What is a lead nurturing workflow?

What is a lead nurturing workflow?

Targeted Marketing and Ideal Customer Profiles Improve Campaigns

What is a lead nurturing workflow work and how does it work?

Consider the ways in which we encounter the word nurture. It’s generally used to describe relationships where a person is entrusted with the role of caregiver. A parent nurtures their child, a teacher nurtures a student, a mentor nurtures us as we pursue a career or a deep personal interest. That concept of the interpersonal relationship is at the center of building and deploying a lead nurturing workflow. So what is a lead nurturing workflow for B2B marketers?

A lead nurturing workflow is a series of automated marketing actions and communications designed to engage and build relationships with leads over time. The goal of a lead nurturing workflow is to keep leads engaged, provide relevant and valuable content, and move them through the buyer’s journey until they are ready to make a purchase decision. With the tools of automation, marketing software helps us deliver a sales prospect an abundance of content that is both customized to their needs, and perhaps more importantly, can be personalized to either the organization or the individual decision makers. Either way, the strategy is a way that we begin to build a relationship with a prospect in the sales funnel and then nurture it as they turn from prospect to qualified lead to customer.

Lead nurturing workflows are typically implemented through marketing automation platforms. These platforms allow marketers to deliver targeted and personalized content to leads based on their behaviors, interests, and stage in the buyer’s journey.

You might engage a prospect with a landing page specific to their interests; that might be paired with another typical building block of inbound marketing, a content offer. Content offers, often referred to as lead magnets, offer prospects some sort of enticement—a discount offer, or perhaps some gated content such as a free download—in exchange for their email address. Whatever your choice of magnet, it’s an important part of beginning to nurture the prospect into your sales funnel. Instead of the old school closer, your role is as a valued partner and educator, guiding the buyer to a purchase decision. Typically, much of that guidance is provided through the use of targeted and personalized emails, which are an important part of your workflow.

There are several marketing automation platforms available that can help you build and execute marketing workflows effectively. These platforms offer various features, integrations, and pricing options to suit the needs of different businesses.

HubSpot is a comprehensive inbound marketing and sales platform that offers a powerful marketing automation tool. It allows you to create and manage marketing workflows, segment leads, deliver personalized content, and track engagement. HubSpot also provides CRM integration, making it easy to align marketing and sales efforts.

Pardot, a Salesforce product, is a B2B marketing automation platform that helps businesses automate lead nurturing, email marketing, and lead scoring. It integrates seamlessly with Salesforce CRM, making it suitable for businesses heavily reliant on Salesforce.

Marketo is a popular marketing automation platform that offers lead management, email marketing, campaign management, and reporting capabilities. It caters to B2B and B2C businesses and provides advanced features for lead nurturing and engagement.

ActiveCampaign is a versatile marketing automation platform that offers a user-friendly interface and robust automation capabilities. It allows you to create automation workflows based on various triggers and actions and provides CRM and email marketing functionalities.

Whatever tools you choose, each step of the buyer’s journey needs specialized content to move your buyer from their initial awareness of a problem to their investment in your product or service as a solution.

Here’s how a lead nurturing workflow generally works

  1. Segmentation: Leads are segmented based on their characteristics, interests, and behaviors. This segmentation allows marketers to create tailored content and messages for each group of leads.
  2. Lead Capture: Leads are captured through various channels such as landing pages, website forms, content downloads, or events.
  3. Automated Triggers: Once a lead enters the nurturing workflow, automated triggers are set up to initiate the sequence of communications. These triggers can be based on actions like form submissions, content downloads, email opens, or website visits.
  4. Welcome Email: The first communication in the nurturing workflow is often a welcome email. This email thanks the lead for their interest and sets the tone for further interactions.
  5. Content Delivery: Over the course of the workflow, leads receive a series of targeted and relevant content, such as blog posts, e-books, whitepapers, videos, webinars, and case studies. The content is designed to educate, address pain points, and provide value to the lead.
  6. Lead Scoring: As leads engage with the content and interact with the emails, their level of engagement is tracked through lead scoring. Lead scoring assigns values to different actions, helping marketers identify the most engaged and qualified leads.
  7. Progression: As leads continue to interact with the content and move further along the buyer’s journey, the nurturing workflow can adapt and provide more advanced and targeted content.
  8. Sales Handoff: When a lead reaches a certain level of engagement and meets specific criteria, they are deemed “sales-ready” and can be handed off to the sales team for further follow-up and conversion.
  9. Continuous Nurturing: For leads that are not yet ready to make a purchase, the nurturing workflow continues to provide relevant content and maintain engagement until they reach the decision stage.
  10. Measure and Optimize: Throughout the lead nurturing process, marketers continuously measure the performance of the workflow. They analyze open rates, click-through rates, conversion rates, and other metrics to optimize the content and timing for better results.

