by gabriel_sales | Oct 8, 2013
In the B2B world, both sales and marketing teams are now under more pressure than ever before.
Sales teams now have to deal with the customer of the digital age, who wants to go through the sales process without the help of sales. Marketers have to do much more with fewer resources, and new measurement tools mean they are more accountable for their efforts.
There are basically two options for how to proceed in this situation. You can keep trying the same tactics that worked when telemarketing and tradeshows ruled the B2B sales world; or, you can adapt.
We believe adapting is the road to success. We also believe the first step to adaptation is aligning your sales and marketing teams and giving them a shared quota.
One of the main reasons sales and marketing need to be aligned is that successful lead generation now requires a blended effort between the two. Lead generation now requires both a clear view of the sales funnel and a well-strategized content marketing strategy for nurturing. Unfortunately, it seems this is something many companies are still struggling with:
- 68% of companies have not identified or attempted to measure their sales funnel
- 65% of companies have no defined lead nurturing process or toolset
- 79% of marketing leads are never converted to sales
- Only 56% of companies have a system or toolset in place to qualify marketing leads
- (Salesforce.com)
The best way to handle all of these issues at once is by leveraging a marketing automation platform in conjunction with a CRM tool. With marketing automation, you gain backend visibility of your prospects and their digital behaviors, giving you insights into when and how a prospect should be nurtured. Using this information, you can then implement an intelligent content marketing strategy based on buyer lifecycle stages and monitor engagement. Marketing automation also has tracking and reporting features that allow you to measure the ROI and effectiveness of your sales and marketing tactics.
When everyone is working with the same data and working toward the same goals, sales and marketing can finally stop their war and start working together. In fact, automation users have a 53% higher conversion rate from marketing response to marketing qualified and a 9.3% higher sales quota achievement rate (Salesforce.com).
To learn more about the value of marketing automation in the B2B sales process, you watch this quick video that explains why Salesforce bought Pardot for $2.5B. Or, you can download our “Marketing Automation Implementation Checklist.”
To learn about the marketing automation consulting or sales pipeline management services we offer, you can check out our services page.
by gabriel_sales | Oct 2, 2013
B2B marketers today face a complex landscape.
Old marketing tactics have dropped in effectiveness (cold calling, trade shows) while technological innovations have created an entire new way of buying and selling (digital content marketing, customer relationship management). Buyers now control the sales process and selling to them now requires the ability to reach and interact with prospects in an entirely new way.
Evidence of this shift can be seen in the findings of a February 2013 eMarketer report that lists the top challenges from B2B marketers today. Apart from not having enough budget (59%), marketers largest struggle is the ability to “reach the right target at the right time in the buying decision” (39%). This shows that B2B marketers have started to recognize that the buyer needs to be the main focus of all marketing efforts.
This also helps to explain why from 2011 to 2012, there was a 233% increase in the portion of marketing budgets allocated to marketing automation solutions (eMarketer).
Marketing automation platforms allow marketers to manage of all of their prospects from one database and track their prospects digital behaviors to help understand where each prospect is at in their buying decision at any given time. Within the platform, you can assign different numerical scores to each piece of marketing content you create—with lower scores assigned to early stage content and high scores assigned to late stage content like pricing pages or product comparisons. By looking at prospects consumption of all marketing efforts (website, blogs, email marketing, social), you can determine what “next step” is going to be most appropriate for each prospect.
This is why using marketing automation for B2B lead nurturing is so effective, as some of the prospects that come into your pipe are not ready to buy right away. You will know this because your marketing automation solution will tell you that the prospect is not engaging with any high-scoring digital content that signals he or she is near a purchase decision, which tells you the prospect needs to go into a lead nurturing stage.
B2B lead nurturing consists of sending your ‘not-yet-ready-to-buy’ prospects marketing content that educates them on your solution and industry in a non-threatening way. A quarterly company newsletter or educational email campaign are good examples of this. By tracking consumption of your nurturing efforts using your marketing automation platform, you will know when a prospect moves out of the nurturing phase and is ready to be engaged by sales.
When done correctly, lead nurturing helps to build trust and keep your company top of mind when your prospect is finally ready to make a buying decision.
To learn more about the importance of B2B lead nurturing, click here. If you have any questions, please feel free to contact us.
by gabriel_sales | Sep 26, 2013
In Malcom Gladwell’s book Outliers, he makes the claim that for anyone to become an expert at something, it takes 10,000 hours of practice.
