Outsource Sales Archives

How an Outsource Sales Email Campaign Works

by Glen Springer | May 16, 2017

One of the challenges facing most businesses trying to scale their sales and revenue is having too few leads in there automated nurturing campaigns. This is especially true for small businesses where cold calling and Google Adwords is extremely competitive or simply too expensive. This is why we often create leads with an outsource sales email campaign to help ramp our client’s sales funnels.

In most cases, email can be the fastest way to ramp a sales funnel. But simply buying a list and then blasting that list is no longer effective. Can-SPAM laws and Google blacklisting make this a high risk tactic.

Below are six steps you can take on your own or steps an outsource sales company will take to fill your top of funnel with a successful email lead generation campaign.

1) Define your goals

An outsourced sales company will help you define your goals. How many leads do you need? How many leads can you handle? They will also work with you to understand how quickly you need these leads and set the proper expectations of what you can expect a campaign to produce:

In the short term – immediately after the campaign
In the mid term – with nurturing
In the long term – once outsourced sales reps start to follow up

2) Target Your Ideal Audience

After defining your goals, an outsourced sales company will be able to approach multiple third-party vendors to develop a campaign that hits the right audience at the right price. In most cases, this will include both decision makers and influencers because the best email marketing campaigns target the widest audience possible. This is because more and more decisions are now not make by a single decision maker but by decision making units that include:

A business buyer
A technical buyer
An end-user

3) Build your campaign engagement plan

After you identify your target audience, an outsource sales company will help you prepare the copy and create the landing pages for the educational content offers you will be using as part of your campaign. The most effective campaigns are typically run in a series of three messages that will resonate with all the different types of buyers and influencers in your target audience.

4) Deploy your email campaign

An outsource sales partner will then deploy the campaign through the third-party vendor. This includes managing the tests and the best times to deploy. Typically the best campaigns includes testing messages on the first two parts with A/B split tests and then using the best performing offers and messages in the final campaign.

5) Measure KPIs

Identify the most relevant KPIs for each campaign and be sure to track results and performance. This also includes prioritizing what are the best leads to follow up with first if you do not have a nurturing campaign or if you are under immediate pressure to bubble up some early stage opportunities.

6) Move them into a nurturing campaign

In most cases, an eProspecting Email campaign is only the first step in a lead generation campaign. Once you have generated the lead, you will need to move them into your marketing automation campaign. An outsource sales company can help you with this as well.

About Gabriel Sales Outsource Sales Services

Gabriel Sales help companies generate a sustained flow of leads using multiple tactics as part of modern sales and marketing operations. To learn more about our approach we invite you to check out our page that discusses our integrated sales philosophy and our 20 years of history of helping companies scale sales with outsource sales services.

Sales Outsourcing and Inside Sales

by Glen Springer | Jan 9, 2017

For decades the typical sales organization was comprised of sales reps cold calling and working in the field. They set their appointments and then meet face-to-face with potential buyers. And in recent years we have started to see a transition to those outside reps getting support from “inside reps” who assist in setting the appointments. And once again typically a company would build this organization internally.

However over the past several years both CRM and marketing automation technologies have become technology staples of most modern B2B sales operations. These technologies enable companies to control visibility of each stage of their sales process. These same technologies now allow companies to seamlessly consider sales outsourcing for their inside sales activities. Here are a few of the advantages to evaluate to help you decide if an inside sales outsourcing team is a good fit for your company:

Sales Training – There are multiple benefits that can be realized from shifting to an inside sales outsourcing model. One of the biggest advantages is that your sales training will become more effective with inside sales outsourcing. When a company uses an outside sales model, sales reps do not come into contact with each other on a regular basis. But with an inside sales outsourcing team your reps will be working in the same office space. It’s much easier to quality control sales training for new reps, share “best practice” sales tips, and disseminate new information. For smaller businesses that only have the need for one or two inside reps this advantage can be even more significant because your inside sales outsourcing team will be surrounded by other reps selling other products. You will gain access to a part time sales manager that will keep your team on track and well trained without the expense of staffing a full time sales manager.

Scaling Faster – As an inside sales outsourcing company we believe when a company is just getting off the ground it makes sense to staff a closer on the client side to gain insights into the entire sales process start to finish. An internal sales executive also allow you to more effectively build the personal relationships a company just getting off the ground needs. In many cases this resource is also one of the executives in the company, often the founder. And then as the company understands its sales process an inside sales outsourcing company can craft a repeatable sales process to generate the lead, develop the lead and qualify the lead using content and well trained business development reps. Switching to an inside sales outsourcing model may make sense, since it provides the ability to integrate new staff more effectively and allows for more rapid growth.