Lead nurturing workflows play a critical role in building relationships with potential customers, keeping the brand top-of-mind, and guiding leads towards making informed purchase decisions. By providing personalized and valuable content at the right time, businesses can increase the likelihood of converting leads into loyal customers.

 

5 Situations in Which Outsourced Sales and Marketing Helps Small Business Thrive

5 Situations in Which Outsourced Sales and Marketing Helps Small Business Thrive

Should you build a strong internal team, or consider outsourced sales and marketing helps small business grow operation? The question commonly arises for growing businesses with limited resources. Accounting, production, and other department face the same general question. So naturally, the same is true for sales and marketing.

Some vendors will tell you that outsourcing is always the better idea. That’s not necessarily the case. While working with an external partner is undoubtedly beneficial in some situations, others may actually benefit from an in-house approach. Don’t be seduced by a vendor that pushes sales outsourcing simply because they want your business to build their own revenue.

Instead, approach the question strategically. Determine whether or not you should outsource your sales and marketing operations based on your unique business situation. Evaluate your environment, capacity, business goals, and priorities. The fewer variables remain, the better your final decision will be for your situation.

Make no mistake: outsourced marketing can help your small or medium-sized business thrive. And yet, according to one recent survey, only 3% of SMBs actually work with an external marketing vendor. Should you be part of that exclusive group? Your business finds itself in one of the below five situations, the answer might just be yes.

Here are 5 Situations in Which Outsourced Sales and Marketing Helps Small Business Thrive

1) Your Business Lacks Marketing and Sales Integration

The age of cold calls is long gone. Too often, business owners and decision makers consider marketing and sales to be two distinct operations. The problem is that your target audience doesn’t see it that way.

Whether they read your website content or receive a sales email, they’re thinking of the same brand. That means your messaging and strategy has to be consistent, regardless of whether you’re writing about industry trends to build credibility or delivering a sales pitch.

That means the two efforts and teams have to match up. The goal of both is to acquire and retain customers, with marketing providing the initial brand awareness and leads that your sales efforts are designed to close. Align your marketing and sales team, and the results can be astounding. Consider the statistics:

  • 56% of aligned organizations met their revenue goals, and 19% beat their goals.
  • Sales and marketing alignment delivers, on average, a 36% improvement in customer retention and 38% higher sales-win rates.­­
  • Aligned organizations achieve up to 19% faster revenue growth – and 15% higher profitability.

And yet, too often, the opposite is the case. Sales and marketing operate as distinct entities, with their own unique goals. As a result, they often become isolated, and the organization fails to reach business goals. When that happens, you might need to consider working with an external marketing and sales vendor.

Through this type of partnership, the alignment becomes more natural. Rather than having to spend time managing both units on your end, you can work with a partner who builds a wholistic, strategic approach that encompasses both. Especially to begin the integration process on your end, this can be a crucial step.

2) You Lack the Capacity or Resources to Manage an In-House Team

Managing a sales and marketing team can be difficult. Sales especially faces common obstacles, as you need to keep the balance of a confident staff not overburdened by challenging goals that still is motivated enough to meet these goals.

Beat them up too much about your sales goals, and they lose confidence. Fail to hold them accountable, and the sales pipe built by marketing never bears fruit. When you cannot hold that balance, while folding marketing into the mix, it might make sense to delegate your sales and marketing management to an external partner.

Through that partner, you can set firm goals that are both strategic and ambitious. Both the chances of hitting these goals and the satisfaction of your organizational team will increase drastically.

Resource limitations pose a similar problem. Organizational expertise takes time to develop, because it tends to be driven by measurement and verification against feedback loop. You need the historical data to benchmark your performance against, which can be impossible when you’re starting from scratch.

Plugging your sales goals into an existing sales process and operation means you can save your resources for other organizational priorities. That’s especially crucial if you need to focus your talent and executive leadership on those aspects of your core business.

Is your time better spent in business development than sales? Does your delivery, client satisfaction, or product development need more attention? Outsourcing your sales may be the key to focus on your core business needs without neglecting the growth of your customer base.

