by Glen Springer | Feb 26, 2014
As a salesperson, knowing who to call and having the ability to control the conversation are key to the outcome of a call. This is where a well-run marketing automation system, content management system and lead scoring system pays off for a sales person.
In a retail setting, it takes a keen eye and well developed senses on behalf of a salesperson to understand what customers are there to buy and who is there ‘just shopping’. The best salespeople seem to have a third eye telling them whom to approach and what tactic to use. In Malcom Gladwell’s book, The Tipping Point, he explains that these superior salesmen know that “nonverbal cues are as or more important than verbal cues” and, “subtle circumstances surrounding how we say things may matter more than what we say.”
People who are able to sell based on subtle cues are really just good at picking up buying signals early. Most salespeople just go from person to person asking, “Can I help you?”—this essentially equates to cold calling. When your organization relies on an inside sales team, you need to be like Gladwell’s superior salesperson, not an average ‘greeter’.
But, how do you do this over the phone when you can’t really interact with customers in a way that allows you to pick up all their subtle buying signals?
This has always been a problem with phone sales and cold calling. Salespeople are left wondering:
- Who’s actually interested?
- What are they interested in?
- What features are they most interested in?
- When should I call them back?
- How do I know if they really want to talk to me?
So, how do you find the answers to these questions with limited visibility?
Answer:
You see what your prospects are doing via your marketing automation system. Marketing automation gives you the ability to know who to call, which is probably the biggest success factor on a sales floor—it is what separates the best from the bunch. Marketing automation also gives you insight into when they want to hear from you, what they want to talk about, what you should share, what you shouldn’t share, etc. With a marketing automation platform, you have the information at hand to gain the respect of the prospect and have a real conversation, rather than a cold call and hearing, “No thanks, I’m just looking” or “ Who are you?” or “What is this about?”.
Another trick of great salespeople involves resources and control. Most successful sales reps know when to move on from a prospect that is not going to transact, allowing them to control when the conversation ends rather than wasting their time educating. Marketing automation can also help automate this often times tough skill by giving you the ability to see if your prospect is opening and sharing content or if he or she is just blowing smoke and is not really ready to transact.
For more on using marketing automation for sales, read “A Twist on Selecting a Marketing Automation Platform.” Feel free to contact us with any questions.
by Glen Springer | Jan 31, 2014
We all know that submitting a contact form, requesting a demo or consultation/review is a clear interaction and digital buying signals. However, we believe these to be verbal or explicit. The following, however, are more subtle and implicit buying signals that can be tracked (at the individual level) using marketing automation software:
1. Repeat visits to your pricing page is the one of the clearest website interactions that indicates a buying decision.
Learning the price/cost involved is an obvious steppingstone in the sales process, one that has value to qualifying a prospect. Finding out the price up front, you are using it as a pre-qualifier. If someone checks your price and never returns, they’ve disqualified themselves – saving your sales team time. If a prospect checks your pricing page and then views more pages (and/or is a repeat visitor) they positively qualified themselves for next steps.
2. Navigating through a visitor flow that simulates your 3-5 call sales process.
This means content like your pitch video, about us page, features and benefits pages, webcasts, contact page, testimonials and services pages. All of these pages support buying decisions and were once part of the introductory sales pitch. Now that buyers are self-educating, you can map their online interactions to your traditional sales process and starting checking off buying signals they need to see and understand before moving forward.
3. Returning to your website through natural search.
If it’s a branded search, this shows they remember you enough to naturally look for you again. Checking the pages they view during this return visit can provide even more insight into their buying stage. If an identified prospect returns to your site through non-branded natural search (and the keyword is unavailable as much of it is today), it still shows a buying signal as they are in an active state of research (multiple visits). Again, deep dive into the specific pages from this return visit to better understand where they are.
4. Viewing your company’s executives social media profiles (especially LinkedIn).
At this point, prospects are usually asking “is this person qualified, and do I want to work with them?” This is different than viewing or following your company profile, where that may only be someone wanting to continue to be educated on the space (or they are your competitor and are mining your content).
5. An email has been opened and clicked numerous (6 or more times) indicating that an item has been shared and viewed internally.
Related to this, watch for multiple hits to same piece of content over multiple days by the same prospect. Since buying decisions require multiple opinions now, these positive buying signals show that the parties that need to be involved in the sale are becoming involved.
