by gabriel_sales | Dec 4, 2013
This is part-two of a two-part blog series on the advantages of hiring a B2B sales outsourcing company in 2014. Click here for part one.
Identify or Confirm Appropriate Market Segmentation and Ideal Customer Profile
Understanding who you are selling to and who your best customers are is much harder in B2B than it is in B2C—mostly because B2B products/services are generally more complex and abstract. In addition, there are generally now multiple decision makers involved in the buying process, each of whom often having different needs and concerns.
Coming up with the right combination of segmentation and messaging is a task that can overwhelm many B2B sales and marketing teams. Getting audience segmentation right often requires a lot of experimentation and small adjustments, and many teams simply do not have time for this. Leveraging a sales and marketing outsourcing company allows you to identify your ideal customer profile and perfect your market segmentation while keeping your top producers focused on revenue generating activities.
Leverage Proven Sales Methodologies and Years of Sales Experience
IT firms live and breathe IT. Real estate companies live and breathe real estate. The same goes for sales outsourcing companies—sales is what they know. By hiring a sales outsourcing company, you gain the years or experience and expertise of a team who spends their days fully immersed in selling.
A quality B2B sales and marketing outsourcing organization also keeps constant track of the changes and trends happening in selling and buying. The fast-pace of the internet and web technologies means changes now happen constantly, and being ahead of the curve can give you a huge edge on the competition. By hiring a sales outsourcing team, you don’t have to worry about keeping up with every trend and change happening in sales and marketing. Your outsourced sales team will take care of that for you—leaving you to focus on serving your customers.
Ability to Execute Quickly and Understand Results
By leveraging a sales and marketing outsourcing company, you not only gain the ability to quickly execute effective campaigns, but you also gain a clearer understanding of the impact of those campaigns. At Gabriel Sales, we use multiple measurement and analytics tools to help our customers get a clear picture of the effectiveness of all of their efforts and work with them to optimize everything we can.
By combining the insights from search data, marketing automation, sales technologies and website analytics, you can get a clearer picture of your market, your prospects, your competitors and your overall impact. By hiring a sales outsourcing company to help, you can derive insights from data more quickly in order to maximize efficiency and optimize ROI.
If you are interested in learning about the integrated B2B sales and marketing outsourcing services we provide, you can visit our services page. Feel free to contact us with any questions.
by gabriel_sales | Dec 4, 2013
Why a sales outsourcing company?
As 2013 nears its end, it is time to start looking to how to make 2014 your best sales year ever. B2B digital sales and marketing gets more and more complex and competitive by the day, and staying ahead of the game in terms of the latest tactics and techniques is a difficult task. We may be biased, but we believe the best way to dramatically increase revenue and decrease your cost of sale is to leverage a B2B sales outsourcing company.
Here are top 5 advantages of hiring a B2B outsourced sales company:
Speed to Success
In the world of B2B sales and marketing, web technologies, search platforms, measurement tools and more have made the landscape increasingly complex. You can no longer simply put up a website and expect to win business. Sales and marketing now involves website development and management in as well as sales pipeline management, digital content marketing, lead nurturing, customer relationship management and more.
If you are still in early stages of development in terms of a fully integrated and digital sales and marketing strategy, a B2B sales outsourcing organization may be a great option. Trying to develop and implement a strategy on your own can be extremely time consuming, and that long of a learning curve is more than many companies can afford. By leveraging a sales outsourcing company to help you develop and execute sales and marketing campaigns, you can reduce your learning curve dramatically and start seeing your revenue increase much faster.
Help You Navigate or Perfect Marketing Automation Software
Regardless of what industry or market you are in, if your competitor is leveraging marketing automation and you aren’t, you are in trouble. Industry reports now show that almost two-thirds of marketers are currently using marketing automation software as a part of their sales and marketing strategy, and 81% plan to fully adopt in 2014 (MarketingProfs).