3) You Need to Control Your Operational Risk

Especially as a startup grows, but also throughout your growth cycle as a business, managing operational risk is crucial. Outsourcing your customer growth initiatives will almost always help to accomplish that goal.

Put simply, working with an external sales or marketing partner will remove a significant chunk of your fixed costs and move them to a variable expense, for a number of reasons:

  • You won’t need hard infrastructure investments n technologies and marketing platforms.
  • You won’t need to hire a full-time sales and marketing staff.
  • Your investment will be more closely tied to output, rather than becoming an inevitable expense.
  • Total costs of a fully functioning sales machine, including talent, managers, executives, and marketing support will range around the cost of a single senior enterprise representative.
  • You will not need to invest in ongoing training and development to keep your own sales and marketing staff active and successful.

In most cases, outsourced sales organizations are bound contractually to hit their targets, report on progress and benchmarks, and provide feedback that can improve your organization. The result is a more informed, data-based sales strategy that is more likely to succeed.

Managing your risk also becomes a qualitative function. Over the past few years, sales execution has become more buyer-focused, moving from the relatively linear ‘traditional’ process to a more fluid, credibility-based alternative. You either have to add new resources to account for that trend, or risk wasting your resources on an outdated, ineffective model.

But if you hire for this shift to a buyer-centric environment, you run into another risk. Adding full-time executives to your sales and marketing team might mean you begin to accumulate too many strategists, and not enough soldiers. Pulling together the strategic side and tactical execution of both sales and marketing is expensive, and can incur significant uncertainty. In an outsourced approach, that is not the case. The same partner will account for both sides of the coin, building an initial and ongoing strategy that tightly integrates with its execution.

4) You Have to Reduce Your Time to Market

The time to market for your business or product may matter for a number of reasons. You might need to contend with a highly competitive environment, satisfy your investors, or ensure the fulfillment of pre-orders. A number of factors influence that process, but don’t forget about your marketing and sales operations.

Even the most well-built product or service cannot effectively reach the market if you don’t know how to unlock your future customers. You need both an understanding of your market, as well as a strategy and a team ready to leverage that understanding into actual sales results.

When you outsource, you get the benefit of plugging into an existing mechanism to achieve those goals:

  • Your sales strategy can be built even as you’re still developing the product.
  • The technologies and platforms needed for an effective sales and marketing execution are already in place.
  • You can tap into a sales and marketing team that is already aligned and works well together.
  • You don’t have to spend time onboarding a new team for your business.
  • You can leverage existing, real-time market intelligence to keep a pulse on the market and adjust your strategy as necessary.

Time to Market is not always an important consideration. But when it is, outsourcing can quickly become a crucial step. You save valuable time in getting your product ready for and in front of your audience. Recruiting, building, and training your sales force can take months if not years. External marketing and sales can help you avoid delays that could otherwise devastate your competitiveness.

5) You Need to Scale a Growing Operation

Time to market, of course, is only one consideration. As demand grows, your business needs to keep pace. Even if you’ve built up a reliable internal sales operation for a startup, that operation may no longer be effective as you grow into  a mid-size business.

The same is true on the opposite end. In fact, downsizing your sales and marketing may be even more difficult than upsizing the same process. Thanks in part to the fixed costs mentioned above, you will be saddled with investments and resources that cannot be effectively deployed.

Now, consider the alternative of working with an external sales partner. The right provider already has the ability to manage any increase or decrease in scale built into the system. The technology platforms account for both growth and declines. The phone systems and workforce are in place to adjust as needed.

The same is also true if you want to grow to a specific size and revenue, then stabilize. During your growth phase, it might make sense to work with an outsourced vendor. As you reach majority, you can work with the same vendor to transfer the earned infrastructure and expertise in-house, and establish your own sales operations. As long as you’re open and honest about that intent from the beginning, you can find a vendor that helps both in the build-up and the transfer.

Should You Outsource Your Sales and Marketing Efforts?

There is no simple answer to that question. Instead, you should evaluate your current situation, and determine based on your existing infrastructure as well as forecasted sales whether finding an outsourced provider makes sense. If you find yourself in any of the above situations, the answer will probably be yes.

In that case, you still need to find a reliable partner who can actually accomplish everything that outsourced marketing and sales are capable of. That provider should not just possess built-up expertise in your core area of need, but also the desire to become a true partner who is invested in your business success.

