenses associated with hiring, training, staffing, and managing full-time employees. Instead of bearing the fully-loaded cost of employing one manager, you gain access to a diverse team of specialists, helping you optimize your campaigns and technology investments at a fraction of the cost.

    This approach offers the flexibility of a monthly variable expense, contrasting with the fixed headcount cost associated with traditional employment models.

    About Gabriel Sales

    Gabriel Sales™  has been successfully helping companies grow for over 20 years. We specialize in helping B2B companies with a multi-step sales process, build modern sales and marketing operations. We currently support sales and marketing organizations with 5 to 500 sales reps. We also work with startups or companies launching new products that are serious about growth. Learn more about our team, approach and proven track record on our About Us page and/or view our Customer Success Stories and ROI Case Studies.

     

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    B2B Buyer Trends

    B2B Buyer Trends

    by | Apr 26, 2024

    B2B Buyer Trends — Seven Things to Know

    (Watch Time – 8:00 Minutes)

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    Summary of B2B Buyer Trends video

    In this short educational  video we will give you a quick overview of B2B Buyer Trends, including:

    1. Why B2B leads and buyers need and want lead nurturing and digital pre-sales education
    2. Why buyers now expect ongoing lead nurturing and content marketing at every stage of their buyers’ journey
    3. The specific types of contents buyers use during their pre-sales education and buying process
    4. Buyers increased desire to avoid sales development reps (SDRs) until they feel educated and are ready to buyer
    5. When video is the most preferred and successful type of content
    6. How far and committed the top sellers are to sales automation and digital first sales
    7. The ROI companies committed to lead nurturing and a digital first sales are experiencing

    This video (an expert from our extensive four part On Demand Training Seminar – The Digital First Transformation and Sales Automation)

    Transcript of B2B Buyer Trends Seven Trends — Seven Things to Know.

    Why Leads/Buyers Need Lead Nurturing

    First, most buyers are not ready to buy when they first start their digital education. Initially, most buyers are just trying to figure out how to solve a problem. Less than 3% of initial email opens are ready to buy, and even more surprisingly, less than 20% of your pay per click or SEO leads or active buyers. But the positive here is that about 80% of all these early stage leads, we call them marketing qualified leads, will spend money within three to 18 months. So once they engage, you have a short list of potential buyers that expects you to educate and nurture them for an extended period of time, which means your marketing team can’t just run lead gen campaigns and expect the same sales results.

    Buyers Now Expect Ongoing Lead Nurturing and Content Marketing at Every Stage of Their Buyers’ Journey (0:48)

    Buyers now expect you to share content at every stage of their buyer’s journey to help them move systematically through their process. This starts by you helping them to identify and understand what problems your solution is designed to help them solve through their shortlisting process and even into their validation and consensus building stages. This means you need lead generation campaigns to create awareness to help the buyer understand what problems you solve. Then buyers also expect you to run nurturing campaigns, including both buyer education campaigns and sales automation campaigns to help them with their consideration stages and their preference stages.

    Successful Lead Nurturing and Sales Automation Requires Multiple Types and Formats of Digital Sales Education (1:33)

    And during these different types of campaigns, buyers want you to share the appropriate type of content in multiple channels so they can control their own buyer’s journey, and they expect you to be prepared to touch them at least 21 times for you to earn their brand awareness and initial trust in to start that process. Most buyers still overwhelmingly prefer to learn about new solutions in email marketing campaigns that are supported by educational content.

    However, if you don’t eventually support these email campaigns with paper per click, social media and SEO campaigns, you’ll miss 33% of the market who prefer these channels. And at this stage, the type of content buyers prefer in all three channels are short. How-to videos, educational blog articles in industry insights and stats that help educate the buyer and also help you to demonstrate thought leadership. Then once that lead is generated, you need to be prepared to share multiple types of content to nurture and create demand for your solution. Because buyers leverage all types of content to move a decision forward if they’re consideration and preference stages to become educated enough to make a decision. So what’s required for success? In a recent Merkel survey of B2B buyer trends, 78% of buyers stated they used case studies and use cases in their process, 76% used webcast educational videos and educational blog articles.