As marketing automation consultants, we are true proponents of marketing automation and the tremendous value it can bring to a company. However, this value can only be realized if significant time and effort are put into the implementation and ongoing management of the platform. This is where hiring a sales outsourcing team with marketing automation experience can give you an enormous advantage. Instead of spending a year or more trying to learn the functionalities and best practices of a foreign platform, you can hire a team who knows that platform inside and out to help you expedite the entire implementation process and get you set up for ongoing success.
To continue reading click here.
by gabriel_sales | Oct 21, 2013
In the whizzing world of social media, it seems like everyday, at least one of your platforms has a new feature, functionality or update. You finally get used to your new homepage or profile layout, and Facebook changes it again the next day.
If you want to use social media as a part of your B2B marketing strategy, it pays to be in the know of the constant changes these sites make. While not every change may lead to a change in your strategy, it is good to make sure you know what’s going on, so all of your bases are covered.
Here are 3 Recent Changes in B2B Social Media Marketing
1. Google wants your blogs to be more relevant and less keyword-obsessed.
Google started using a new search-algorithm in late August called ‘hummingbird’ that is semantic-based and is supposed to be more conversational. In terms of written content like blogs, this means that simply throwing the same phrase or keyword in there 10 times is no longer going to do anything. Google now rewards high-quality, original blog content that truly answers the question it says it does. Google has also started featuring an “In-depth Articles” section on some search results pages, which means we could see an increase in the average length of blog posts.
2. (Almost) Everything is searchable on Facebook now.
Earlier this year, Facebook released its Graph Search, which allows users to search for people via “likes” or other demographic details (subject to privacy settings). Last month, the functionality of Graph Search expanded to include status updates, photo captions, check-ins and comments in search queries. This new search capability makes it easier to find information regarding a specific place or topic and will also help open up a new audience for businesses doing online marketing.
3. Twitter has a new recommendation notification.
The pace that Twitter moves makes it hard to keep up with everything and everyone you have interest in. If you aren’t on Twitter 24/7, it is likely you are going to miss something like a great retweet or a prospect you could have followed. @MagicRecs was released last month by Twitter to help eliminate this problem by giving you “personalized recommendations when multiple people in your network follow the same user or favorite or retweet the same Tweet.” Using @MagicRecs, you can stay on the pulse of Twitter with no little to no effort on your part.
If you’d like to learn more about Google’s recent changes, click here. If you have any questions or need help with B2B social media marketing, feel free to contact us.
by gabriel_sales | Jun 24, 2013
As B2B sales and marketing continues to adapt to paradigm shifts in technology and culture, marketers are finding new ways to communicate with prospects and deliver engaging content.
One of the most popular ways to deliver messages in the new digital sales space is through the use of B2B sales or marketing videos. Videos can be effective for B2B sales for many reasons.
The first reason is that unlike a white paper or text-heavy blog article, videos can make use of color, motion and sound to grab and hold your viewers attention. Second, you can use infographics and visually engaging representations of data to tell your brand story in a completely new way. Third, by putting your voice and or face on screen, your prospects feel that they are getting to know you, which will help you earn their trust.
The first thing you need to do when creating a B2B sales or marketing video is determine what you want the video to do for your company. Do you want to educate, entertain, build trust, differentiate or sell? Once you have decided your desired function for the video, you need to pick a structure and format conducive to your choice.
Are you trying to position yourself as a thought leader in the industry? Then you need an educational video that talks about industry news, trends or insights. In the example below from Gabriel Sales, CEO Glen Springer addresses the recent purchase of SalesForce by ExactTarget. His video answers a question many people in the industry are currently asking (“Why did Salesforce Buy ExactTarget for 2.5B?”) in a way that also demonstrates value for Gabriel Sales’ services. This video is therefore able to showcase Springer’s industry expertise while simultaneously educating prospects for Gabriel Sales.
Another way to educate your prospects with video is to simply explain what you do. In the B2B world, many products and services are not self-explanatory and require a fair amount of education to get the prospect to understand value. In the example below, Gabriel Sales’ COO Carol Springer explains what B2B demand generation is and the process Gabriel Sales goes through to generate demand for our clients. While the video does attempt to sell Gabriel Sales services, it is still educational in tone and content.