We can be that partner for you. Outsourced sales and marketing helps small businesses grow. In fact, our integrated approach to modern marketing and sales makes us the perfect fit to help your business grow and optimize its sales efforts. Contact us for more information, and to start discussing a potential partnership.

 

About Us

Gabriel Sales specializes in helping SMBs and Startups grow their business with modern outsourced 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.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Why Outsourced Sales and Marketing Works

Why Outsourced Sales and Marketing Works

Outsourced Sales Integrated Campaign

How Outsourced Sales and Marketing Works to Keep You Focused on What Matters Most

 

Goethe shared the maxim “Things which matter most should never be at the mercy of things that matter least.”

Vince Lombardi was a champion because he lived by the creed that “Success demands a singleness of purpose.”

And the greatest lesson Garry Keller learned when building one of the largest real estate agencies in the world in a little over a decade is this: “Multitasking is a lie…You can do two things at once, but you can’t focus effectively on two things at once.” In his book “The One” he makes a compelling and succinct argument for focus:

“Success demands singleness of purpose. You need to be doing fewer things for more effect instead of doing more things with side effects. It is those who concentrate on but one thing at a time who advance in this world.” He goes on to state, “Passion for something leads to disproportionate time practicing or working at it. That time spent eventually translates to skill, and when skill improves, results improve. Better results generally lead to more enjoyment, and more passion and more time is invested. It can be a virtuous cycle all the way to extraordinary results.”

How does all this impact sales and demand generation for your business? It appears to be a daunting challenge. Especially when we all know that no “one thing” works in isolation to generate qualified sales opportunities because:

  • Cold Calling stopped working on its own because buyers simply pick up the phone less.
  • Email marketing is a great and cost effective way to generate early stage leads, but the leads then need to be nurtured, then prioritized to maximize your calling budget.
  • Email spam filters are making it harder to deliver messages without following best practices.
  • You need systems expertise and best practices to get the most from your CRM and marketing automation platforms.
  • LinkedIn is still valuable, but requires more focus because it is becoming cluttered and pushed as a marketing tool after it’s acquisition by Microsoft.
  • Other social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram work until they don’t, and are slowly embracing PPC business models to compete with Google, which is driving up costs of acquisition.
  • For all these marketing channels you need a consistent flow of quality and substantive video and digital content to educate buyers, improve your visibility on search engines and to generate leads.
  • Finally, success requires that you don’t get distracted by what you could do. With the proliferation of social media adoption and content marketing, there are quite simply too many choices; we are all flooded with the latest “magic bullet” daily. These distractions can have us chasing our tails, thinking about what we could do vs. what we should do.

There are no new magic bullets. Generating sales opportunities still requires sharing your truth authentically with substantive content using multiple methods. You then need to have conversations with buyers that are interested in speaking with you.  And these fundamental tactics work best if they are done simultaneously. Success requires hard work, done consistently for an extended period of time.

As John Wooden, former UCLA basketball coach and owner of the most consecutive championships of any coach all time, puts it: “If you keep too busy learning the tricks of the trade, you may never learn the trade…I discovered early on that the player who learned the fundamentals of basketball is going to have a much better chance of succeeding and rising through the levels of competition than the player who has talent but doesn’t focus on developing fundamentals daily and was content to do things his own way.”

Picture12The challenge that many stretched executives face when they push through growth stages is, there are an infinite amount of things they “could” do to have a positive impact on their business.  And often the things they “could” do are more comfortable, sit in their core skill sets, more innovative and often more fun. As a result, the mundane (and frankly boring) fundamental tasks required on a regular basis for successful demand generation and growth start to slip through the cracks. At first, it happens occasionally. Long term some of these fundamental tasks are often neglected completely.

With all these moving parts, fundamental tasks and distractions, it’s no surprise executives and senior sales professionals trying to grow sales demand struggle. Lack of consistent focus on “should do” tasks creates inconsistent results, especially when the tasks are assigned to existing employees without the passion, experience or expertise.

Executives and employees often have the best intentions, but sales and marketing success requires a commitment a set of fundamental  demand generation tasks on a daily, weekly and monthly basis. For resources that are already stretched, these “should do” tasks quickly become interruptions and are reprioritized and turned into “could do” tasks.  And “could do” tasks are ignored for more primary responsibilities. Ultimately, demand generation is like athletic training – if you don’t put in the time, you don’t reap the benefits.

