How Marketing Automation Helps Sales Reps

How Marketing Automation Helps Sales Reps

by | Jan 3, 2019

Marketing automation helps sales reps increase their productivity in multiple ways.

Marketing automation tools are used by companies of every size to increase the value of their online presence. Whether a business needs better lead generation or an improvement in the number of sales successfully closed, automated marketing can dramatically extend your online reach, allowing you to drum up a much higher number of leads, and in turn find more good leads that will turn into sales.

However, sometimes sales departments don’t use these tools correctly. Often this is the result of misunderstanding what these tools are capable, of, and becoming overly reliant on them for help in every facet of the job. Marketing automation is powerful, but in the end still just a method for enabling a live person to do more than would otherwise be possible.

In the interests of helping people understand how to maximize the value of these automated systems, here are ten ways that marketing automation assists sales reps.

Lead scoring. If you have a good number of existing leads and a steady stream of new leads always coming to you—a fortunate situation, to say the least—you still need to know which of those leads are most likely to result in sales. Lead scoring tracks a potential buyer’s activity to determined who is most engaged. This gives sales reps an easily accessible list of priority customers, requiring no guesswork as to who should be contacted first.

 

Buyers indicate their interests before speaking with a sales rep. Related to lead scoring, automated marketing systems track what products and services your engaged leads are checking out. When your sales rep is ready to make contact, they can do so knowing the customers’ interests and thus what to target with their sales pitches.

 

Sales reps can see how effective their contacts are. Every sales rep knows the feeling of having a customer that they’re sure is interested, the customer will buy soon, it’s pretty much a lock, and so on. What helps more than a good feeling, even for the best rep, is hard data. Marketing automation tells you how often leads open your e-mails and click on the links you send. If they are, wonderful; if not, this lets you know that you need to devise a new angle for selling the ‘hot’ lead on your product, rather than continue sending the types of e-mails they’ve been ignoring.

 

Automated e-mail templates save your reps time and give them feedback. Once e-mail templates are programmed into the automated system, they can be put to wide scale use and their effectiveness thus gauged on a large quantity of data. If a certain template does not do enough to trigger further engagement from leads, you know and can try something else. And if you find a template that is super effective, the automated tools make it easy to streamline its use.

 

Automated follow-up e-mails. Follow up contacts are important for maintaining a lead’s awareness of your company and the sales rep with which they’ve spoken; you never know when a lead that is unlikely to buy now will change their mind. However, the effort takes time that could be spent pursuing different leads instead. With the ability to set up a drip campaign ostensibly coming ‘from’ the sales rep, marketing can make sure the effectiveness of follow-up contact is maintained while freeing up the rep to speak with different leads.

 

Quick access to past communications. Any good marketing automation software (Pardot, for example) can integrate with your CRM. Once the rep uses software that connects the two (often Outlook), their e-mail history will be loaded into the automated software, making access a swift and painless matter.

 

Reduced headcount for your company. Marketing automation allows each rep to handle many more potential customers than they would without those tools. No matter how many leads your company is capable of generating, it requires fewer sales reps to deal with that number than would be the case without marketing automation tools at your disposal.

 

Tracks top performers with statistics that can help everyone. If you have a decently-sized sales force, some reps will struggle and some will shine. Rather than let the struggling reps muddle along, or worse, firing them when they might have potential, you can find the differences between how top reps and struggling reps approach their jobs. Which leads do top reps pursue? What lead scores most commonly lead to sales? Automated marketing systems can collate this data and make sure all your reps know how to get the most out of their work hours.

 

Allows for timely contact. Automated systems tell you more than where or how often leads visit your site; they tell you when the leads are there. The lead deck points out to your sales rep that a lead is on your site, meaning that’s a good time to send an e-mail or make a phone call. Catch leads when they’re already thinking about your products, rather than risk doing so at a time when you’ll be easier to ignore.