From Outliers:
“The emerging picture from such studies is that ten thousand hours of practice is required to achieve the level of mastery associated with being a world-class expert—in anything,” writes the neurologist Daniel Levitin.” — p. 40
Since the book was published, there has been a lot of criticism of Gladwell’s book from people citing professional athletes or Olympians who reached a high level of accomplishment in their field without the prerequisite 10,000 hours of practice. Last month, however, Gladwell responded to critics in a New Yorker editorial and claimed the rule still applies to activities involving a high degree of cognitive complexity:
“The point of Simon and Chase’s paper years ago was that cognitively complex activities take many years to master because they require that a very long list of situations and possibilities and scenarios be experienced and processed. There’s a reason the Beatles didn’t give us “The White Album” when they were teen-agers. And if the surgeon who wants to fuse your spinal cord did some newfangled online accelerated residency, you should probably tell him no.
It does not invalidate the ten-thousand-hour principle, however, to point out that in instances where there are not a long list of situations and scenarios and possibilities to master—like jumping really high, running as fast as you can in a straight line, or directing a sharp object at a large, round piece of cork—expertise can be attained a whole lot more quickly. What Simon and Chase wrote forty years ago remains true today. In cognitively demanding fields, there are no naturals.”
At Gabriel Sales, we wholeheartedly agree with Gladwell and believe this concept can be applied to the world of B2B sales and marketing.
As a sales and marketing outsourcing company with over 13 years of experience specializing in B2B, we were an early adopter of marketing automation. After implementing a marketing automation platform for ourselves and seeing the dramatic results it brings, we have done over a dozen more implementations for our clients.
Our status as an early adopter means that by the end of 2012, we reached the prerequisite 10,000 hours of experience needed to be classified as world-class marketing automation experts.
Current Challenges with Marketing Automation Implementation
In a July 2013 report from BtoB, companies were asked to name their top challenges to adopting marketing automation. One of the top five responses included the complexity of marketing automation software itself (23%).
After more than a dozen implementations, we understand the software and know the best practices as well as what to avoid. Over the years, we have learned new ways to optimize the software and retired old tactics that were not producing results. As a sales outsourcing organization, we also understand how to integrate your sales process with your marketing automation platform to track buyer lifecycles, nurture leads, identify buyer personas and more.
We have seen that companies that try to do this on their own can take up to three years to see any results. By bringing on Gabriel Sales to help with your marketing automation implementation, you can start to see results within a year—saving yourself countless hours that would be better spent generating new revenue and serving your customers.
To learn more about marketing automation implementation, you can download our Marketing Automation Implementation Checklist. To learn more about the consulting we provide as marketing automation experts, you can visit our services page or contact us.
by Glen Springer | Sep 5, 2013
As experienced marketing automation consultants, here are our top 10 tips to increase effectiveness of marketing automation while simultaneously improving your overall productivity:
- Comprehensively configure your tools. Configure everything you can that is pertinent to you. Look at add-ons/connectors, search marketing and social settings, etc. to make sure you are getting the most out of your software.
- Explore all of your options within the tool. There are hidden gems in your software that are incredibly useful. Functions like “Prospect Audits” and “System Emails” are good examples of features that have become hugely valuable to our work that are buried in the high level set of software features.
- Create real-time alerts for the most critical events happening on your site. Someone fills out a form—fire alerts on all cylinders! Someone hits your pricing page—notify a sales rep by email.
- Set internal calls to action in the subject line of notification rules. In other words, if someone fills out a form, my subject line to my sales rep is “CONTACT NOW”.
- Schedule as many of your emails and social posts in one batch, aka time blocking to get into a rhythm and remove distractions.
- Do micro-targeting and split testing to get as much intelligence about your message as possible.
- Map out your drip campaigns and logic in collaborative campaign documents so you can work better with the necessary parties. Using a cloud content management service is one way to do this.
- Do weekly/monthly audits of rules, dynamic segments, auto-responders and any other automated tasks to make sure that they are still 1) accurately working for your campaigns 2) necessary (otherwise, clean out the clutter).
- Ongoing training. Make sure the people actively using the tools are continually learning how to most effectively use the tools. Software gets updated, best practices are established and your team needs to be informed.
- Staff a marketing technology specialist. A growing profession is the tech-savvy, marketing-minded professional. Both creative and technical, marketing technologists can help you get the most out of your marketing automation software.
For more tips on how to increase effectiveness of marketing automation, you can download our Marketing Automation Implementation Checklist here. If you have any questions, please feel free to contact us.
by Glen Springer | Aug 22, 2013
One of the key features of any marketing automation software is creating marketing automation rules based on a variety of factors including activities, events, scores, grades, dates, etc.
Keeping track of all your active automation rules is essential. A few scenarios to consider:
You have a form for a whitepaper download that triggers an autoresponder and then a 3-part follow-up email sequence. Overlapping that, you also have a drip program that triggers after a prospect has been in your database for 14 days. It’s essential to be aware of the details of these overlapping rules (and all others that are related) so that you don’t, for example, have 2 emails go to the same prospect the same day.