6. Downloading case studies, especially ones where the case study is in a comparable vertical.
Viewing these case studies not only provides social proof, but also indicates the prospect wanting a deeper analysis and understanding to see that what you provide (products/services) can work for them, too.
7. Re-watching videos or specific sections of videos.
Analyzing video heat maps show when videos or sections of videos have been re-watched. To best understand this buying signal, you’ll often need to look a little deeper at the section they are re-watching to be sure that the part that was reviewed is your value prop/business case/sales pitch/specific product feature and not industry education/general info.
If you are in sales or marketing, you know by now that the buying process has changed. Prospects are self-educating online and engaging in sales once they’ve “bought” what you offer. Using marketing automation software, you can more accurately assess a prospect’s stage in the buying process through non-verbal, digital interactions with your content (“content” being a very broad categorization of emails, webpages, social profiles, etc.).
For more on how a marketing automation platform can help sales, click here. Feel free to contact us with any questions.
by Glen Springer | Jan 23, 2014
At Gabriel Sales, we like analogies.
Recently, we discovered a truly magical analogy for marketing automation coupled with a notable piece in the Harry Potter stories, Dumbledore’s Pensieve.
Dumbledore: “I use the Pensieve. One simply siphons the excess thoughts from one’s mind, pours them into the basin, and examines them at one’s leisure. It becomes easier to spot patterns and links, you understand, when they are in this form.“
Here are five reasons why marketing automation is like Dumbledore’s Pensieve:
1. It allows you to store large amounts of information without becoming overwhelmed.
When Harry Potter first asked Dumbledore what his Pensieve is, Dumbledore responds, “This? It is called a Pensieve. I sometimes find, and I am sure you know the feeling, that I simply have too many thoughts and memories crammed into my mind.”
When Dumbledore feels overwhelmed by too much information, he uses his Pensieve to unload important thoughts and memories in a safe place. Sales reps and marketers can use marketing automation to do the same in regards to the copious amount of sales and marketing related data they have to manage on a day-to-day basis.
2. It saves important information in a place that is always accessible.
Once a memory is put into a Pensieve, it will always be available for reference. This helps Dumbledore immensely in his battle against Lord Voldemort as he is able to recall key details from events that happened decades ago.
While marketing automation is not yet decades old, it can still be used in the same way. From the time you start using your marketing automation software, all data is recorded and saved for future reference. This can especially helpful in regards to prospect behavior and the increasing length of B2B sales cycles. It may take a year or more for a prospect to go through the entire buying process—making it hard to keep track of where they are in your sales cycle. Marketing automation allows you to go back and see the specific details of any digital interactions a prospect has with your company.
3. It allows you to look back at the past to help make decisions about the present.
Similar to the last point, the Pensieve allows you to look at specific details about events in the past to enable you to make better decisions about the present. Harry faces an extreme example of this when, during the Battle of Hogwarts, he looks at Severus Snape’s memories and determines the best course of action is to sacrifice himself to save humanity.
Admittedly, there are no guarantees that marketing automation will help save humanity from evil. But, it may help save a deal (or ten). Marketing automation allows you to look back and measure performance of different activities like email campaigns and social media efforts—allowing you to see what is and what isn’t working and determine how to best optimize.
4. You can take people along the journey so they can see for themselves.
One of the coolest things about the Pensieve is that you can use it to experience memories that aren’t your own. Harry does this numerous times during his lessons with Dumbledore to learn how to defeat Voldemort, and his experiences in the Pensieve become an integral part of his success.
Marketing automation platforms are like the Pensive because anyone in organization can be brought in to see for themselves what is happening or what has happened. For example, if a new sales rep is brought in, he can quickly bring up any prospect’s profile to see their most recent activity, marketing content score, most visited page views, etc. This gives him enough background to know exactly how to jump in and guide the prospect to the next part of the sales process.
5. It is a way for you to observe experiences without people knowing you’re there.
When you are reliving memories in a Pensieve, you live them exactly as they were, and no one knows you are there. Harry first realizes this when he goes into the Pensieve and experiences the trials from the First Wizarding War—and no one notices his presence.
Marketing automation platform also allows you to observe behaviors without people knowing that you are observing them. It may sound creepy, but like the Pensieve, it meant to be helpful. By viewing the engagement your prospects have with various emails, marketing content and internal webpages, you can more accurately assess their pains and provide them with relevant and valuable content that addresses how to solve those pains.