 

Reduces or prevents lead and deal leakage. One of the unfortunate positions sales reps find themselves in is the necessity of closing enough deals to make their sales targets for the month or quarter, which can often require them to focus on more on leads who are ready to buy now and abandon contact with leads who may need more time to come around. While this can help them reach their numbers in the short term, it creates perverse incentives for the reps at the expense of the company. After all, your business needs every potential customer, both the ones buying now and those considering it down the road, and it does you no good if the reps don’t have time to nurture those long-term contacts. Automated marketing takes enough of the grind out of a sales rep’s job to allow them more time to develop a sales pipe for the future as well as for today.

Used correctly, marketing automation helps sales and is an incredible tool for maximizing sales and revenue across every rep in your company. If you’d like to know more about what marketing automation can do for you, contact us for more information.

About Us

Gabriel Sales specializes in helping SMBs and Startups grow their business with modern sales and marketing operations.

Our team can augment gaps in your existing sales and marketing operations or we can be leveraged for full-service campaigns that include:

  • Integrated Sales and Marketing Strategies
  • Database Research and Targeting
  • Automation and CRM Systems Best Practices Implementation
  • Inbound Lead Generation
  • Outbound Lead Generation and Lead Scoring
  • Sales Qualification
  • Closing

To learn more about how we can help you grow your business (or decide if we are the right fit for you), we invite you to visit our page that details our integrated approach to sales and marketing outsourcing. Or feel free to contact us for free initial consultation and discovery session to see if our approach is the right fit to help you hit your revenue targets.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

8 Marketing Automation Tips

8 Marketing Automation Tips

by | Mar 6, 2018

Businesses that use marketing automation to nurture prospects experience a 451% increase in qualified leads. (Propeller)

B2B marketers say the number one benefit of marketing automation is the ability to generate more qualified leads (Pepper Global). They experience these great results because, marketing automation allows you to educate buyers, build trust, and stay in touch with prospects as they search for solutions to their problems. However, while more than 60% of marketers use email to stay in touch with their prospects, only 13% use marketing automation tools so they put in some of the effort but only get a fraction of the results. They also miss out on early stage leads, since marketers using marketing automation generate twice as many leads than those who just use one off blast emails. It’s statistics like these that spurred us to share some of Gabriel Sales’ automation best practices that have benefitted our firm and our clients.

Marketing automation is not necessarily difficult, but it does require a bit of a learning curve and some planning. Here are eight best practices we use that will ensure you’re marketing automation will be used wisely.

Start with a Strategy

Without a strategy, your marketing automation tool will inevitably become an ordinary email tool, blasting one-off messages and newsletters. The process of creating a strategy requires defining your value proposition, targeting your audiences, outlining the buyer personas of your ideal customers and mapping your buyer’s journey to your sales process. This allows you to tell your story, establish thought leadership and build trust with your potential buyers without the expense of sales reps doing this one customer at a time. A DemandGen study found that 95% of buyers consider content as trustworthy (and in some cases at early stages more trustworth then sales reps) when evaluating a company and its offerings.

Framework to Tell a Powerful Sales Story with Simple Messages

A critical part of the strategy will be a series of simple messages that tells your sales story in a way that resonates with your buyer’s needs.  This message framework will anchor your marketing efforts.  This framework  will deliver the right message at the right time based on where your buyer is at specific stages their buyers journey. As the table shows, there are different pieces of content topics and different types of media that work best for certain stages. While educating your potential buyers  about your perspective on challenges they face in the marketplace, who you are, and how you may be able to solve their problems, your content will be organized in a systematic way to help them  understand if you are the right fit to help them solve their challenges .  This builds trust with buyers looking to buy and keeps your brand and your solutions top of mind, for those not yet ready to purchase with helpful educational content.

Use Lead Nurturing to Create Opportunities

On average it takes, on average between 7 and 13 touches by both sales and/or marekting before a sale is made. This does not count the 47% of buyers who want to view 3-5 pieces of content before they even want to engage with a sales rep. (DemandGen). All this takes time.  And if you rely on sales reps to carry the load it can also take a significant amount of money. For those leads that already know about your solution, but aren’t yet ready to buy, lead nurturing allows you to stay top of mind through offering educational and thought-leadership content about industry trends and developments without the expense of a sales rep. Establishing thought-leadership is critical to an overall effective cost of sales percentage, since 96% of B2B buyers want content with more input from industry thought leaders which includes the company’s selling solutions that solve their problems (Demand Gen Report, 2016). Companies that excel at lead nurturing generate with educational thought leadership generate 50% more sales ready leads at 33% lower cost (Source: Forrester Research).