Complexity of the Sale Another highly influential factor that determines how to deploy an inside sales outsourcing team is the complexity of the company’s sales cycle – how many buyers and influencers are involved, deal size and value, and the complexity of the product itself.

For example – an enterprise sale is a long cycle involving multiple individuals at various levels of the organization. In these cases, external sales reps are required – again, because selling extremely high-value products over a long period of time is something that relies on the development of more personal business relationships. If this is the type of sale you need we typically recommend using inside sales outsourcing for the initial lead generation and the early stage introduction of your solution to multiple buyers across the target organizations. Once the buyer becomes engaged your outside sales rep should take full ownership of the sale.

On the other hand if you have a short and simple sales cycle this is where an inside sales outsourcing model can take the sale further. Inside sales outsourcing can generate the lead, develop the lead and educate the buyer. In some cases you can simply staff a sales engineer with technical or business domain expertise to answer technical or deep domain questions and your inside sales outsourcing team can manage the final close of the sale.

If outsourcing sales makes sense for your business then choosing the right inside sales outsourcing model is key to ensuring it sales outsourcing will help to grow your business. In many cases a hybrid model may make the most sense. To learn more about how Gabriel Sales approach sales outsourcing and marketing feel free to visit our sales outsourcing services page.

Why You Should Consider Outsourced Sales and Marketing to Generate Sales Ready Leads and to Build Your Sales Automation Engine

by Glen Springer | Oct 4, 2016

Preface

This article will eventually detail why we believe a Sales Ready Lead Campaign is the best way to implement a sales and marketing automation engine for first-time users. Before jumping into that business case, we wanted to share some facts and figures that explain why automation systems are now a requirement for sales success.

Automation Facts & Figures

Marketing Automation Systems are quickly becoming standard best practices for sales and marketing success. Here are some recent statistics:

Best-in-Class companies are 67% more likely to use a marketing automation platform. – Aberdeen Group “State of Marketing Automation Processes that Produce”
63% of companies successful in marketing automation plan to increase their marketing automation budget. The companies with successful marketing automation programs will invest in further success in the coming year. – Marketo & Ascend2“Marketing Automation Strategies for Sustaining Success” (2015)
63% of companies outsource all or part of marketing automation strategy planning. With t. 37% using in-house resources only. – Ascend2 “Marketing Automation Trends Survey” (2016).
79% of top-performing companies have been using marketing automation for more than 2 years. – Gleanster “2016 Marketing Automation Benchmark”

Automation and lead scoring are critical because more and more products and solutions are first bought through digital education, and then sold when your buyer is ready to be sold. And you need automation systems to address this shift in buyer behavior.

Over time marketing automation helps you win more business faster and at a lower cost. But the time delta for success ranges between 3 months to well over a year depending on your existing sales cycle.

And according to Ascend2, “Marketing Automation Trends Survey” (2016), the most significant barriers to marketing automation success are:

Lack of an effective strategy (52%)
Complexity of the system (42%)
Inadequate contact data quality (38%)
Lack of employee skills (32%)
Lack of relevant content (31%)
Marketing and sales alignment (30%)
Budget constraints (27%)

With those types of barriers and timelines, this makes proving that marketing automation will work for your business and getting it right the first time is at least as equally critical as hiring the right sales reps the first time to avoid sunk costs with no results. But what makes getting this marketing automation team hire right even more difficult than finding and hiring the right rep is the fact that marketing automation is just starting to become mainstream. There is simply not enough talent out here with the requisite experience (with the bumps and bruises and wins and losses) to ensure your initial success. Bottom line, demand for talent and experience is not keeping up with the supply of talent to ensure success.

Most marketers that are in-house talent only have one or two implementations under their belt. We believe that working with an outsourced sales and marketing company like Gabriel Sales is worth strongly considering for four reasons:

We have multiple implementations under our belt across multiple verticals selling multiple solutions with varied sales cycles so we can cross-pollinate best practices.
Outsourced sales and marketing companies appreciate marketing metrics but understand the only metric that counts is closed revenue.
We understand how to create and use content to automate the sale and leverage the technologies to score leads.
We can build your engine and sales automation process faster at a lower cost and then transition the engine when it is fully productive.