    68% used white papers, and in 20 21, 50 4% of B2B buyers are now using podcasts. So you need to be prepared to use a wide variety of content in multiple channels to make it easy for the buyer to buy using your buyer education in sales automation campaigns

    Buyers Want to Avoid Sales Development Until They Feel Educated and are Ready to Buyer (3:43)

    Perhaps the biggest impact of this digital transformation is that buyers now want to avoid sales reps until they feel educated. As a result of this buyer preference for digital first education, 64% of sellers state, they’re now less dependent on sales reps. 80% of buyers don’t want to speak to an SDR until they have completed their pre-sales research. 33% moving to 44% for millennials want to avoid sales completely if possible, and most buyers won’t engage with a sales rep until they’ve consumed at least six to 12 pieces of content. Digital content is now replacing some of the most time consuming in historical tasks of the sales development rep, first and foremost, being all the time and money it takes for pre-sales education of the buyer.

    Video is the Preferred Content for Pre-Sales Education and Mid-Stage Buyer Education (4:33)

    And in large part, most of this pre-sales education is now being done with video because when it comes to content, we’re both video and text are available on the same page. 72% of buyers would rather use video to learn about your solution using video and email campaigns boost open rates and clickthroughs and video posts have the highest engagement in social media campaigns. And probably the biggest bonus of video is that it leads to conversions or at least predicts conversions because 25 to 45% of buyers that watch a webcast convert into a sales opportunity, and most buyers state they’re ready to engage with sales after watching three to five videos.

    Your Most Successful and Largest B2B Sales Competitors are Already Striving for Sales Automation (5:22)

    The next thing that’s important to understand about this transformation is the competitive landscape. So Gabriel Sales has been dealing with tech and tech marketing for a long time, and we’ve seen the pendulum swing back and forth between giving SMBs an ability to compete effectively and giving the enterprise the advantage. And right now, the enterprise companies have an edge because they’ve taken meeting the needs of the digital buyer seriously and have driven digital content deeper into the sales process faster.

    This was one of the really big changes that occurred during the pandemic because the enterprise was better equipped to immediately be able to deploy their existing marketing resources to digital marketing to support the virtual and remote sales process, and they were able to fund new technologies faster and more effectively when travel budgets were cut. As a result, 75% are now leading with Digital First to support their entire pre-sales process, and in a few short years, the majority of enterprise companies already believe that these new sales processes are as or more effective than their historical processes. In a full 85% of enterprise companies are now committed to building a digital first go-to-market sales process moving forward. And over the next several years, digital spend is once again predicted to double Gartner’s future of sales. Research is now predicting that by 2025, 80% of B2B sales interactions will occur in automated in digital channels.

    To compete for and win business will require a commitment to content marketing and nurturing.

    Sellers that Implement Lead Nurturing and Digital First Sales Automation Win More Business and Drive More Revenue (7:13)

    Finally, what can your business expect when you embrace this digital first transformation? Buyers are already dramatically rewarding sellers for a digital first sales and nurturing process. Sellers that are committed to content marketing after the initial lead has been generated, see their sales team’s opportunity pipeline grow by over 450% in nine to 18 months. It’s harder to get a seat at the table with your buyers if you don’t provide content after you generate that initial lead. And most importantly, and most exciting sellers that do a good job helping buyers buy digitally are now closing at two x the rate of sellers that don’t.

     

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    Demand Generation vs Lead Generation

    Demand Generation vs Lead Generation

    by | Mar 16, 2024

    In this video you will learn the difference between lead generation vs. lead nurturing and demand generation

    Watch Time – 4:00 Minutes

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    Summary

    This short video is packed with hard data and concrete numbers as we compare Demand Generation vs Lead Generation and explain the strengths and weakness of both a lead generation process and demand generation process.  In this educational video we detail:

    • The different purposes of lead generation and demand generation
    • The results you can expect if you are running a lead generation process
    • The results you can expect if you add a lead nurturing and demand generation process
    • The impact lead nurturing has on creating well educated sales ready leads and increased conversions
    • The cost savings you can expect automating  your pre-sales process  

    This video is an excerpt from The Differences Between Lead Gen vs. Demand Gen and the Impact on Your Sales Funnel Part 4 of 4 of our free comprehensive free 4 training seminar on how to effectively sell to the modern The B2B Digital First Transformation Webinar Series.

     

    Watch Our Free On Demand Digital Transformation Educational Series

    Transcript

    Defining the Role of Lead Generation and Demand Generation

    When you examine the entire sales funnel, Lead Generation is the first step in the sales process and buyer’s journey. Lead Generations job is to move buyers into the top of the sales funnel by creating awareness and curiosity about your solution, and then Demand Generation and Lead Nurturing takeover to automate the pre-sales education process as the buyer goes through their second step of consideration and their third stage of preference.