You are sending out case studies to a select group of prospects and want to suppress from delivery, people in companies where the case studies originated. Make sure you consider all the possible fields that could identify a prospect in a specific company including variations on domain names in email addresses, abbreviated vs. spelled out company names, or companies that are children of the parent company.
You need to update the Source record of a collection of prospects and want to make sure all prospects’ Source is accurately reflected. Things to consider include: reviewing existing “Source” assignment rules, analyzing prospect records to make sure you are correctly segmenting and updating records (e.g. updating blank records only), and previewing your rule results for accuracy before running the actual rule.
In the above examples, paying close attention to your data and respective automation rules will lead you to more accurate data for reporting and more successful targeted campaigns. Not paying attention will lead to, at minimum, explaining your mistake, and, at worst, losing a potential deal.
by Glen Springer | Sep 17, 2012
As a sales outsourcing company, we are now quickly becoming sales marketing automation outsourcing specialists as well. As an outsourced sales company, we have a unique perspective how marketing automation helps sales because we specialize in leveraging content marketing to engage prospects as much as we use marketing automation to generate and nurture leads. And by engage we mean helping to convince your buyer to buy from your company. This blog addresses the top 10 advantages of putting sales and marketing automation tools in your sales reps hands. (If you’ve never seen a Marketing Automation Software here is a quick link to 5-minute demo so the points below make a ton more sense.)
How Does Marketing Automation Outsourcing Help Increase Sales Reps Production?
Lead scoring
For companies that are lucky enough to have a steady stream of leads marketing automation prioritizes where your sales reps should invest their time. Marketing automation tools uses realtime scoring to see who is most engaged. With this point system, you are no longer need to guess “where to start”.
Your buyer tells your rep their interests
Marketing automation identifies what content your buyer is most interested in. This essentially gives your rep night vision goggles into your buyers biggest interests and concerns.
Help your sales champion to champion
A sales rep can be sold by their prospect. If you, as the rep, have a hot one on the line and it’s going great, utilizing a Marketing Automation tool is key. You can see if your prospect is actually opening your emails, clicking on the content you are sending and going to your site. If the content is not engaging or not being shared, you can raise that as an issue and ask “how can we improve our performance to make it easier for you to sell.” We find that the prospects that transact, typically engage with at least 12 pieces of content. If a prospect is not engaging, chances are they are not serious about buying.
Saves time and provides feedback
Email templates programmed in the Marketing Automation Tool can be measured in their effectiveness (essentially you can now do in the micro what you do with your bulk email blasts). If emails are not working you know. Streamlining great emails that work keep follows up simple while also keeping your rep on the phone.
Saves more time by automating follow up emails
Using drip campaigns set up by marketing “from” the rep allows the reps to stay engaged with non-active prospects. No more worrying about wasting time and precious phone time on cool prospects. We never know when a cool lead will now be ready to buy and drips ensure prospects will think of you when that time arrives and they are ready to engage.
Quick access to all past communications
With streamlined integration between a marketing automation software (we use Pardot) and your CRM, all the rep needs to do is use their Outlook Pardot connector and their email history will automatically be entered into Pardot and Salesforce. This keeps updating the CRM simple.
Reduced headcount
With marketing automation, reps can now “work” more prospects, requiring less reps and more time for reps to work on closing deals, not nurturing non-ready to buy leads.
Prevents lead and deal leakage
Typically sales reps will abandon leads if not ready to buy within a given time period, depending on the sales cycle. Reps need to work closest to the dollar. To close those deals on the horizon requires nurturing, and most reps do not have the time to do this even with the best of intentions. They are incentivized to close this quarter. Marketing automation lets them close this quarter and continue to build a healthy pipe for next quarter. Marketing Automation cures that sickness.
Model the top performers
Automation and CRM tools allow a view into top performers secrets of success What leads do they pursue? What scoring attributes commonly lead to a sale? How do they engage prospects? When do they engage prospects? Periodic and systematic analysis of rep performance relative to the attributes and activities that are captured by demand generation tools and CRM can provide invaluable insights for struggling reps.
Call at the right time
A lead deck is a live feed that is part of the tool that notifies your rep the minute your prospects are active on your site. When your prospects have your company top of mind, and your buyer is sitting at their desk (or on their PDA checking you out) your rep has it’s a great time to pick up the phone or hit them with an email.
To see a quick demo of a Marketing Automation Tool Click Here. To see if we can accelerate your B2B demand generation with better and faster technology integration and getting your sales team up to speed please feel free to reach out for a quick conversation and we will let you know if we can help. We guarantee what we are sharing here is simply the tip of the iceberg.
In the B2B world, both sales and marketing teams are now under more pressure than ever before.