How Gabriel Sales Outsourced Sales and Marketing Capacity and a Sales Ready Lead Campaign Can Help

Gabriel Sales has more than 40 Marketing Automation implementations under our belt. We bring both the capability and capacity you need to get it right the first time with a blended team of:

Strategists
Systems integrators across most automation platforms and Salesforce
Our own low-cost tools if you are not initially ready to commit 20k+ annually for a full marketing platform like Pardot, Hubspot, or Marketo
Content producers
Marketing coordinators
Database marketers
Trained business development reps

More importantly, we can have you to market in weeks with Sales Ready Leads flowing so you avoid the quarters it takes to build on your own.

And once the engine is built and functioning we can continue to sustain or scale indefinitely or you can take over in-house with a seamless transition of your engine and systems.

To learn more about our approach and how it all works check out this short 3-minute educational video and educational microsite. Watch the embedded video below. Or contact us for a free readiness assessment that evaluates how large a market you can target, your content readiness and a preliminary result forecast.

Using Marketing Automation for B2B Lead Nurturing

by Glen Springer | Oct 2, 2013

Photo of green plant between male hands on a black background[/caption]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.

B2B Demand Generation Requires Sales Content Marketing

by Glen Springer | Jan 20, 2012

This blog discusses how Gabriel thinks about B2B Demand Generation and the hybrid role it plays in sales, sales marketing and market intelligence. In short, Sales Marketing is always supporting the close of business. In this blog we will share how you can close more B2B customers leveraging the opportunities in the new sales engagement model we now all face. This is Part 1 of a 3 Part Series.

To set some initial context to understand what Gabriel Sales means by “Sales Content” Marketing and how it supports B2B Demand Generation it’s important to understand that B2B Sales Content Marketing, at least from our perspective, is about moving a deal forward in the customer buying cycle so it results in a closed deal. Sales content supports the brand, but that is not its primary purpose. In a sales culture Demand Generation is not about Lead Generation and Marketing Qualified Leads. Who cares if a lead is Marketing Qualified. Demand Generation is about “Demand” meaning deals that are going to transact. Demand Generation means handing sales qualified leads over to sales reps that they can close.

A solid sales organization needs to be organized around an inside sales and marketing team that can generate Sales Qualified Leads and a team that can close business. As a sales outsourcing company we staff a team that can close business. As an outsourced B2B demand generation company, our goal, and the goal of any sales organization, needs to be creating a high velocity sales machines with a staff that does three things:

Identifies and develops Sales Qualified Leads as quickly as possible so the sales team can engage
Continues to nurture and develop Sales Accepted Leads (not ready to buy but worth investing inside reps time in) until they are ready to buy
Profile Accounts – So you can score them for continued follow up by marketing efforts

This requires us to combine outbound sales efforts with inbound sales content marketing services (either creating digital content or creating the feedback loops for our client’s marketing team) because the goal is to move a customer through their buying cycle.

For a high velocity sales machine that integrates inbound and outbound efforts your inside sales team needs:

To be experts in using sale marketing content to move customers from Marketing Qualified Leads to Sales Qualified Leads.
To be accountable for driving insights and recommendations to the marketing team.
To have the tools and technology to provide that feedback.

For true sales and marketing alignment, sales marketing efforts need to focus on generating closed business by supplying qualified deals and helping your buyer to transact. This means your marketing team needs to:

Listen to the voice of the customer and the voice of the sales force
Quickly create content or support the creation of content that moves deals forward
Have their demand generation success scored on their contribution beyond simply putting MQLs in the pipe

To summarize, B2B demand generation is about sales content marketing. In part 2 of this blog series we will cover Gabriel Sales’ simple framework for aligning sales and marketing and simple steps you can take to get sales and marketing to work together towards a shared vision. In part 3 we will discuss how smart sales content marketing can be re-purposed to provide an exponential lift by increasing your marketing teams ability to put better Marketing Qualified Leads into your Sales teams’ pipe; and the role of Marketing Automation Platforms.

If you would like to learn more about how an outsourced demand generation solution may be able to help accelerate this alignment please feel free to CONTACT US for a free initial strategy conversation. Or visit the B2B Demand Generation Resources section of our Website.

To Check out Part 2 in this Series B to B Demand Generation Requires Sales and Marketing Alignment CLICK HERE.