by gabriel_sales | Nov 29, 2012
Understanding the difference between a Sales Cycle vs. Buying Cycle may be the most critical shift an organization needs to make to see significant and sustained revenue growth, especially for complex or highly competitive sales.
In a nutshell, the Sales Cycle is how your company looks at moving deals through their own sales pipe and sales process to close deals. Typically the flow looks something like a lead, marketing qualified lead, sales qualified leads, needs analysis, proposal, negotiation, verbal, and closed. This is a company centered view.
A buying cycle is looking at your sales cycle from what the customer needs. Probably the best example we have seen of a buying cycle is from Robert Jolles book Customer Centered Selling. Below is our brief explanation of how we look at this cycle, addressing some of the implications it has for us as an outsourced sales and marketing company with how we divide the sales and marketing functions.
Phase 1 – Intention to Buy
- The buyer starts satisfied with their current solution
- The buyer acknowledges to themselves that they are not satisfied
- The buyer makes the decision to do something about it
- The buyer starts to think about “what are the criteria” to consider moving forward
As a lead generation and a demand generation company, we understand that intention is meaningless without action. The world is full of people with great intentions that never actually take any action. Your job as a sales person and marketer is to understand that your first task in generating demand for your solution is to help educate a buyer on the “criteria” they need to consider. You need to appreciate that given a choice, most buyers will sit on the fence for as long as possible. They want to move forward, they know it’s good for them to move forward, so you need to help educate the buyer enough so they do in fact move forward. Your first job as a sales and marketing professional is to inspire and catalyze the desire that gets your buyer to move from the passive buying process to the active buying process. More and more, this is becoming the function of your content marketing and inside team.
Phase 2 – Active Buying
- The buyer needs to figure out how to measure the solution to: justify the purchase, understand the impact of doing nothing vs. changing, see the impact on topline, recognize the implications for bottom line, feel subjective relief of pain or risk
- The buyer investigates deeply, typically with short list of solutions and a deep dive into one or more solutions
- Selection is made; a front-runner is chosen
- The buyer reconsiders their decision
During the “Active” buying process, your sales team is typically on point. It’s at this point that marketing should take a back seat – with one exception: marketing needs to continue to support the sales team with the content they need to help deal with the reconsideration phase of the sales cycle. Your marketers need to be prepared to help the buyer remember why they were no longer satisfied and embarked on their buying cycle in the first place.
by Glen Springer | Nov 13, 2012
Technology Will Accelerate Marketing’s Impact on Revenue
In Part 1, Increase B2B Sales Volume and Revenue and Part 2,What Does Your B2B Sales Approach and B2B Marketing Culture Need to Look Like?, we discussed the new situation in B2B sales and how the buying process has changed, how marketing is more important to your sales process than ever, and how you may need to alter your sales process and augment your team.
In part 3, we outlined the 11 core competencies required to build a successful b2b demand generation marketing program that puts your buyers and their buying cycle (as opposed to your sales cycle) at the center of your sales and marketing process.
Now, in part 4, we explain the five key ways that marketing automation and sales technology can quickly shift your culture and help your sales team be more effective. The five ways are:
- Lead Capture
- Lead Qualification
- Email Automation
- Lead Intelligence
- Real Time Lead Alerts
Here’s a brief explanation of how each of these features will help your sales team:
Lead Capture
For example, Pardot Marketing Automation Software allows you to identify companies that are visiting your site without the need for any information to be collected on a form. There is a database of IPs that identify the company. The major value here is identifying potential prospects without waiting for contact info to be submitted, using 3rd party data providers like Inside View, LinkedIn, One Source and SalesForceData to more quickly identify the key contacts within the companies visiting your site. These 3rd party data providers also help you pull in additional missing data points about the company and key contacts.
Just as important is actually capturing leads with landing pages and forms. That is nothing new, but the ability to then implement strong lead management rules helps hand over qualified prospects automatically.
Lead Qualification
There are two main ways to qualify leads: using implicit behaviors and activities and explicit data and demographics.
Using implicit information and lead scoring, you can rank and score activities (email, web and social) variably by importance and then set up actions to pass the top scoring prospects over to a sales rep automatically.
Using explicit data and lead grading, you can qualify a prospect on who that person is, e.g. a CEO versus a workaholic just trying to learn something new by requesting your content. You can also change grades up and down based on industry, company size and other factors. Essentially, it’s grading prospects against an ideal customer profile that your sales and marketing team identifies.
Along with helping your sales team avoid talking to bad prospects, using these grades and scores provides you another way to dynamically pre-qualify and assign the best prospects to your sales rep.
Email Automation
Email automation for sales reps takes their knowledge about and performance with their leads to another level. Reps can now use email integration tools for Outlook, Gmail, Apple Mail, and Thunderbird to send personal emails through their marketing automation tool, This allows them to personally track opens and clicks with automatic notifications being sent back to the rep when these actions are taken.