Integrate Social into Your Distribution Network

While marketing automation is associated with email marketing, modern automation tools are now easily connected to help you publish your content to additional networks in social media. That said, those channels are merely that, distribution outlets where it exposes your content to additional buyers so you can educate and build trust with your audience in additional areas across the web.  If you make the investment in content it also makes sense to share that content in social media.  Blog articles are leveraged by your automation platform to generate and score leads by educating and building trust.  But since you already have the content you can post it to social media to solidify a relationship with your leads and to make additional buyers aware of your solution.

Use Lead Scoring to Identify Who’s Engaging

Lead scoring is the least used feature by most businesses but it is the most critical for small and mid sized companies to increase productivity and lower their cost of sales. Lead scoring is the ability to figure out where someone is in their buying process and when they are getting actively interested in purchasing.  Lead scoring allows  sales and marketing to quickly flag who should be getting more attention from higher-end sales reps. Lead scoring will generate more revenue because better leads (buyers with high scores that are ready for sales interaction) will bubble to the top and be pritorized for you sales team, allowing your sales team to contact your most potential buyers at the right time. Lead scoring saves you money because leads with low scores that are not yet ready to buy, can be managed and developed by less expensive reps or in some case just by nurturing with marketing automation during their early education stages of your sales cycle. Lead scoring works. 68% of top marketers report lead scoring as the most responsible feature for improving thedirect revenue contribution of their content marketing efforts (Lenskold Group).

Integrate your CRM to Capture Lead Data

Capturing data and valuable information about your buyers is one of the key drivers to help you drive sales.  Marketing automation allows you to capture both key sales and marketing metrics. When you have collected this information in your CRM system you sales reps will have direct access to it.  This allows your sales reps to easily organize and sort prospects by any number of criteria including, points accumulated,  predict location in the sales funnel/buyer’s journey and to see what educational content the buyer has consumed.  This data allows you to sort buyers and then to sell to them more effectively because they will have a jump start on their level of education and business needs.

Use Data to Improve How Your Target Markets

You can learn a lot about your target audience by measuring the people who are engaging with your content through your website and emails.  To better understand the interactions you can split them into two data categories, explicit and implicit. Explicit data tells you who’s volunteered information to you via web forms, events or other interactions such as phone calls. Implicit data measures online behavior such as emails opened, click-throughs, form submissions, and downloads of your marketing collateral.  If an activity is predictive of buying the lead can be scored appropriately and can be highlighted in your CRM.  In many cases you can send real-time alerts to sales reps once a prospect reaches a certain point threshold or if a certain activity takes place. And timing is everything. In some types of sales 35-50% of all sales are won by the vendor that responds first (InsideSales.com).

Keep it Simple

Many SMBs we talk with say they haven’t made the leap to real marketing automation yet because they believe it’s too difficult. And while successful marketing automation involves many moving parts – contact us forms, downloadable assets, social and CRM integration, lead scoring, etc. – it’s important to start small and slow, while always keeping the end goal of the purpose of marketing automation top of mind. And the ultimate point of marketing automation is to put more sales qualified opprotunities into the hands of your closers. Decide on your goals for each campaign and the few KPIs to measure your success and design accordingly. Three simple KPIs to start with are:

  1. Contact volume.Automation helps marketers manage greater lead and prospect volume with more efficiency and effectiveness. So, it’s important to keep an eye on how many contacts, prospects and leads are engaging with your content to better understand where they are in the buyer’s journey and if there are any actions to be taken.
  1. A common goal is to better move contacts through your buyer’s journey and into your sales reps’ funnels, and track progress to identify what content is working and what’s not. Measure how campaigns impact MQLs, SQLs, and unsubscribes: are your campaigns better qualifying leads, improving the marketing-to-sales lead delivery volume, generating deals that are actually interested and helping nurture leads and prospects not yet ready to buy?
  1. Track engagement – email opens, click-throughs, website visits, shares, etc. – to identify the most effective messages and content that moves the needle with your audiences. Tracking engagement also allows you to identify the most active contacts and whether they need attention from sales.

