by gabriel_sales | Sep 13, 2012
Marketing Automation Outsourcing Can Be Accelerated with Content that Helps both Your Sales Team and Your Lead Generation Efforts
As an outsourced sales and marketing company we now require quality sales content to successfully do our job. To accelerate our demand generation engine we execute specific campaigns to put new leads in the pipe to accelerate the Marketing Automation Outsourcing services we provide. Below is a recent survey of what your peers and mature competitors are doing to win in the market place. And below that in this blog we prioritize what we provide as an outsourced sales and marketing company on the content front to support your successful sales efforts as we build demand generation engines.
Combining Sales Collateral with a Marketing Automation Outsourcing Solution
Here is a quick list of the content we need and prioritize to help support your sales and to accelerate your marketing automation outsourcing solution simultaneously. Typically when we engage with a new client we either help to implement a marketing automation outsourcing solution or execute a campaign specifically to implement some of our marketing automation outsourcing best practices.
Blogs – We generally find that we get the biggest bang for the effort and the buck especially when launching new sales efforts. The majority of what we need to get a sales effort underway can be done with your thought leadership through quick blog posts. Especially in the early stages of engaging a prospect.
Microsites – Gabriel Sales deploys our proprietary Gabriel Sales Digital Sales Base Camp™ as part of every engagement. This allows us to quickly re- contextualize your existing content for specific target markets. As an outsourced sales and marketing company this helps all your marketing and sales content, both current and to be created, work harder and faster for you.
Case Studies – These don’t need to be incredibly technical. Keep your case studies business and solution focused. They help your sales reps qualify if a potential buyer is a fit.
Webcasting – We love webcasting as a tool and tactic. They are the gift that keeps on giving and helps to reduce your COS% because we can introduce your thought leaders, sales engieneer and product specialist so they can sell one to many and we are engaging your buyers 1:1.
White Papers – We love white papers but you need to be prepared to drive some serious value with them. We help our clients design White Paper that can be re-leveraged for additional blog posts and integrated into a complimentary Webcasting Series. Given a choice between webcasting and white papers we generally lead with Webcasting. They are faster and typically more valuable in moving qualified deals deeper into the pipe.
E-Newsletter – Once you have the above bases covered these are easy to create.
Social Media – We lean heavily on Linked In and for some technologies we sell we advocate Twitter. From our perspective adding Facebook and a half dozen other channels simply need to be automated with RSS feed.
For a deeper dive how your company can align sales and marketing with smarter content marketing lease check out our knowledge center How to Integrate Content Marketing.
To learn more about how we can help to prioritize your sales content marketing strategy to accelerate deal flow through your pipe line please feel free to reach out for a quick conversation.
by Glen Springer | Sep 9, 2012
A Successful Outsourced Sales and Marketing Company can take Tips from a Rock Star?
As a successful outsourced sales and marketing company it’s important that we keep our outsourced sales reps and marketers up beat and motivated. Success in life no matter what your pursuit all take the same basic building blocks. This quote was particularly helpful in demonstrating that with our sales team so we felt like we would share it with a wider audience.
Bono In response to the question about U2’s drive for huge worldwide success:
“Be honest. Are you really telling me that you’d never contemplated failure before?”
Responded:
“I don’t remember it. I would get angry, I would get upset that we weren’t what we could be. I don’t remember thing that we never would be successful. I always thought we would. And as soon as we did, it would be clear. Doubt, self doubt, was about the current material we could improve, but the destination was never a doubt. See, there is a chasm between envy and desire, OK? Envy is like wanting something that’s not yours, not worked for. But desire is different. Desire comes out of wanting what is yours, and still wanting it even if it’s not yet there. When desire becomes envy there is a difference. And there is a difference between the point of view of the fan. When (a fan) looks up at desire they think I can be”
Great quote but what does this have to do with sales and marketing. We think the difference between desire and envy, where you are coming from in your heart and head is often the difference between success and failure. Obviously you can’t get much more successful then U2 has. And its clear from this quote that this was not an accident.
What does this quote demonstrate to help create a successful outsourced sales and marketing company?
- Success requires passion but not anger. A drive to push yourself and your team.
- Success requires knowing what your chief aim is. Visualizing it.
- Success requires never doubting that you are capable of it.
- Success requires coming from a place (desire) where you believe in what you are doing (selling, marketing)
- Success is about never forgetting that your success requires that you genuinely care about your fan (customer).