Another powerful email automation component is personalized email marketing campaigns, where the marketing team can craft a message to the companies entire pool of prospects, yet dynamically assign the “From” and “Email” field of the lead’s assigned rep. This serves two main purposes: 1) the rep will get the credit for a pleased lead being sent valuable content (yet the rep didn’t have to do anything – marketing and software took care of the touch for them) and 2) all replies to the content will go directly back to the rep (plus, the rep can also be notified when their lead interacts with that message).
A bonus aspect to email automation is the sales rep can pass back “not-yet-qualified” leads to be nurtured by marketing and allow for further lead qualification. The sales rep can be notified again once the lead qualification status has been improved based on the lead’s content interaction activities and scoring rules.
Lead Intelligence
Sales reps will be able to track all online behaviors (email, website and social) and that data can be put directly into the CRM that the sales rep works from, e.g. Salesforce, instead of requiring the sales rep to learn the ins and outs of the marketing automation prospect tracking system (though they probably will want to once they see how much more effective they are). Activities like original lead source, specific page views, keyword searches, webinar attendance, etc., can all be tracked. This allows the sales rep to profile and frame the content for conversations, voicemails and follow-up emails based on those specific prospect activities.
Real-Time Lead Alerts
Real-time lead alerts allow sales reps faster response time when companies or leads are actively engaged in the sales education collateral. Sales reps can receive instant alerts or daily email summaries regarding these activities. They can receive instant alerts via email, text messaging, mobile apps, and desktop apps, whichever they prefer.
With these alerts and summaries Reps can:
- Prioritize their day with the most active prospects
- Perform quick lookups of anonymous visitors in LinkedIn or Jigsaw to identify potential new prospects
- Click on links to trigger CRM profile lookups
- Send emails to active prospects with a few quick clicks
- Filter out unwanted activity
All of these features, Lead Capture, Lead Qualification, Email Automation, Lead Intelligence and Real-Time Lead Alerts, save your reps time and make them more successful. An effective integration and use of marketing automation can synthesize marketing and sales objectives and improve the effectiveness better than ever.
If you are still a little skeptical that marketing automation and content marketing are going to be critical to your success we invite you to check out our blog Content Marketing is Now Required for Quality B2B Lead Generation that will give you a little background on the risk you are running and the cost of delay.
If you want to learn more about how Gabriel Sales can combine your product knowledge and thought leadership with our sales and marketing automation expertise to get you in the game faster, request a complimentary review. If you want to review more information, download the White Paper for Tactics you can implement now.
Additional Blogs in this Series:
Part 1 – Increasing Your B2B Sales Volume and Revenue – What’s Changed?
Part 2 – What Does Your B2B Sales and Marketing Culture Need to Look Like?
Part 3 – What Core Competencies do I Need From My Marketing and Lead Generation Team?
Part 4 – How Can Marketing Automation Improve My B2B Sales Performance?
Part 5 – Why is Content Marketing is Now Required for Quality B2B Lead Generation?
by gabriel_sales | Sep 21, 2012
Outsourced Sales and Marketing can help you to achieve your sales targets faster and at a reduced operational cost. This is especially true if you are just getting out of the gate. In a previous blog we discussed the time and money it can save you in recruiting, sales management and marketing management. However you cannot expect to under fund your sales and marketing efforts and still compete in the market. This is especially true if you are a young company, a technology start-up or new to the market. An outsourced sales and marketing solution has the advantages of a fully functioning organization that is already in motion but you need to consider your competition and understand that if there is competition in the market that you need to invest enough to allow your sales and marketing team the ability to compete and win.
Some Strategic Issues that Shape Successful Outsourced Sales and Marketing
Here are some of the areas you should expect your outsourced sales and marketing company to explore with you:
Market dynamics – What is your understanding of the market and selling dynamics of other companies – Do you understand your differentiators. What is your core value proposition? How deep is your understanding of the competitive landscape?
Do you have realistic goals – Do you have any existing conversion metrics and sales pipe history to support those goals? Is one of the top priorities of your sales and marketing outsourced vendor to help with this?
Key events in your sales cycle – What are the key events that occur during your customers buying cycle? What is your win loss ratio? Do you need your sales and marketing outsourcing solution to help you figure this out. In that case you may want to position this as a consulting engagement to your board. If any of the past several issues has left you wondering what is the difference between outsourced sales vs. sales consulting here is a quick overview from a past blog post…Sales Consulting vs. Outsourced Sales.
What does your existing customer set look like – The prospects an outsourced sales and marketing company like Gabriel Sales will be targeting for you will want to understand who your current buyers are. Prospects will want to know what vertical markets you are in and you will need to be able to provide your outsourced sales partner with reference clients in other verticals if they are opening a new vertical or market for you.
Do you have the budget and the patience to successfully execute to a successful plan – While and outsourced sales and marketing company can get you into the market faster and more effectively, a well executed plan takes time to ramp. Obviously using an outsourced sales and marketing company will allow you to gain traction quickly but they will not be able to dramatically change a company’s typical buying cycle for your product. If your typical sales cycle takes 6-12 month you can expect an outsourced sales and marketing company to shave a month or two off that cycle at best but you need to account for the initial 90-120 days to ramp the initial pipe. Do you have the patience to wait for the sales engine to ramp? We typically see our efforts take significant hold at 9-12 months. We do have some tactics to gain traction with key accounts quickly. To help on this front you need to have an ideal customer profile but realistic timing needs to be factored into the overall strategy.