Keeping it simple will only require you to focus on the buyers and purchase influencers you want to engage with right now.  There are all sorts of advanced features and complex segmentation that is possible but this is a distraction in the short term.  When you are just getting started we recommend that you leave the segmentation, tagging, etc. for later campaigns, once you’ve warmed up your audience with your educational, trust-building content.

No matter how you slice it, the move to marketing automation is growing and will be a requirement to compete for sales successfully in the next several years. Currently, 67% of marketing leaders use a marketing automation platform, while over the next two years, an additional 21% of marketing leaders plan to use a marketing automation platform (Salesforce “State of Marketing” 2017). Those numbers are not surprising because marketing automation works and saves time and money for organizations that leverage the technology to their advantage – 80% of marketing automation users saw their number of leads increase, and 77% saw the number of conversions increase by 2X over the first 18 months of implementing a platform (VB Insight “Marketing Automation, how to make the right buying decision” 2015). It’s no wonder, 91% of the most successful users agree that marketing automation is “very important” to the overall success of their marketing across channels (Marketo & Ascend2).

 

About Us

Gabriel Sales specializes in helping SMBs and Startups grow business with modern sales and marketing operations. Our team can augment gaps in your existing sales and marketing operations or we can be leveraged for full service campaigns that include:

  • Integrated Sales and Marketing Strategies
  • Database Research and Targeting
  • Automation and CRM Systems Best Practices
  • Systems Implementation
  • Inbound Lead Generation
  • Outbound Lead Generation and Lead Scoring
  • Sales Qualification
  • Closing

To learn more about how we can help you grow your business (or decide if we are the right fit for you), we invite you to visit our page that details our integrated approach to sales and marketing outsourcing. Or feel free to contact us for free initial consultation and discovery session to see if our approach is the right fit to help you hit your revenue targets.

How to Use Content Marketing and Automation for Consistent B2B Lead Generation

by | Feb 22, 2018

 

57% of B2B buyers have already made their purchase decision before ever speaking to a sales person (CEB Global).

 

Ask any modern marketer one of the keys to generating consistent leads, and one thing they’ll say – if not the first – is automate your content marketing. Automated content marketing makes it easy for you to send compelling messages at a thoughtful and coordinated cadence. Scoring your buyers engagement with the content allows you to understand your audience and where they are in the buyers’ journey. This process is the most effective way to generate and develop leads without breaking the bank. It also produces superior results because content marketing costs 62% less than traditional marketing and generates about 3-times as many leads (DemandMetric). Furthermore, B2B marketers say the number one benefit of marketing automation is the ability to generate more and better leads (Pepper Global). Add analytics to your content marketing automation efforts, and you have a good recipe for generating quality leads consistently – 42% of B2B marketing professionals state that a lack of quality data is their biggest barrier to lead generation (BrightTALK, 2015).

In today’s B2B market, buyers research and engage digitally with content through 67% of the typical B2B buyer’s journey before they even consider talking with someone regarding a purchase(Lenati). In fact, 47% of buyers want to view 3-5 pieces of content before engaging with a sales rep. (Demand Gen Report, 2016). So it’s paramount for your content marketing strategy and lead gen success to run campaigns with enough content to generate trust with buyers looking for you to:

  • Prove you understand the problems they face
  • Understand what problem your solution solves
  • Understand what does this solution do better than the others
  • Confirm this solution a good fit for their need

Addressing these FAQs that occur over and over again in your sales process can be automated with educational content that discusses industry trends, common pains, different ways to approach various solutions to industry issues, etc. This simple and substantive information that you can share as a thought leader gives buyers the information they need as they move through their buyers’ journey. Not only does it build trust with the buyer, it offers them insight to make an informed decision about solution options. Because in reality most buyers look at sells reps as a necessary evil. Only 29% of people want to talk to a salesperson to learn more about a product, while 62% prefer to consult a digital content (HubSpot, 2016).

