by Glen Springer | Dec 2, 2015
Over the past 10 years over a dozen of our virtual sales and marketing engagements have been supporting the sophisticated sales efforts of call centers, business process outsourcers and knowledge process outsourcers. This has been invaluable in helping us learn how to best provide our clients with operational excellence. We keep our finger on the pulse of innovation, and it has given us a unique perspective of what is necessary to consider on the front end in order to ensure successful engagements.
Outsourcing sales and marketing is unlike any other form of outsourcing or professional service. If done properly, the result looks like a blend of customer service, business process, and knowledge process as well as the creative “art of the close.” It’s our position that sales strategy has shifted, and the focus is on the science and the process, with the art coming second. With that being said, one thing we have learned from working in outsourced models for as long as we have is that there is no universally successful approach. The more you share with your potential partner upfront, the more successful you will be.
So, to kick start this dialogue, we want to focus on the following areas to help those of you considering to outsource sales come to understand our strategy and approach on the front-end:
What am I looking to change about sales and marketing, and how well are they aligned?
More leads, closed deals and more revenue is just the beginning. Am I taking a new product to market? Do I need to improve my margins? Do I want clients that can scale? Do I want to be in a growth vertical? Do I want to sell to the budget makers or the budget spenders? Do I want to be in a new geography? Do I want to empower my channels? Is it about pipe velocity or pipe quality? – All of these questions should already be buzzing about your thought process.
Are my sales team and management currently viewed as a strength or weakness?
It’s tough to bridge the gap between sales and marketing. Everyone likes to sit in their own silo. Sales people especially are often overly optimistic, and marketing has a hard time matching this measurable success and enthusiasm. If you ride them too hard though, they lose confidence and drive. If you don’t hold them accountable than the pipe can’t be expected to bear fruit. A question emerges: does it make sense to delegate that management to a partner that is contractually bound to hit targets and service levels from day one?
Will outsourcing help me to manage my risk?
This is a loaded question, but we find the answer will almost always be yes. Organizations that outsource sales are bound contractually to target, metrics, reporting requirements and feedback requirements most organizations rarely get from their employees. Outsource sales organizations reduce fixed costs and migrate to a variable expense on your P&L’s. Outsourced sales and organizations get rid of your need for hard infrastructure and capital investments in technologies and marketing platforms. With an outsourced team you get a Senior Sales and Marketing Talent, Executive Talent, a functioning sales machine and marketing support for generally the same cost as a senior enterprise rep. For new product launches, outsourced partners provide real time market intelligence right off the bat due to their combination with lead gen activities. You get instant impressions and insight into the marketplace.
For more on Gabriel Sales or B2B sales outsourcing, please contact us.
by gabriel_sales | Jul 22, 2014
Last month, the results of a B2B Video Marketing Benchmark Survey were published—showing that video marketing is on the rise in B2B, with 69% of respondents currently using the tactic.
For those that are engaged in B2B video, 82% reported experiencing at least some type of success in their efforts. While the other 18% prove that there is still room for improvement, this is a good sign for those who have been wary that video could work in B2B.
However, the survey shows that significant barriers remain to achieving success with video. The top barriers listed include:
- No budget (47%)
- Lack of internal resources (45%)
- Creating compelling content (45%)
- Lack of effective strategy (33%)
While it is unsurprising that lack of budget tops the list, the survey suggests the budget barrier may weaken over the next year as the majority of companies plan to increase their video marketing spend. But, the next top barriers on the list show that once budget is taken care of, problems remain.
“Lack of internal resources’, ‘creating compelling content’ and ‘lack of effective strategy’ all point to the same problem: lack of expertise. It seems that even if companies can find the budget for video marketing, they often lack the personnel, skill and strategy to really move the needle in terms of business value. They know they need to do B2B video marketing, but they don’t really know how.
It is no shock then, that “65% of B2B organizations outsource all or part of their video marketing campaigns, gaining the specialized skills and resources not available internally.
Companies that outsource video marketing generally gain several advantages. First, you don’t have to waste time figuring out what works and what doesn’t. The outsourcer has already done that and will offer their best practices, saving you countless hours and dollars. Second, hiring a full-time video expert might not make sense financially if your company only wants to make one video per quarter. With an outside agency or outsourcer, you gain all the skill and expertise needed without incurring the cost or risk of hiring internally.