Because of distractions, inconsistent commitment to fundamental daily, weekly and monthly tasks, and a lack of focus, we see businesses across the country with great sales and marketing strategies, great stories to tell and great products, struggle to take sales to the next level.

When you work with an outsourced sales and marketing company, you can be confident and expect that your team will be passionately focused on one thing – putting qualified sales leads in your sales team’s funnel.

You can also expect that your outsourced sales and marketing team will focus on the following fundamental tasks on a daily, weekly and monthly basis.

Your Content Marketing Team – Will help you turn your thought leadership into substantive content in multiple formats including; Articles, Checklists, Videos and Webcasts that:

  • Can be used for email marketing and lead nurturing in your automation systems
  • Can be leveraged for SEO and PPC
  • Can be leveraged by business development reps and sales reps to use as part of their sales processes
  • Can be shared on social media

And that content will be created in the right formats and distributed consistently at the right cadence to meet your specific competitive needs.

Your Email Marketing Lead Generation Team – Will source the best lists from vetted vendors to produce targets and leads to feed the top of your sales funnel with leads that can buy or influence the purchase of your product.

Your Inbound Marketing Team – Will focus on your PPC, SEO and Social Media results.

  • Your PPC resource will track your results weekly, and analyze your results monthly, to optimize campaigns incrementally when possible to ensure you maximize your budget.
  • They will create quality content that Google and your buyers appreciate and consistently optimize it for specific keywords to help you climb in natural search when possible.
  • They will consistently distribute your content in social media channels for additional exposure.

Your Marketing Database Admin and System Technologist – Will keep your system optimized to produce sales results and make sure your automation and CRM systems are running smoothly, ensuring your automation tools are scoring and prioritizing effectively for your callers.

Business Development Reps –  Your first touch callers:

  • They will call prioritized leads with call volume targets on a daily basis
  • They will start to build helpful relationships with potential buyers
  • They will conduct pre-qualification calls for need and potential interest
  • They will ask for an appointment with a senior rep when it makes sense

Sales Reps/Managers – Will move and steward deals through the funnel on a daily basis.

  • They will stay on top of the hottest leads
  • They will qualify for needs, budget process and decision making process
  • The will schedule appointment with sales engineers and your team’s senior resources
  • They will manage deals through the sales process to closing

Account Managers – Keep the entire team aligned and “Account”able for hitting targets and milestones.

  • They will ensure calling and conversion targets are intelligently set and met
  • They will ensure callers are focused on prioritizing calls correctly
  • The will keep the marketing team on track and on time producing the right content and filling the pipe with new leads at the right cadence
  • They will manage the feedback loops with your executive team so the right insights are shared and the right pivots are recommended

As John Wooden put it: 

 “The star of the team is the team and it takes ten hands to score a basket. Time lost is time lost. It’s gone forever. Some people tell themselves that they will work twice as hard tomorrow to make up for what they did not do today. If they work twice as hard tomorrow, then they should have also worked twice as hard today. That would have been their best.”

An outsourced sales and marketing team will allow your team to focus on what they do best. Because an outsourced sales and marketing team will consistently focus on the fundamental daily, weekly and monthly tasks required for your demand generations success.

About Gabriel Sales

Gabriel Sales specializes in helping SMBs and Start Ups launch modern sales and marketing operations and build successful and custom best practice strategies to consistently generate sales qualified leads. To learn more about our outsourced sales and marketing services, we invite you to visit our outsource sales and marketing services page.

 

 

 

How Outsourced Sales and Marketing Qualify Leads

How Outsourced Sales and Marketing Qualify Leads

Over the past several years, the lines between sales and marketing have been blurred. This is especially true when it comes to qualifying B2B leads. As an outsourced sales and marketing company, we see both good and bad B2B lead qualification processes. And with the new digital buyer, we believe that the most successful path to qualify leads is now a combination of sales and marketing working together to get the most from your sales and marketing budget.   We believe this is one area where considering an outsourced team may make sense. Here is how outsourced sales and marketing qualify leads.

Call B2B Leads Immediately

We all know that there are huge advantages to following up immediately. Buyers have short memories, so you need to strike while the iron is hot. If a call is made instantly after a webinar or a form fill, the buyer may not be ready to buy, but they will be more likely to answer a handful of initial qualification questions about time frame, budget, and why they’re interested. The added bonus is, if the buyer is ready to start evaluating vendors, the first several vendors to reach out will be at the front of the line and the likelihood of getting on their short list increases dramatically.