Align Marketing and Sales to Improve Lead Generation Efforts

With the multiple moving parts involved in the modern sales and marketing machine, both departments must work together to generate leads, educate them, and move them towards a purchase decision. Marketo finds that companies with an aligned sales and marketing strategy are 67% better at closing deals. Having an aligned sales and marketing process that works well for generating leads is critical to any firm’s growth. With alignment, both entities understand the target audience, the sales cycle, the appropriate content to send through the proper channels at the right time. The coordination of sales and marketing bridges the communication gaps that otherwise stifle messaging consistency and lead qualification collaboration. By bringing marketing and sales together and making us more effective as a team, we can build a stronger program to meet advisor needs and achieve business results.” – Mary Rosai, Senior Vice President of Institutional Services Marketing, Charles Schwab (Marketo).

Create Authentic and Subtantive Content, Score It and Automate It

If you talk to any modern sales and marketing professional these days about content marketing and how they approach it, you’ll most likely hear four things in common. Think of them as “the four pillars,” of content marketing:

  1. Tell simple, direct and compelling stories
  2. Be insightful and helpful
  3. Leverage data when possible to back-up your claims
  4. Offer advice without hard pitching your solution

In this day and age, B2B buyers are squeezed for time, so they’re interested in useful, and simple to consume educational content that is easy to access and digest. Case studies, white papers and educational blogs helps buyers compare their efforts, challenges and pains with their peers and/or justify their investment. 9 out of 10 B2B buyers say online content has a moderate to major effect on their purchasing decisions (Lenati). The most tangible way to link your business to B2B buyers needs is to show how you solve problems better than your competition.

Marketing automation allows you to share your educational and thought leadership content along the buyers’ journey to develop trust and stay top of mind with consumers that are not quite ready to buy. Automation tools allow you to score leads according to the value of the content their engaging with, allowing your sales and marketing team to predict their readiness to buy based on the content they consumed. In a recent survey of companies leveraging marketing automation with quality educational content on a a regular basis 80% of users saw their number of  converted leads increase, with 77% seeing the number of sales conversions from those leads increase (VB Insight).

Summary

B2B lead generation is one of the top sales challenges facing many SMBs that want to grow their sales revenue. Generating a consistent flow of quality leads is critical to be competitive in the market. Telling simple stories in a systematic way and executing content marketing campaigns using modern sales and marketing operations is crtical to any business that wants to consistently grow their sales funnel in todays buyer driven market. Implementing the right strategy, lead generation techniques, and technologies to allow your sales team to focus on selling to qualified leads, while your marketers focus on sustained and consistent lead generation efforts will improve your sales results and help you meet your revenue targets.

About Us

Gabriel Sales specializes in helping SMBs and Startups grow business with modern sales and marketing operations. Our team can augment gaps in your existing sales and marketing operations or we can be leveraged for full service campaigns that include:

  • Integrated Sales and Marketing Strategies
  • Database Research and Targeting
  • Automation and CRM Systems Best Practices
  • Systems Implementation
  • Inbound Lead Generation
  • Outbound Lead Generation and Lead Scoring
  • Sales Qualification
  • Closing

To learn more about how we can help you grow your business (or decide if we are the right fit for you), we invite you to visit our page that details our integrated approach to sales and marketing outsourcing. Or feel free to contact us for free initial consultation and discovery session to see if our approach is the right fit to help you hit your revenue targets.

 

The Team You Need for Modern Sales and Marketing

The Team You Need for Modern Sales and Marketing

by | Jan 18, 2018

Today, SMBs ready to expand sales and marketing efforts beyond their current capacity often consider hiring an outsourced sales and marketing team to assist in scaling the business. These days, organizations can hire an experienced team of marketers and sales people for a fraction of the cost of recruiting, hiring, training, and managing its own internal team. But, keeping your sales and marketing process flowing daily is more critical than ever to deliver a sustained flow of leads and opportunities. Therefore, it’s more important than ever to have the right members of your modern sales and marketing team to ensure all the bases are covered.

Many companies are now realizing how effective (and expensive) forming a modern sales and marketing team can be to increase sales. The right team makes all the difference and can have a significant impact on the growth of a company’s bottom line. But assembling the right team of heavy-hitters can come at a cost.