    This process keeps you top of mind as the buyer moves deeper into the funnel and, when the buyer is ready, sales takes over to help them make a decision.

    The Stages and Sales Funnel Conversion Results of a Lead Generation Process

    Lead Generation is primarily a sales driven process because the seller controls the majority of the buyer education. Marketing or a cold caller targets and generates the lead. The lead is then passed to sales regardless of how ready they are to buy. Then sales invests time, money, and resources with one-on-one pre-sales education, demonstrating the solution, explaining its value, and qualifying that buyer for need, interest, and fit.

    After all this time and effort, about 10 to 20% of leads are turned into opportunities and about 80% are either not the right fit or too early in their buying process and not ready to buy. These leads are discarded, with sales promising to follow-up at some future date, which only happens about 20% of the time. This is a continuous cycle requiring a continuous investment in new leads.

    The Stages and Sales Funnel Conversion Results of a Demand Generation and Lead Nurturing Process

    In sharp contrast to Lead Generation, Demand Generation is a buyer driven process because the buyer engages on their timelines.

    A Demand Gen process starts the same way by targeting potential buyers to create awareness and collecting as many leads as possible. But then marketing, not sales, nurtures those leads, sharing educational pre-sales content the buyer can engage with on their timelines.

    Demand Generation digitally automates your pre-sales process to make it easy for the lead to consider how your solution can help them solve their problems to become a marketing qualified lead until they learn how your product works and what success looks like so they prefer your solution. While all this is happening, your marketing tech stack is scoring your buyer’s engagement to predict purchase intent until they become a sales ready lead.

    The first big difference is pre-sales automation and lead nurturing gets rid of all the time, money, and expense of the one-on-one pre-sales education that’s required in a standalone Lead Gen process.

    The second major difference is the quality of sales ready leads. Typically, your sales team can convert about 50% of sales ready leads into opportunities versus the 10 to 20% of a Lead Gen process. Sales will only discard about 10% versus the 80% that are discarded in the Lead Gen process.

    A final major difference is that they can recycle 40% back into the Demand Gen engine for extended nurturing to keep them warm until they’re ready to buy. This recycling is a major advantage Demand Generation has over a competitor running a Lead Gen process that discards 80% of their lead investment because most discarded leads buy from someone in three to 18 months so nurturing eventually turns another 25% of these recycled leads into opportunities.

    Conclusion

    Over time, all these incremental gains stack up, and this is why companies running a Demand Gen process generate 450% more opportunities and close two times the deals over their competitors when compared to companies that don’t.

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    Seven Trends For Lead Nurturing

    Seven Trends For Lead Nurturing

    by | May 2, 2023

    What’s Are the Seven Things You Need to Know About Lead Nurturing for Successful B2B Sales and Marketing Operations? 

    The world of sales and marketing is transforming at an unprecedented rate. This change is being driven the B2B Buyer’s desire for a Digital First sales process. This article will discuss the seven trends for lead nurturing and B2B demand generation every business owner should know to help their business thrive.

    This shift in B2B Buyer’s desires has caused businesses of all shapes and sizes to rethink how to sell more effectively. And the Fortune 500 moved to meet the Buyer’s desires first. To address this new set of expectations, Enterprise companies took responsibility for pre-sales education away from the traditional role/responsibility of the sales development rep and passed that accountability to the marketing operations team.

    This change is so rapid, that according to a recent Adobe research project, 82% of marketing professionals overwhelming agree that marketing has changed more in the past two years than in the past 50.  And 89% to 92% of these same marketers agree on three other facts as they take on these new pre-sales education responsibilities:

    • You need to focus on digital education first
    • Marketing operations needs to educate Buyers much deeper in their buying process
    • Marketers will need to keep learning on the job as new trends and patterns emerge

    Smart Decisions Require Understanding the Modern B2B Buyers’ New Behaviors 

    In this current environment, it’s difficult enough for even the most skilled marketers to keep up with all these changes. As a result, business owners and sales professionals are at even greater disadvantage.  Most sales professionals are confused and struggle how to most effectively fill their sales funnel with well-educated Buyers in the short term while making critical long term strategic marketing and sales operations decisions that will allow them to thrive in the long term. 