If your sales pipe could use a boost feel free to contact us to see if one of our programs can help.
by Glen Springer | Sep 4, 2012
This blog is part of a two part series that discusses two marketing automation implementation best practices to accelerate your demand generation engine implementation using Sales Lead Definitions. These marketing automation implementation best practices allow marketers we work with to increase their initial lead volume from our initial Gabriel Sales Ramp™ Campaign (to keep the sales team happy) while we also help to build your engine.
As background – as Gabriel Sales works with our clients building a repeatable telesales process and demand generation engine, we often discover that your company has great metrics and processes to move deals from “Sales Qualified Opportunity” to “Close” but limited visibility into the Early Stage Pipe metrics. Just like late stage pipe velocity, using Sales Lead Definitions to define the discrete stages of your early stage pipe is critical to success of any integrated content marketing and sales effort to put more sales qualified leads into the pipe.
The purpose of this blog is to introduce a marketing automation implementation best practice using Sales Lead Definitions to help accelerate agreement on how the early stage pipe can be scored so your sales team:
- Can quickly help marketing create the lead definitions and get back to selling
- Has the flexibility to successfully take early stage leads from the pipe in the short term to take advantage of the initial lead volume
- And as the engine reaches maturity, the sales team reaps the benefit of more sales qualified leads in the mid and long term
Starting with the End in Mind with your Marketing Automation Implementation
Building a Demand Generation engine does not happen overnight but once created it pays huge dividends. The top three short term benefits are:
- Turn buyers ready to buy into Sales Qualified Leads faster to increase your sales pipeline’s velocity
- Maximize your lead generation budget by effectively nurturing leads not ready to buy so when they are ready to buy they buy from you, (which will eventually increase the size of your sales qualified pipeline)
- Reduce the cost of time spent by your senior sales reps and product specialists educating and selling to buyers that are not ready to engage with sales yet (or buyers who are just kicking the tires and never plan on buying) so your top resources spend their time focused on “closest to the dollar” activities.
Once the engine is built the end goal is to take your increased revenue and the bottom line savings your demand generation engine is producing to:
- Put more even more leads into the pipe
To build an engine requires a telesales team and marketing team aligned with a singular focus of putting more sales qualified leads into the hands of your closers. Below is how this alignment works.
A Framework for Agreement on the Lead Stages is a Critical Marketing Automation Best Practice
Most clients we work with are generally great at defining what a “Lead” is and what a “Sale Qualified Lead” is. If a company has an active inside sales team in place already they may have some of the other sales lead definitions in place as well.
As part of our initial consulting work we work with the sales team to distill specific probing and open ended questions that can be used in the early stage sales process to define where the buyer is in their sales process. This is then used by both marketing and the inside team to support the sales team.
Ultimately the key driver to the organization is going to be how many deals actually close. What a combined telesales and marketing team can impact is how many “Sales Qualified Leads” get in the hands of the “Closer”.
There is no one right and wrong way to set the criteria below. What we are sharing is a starting point so your executives and your closers can evaluate the early stage pipe and make better decisions about what actions to take. For sales specifically it is meant to communicate where the buyer is in their buying cycle, if and when sales should engage and how sales should approach engaging your buyer (where is the buyer in their buying cycle). The criteria below allows your marketing automation to do its job and allows your inside team to move deals through the pipe more effectively. When properly executed you will:
- Save your closers and product specialist’s bandwidth.
- Allow your sales team to “cherry pick” leads from the pipe earlier if they see an opportunity they would like to pursue.
- Clearly communicates to your sales team where the buyer is in their buying cycle so they know how to best approach that buyer.
Lead Target – The decision makers and companies you are targeting. Ideally you are targeting an ideal customer profile.
Marketing Qualified Lead – Any lead that has expressed mild interest or raised their hand and opted into receiving content from your company. The source of the lead does not matter.
Telesales Accepted Lead – A lead where the company is the right fit (right account profile) and the buyer you are speaking with has the interest in learning more. May have the ability to influence or may have the ability to get you in front of the influencer or decision maker.
Telesales Engaged Lead – (a sub set of Telesales Accepted Lead). There is an agreed next step. Could be in a week, month or could be in a quarter. In some cases it could be at a specific point in time for next year’s budget cycle. Typically the buyer has been asked if they are ready to talk to sales and has declined “not yet but stay in touch”.
Sales Accepted Lead – You know the lead has the ability to influence or champion. Your product can solve a problem the buyer has articulated. May be willing to schedule an appointment. May require someone more senior to move forward.
Sales Qualified Lead – Meets one or more of the following criteria. Decision maker is involved. Path to budget or live budget is in play. A champion has expressed interest in moving the deal forward with you. Specific pain or need has been articulated by the buyer.