Many SMBs that are just getting started don’t quite grasp how modern sales and marketing operates, therefore, they don’t understand the pieces needed to effectively build and run a modern sales and marketing team themselves. As a result, some look to outsource sales and marketing efforts to learn modern sales and marketing best practices and exactly what tools and efforts it takes to run successful campaigns that keep the funnel flowing.

First, building a team – or hiring an outsourced team – must have the same focus and goals, including:

  1. Shifting sales and marketing efforts to making it easy to build trust and drive value for your buyers digitally before you “sell.”
  2. Building trust through shifting your organizations messaging from what your product/service does and how awesome it is, to helping the buyer understand how it fits within the market and what problems it solves.

A modern sales and marketing team rigorously communicates about these goals and the status of the messaging, lead development, and failures and successes in the particular areas of interest. Marketers and sales people collaborate and discuss data points and information each is hearing from the industry, which can be used to educate users, while establishing thought-leadership and trust. Developing trust with your buyer early in the buying and selling process is one of the top reasons for forming (or hiring) a modern sales and marketing team.

Here’s the team we’ve found success with and what that team looks like.

Account Coordinator

A sales and marketing account coordinator (AC) is responsible for all the project management and reporting for accounts, including all modern sales and marketing team efforts. Deploying and managing drip campaigns and coordinating one-offs, follow-up emails and micro-campaigns dominates the ACs time. Most importantly, the account coordinator is in charge of transitioning all qualified leads to the sales reps or internal closers, and share what they have learned from the buyer – digital content engaged with and what they have learned about the buyer’s needs. Communication is key, as it saves time and ensures the collaboration of data and the accuracy of reporting.

Main Duties:

  • Project Management
  • Deploy Email Campaigns
  • Manage Drip Campaigns
  • Oversee Nurture Campaigns
  • Report Conversions
  • Manage Weekly Meeting

Content Producer

Content is king for modern sales and marketing, so a content production specialist (in-house or contract) is an essential part of a modern sales and marketing team. The content producer creates and manages content designed for various campaigns and different stages of the buyers’ journey. Producing thought leadership content and explaining how an organization approaches industry trends and issues is necessary to fuel the automation engine and move consumers through the stages coherently. The content producer will be able to integrate frameworks to help you create thought leadership content in the form of webcasts, videos, blog posts and checklists and present it logically on landing pages and microsites. This digital content can act as a surrogate for your senior reps early in the sales process, while scoring the content users engage with most and measuring their interest. Your “digital thought leader” will demonstrate and share educational content and expertise early in the sales conversation to display solutions and build trust.

Main Duties:

  • Produce Educational Assets
  • Write blogs, emails, white papers, case studies, etc.
  • Produce Screencasts and Webcasts Videos
  • Build Microsites and Landing Pages

Database Analyst

Successful modern sales and marketing requires campaign performance analysis to measure best practice KPIs such as click-through rates, click-to-open rates, etc. Look for high performance click through rates (CTR), click-through percentages and unsubscribe rates and adjust your campaigns accordingly. If a particular piece of content is triggering an above-average unsubscribe rate, remove it from the campaign and monitor the updated flow of buyers through the journey. If there is an email that has a high CTR, optimize the corresponding landing page and consider using it as part of an inbound campaign. There are many ways to interpret the provided data and make the appropriate changes to campaigns, the key is having a marketing database expert to ensure the system is set up correctly to capture the coveted data sets.

Main Duties:

  • List Acquisition
  • List Management
  • List Suppression
  • List Appending
  • List Delivery

Automation Expert

A modern sales and marketing team needs an automation expert to manage the execution of your drip and nurture campaigns, and to ensure your database is moving through the appropriate buyer’s journey. A marketing automation expert will implement best practices and provide expertise to help build trust with buyers not ready to buy digitally. A marketing automation expert will set up the automation system to allow you to track a buyer’s digital footprint, so when they are ready to buy, your closers will be notified, never missing an opportunity.