To learn more about why B2B video marketing is a great idea in 2014, read this quick blog. Feel free to contact us with any questions, or check out our services page if you are interested in B2B video production and management.
by gabriel_sales | Jul 17, 2014
In our last blog, we discussed some of the main challenges B2B companies are having with sales and marketing today. To summarize, the three main challenges are technology implementation and use, developing content that engages customers and proving marketing’s value in a business sense.
This blog will discuss three ways a B2B outsourced sales team can help your marketing efforts by helping to solve these challenges for their clients.
1. They can tell you what types of content you need and what types of content you shouldn’t waste your time with.
Many B2B companies entering the complex world of content marketing know they need content, but they don’t what type of content works in B2B and what type is needed for their specific sales. B2B sales outsourcing teams generally have experience working with dozens of clients in multiple markets and industries and therefore can offer insights and best practices based on what has worked in the past.
For example, engaging in social media marketing can be a lot of work. A B2B sales outsourcing team can tell you which platforms are most and least effective for your solution or market, and save you from spending hours on Twitter when your customers use LinkedIn. An outsourced team can also help in optimizing the content you already have so it is more engaging for buyers. For instance, they may tell you to break up an hour-long webcast into 5-10 minute chunks, making the content more accessible and less overwhelming for those on a time crunch.
2. They can help you use technology to make sure the content gets to the right people.
In addition to helping you create content that delights and engages your customer base, an outsourced B2B sales team can also help you to target the best decision makers and implement technology solutions to help manage and streamline the entire sales and marketing process.
In regards to complex software solutions like marketing automation, an outsourced team can help you through the implementation process and give you the do’s and don’t they have learned along the way. Additionally, they generally know how to integrate content with marketing technology through features like email drip programs, content/lead scoring and real-time alerts.
3. Their reporting yields insights that enable you to quickly improve and refine as time goes on.
An outsourced B2B sales team should report on the work that they do. The type of reporting you receive may vary depending on what company you work with and what your specific sales and marketing goals are. For example, at Gabriel Sales, we provide our clients with at least 12 different types of reporting on a weekly basis—including conversion ratios, email campaign analytics, verbatims of cold calls, etc. We also have weekly or bi-weekly status meeting to discuss progress and needs for improvement.
With this level of detail and transparency, it becomes much easier for companies to understand the value that marketing efforts contribute to the overall business. With all of the relevant data in front of them, companies are able to make better choices regarding strategy, and spend less time trying to figure out whether or not something is working.
If you’d like to know more about the value of B2B sales outsourcing, read 3 Ways B2B Sales Outsourcing Can Turn Around Stagnant Sales. Feel free to check out our services page to learn more about what we do and how we can help.
by Glen Springer | Feb 5, 2014
Many people consider Outsourced Sales and marketing work come to me with some preconceived notions about what they would like to do.
One thing I hear over and over again is the desire to produce outsourced sales or marketing functions using a pay-for-performance model. While the intentions of using a pay-for-performance model are usually good, in practice, there are several reasons why it doesn’t work well for outsourced sales.
The first is in regards to the cost of resources. Let’s take cold callers for example; cold callers are an extremely expensive resource (especially if they are full-time). Cold callers can also require a lot of training before they can become effective.
If everyone is in agreement that cold callers are valuable resources, why would an outsourcer agree to invest in those resources without any guarantee of return on that investment? From a business perspective, it just doesn’t make sense.
Another reason why pay-for-performance does not work well for outsourced sales is that it puts the focus on short-term goals rather than long-term success.
For example, I often get asked if we will take compensation for each appointment set. From a sales reps perspective, this incentivizes the sales rep to ‘hit his number’ by setting as many appointments as possible, regardless of the quality of those appointments. Because, if the only performance metric being looked at is the number of appointments set, the rep has no motivation to put in the extra time and effort to only set meetings with quality prospects that he thinks will eventually close. With no reason to think past hitting his numbers for this week/month, a pay-for-performance sales rep is focused on his short-term goals, not your long-term success.
If you would like to know more about the value of outsourcing B2B sales, read Scale Your Business for Sales with B2B Sales Outsourcing. To learn how we price our sales and marketing outsourcing services, you can visit our services page and click on the different boxes for pricing details.
Feel free to contact us with any questions.
by gabriel_sales | Jan 30, 2014
As we have written about previously, regardless of what the next hot marketing technology or trend is, content will be the fuel that gets us where we want to go. While many companies choose to produce their marketing content internally, there are several reasons that sales outsourcing might be a more cost-effective and efficient solution.