If you’d like to read another fun analogy about marketing automation, read “Marketing Automation is Not What You Think”. Feel free to contact us with any questions.
by Glen Springer | Jan 17, 2014
At Gabriel Sales, we have a slight twist on selecting certain types of software and platforms. We look closely at how the tool can be easily and most effectively used by a sales team and not just the marketing team. When selecting a marketing automation platform to be used by a sales and marketing team, here is some of the criteria we recommend you consider from the sales users’ perspectives:
Is it simple for a sales rep to login and know exactly where to go?
This is a bit of a no-brainer for software design in itself, but our experience with marketing automation software demonstrates that a lot of features may be clear and easy to use for the marketing team while the sales team is vastly overlooked. Look for software that is easy to use from your sales users by having them attend demos and ask questions pertinent to how they do their jobs.
How easy and versatile is the automated alert system?
It’s imperative that sales reps are notified real-time for certain prospect events and daily/weekly/monthly for others. Having a diverse set of alert options (email, SMS, desktop and mobile apps) will help your team have the fastest response time to your prospects. Data has shown that responding within an hour of inquiry increases conversation rates by 7x (Source). As an example, having a drip campaign sending automated scheduled emails that will then alert sales users when a prospect has interacted with an asset in the campaign where that interaction shows a buying signal.
How clear are the methods and accessible are the variables that can be segmented upon?
A sales rep wants to use their time efficiently and being able to group prospects into well-defined segments makes their job much easier. Want to call on everyone who has a score of 100+ that visited the site this week AND went to the pricing page? Should be a straightforward process to get that list.
How does lead scoring work?
Scoring needs to be flexible and comprehensive. A sales rep wants to be able to see the aggregate score and the specific activities and their respective score. They may not always understand the logic behind specific scoring, but if they are able to see that a video playback was scored at 50, they know that the video itself is a high value activity and a signal to the prospects interest level.
Is prospect activity tracking thorough and easy to understand?
Sales reps want to be able to understand what the prospect is interested in to best modify one-to-one interactions. Having marketing automation software that has a large collection of different activities it can track is imperative for best understanding specific interests in both content and content types. Does Prospect A watch a lot of videos? Send more videos in the follow-up. Is Prospect B interested in the features, create some quick clips on highlights of those features.
What processes can be automated to keep the sales staff productive and not breaking momentum?
Sales reps want to stick with their highest importance activities and not get caught up in dealing with too many steps to record and follow-up with new prospects. Having a systemized process that makes it dead simple to manage alleviates huge headaches and bottlenecks for sales reps doing their best work. An excellent example of this is building a form that the sales rep can complete (that does not set a cookie) that then triggers a series of activities including 1) sending an email, 2) adding to a nurturing campaign and 3) notifying sales executives of next steps.
This is not an exhaustive list of features to consider when selecting a marketing automation platform, but it is a list of the major features we’ve identified as a collaborative sales and marketing team that will optimally support your sales team.
by gabriel_sales | Dec 30, 2013
2014 is nearly here, and before we make our resolutions and goals for next year, we wanted to take one last look at our best and most popular blogs of 2013. While we believe that many strategies, processes and tactics in B2B sales and marketing will change and evolve in the coming year (you can find our predictions for 2014 B2B sales and marketing trends here), many of things we worked so hard to develop last year will continue to be relevant.
Here are 5 of our most popular blog articles from 2013:
The Shift to Bought, then Sold
“…in today’s digital landscape, your buyers are becoming more self-directed. They want to buy on their own time and expect to be educated digitally. Only once they feel educated are they ready to be engaged by a sales rep.” Continue reading.
Marketing Automation is Not What You Think
“Nearly every business today is looking for ways to generate more leads and close more deals. Many companies are now looking to marketing automation as a means to achieve this and end up dissatisfied with the results. The reasons for dissatisfaction vary; some are challenged by the complexity of the software itself, others are frustrated by the software’s lack of integration with sales. Whatever the reason, we believe dissatisfaction with marketing automation stems from the same misunderstanding.” Continue reading.
B2B Buyer Personas: The 6 Types of B2B Buyers on the Internet
“As the buying process changed with the introduction of web-based technologies, buyers changed too. Buyers adapted new traits and behaviors conducive to the new digital space they occupy. By understanding these new traits or characteristics and incorporating these insights into your sales strategies, you can make better connections, earn more trust and ultimately, close more deals.” Continue reading.