Main Duties:

  • Implement Systems
  • Integrate Systems
  • Manage Systems

Business Development Reps

Depending on your needs, your modern sales and marketing team may include callers, acting as business development reps, to generate interest and manage the early stage education of buyers. Effective callers will execute light discovery to qualify lead interest (from no interest to sales accepted interest) and set appointments with reps or closers responsible for managing the completion of the sale. How your team is staffed will depend on the size of the market you’re targeting and the volume of revenue you need to generate. This will also determine if you should hire a fully dedicated modern sales and marketing team internally for your organization or if it’s more cost-effective to hire a blended team of outsourced of resources.

Main Duty:

Follow up with inbound lead immediately – Senior sales resources and executives are busy, in meetings, running operations, managing accounts and leading the company. Your business development rep will ensure you’re focused on potential needs when the buyer expresses them with an inbound request. Your rep will help you get to the buyer faster – if he/she follows up in a timely manner. And as multiple studies continue to explain, the first person back to the buyer has a 50% advantage closing that deal over competitors.

Executive Oversight

Finally, you will gain access to a senior executive and strategist. This resource will be a peer that can help you to steward your sales strategy and your marketing strategy and will ultimately be accountable for your overall success.

An outsourced sales and marketing company can work with you to understand your Ideal Customer Profile. They can then help you acquire the databases, phone numbers and email addresses of these buyers and load your CRM with buyers to target that have the need for your product or solution so you are focused on selling to the right buyer.

About Us

Gabriel Sales specializes in helping SMBs and Startups grow business with modern sales and marketing operations. Our team can augment gaps in your existing sales and marketing operations or we can be leveraged for full service campaigns that include:

  • Integrated Sales and Marketing Strategies
  • Database Research and Targeting
  • Automation and CRM Systems Best Practices
  • Systems Implementation
  • Inbound Lead Generation
  • Outbound Lead Generation and Lead Scoring
  • Sales Qualification
  • Closing

To learn more about how we can help you grow your business (or decide if we are the right fit for you), we invite you to visit our page that details our integrated approach to sales and marketing outsourcing. Or feel free to contact us for free initial consultation and discovery session to see if our approach is the right fit to help you hit your revenue targets.

B2B Outsourced Sales Lead Generation Calling Tips

by | Jun 2, 2017

Gabriel Sales builds modern sales and marketing operations for B2B companies with solution sales that require a senior sales rep to manage the transaction of the sale. Over the past several years, we have seen the effectiveness of cold calling decrease substantially, but when executed the right way, it can still yield results. Here are some tips for companies that have worked for our B2B outsourced sales lead generation clients that you can implement on your own, or with our outsourced sales and marketing support.

B2B Outsourced Sales Lead Generation Tips

First, invest the time upfront to ensure you’re calling the right buyer. Spend as much time as you can, building databases of the right type of buyers at the right types of companies. A recent Gartner Group Study show that a typical business with less than 500 employees has an average of seven to ten people who are responsible for most buying decisions. Connecting with the right people is critical to your success – a simple, but sometimes overlooked, first step.

Try to start with calling at least a warm lead – ideally the phone call is a conversation. A conversation is much easier to have with at least someone that is slightly aware of your company. Whenever possible try to introduce yourself in advance. The most cost effective way to do this is with an email marketing campaign prior to the call.

Keep the first call educational, and share value first. Cold calling doesn’t mean that you are cold selling. The goal of the first call is to get your prospects attention, and you will only have 10 to 15 seconds to do that. When you call, be armed with something of value – it could be a webcast, a white paper, or a video to share. Sharing is caring and you will set yourself up for success downstream.

Use a marketing automation platform to prioritize leads. One of the most under-used feature of a marketing automation system is its lead scoring function.  You can use marketing automation platforms to see what content your buyers is engaging with. Calling time is precious time, so you can use a marketing automation platform to prioritize it.

Remember that the first two to three calls are not going to result in closed business, especially for more complex sales. Studies continue to show a typical sales cycle requires at least five to seven customer touches from the sales rep and engagement with at least that same amount of digital content. Use these calls to build value, not to sell features.

Qualify early. You should also use the first couple of calls to qualify the buyer. Is the company the right size? Do they have a need for your services?  You can be blunt and direct here as it saves both you and the buyer time – and a no is as good as a yes early in the sales process.