It is also important that when you get and inbound lead or generate an outbound lead, you immediately drop it into your marketing automation platform. This will keep you top of mind and allow the buyer to learn more about your company (and brand your company) on their own time – not on your caller’s time.

An outsourced sales and marketing company can provide the staff to help you stay on top of all inbound leads.

Understand who you’re qualifying

Do your homework. Research shows, only 2 out of 10 callers take the time to do even a minute or two of research prior to making a qualifying call. Take the time to understand whom you’re qualifying and what the company does.

This is especially true when calling senior executives. The more you demonstrate your knowledge about their company and industry, the more likely they’ll share information about their needs and challenges.

An outsourced sales company will already have the necessary tools and the trained staff to make researching the buyer easier and more cost efficient.

Be Smart About Whom You Call

Building a buyer persona and an ideal customer profile is now critical to getting the most out of your marketing and sales budget. If you hit the mark targeting the right industries and companies,  you’ve already qualified for the first level of fit.

Calling is the most expensive part of B2B lead qualification, so you need to focus on buyers and influencers most likely to buy. Today, you absolutely need to separate the buyers most likely to buy, so you can focus your time on these buyers first, and the easiest way to do this is to use your marketing automation platform to score the buyers most engaged with your digital content.

Outsourced sales and marketing qualify leads faster because they will have a blended team in place that can target correctly, acquire databases faster, and have the automation best practice expertise to help you use your marketing automation to score leads more effectively.

You No Longer Need to Qualify Immediately

BANT is dead. If a potential buyer doesn’t have the budget and authority immediately, it doesn’t mean the lead is dead – it simply means it may take more time to qualify. If a prospect has the need, you can now drop them into your automation campaigns, and over time, as their interest starts to grow, the timeline and budget will start to appear.

Not to state the obvious, but new leads need to be prioritized, but only 10% of qualified leads convert into immediate sales. Granted, there is tremendous gratification in that, but 90% of your B2B leads now take time to develop, which often requires a combination of continued marketing and occasional phone calls. Keep leads in your system until they opt out.

About Gabriel Sales Outsourced Sales and Marketing

Gabriel Sales build modern sales and marketing operation for small businesses and startup.  We use best outsourced sales and marketing practices and modern sales and marketing to qualify leads and run intergrated sales and marketing campaigns to build a consistent flow of quality leads.

Repeatable Outsourced Sales Process

 

To learn more about our outsourced sales and marketing  and decide if this may be the right approach for you please visit our new approach to outsourced sales page.

 

Outsourced Sales Product Launch

Outsourced Sales Product Launch

In this accelerating and highly competitive business environment, innovation is critical for continued growth. As Bob Dylan aptly wrote, “Those not busy being born are busy dying.” In some cases, this is adding additional services for existing clients; while in other cases, this can mean a new product launch.

When your new product is ready to launch, you have a decision to make. You can give the product to your existing sales team, but this may distract them from staying focused on your core business. Or you may consider hiring a new sales rep – or multiple sales reps; however, the challenge with this approach is that hiring and training a new sales team that understands the market takes time and costs money. And with everything else surrounding a new product launch, most executives will already have a great deal on their plate.

This is when considering an outsourced sales product launch may make sense. An outsourced sales product launch will have the following key advantages:

  • Quick and effective go to market strategy – an outsourced sales company will be able to work with your executives to craft a go to market strategy.
  • Content production support – an outsourced sales company can recommend and cover gaps in the content required to take a new product to market.
  • No recruiting costs – you can tap into a blended team of sales and marketing professionals, reducing the costs of launching your new product.
  • Faster to market – with a team ready to go you will get to market faster, giving you a competitive advantage or keeping a competitor within distance.
  • No hiring and training new salespeople – you will not need to spend valuable time training a team.
  • Sales experts who can help you hone your strategy – an outsourced sales company will have a team that knows how to work together and how to communicate and share new strategies that may help your business as they’ll know what sales and marketing tactics work best.
  • Tools for measuring success – an outsourced sales company that specializes in running new product launches will understand how to implement CRM and Marketing Automation Systems. Furthermore, they will be able to run these tools in parallel, or they can help you to refine your existing tools to measure the key metrics for success, so you get smarter faster.
  • Lower cost to test multiple lead generation tactics – an outsourced sales company will be able to run multiple types of campaigns simultaneously, including:
    • email campaigns to generate leads and build awareness
    • PPC campaigns to generate leads and build awareness
    • Cold Calling campaigns to generate leads from your most important targets
    • Marketing automation campaigns to develop and score leads
    • Follow up calling campaigns to qualify leads and set appointments

About Gabriel Sale Outsourced Sales Product Launch

If you aren’t sure how to effectively build a strategy or launch a campaign for a new product, an outsourced sales company may help get you to market faster and more effectively at a lower cost. Many companies have pursued this strategy effectively in the past. You can learn more about Gabriel Sales outsourced sales results from our outsourced sales case studies.