We generally find that reaching the initial agreement is simple to reach as part of our initial interview process. Once the questions and criteria are in place we are able to work with our client to keep lead volume up as we work with our clients to build the engine. For more marketing automation implementation best practices details check out our next best practice blog – How to Keep Volume Up as You Build Your Engine.
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by gabriel_sales | May 3, 2012
Gabriel Sales helps companies move leads from marketing qualified to sales qualified deals faster. As a b2b sales marketing company here are a several things we suggest you avoid when following up on inbound leads.
- Handing leads to your rep without them being educated on the piece that generated the lead.
- Not leaving a voice mail.
- Leaving a voice mail that just talks about your company. Try something like “This is Mary from ACME, we help companies solve this problem, and I wanted to see if we could share another piece of content about.”
- Always leave your number at the beginning and end of the message.
- Don’t ignore non-business email addresses. Repeat…do not discount these. According to the latest TechTarget Media Consumption research, approximately 40% of corporate IT buyers indicate that they use their personal email account regularly for business.
A marketing automation is also a big help in increasing you ability to generate more business from your inbound leads. If you have not checked out what these platforms can do here is a quick overview from Pardot 5 Minute Overview of Marketing Automation .
If you curious if an outsourced sales and marketing company can get you on a faster track to sales results feel free to contact us for a quick consultative call.
by Glen Springer | Apr 30, 2012
So now you that you have purchased a marketing automation platform you are ready to implement and it’s not as simple as you were led to believe. As an outsourced sales and marketing company we have already helped to implement several platforms (as well as implementing our own) and helped companies with several stalled implementations. Here are some best practices in marketing and sales automation because, as one vendor recently told us, ‘we can sell them the car but we can’t drive it for them’. Here are some basic tips and some best practices to help you avoid some headaches and to learn from our mistakes and success. If you have not checked out what these platforms can do here is a quick overview from Pardot 5 Minute Overview of Marketing Automation and this post will make a whole lot more sense.
Think about your Content in a Different Way – The whole point of a marketing automation platform is to drive more business in a more effective way. This starts with how you are speaking with your buyer. If your content is still all about your product – tech sheets, features and benefits etc. its -time to think about being customer centric rather than product centric.” Your drip campaigns will drive more business if you talk to your customers about their problems and their needs. You may need to look at the “voice” of your messages and refine your language a bit. As a starting point look at how may time you talk about “Our’ product, “our” team vs. “your” needs, “your” business and “your” customers. Stop being product centric and start being customer centric. Here is a series of blogs on how to shift your content approach and get sales and marketing on the same page.
Organize your Content Ahead of Time. For a marketing automation platform to run effectively it helps to do two things with your content. First you should isolate all your webcasts, white papers, blogs, videos on individual website pages. This allows you to easily understand what your customer specifics needs are which in turn allows you to score your leads more effectively as you track their digital interest. Secondly, it really helps to also create landing pages that offers your customer content for all three stages of their buying cycle so you can track when your buyers are moving from educating themselves (kicking the tires) to being ready to buy (e.g looking at pricing or testimonials). Gabriel Sales has created an easy to use sales content management technology – Gabriel Sales Digital Base Camp™ that can help you do this in a matter of weeks. Below is an example of one of those lead scoring features.
Involve Sales and Invest the Time Integrating with your CRM – What we have found is that even a basic integration can take an IT professional too much time. Most of the marketing automation platforms we have seen have huge volume of really cool features and bells and whistles so you can tend to over design before you know how you want to use them. Ultimately this is about empowering your sales team and recognizing your IT teams expertise is not sales. Probably one of the biggest bottle necks we have seen is that IT folks get proprietary and a project that they thought would take weeks can take a developer three months or more . The challenges are not with the system’s API or stability; they were with our client’s requirements, process definitions and prioritization. Like most development work that starts “easy” it quickly gets complex when they don’t understand the underlying business processes. Unfortunately as the time line expands it ends up being sales and marketing that are on the hook for results and not the developers. Salesforce.com has been the easiest integration for all the platforms we have seen.
Keep your Initial Drip Campaigns Simple. This is probably one of the biggest lessons we learned. When we first started we came up with a very complex IF/ then workflow so if they opened this piece of content on a topic area we would send them another piece of content on topic area B and then if they didn’t open that we would send them content Z. It was too much and just writing about it confuses me. What we found is about 80% of the value you are going to get from your initial drip campaigns is going to come from simply implementing them. It takes time to learn a new software and the biggest value the software provided initially is simply keeping your brand and solution in front of your buyers over time so your reps don’t have to. A simple five to seven touch campaign without any IF/then work flows was enough to get more deals flowing at less cost. Don’t frustrate yourself. You will quickly learn from your wins. If you are a smaller company, as a best practice, we recommend that you start by talking to your sales reps about their sales process and simply take that sales process map and create your initial drip campaigns for about three target markets.