Ask questions, especially open ended questions. Sales relationships and qualified B2B sales leads are built through conversations, and conversations are started when you ask questions.  You should be asking questions at least three times more than you are pitching.

Do your homework for the second call. LinkedIn is now only a quick search away, and marketing automation systems will allow you to see what content interests your buyer most. Both these are invaluable tools for a second and third call to help you move your conversation forward.

About Gabriel Sales B2B Outsourced Sales Lead Generation

We specialize in building modern sales and marketing sales operations. We combine sales strategy and modern B2B marketing and sales best practices with a blended team of email marketing and content production specialists, marketing technology experts, and a team a sales development and market execution professionals to help with companies with B2B outsourced sales lead generation results. To learn more about our approach visit our outsourced sales case studies or our approach to B2B outsourced sales lead generation page.

Outsourced Sales and Marketing Can Help with Marketing Automation

by | Dec 21, 2016

Why Outsourced Sales and Marketing Makes Sense for Marketing Automation Implementations

So you have decided that you want to transform your sales and marketing operations. This means you need a lead scoring system and marketing automation platform. However, you are still a little leery because of the sizeable investment in the software and team of marketers this commitment will represent. You have the following concerns:

  • You want to test a marketing automation platform but you don’t have the internal resource to run it
  • You want to limit your investment until you know it will work before you make that commitment to both talent and software
  • You have enough content to generate leads but not to nurture leads
  • You don’t understand the best practices or how to baseline that return

Essentially you want to get started and prove you can get a return on your efforts before you pull the trigger and build your own team.

Below are 5 ways outsourced sales and marketing can help with Marketing Automation as you execute this strategy.

Automation Platform Selection

Most outsourced sales and marketing companies will have deep expertise across the platforms. They will have preferred providers but you can expect them to make solid recommendations based on your needs, sales cycle and budget.

Try Before You Buy

You can always contract directly with a marketing automation software supplier if you wish. And once you have decided that marketing automation works for you that is what we typically recommend. However almost all the software providers require at least an annual commitment and in some cases an annual payment. They want you to commit because it takes marketing automation about six months to a year if you are building a team on your own. Most substantial outsourced sales and marketing companies will be able to negotiate shorter commitments or in Gabriel Sales’ case will be able to provide solutions on a month to month basis until you prove concept. This frees up budget to spend on generating leads to help you produce an ROI from your marketing automation process faster.

CRM Data Integration

Key to successful marketing automation is connecting the automation system to your CRM so you have one clean buyer record. This makes it possible for your sales reps to see the value from the automation platform without needing to learn another system. An outsourced sales and marketing company will have processes to clean your data and will be able to connect all the data required. This makes the system useful to your sales team immediately.

Campaign Deployment

An outsourced sales and marketing company will have the technical skills to deploy a campaign through your platform in a fraction of the time it would take to learn these systems on your own. This includes: customer and prospects segmentation, best practices for how to launch your campaign, how to scale, and the frequency of your email communications.

Lead Scoring Best Practices

Lead scoring requires a combination of sales and marketing alignment, a strong content matrix, and a strong definition of both implicit and explicit qualification criteria. An outsourced sales and marketing company will be able to work through these issues in a fraction of the time ensuring that your engine identifies buyers most likely to buy.

Sales Team Adoption

Your automation platform only has value if your sales reps follow up with leads. An outsourced sales and marketing company will be able to train your sales reps how to leverage the system and also provide appointment setting support if your team lacks the time to follow up with your new volume of leads.

Reporting

Many of the marketing automation platforms give you the ability to run hundreds of reports. Most executives only want to see dashboards and a handful of reports that demonstrate how many contacts you’re marketing to, how they’re segmented and what scores are leading toward pipe velocity and sales conversions. An outsourced sales and marketing company will be able to cut through the noise and provide these reports to you for ROI measurement out of the gate.

Gabriel Sales helps companies transform their sales and marketing operations by providing the team and tools you need to generate score and qualify leads faster at a lower cost. To learn more about our outsourced sales and marketing approach and philosophy visit our About Us page.