The right level of funding approved– All this boils down to the right level of funding. Sales and marketing outsourcing help get you out of the gate faster and cheaper but it does not absolve you from the need to fund your efforts at levels where you can compete. You need to make sure that senior management and your board are aware of this and do not set false expectations. As with any strategic initiative you need to have buy-in and appropriate funding from the senior management team, and sales and marketing outsourcing is no exception.
There are many strategic decisions that you need to consider in executing a successful sales and marketing strategy. This blog addresses a handful that we work through with you. For additional tactics we use to ensure your long term success we invite you to check out a couple of our education series here:
Selling Smarter and Selling Faster White Paper
Build a Successful B2B Sales and Marketing Engine – Educational Resources
For more information on how Gabriel Sales has helped dozens of companies enter a market successfully please feel free to contact for us an initial review.
by gabriel_sales | Sep 19, 2012
A recent Deloitte survey on outsourcing pointed to a projected increase over the next several years. What is driving this across the board is a desire for companies to focus on their core competencies. What was interesting to us as an sales and marketing outsourcing company is the expected anticipated growth of sales and marketing outsourcing specifically of 22%. Why are so many diverse companies, both big and small, turning to outsourcing? Organizations chose to outsource for many reasons, and when asked which objectives were the most important to their outsourcing initiative 87% said reducing operating costs, 73% said improving customer service, and 49% said gaining a competitive advantage.
As an outsourced sales and marketing company we find that the largest area we are able to reduce operating costs for our clients immediately is in our ability to take over your sales recruiting, sales management and marketing management overhead which can run into six figures plus annually (not including staffing the reps). With this headache off your plate you can focus on your core competencies.
The report goes further and talks about some of the areas that are critical to a successful outsourcing engagement that we believe also applies specifically to sales and marketing outsourcing. They are:
- A spirit of partnership between the vendor and the company. This is especially critical when the goal of sales and marketing outsourcing is closed deals.
- Clear service levels
- Strong and joint management of the relationship. This is especially critical in sales and marketing outsourcing which may require pivots, as feedback from the market drives modifications in how the market should be approached.
- Detailed contract terms
- Strong vendor account management team. When outsourcing sales and marketing this should include both a marketer and a sales manager.
- A strong company management team. We strongly recommend that you do not just plan on turning sales and marketing outsourcing on and walking away. Staying engaged on a monthly or weekly basis can help the relationship flourish and generate more leads and closed business for your company. Sales and marketing outsourcing companies are experts in selling but they cannot immediately replace your thought leadership in your product and market.
To discover if an outsourced sales and marketing company outsourcing is right for you please contact us for a quick review to see if our strategies can help.
by gabriel_sales | Sep 14, 2012
Content Marketing is now required as ground cover for your sales team. If you haven’t started you need to start now. As a sales outsourcing company working to successfully launch sales content marketing efforts for multiple clients we often hear that “it take to much time, or I am not ready to commit.” Our position:
- Content marketing does not need to be complicated for B2B marketers to meet the needs of sales. As a thought leader you have tons of little snippets of value to share on a regular basis.
- You don’t have a choice if you want your sales reps to successfully compete and win.
As a sales outsourcing company we understand that, especially for company’s new to content marketing, it may seem daunting. But it’s easier than you think. We are experts and thought leaders in sales and marketing tactics and strategies. You are experts and thought leaders in your product and solution area. One of the values we bring as a sales and marketing outsourcing company is that we have a methodical system to quickly turn your thought leadership into tools that will empower your sales and marketing efforts.
Below is our framework for content marketing that will help empower your sales team with the tools they need to be successful.
Using our framework we help our clients to quickly determine what specific content is required at specific stages of the sales cycle. We implement Digital Demand Center™ our proprietary Content Management System to accelerate this process. As the survey below indicates the majority of the content required can be initially distributed with blogs. When combined with our expertise in sales storytelling, educational webcasting and sales video content production we can get your sales team (or our sales outsourcing and marketing effort on your behalf) to market with a winning sales content marketing strategy in a fraction of the time you may be able to achieve on your own.
Can Sales Outsourcing Help Your Company?
To check out what your peers are already doing check out this previous blog post. To discover how we can help accelerate your sales integrating multiple tactics and strategies please feel free to reach out for an initial conversation.
As a sales outsourcing company we are now quickly becoming sales marketing automation outsourcing specialists as well. As an outsourced sales company we have a unique perspective how marketing automation helps sales because we specialize in leveraging content marketing to engage prospects as much as we use marketing automation to generate and nurture leads. And by engage we mean helping to convince your buyer to buy from your company. Isn’t more sales what sales and marketing automation outsourcing be about. This blog addresses the top 10 advantages of putting sales and marketing automation tools in your sales reps hands (if you have never seen an Marketing Automation Software here is 