Tap your vendors (and other vendors) knowledge centers – This industry is not that old. Eloqua, Pardot and Marketo (to name a few) all have fantastic knowledge centers that can teach you the basics of lead scoring and nurturing etc. Our vendor Pardot has been a huge help but we have also found both Marketo and Eloqua’s knowledge centers to be valuable as well. Obviously as an outsourced sales and marketing company we also recommend that you strongly consider working with an organization like ours. We have the advantage of having worked in the space across multiple enterprises so we have made a great deal of the mistakes already so you don’t need to.
We hope this blog has been helpful. Marketing Automation is a relatively new concept for most marketing teams and we have found that once you start to gain some momentum you will quickly realize that it’s clearly how business will be done for the next decade. We are just at the beginning of a new paradigm starting with marketing automation and then, as we are quickly discovering, if your marketing automation implementation is done correctly this will drift towards sales automation. Ultimately this will begin to drive more deals fast at less cost. We are experiencing some fantastic initial success reducing cost of sales percentages for both ourselves and our clients. The learning curve is exponential. So have fun.
If you have not checked out what these platforms can do here is a quick overview from Pardot 5 Minute Overview of Marketing Automation. If you have a stalled with your marketing automation implementation or if you would like to know more about best practices in marketing and sales automation, feel free to contact us for a quick consultative call.
by Glen Springer | Apr 27, 2012
Question: Why Does Sales Content and Marketing Automation Matter for B2B Sales and Sales for Small Business
Answer: If you don’t have it and your competitor does you will lose business!
The rules of B2B Sales have changed. Small Businesses can now compete against bigger budgets. With the new wave of B2B marketing tools available, you can:
- Watch how your prospects are educating themselves
- Understand their needs
- Forecast their interest
All with limited interaction directly with your best reps until the prospects is ready to buy!
No one ever wakes up thinking, “I can’t wait to get a sales call today!” Nobody really wants to be sold. Especially by a salesperson. Really, when was the last time you even answered an unidentified call at work, much less listened for more than 30 seconds when a sales rep made his elevator pitch unless they hit a hot button in the first 15 seconds. Would you take a second call if they did not offer you something of value first and some additional content at the end of that first call? The same is true for your prospects. That’s why they avoid your salespeople until the last possible minute.
While your customers don’t like being sold they still like buying. So instead they are educating themselves by accessing your publicly available information and connecting with peers online until they’ve narrowed down their options. In fact, SiriusDecisions estimates that the buyer’s journey is generally 70% complete by the time a sales person is contacted. Think about it. When was the last time you made a purchase without spending time researching on your own first. Poking around on Google and Bing. Checking out the companies website while you were on the phone with the cold caller if you were interested. If how the buyer buys has changed… have you looked at how you sell to see if its meeting the buyers mark? Is your sales team running to stand still.
The winning closer is no longer the rep that hunts but the one who consults with prospects to simplify their decision-making process based on a keen understanding of buyer interest and behavior. When a prospect finally reaches out, your sales rep had better understand everything there is to know about the buyer and be prepared to deliver value. Immediately. That’s why marketing automation and sales content is critical. If you don’t have B2B marketing tools and processes in place your competition will win the business.
Marketing Automation Leads Means Sales Readiness – its about giving your salesperson the ability to deliver the right content and the right message to the right person at the right time. And its about:
Giving your highest paid talent a prioritized list of who to contact next based on
- Behavioral data that summarizes prospect interests and intent
- Tools that alert your top talent when their hottest prospects are online and at their desks
- A library of content aligned to specific stages of the buying process that helps your rep build trust and rapport with the buyer
Your success as a marketer, business unit manager or small business owner depends on your ability to help the sales team sell. Ask yourself these questions:
- What if your competitors demand generation engine could tell your sales reps what each prospect is interested before and during the entire sales process?
- What if your competitor gave their sales reps tools so they could send the right content and track that content as the buyer was buying?
- What if your competitors delivery team blogged once a week with their thought leadership and points of view to help your their sales reps address objections?
Who is going to win that deal?
If any of the thought we are sharing hit a chord or to see if Sales and Marketing Outsourcing or some Sales and Marketing Process Consulting may be able to help you accelerate your B2B Demand Generation Engine please feel free to contact us for a free benchmark and 30 minute needs analysis.
Related Blog Posts:
Top 10 Strategies for B to B Demand Generation
How to Align Your Sales and Marketing Process