Click here to watch the video.
If your aim with B2B video is instead to build trust or convince your prospect to transact, client testimonials are a great option. By having someone else sing your praises, you get to sell without being the annoying and pushy salesman that everyone hates. In the example below, Gabriel Sales’ customer Solution Dynamics talks about the value that Gabriel Sales services have brought to the company during their 18-month relationship.
Click here to watch the video.
In summary, creating B2B sales videos can be an effective way to engage new customers and even close deals. It is important to remember to determine the purpose or function of the video you want to create and then match the tone and content accordingly.
If you would like more information on B2B sales videos, or have any questions about Gabriel Sales services, please feel free to contact us.
by gabriel_sales | Jun 20, 2013
This is Part 2 of a 4-part blog series discussing the need for expert solutions for B2B sales and marketing in 2013.
In the third part of this blog series, we explained that sales expertise, technological capabilities, the ability to produce a mountain of marketing content, a little bit of storytelling and some social intuition are required for successful B2B sales in 2013.
In light of this daunting and expensive list, many companies have turned to experts for help.
Here are some analogies to illustrate this point: If you had a cockroach infestation in your home, would you buy the equipment and get the training to do the exterminating yourself, or would you call an expert? Or, if you or your partner goes into labor, do you think, “I can handle this on my own,” or do you call a doctor or midwife that has been delivering children for years?
Similarly, by hiring a B2B sales and marketing outsourcing company, you get the benefit of new insights, technologies and capabilities without having to learn everything yourself. Sales and marketing outsourcing companies have been paying attention to how the rules of buying and selling have evolved because that is the water they are swimming in.
At Gabriel Sales, we have been helping B2B companies increase sales and revenue and close more deals, faster for over 13 years. We have been closely monitoring industry trends and are using the most up-to-date and efficient internet technologies available.
We have a streamlined discovery process to help you quickly plan and execute integrated and scalable B2B Sales, Content Marketing, Lead Management and Pipeline Development Programs. We make the complex simple by combining your knowledge of your customer, market and business with our best practices, sales tools, marketing technologies, database expertise and industry benchmarks. We then create a program that meets your needs, hits your targets and gives both sales and marketing a shared “Sales Quota Scorecard” across tactics.
To learn more about how we can help, you can visit our services page or download our white paper called, “Integrate Sales and Marketing in 2013 & Beyond”.
If you have any questions, please feel free to contact us.
by gabriel_sales | Jun 14, 2013
This is Part 3 of a 4-part blog series discussing the need for expert solutions for B2B sales and marketing in 2013. For Part 1, please click here and for Part 2, please click here.
In the first two parts of this blog series, we explained how technological innovations have dramatically changed the way we communicate with one another as well as how we buy and sell things.
To briefly review, we explained that the internet and internet-based technologies have changed communication from a transmission model to a participation model. For B2B sales in 2013, this means that you can no longer simply ‘transmit’ sales material or sell hard upfront. This is because your buyer wants to ‘participate’ in the sales process every step of the way.
By creating digital marketing content and running content marketing campaigns using a marketing automation platform, you can simultaneously give your prospects something to participate in and monitor their buying behaviors.
Using the information you gather from your marketing automation solution, you can intuitively guess how each prospect would like to participate with your brand as they move down the sales/buying cycle. For example, if they have been reading all of your educational blog posts, they might also enjoy downloading a white paper. If they have been clicking on “pricing” or “comparison” type pages, they might be ready for a phone call.
Understanding how the new participatory communication model works, and integrating this information with B2B selling and buying cycles is not a simple task. It requires sales expertise, technological capabilities, the ability to produce a mountain of marketing content, a little bit of storytelling and some social intuition.
In light of this, many companies have realized they do not have the internal capacity to revamp their sales and marketing to fit the new communication model and buying cycle. Instead, they have turned to the experts.
In the last part of this blog series, we explain why trusting the experts makes sense for B2B sales and marketing outsourcing in 2013. Click here for Part 4.
If you have any questions, please feel free to contact us.