    Fortunately, for today’s small and mid-sized businesses owners, we now finally have a great deal of information about what these new Buyers want from Sellers, expect from Sellers and how these Buyer’s behave when their needs are met. 

    And – after launching over 150 successful sales and marketing automation implementations and sales and marketing ops teams – there are two things we know about business owners and entrepreneurs.

    • First – once business owners understand the needs of their Buyers, they know how to meet the needs of their Buyer.
    • Second – once business owners are armed with the right information and insights, most can make smarter growth decisions quickly and can prioritize their budgets intelligently.

    With both of these facts in mind, we wanted to share the most recent information on how the Digital First Transformation has permanently altered Buyer behavior. And why the Modern Buyer prefer.

     

    The B2B Digital-First Sales and Marketing Trends Everyone Needs to Know and Address

    One – Most Buyers Start Their Digital Education Months or Years Before They Are Ready to Buy

    First, most Buyers are not ready to buy when they first start their digital education. Initially, most Buyers are just trying to figure out how to solve a problem. According to the most recent research by Aberdeen Research, less than 2% of initial email opens are close to being ready to buy. And even more surprisingly, less than 20% of your pay per click or SEO leads are active Buyers.  

    On the negative side, this means ad hoc lead gen campaigns, awareness campaigns and appointment setting campaigns have lost a great deal of their effectiveness and impact.

    But the positive fact is that about 80% of all these early-stage leads, we call them “Marketing Qualified Leads” (MQLs) will spend money within 3 to 18 months. So once a lead engages with you, even if they are not ready to buy immediately, you will have a short list of Buyers:

    • That you know will be spending money within the next 3 month to 18 months
    • That expect and want you to educate and nurture them for an extended period of time

    You know these future Buyers are receptive to your thought leadership. You know that some will welcome your support as you help them move systematically through their buying process.

    Two – Buyers Don’t Really Want to Talk to Sales Reps Until They Are Digitally Educated (And Ready to Shortlist)

    According to Forrester, your typical Buyer now consumes 7-15 pieces of digital content prior to engaging with a sales rep. And they do this with 3 to 5 different solution providers.  And as noted in the intro of this article:

    • 80% of Buyers want to delay dealing with Sales Reps until they have completed their initial research and are ready to short list for a decision. (Marketing Sherpa)
    • 62% will try and reach a decision without talking to sales rep, if possible. (Content Marketing Institute)
    • And in 2022 33% to 44% want to avoid a sales rep completely, if possible. (Merkle B2B Study)

    This further impacts the long-term effectiveness of ad hoc lead gen campaigns and means nurturing your later stage funnel is now required for Digital First success.

     

    Three – Buyers Rarely Short List Sellers Without Sustained Lead Nurturing and Digital Pre-Sales Education

    As Gartner’s latest survey and chart above clearly details, “Content is King”.  This now applies to the entire sales funnel. Success now requires Sellers to continue to market the entire funnel after the lead has been generated.  This means you need to use content marketing tactics through the pre-sales process because this pre-sales process is now often happening without the direct involvement of your Sales Development Rep.

    This nurturing process is no longer optional because according to the 2022 Demand Gen Report,  95% of Buyers short list a solution provider that “Provides them with ample content to help navigate through each stage of the buying process”.

    If your content marketing campaigns don’t move beyond the appointment setting and lead gen stage, it will be exceedingly difficult to survive and you will have little chance to thrive in the near future.

     

    Four – Buyers Overwhelming Prefer Video and the Trend is Accelerating

    During the pandemic lock downs, with face-to-face meetings impossible to execute and with Buyers moving to home offices (and with direct lines typically going straight to voice mail), video adoption was an experience all B2B Buyers and Sellers shared during the pandemic.

    Zoom normalized video for all of us.  It also normalized video adoption for pre-sales education.  According to both Wistia and Vimeo, downloads jumped by 380% in 2020.  And if you thought this adoption would slow down exiting the pandemic, you would be wrong.  In the first quarter of 2022, video consumption increased by another 148%.  Video is growing because video works.