Gabriel Sales provides sales outsourcing and marketing services to help Start Ups and SMBs modernize their sales and marketing operations. To learn more about our approach to helping companies address the new digitally-driven buyer, you can also check out our About Us page.

 

How B2B Sales Outsourcing Lead Generation Works in 2017

2017 has gotten off to a solid start for most B2B companies and the economy is continuing to gain momentum quarter after quarter.  So what company would’t want to have more qualified sales opportunities every month. Even with the economy headed the right direction, almost every sales executive and sales rep we speak with can still handle more quality sales appointments. In fact, when surveyed at the end of 2016, my Marketing Profs generating and setting appointments with qualified opportunities continues to be the number one focus of most small businesses trying to scale. It’s also become one of the most challenging parts of the sales process for similar reason at most small businesses:

  • Buyers have so many lead gen reps approaching them daily, it’s harder and harder for a sales person to break through and connect.
  • Sales reps don’t have the time required for generation leads on a daily basis
  • Prospects require sales reps to share quality content once they do connect
  • More and more buyers are educating themselves online, trying to avoid talking to a sales rep until they are well educated – prospects are doing so much of the fact-finding on their own. They are looking for ideas, suggestions, and resources online, and not even involving a sales person at that stage of their journey.

What would happen to your revenue growth if you had a consistent flow of leads coming into your organization on a monthly and weekly and basis? And what if these leads were prioritized, so if your closers or Sales Development Reps had limited bandwidth, they could call the buyers most likely to be interested first.

This is now possible by integrating sales and marketing functions to run sales and marketing campaigns. It is not a magic bullet; it takes hard work, but the idea is simple. A B2B sales outsourcing can help you do the hard work.  A B2B sales outsourcing and marketing company can help you take the information that used to be exclusively be  shared by a sales rep and a sales engineer early in the sales process and create digital content that in effect clones that sales process. You then need to share the content with your buyers in multiple ways. In doing this, buyers can find your information online, or you can share it in email campaigns, or your sales development reps can share with the buyers early in the sales conversation.

Granted the concept is not a new one.  You use marketing to attract buyers, but the way you now have to put all the pieces together is more important than ever. . Here are 5 steps you need to take to generate more leads on your own or with a B2B sales outsourcing partner:

Map Your Sales Process and Your Buyers Journey – Document every step in your sales process. Document each step in your Buyer’s Journey. Create a content map of the questions and information you share at every stage of the buyer’s journey.

Create Content to Share Your Expertise. Commit to creating digital content that replicates the information needed for the buyer journey. Use a combination of head shot videos, screencast videos, short webcasts, blogs and checklists.  A B2B Sales outsourcing company like Gabriel Sales can run a content production workshop to help you create enough content for three to six months of your initial effort over a quick several day period. Long-term (after you get through your first wave of content), you will need to be prepared to continue to create two to four additional pieces of content per quarter.

Share the Content through a Marketing Automation Platform – Start sending content on a regular basis with a marketing automation platform.

Score the Leads –  Use the marketing automation to score lead engagement with the content you send and any other content they find on their own on your website.

Share Content as Part of Your Calling Efforts –  Have a piece of content to share when you cold call. Sharing is caring and you will generate more early stage leads this way.

Share it in social media – You can publish directly on LinkedIn, and push through Twitter, as well as host videos on your website and in your YouTube channel. And don’t forget about Google+.

When your prospects see you as an expert who can add real value, they will be happy to take your call and meet with you. And with scored leads, you can prioritize the buyers most likely to buy.

About Gabriel  Sales B2B Sales Outsourcing

Gabriel Sales helps companies transform their sales and marketing with:

  • Sales Consulting
  • Outsourced Sales and Marketing
  • Sales Automation Systems Implementation

To learn more about our philosophy and how we may be able to help we invite you to visit our About Us page.  Or you can check out our outsourced sales and marketing services here