3 Reasons Your B2B Sales is Failing
“Many B2B companies have started to catch on to the fact that marketing in the digital space is dramatically different than marketing of the past. Selling in this space means playing by different rules (i.e. the buyer runs the show), however, many companies have not taken the time to understand the complexities and intricacies these new rules contain.” Continue reading.
B2B Sales Pipeline Management
“B2B companies need to think of sales as a process to be managed that is backed by logic and data. Management of your sales process should be focused on your pipeline. A sales pipeline ‘is the amount of business you attempt to close in a given month, quarter or year’ (inc.com). You can manage the data of your sales pipeline using spreadsheets or sales and marketing technologies and then use that data to give you insights as to how to forecast better, improve your conversion rate and refine your marketing messages.” Continue reading.
If you would like to learn more, you can download our 2013 white paper called, New Rules for B2B Sales & Marketing in 2013. To learn about the B2B sales and marketing outsourcing services we offer, feel free to visit our services page.
Contact us with any questions.
by gabriel_sales | Dec 20, 2013
As we take a look at the end of the year industry reports coming out that discuss the main B2B sales and marketing challenges going into 2014, we see the consensus of B2B marketers is that “getting more leads” is their number one challenge.
If your goal is to increase sales revenue, it is rational to want more leads; more leads equals more prospects, which equals more conversions and therefore more deals. However, as a B2B integrated sales and marketing outsourcing company who has run hundreds of sales and marketing campaigns for dozens of clients, we have seen a different approach to be much more effective.
From our perspective, the reason many B2B companies are constantly crying for more leads is that they are not effectively working the ones they already have. Consider these statistics:
- 5% of your market is ready to buy at any given time (Selling Power Magazine)
- 80% of leads are passed to sales before they are ready to engage (Marketing Sherpa)
- 70% of mishandled leads buy from a competitor (Forrester)
So, here is what is happening: A company gets a lead, and marketing sees a general level of interest. The marketing team then passes the lead on to sales before anyone takes the time to fully understand where the prospect is at in his or her buying cycle. Sales then determines that the lead is not interested or not ready to buy, and the lead is essentially thrown in the trash (or given to your competitor).
This is another example of the traditional sales model lingering in the digital space. The old way of selling said to ‘sell hard and fast upfront’ and keep pushing to the close. The problem is that this sales model does not work anymore. Not only that, but if you try to use this technique on buyers today, they will run. Fast.
Buyers are now in control of the sales cycle—they get to choose what marketing content to view and when to view it, when to engage with sales and when to buy. If you get in your buyer’s way while they are doing this with pushy sales messages or phone calls, you will come off as annoying or worse, threatening.
Rather than a traditional sales approach to lead generation, B2B companies need to engage in lead nurturing and sales pipeline management in 2014.
Lead nurturing addresses the problem of only 5% of your market being ready to buy at any given time. B2B lead nurturing generally consists of sending out early-stage educational content that is non-threatening and helps your prospects move through their own discovery and education around your product/service. When your prospect is finally ready to buy, he will be so grateful to for genuinely educating him that he will call up your sales rep and make a purchase.
Sales pipeline management is a way of managing lead generation, conversion and nurturing. By tracking your prospects activity across all marketing and sales tactics (content marketing, email campaigns, website activity, social media, etc.), you get a better understanding of where each prospect is in his or her buying cycle.
For example, if a prospect is only clicking in early-stage, educational blogs, you know they are not ready to buy. If a prospect is instead clicking on customer testimonials and pricing pages, you know it is time for a sales rep to pick up the phone.
By using digital strategies like lead nurturing and sales pipeline management, you ensure that you are not throwing away leads to early. To implement these strategies, you simply need to map out your sales process and create marketing content to fit each stage of your buyers’ buying cycle, then push the content at the appropriate time (using your marketing automation solution), track engagement and finally, bring in the closer when buying signals have been shown.
If this seems complicated or overwhelming, here are several resources to help you get started:
If you are interested in learning about the leads nurturing and sales pipeline management services we offer, you can visit our services page. Feel free to contact us with any questions.
As a salesperson, knowing who to call and having the ability to control the conversation are key to the outcome of a call. This is where a well-run marketing automation system, content management system and lead scoring system pays off for a sales person.