    • Video is more convenient for the Buyer – 64% of Buyers stated they prefer video because its more convenient for education. (Gartner)
    • Video drives better engagement – Video posts have the highest engagement in Social Media (AdWeek) and using video in the email subject line, boosts open rates by 19% and increases click through rates by 65%. (Pardot)
    • Video is preferred over text when exploring solutions – Given the choice between text and video, 75% of Buyers will choose video to learn more about a solution. (Hubspot)

    And according Vidyard and Vimeo, this shift to video is going to continue to accelerate in 2022 and 2023.

    • In 2022 80% of the Fortune 500 is moving towards internal vs. external production.
    • Video is being used later in the sales funnel, with the average video created coming in at 9 minutes and 48 seconds in length.
    • And the average company that has been using video as part of their nurturing process is planning to double to triple their use of video in 2023.

    To learn more about how to leverage video as part of your sales and marketing operation check out our two articles –  Six Important Videos to Fill Your Sales Funnel with Sales Ready Leads and What Videos Are Most Effective B2B Lead Scoring and Sales Automation.

     

    Five – Buyers Reward Sellers Committed to Digital First Lead Gen, Pre-Sales Education and Lead Nurturing

    B2B Buyers are already dramatically rewarding Sellers for a Digital First sales and nurturing process:

    Sellers have more opportunities to do business – Businesses that implement a content workflow and use marketing automation to nurture prospects, experience a 451% increase in qualified leads in 9 to 18 months. (ANNUITAS Group)

    Sellers win more business – 95% of Buyers chose a solution provider that “Provided them with ample content to help navigate through each stage of the buying process.” (DemandGen Report)

    Sellers win more business more frequently – You are 2X as likely to win business over your competitor if you provide a substantive digital education experience for your prospects throughout their buying process. (McKinsey)

     

    The Impact of Lead Nurturing vs. Lead Gen on Your Business (Watch Time 4:00 Min)

     

    Watch this 4 minute video to learn what the sales impact is of an effective lead nurturing and demand gen engine

    Six – Enterprise Companies are All In on Digital First

    According to McKinsey’s survey, “The Future of Sales”, close to 9 in 10 enterprise companies confirmed that the new Digital First go-to-market sales practice was going to be a fixture of their business moving forward.  And 85% stated they were going to stay committed to this process throughout 2023 and beyond.

    They are committed to this process because it works; i.e., it meets the desires of their Buyers.

    Trends For Lead Nurturing

    And they plan to accelerate the adoption of this Digital First process by their Buyers because they are planning on almost doubling their spend over the next 4 years. 

    Seven – This Will All Lead to Pre-Sales Automation

    Among the important trends for lead nurturing is the combination of B2B Buyers preference for Digital First pre-sales education over speaking with a sales rep, combined with the success of this process, and the investment being made by the Fortune 500 is why:

    “Gartner’s Future of Sales research shows that by 2025, 80% of B2B sales interactions between Suppliers and Buyers will be automated and occur in digital channels”

    Conclusion

    Replacing your historical sale rep driven process and ad hoc lead gen tactics with a comprehensive content marketing strategy and nurturing process  is not an “if” decision – it’s a “when” decision.  The B2B Buyer and the Enterprise market are both driving towards Sales Automation and the cost savings that this shift will represent.

    Many small businesses, young companies, mid-size companies, and even under-resourced sales and marketing groups are struggling to keep up with this Digital First transformation.  Many have an initial lead gen program in place, but that program is not producing the results it used to, or it’s not producing to expectations.

    In many cases, SMBs struggle to craft a solid strategy deeper into the funnel, or they’re flying blind with a scattershot strategy.  They lack the bandwidth to make informed decisions around the right marketing and sales tech to leverage.  They lack the talent and resources to create quality content on a consistent basis, or they lack the time or can’t afford to assemble an experienced team of proven sales and marketing operation experts that are required to run a sales engagement engine consistently.  To learn even more about the advantages of outsourcing you lead nurturing and demand generation process you can read Why Outsource Demand Generation and Lead Nurturing.

    When you’re ready, we have developed Digital Demand Center™ , a turnkey solution designed specifically for SMBs that turns the Digital First Transformation into an opportunity for SMB Sellers to survive and thrive.

     

    How it Works – Turnkey  Lead Nurturing and Demand Gen with Digital Demand Center

     

    (Watch Time – 5:00 Minutes) – Quick overview of how a our turnkey demand generation engine fill your CRM with well educated sales ready leads.

    If you feel like you would like a much deeper crash course on all challenges and tactics required for success, we invite you to check out our Educational Video Series on The Digital First Transformation.

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