Here are 3 reasons to consider sales outsourcing content creation:
1. Marketers today are expected to act as publishers.
If you look at Salesforce’s blog, they are posting about 7 articles per day. Pardot, one of the leading marketing automation companies in the US, posts at least one every day. Oracle tweeted over 60 times on January 29th.
While your business may not need to be tweeting at the same rate as Oracle, you do need to publish relevant content, and you need to do it frequently. If your company is on the smaller side, this work can exhaust your resources, especially if you do not already have trained writers on staff. Similar to sales outsourcing, by leveraging an outsourced individual/team to write your blog articles and post them to social media, you can quickly and cost-effectively produce more content—improving both sales engagement and SEO.
2. Outsourced content producers understand how to tailor content to fit different stages of the buying cycle.
Each of your prospects is in a slightly different place in their buying cycle, and in order to move on to the next phase, each is going to need to see something slightly different. Prospects early in their buying cycle need to see very basic, educational content that speaks to their specific pains. Prospects closer to purchasing need to see detailed case studies, comparisons, demo videos, etc.
If you are not yet producing different types of content to match the various stages of your buying cycle, an outsourced content production team can help. By helping to map out each stage of your sales process and then coming up with different pieces of content for each, an outsourced team allows you to be confident that your content is actually working to bring prospects through your pipe and directly contributing to ROI.
3. It allows you to stay focused on serving your customers and looking for new revenue opportunities.
If you are at a tech startup or smaller managed services company, you likely do not have all the time in the world to sit around and come up with new ideas for content all the time. Even if you can come up with some ideas, seeing them through to execution can be difficult when you constantly have more pressing matters to attend to.
By leveraging outsourced content producers, you can stay focused on your company’s highest value activities—leaving content production to the experts.
For more on the value of outsourcing content production or other sales and marketing functions, read Scale Your Business for Sales with Sales Outsourcing. Feel free to contact us with any questions.
by gabriel_sales | Jan 7, 2014
As a quick Google search will tell you, the complexity of B2B sales outsourcing is increasing dramatically as we move more and more into a digitally-driven world. In this new world of digital sales tools, marketing automation and customer relationship management, it takes more than a good cold call script to close a deal.
Scaling your business in this environment is going to take a commitment to smart technology use, authentic storytelling and a strategized sales process. Because many B2B companies do not have a marketing automation expert, a trained journalist and a highly experienced sales team on staff, they now are looking to external resources for support.
When it comes to B2B sales outsourcing and marketing, the right solution for any company is going to depend on their existing gaps and current goals. Some companies may only need help with technology implementation (marketing automation consulting), some have struggles that are on a more strategic level, and others need support through execution (content production).
Here are three ways a sales and marketing outsourcing company can provide value to a company looking to scale:
1. Go-to-Market/Market Validation Consulting
Before attempting to scale any kind of business, it is necessary to have a clear picture of your market and your ideal customer profile. With go-to-market strategy or market-validation consulting, you can leverage expert research and advice and test your markets, message and solution before committing to sales and marketing budgets. By paving the way for success beforehand, you can eliminate time spent chasing bad tactics and unnecessary development cycles and instead focus on campaign refinement and optimization.
2. Pipeline development via staff augmentation
Many times, scaling a business is about having the right people on board. By leveraging an outsourced sales and marketing team, you get access to a highly experienced group of experts you likely could not afford to hire internally. This team can help you with all parts of sales pipeline development including content production, email nurturing, SEO, database management, etc.
3. Measurement and reporting
As a service provider, every outsourced sales and marketing team should be accountable for the work they do. As a B2B company looking to scale, the detailed measurement and reporting an outsourced team provides can be extremely valuable. While we cannot speak for every outsourced sales and marketing company, at Gabriel Sales, we provide our clients with twelve different types of reporting on our efforts—from data on conversion ratios to verbatim transcripts of cold calls—and have weekly meetings to discuss our successes and areas for improvement. This increased level of transparency gives companies the ability to better forecast and understand where and how to optimize as they scale.
To learn more about the value of B2B sales outsourcing and marketing, read How an Outsourced Sales Team Can Help Your Marketing Team or 5 Advantages for B2B Sales Outsourcing in 2014. If you are interested in learning more about what we do, you can visit our services page.
Feel free to contact us with any questions.
