by Glen Springer | Jun 14, 2017
Why are Marketing Metrics so important for success? Athletes have known the answer for years. Quite simply, you can’t improve what you don’t measure. This is why of the six teams leading early in the 2017 MLB season, five are advocates of the data-driven systems advocated in Michael Lewis’s, Moneyball.
Over the past ten years, we have seen data transform the way businesses are run – and sales and marketing are no different. You can use data to help you to improve what is working, remove what is not working, and make smarter business decisions in the future. Capturing this data is one of the key drivers of the recent adoption of CRMs like Salesforce.com, and Marketing Automation Systems. It’s also why working with an outsourced sales company may be a smart move for many companies because they can help them capture key outsourced sales and marketing metrics.
So how does all this impact your business? In sales, like sports, consistent wins don’t happen by accident. Repeatable results are driven by repeatable math—numbers that define your sales team’s past performance will predict future performance.
Here are the key outsourced sales and marketing metrics you can expect from an outsourced sales company.
Outbound Calling Metrics
The first key metric an outsourced sales and marketing company can help with is, how much outbound activity does it take to generate a lead. An outsourced sales company will measure the results of every call and track the connection ratios (how many calls does it take to get a person on the phone). Your outsourced sales reps will also track how many calls result in someone that is mildly interested in your solution, and willing to accept Marketing Material (Marketing Qualified Lead – MQL), and how many buyers have a potential need for your product (Sales Accepted Lead – SAL)
In most cases, cold calling alone may not be the most effective way to generate leads and you will understand these metrics clearly. Below is a chart of the cold calling metrics you can expect from an outsourced sales company.
Email Lead Generation Metrics
Marketing Sherpa found, 70 percent of buyers now prefer to learn about new products and services from email first. For about the cost of a cold caller for one month, you can now make 25,000 to 75,000 potential buyers and influencers aware of your solution. What is important from a data perspective is, you can also test up to nine different messages as part of these campaigns. The key outsourced sales and marketing metrics in this case will be:
- What messages and subject lines resonate most in the market
- What offers were most engaging
This information can help you to determine:
- What messages your callers should focus on
- What content should you create to help digitally educate your buyer
Key Outsourced Sales and Marketing Metrics Scorecard
Building a consistent flow of leads is the most critical first step in scaling a sales effort. But if you’re over spending or underspending on your lead generation efforts, you will not be keeping your closers’ (your most expensive sale cost) time maximized. A scorecard will tell you:
- How much and what type of activity is required to generate a lead
- How much outbound activity is required to generate a single qualified sales opportunity
- How many of those opportunities will result in a proposal
- How many proposal does it take to win a deal
Gabriel Sales Provides outsourced sales and marketing metrics
Gabriel Sales specializes in helping SMBs and Start-ups launch modern sales and marketing operations. As part of building, launching, and executing sales campaigns to fill your closers sales funnel, we provide key outsourced sales and marketing metrics. To learn more about our outsourced sales and marketing services we invite you to visit our outsource sales and marketing services page.
by Glen Springer | Jun 12, 2017
Having useful B2B lead generation tactics is one of the top sales challenges facing many small business that want to grow their sales revenue. And generating a consistent flow of leads is critical in a competitive market. To grow the sales of a solution, establish or maintain a competitive advantage to thrive in today’s sales environment, which requires innovative approaches and hard work.
This is where a B2B sales outsourcing solution may be able to help. A B2B sales outsourcing company can assist you in framing and executing the most current and effective campaigns using modern sales and marketing operations. This will allow you to move faster, implementing the right research, lead generation techniques, and technologies. Your sales team can focus on selling, while your B2B sales outsourcing partner can focus on sustained and consistent lead generation to improve your sales results and help you meet your sales revenue targets.
With so many possible tactics available right now, your B2B sales outsourcing team will help you select the best direction for your business.. The following lead generation tactics are some of the options that will now be at your company’s disposal.
Content Marketing
Content marketing is now a requirement for lead generation success. Over 70% of buyers now prefer to learn about new products or solutions with educational information shared through email. You can share this content through social media campaigns, email-marketing campaigns, and with cold callers on first calls.
Over time, a bonus effect of quality content will enable you to slowly start moving to a higher and higher position in search engine results. A B2B sales outsourcing lead generation company like Gabriel Sales will be able to help you craft educational content that your buyers will enjoy in a short, one to two day content workshop.
Social Media Marketing
Once you have your quality content, you can share that content on social media. For most B2B companies, we recommend starting slowly and saving your best content for social media. The two most effective tools for B2B campaigns are LinkedIn and Twitter (in that order). It is also helpful to share that same content on Facebook and Google +. Google+ is very helpful to improve search engine results.
Email Marketing to Generate a New B2B Leads
Email marketing is all about communicating through a structured email to generate leads and establish a relationship with potential clients. A B2B sales outsourcing lead generation company will be able to help you navigate through multiple vendors to target as many as 75,000 potential targets for about the fully-loaded costs of one sales development rep for one month. This will typically generate 2000 to 4000 early stage leads.
Email Marketing to Develop and Prioritize B2B Leads
One of the most significant developments in sales and marketing over the past decade is marketing automation platforms. Marketing automation allows you to share your thought leadership to develop trust and stay top of mind with consumers that are not quite ready to buy. These same tools also allow you to score leads and predict their readiness to buy based on the content they are engaging with. A B2B sales outsourcing company will be able to help you implement these campaigns and technologies the right way the first time with planned lead generation tactics.
B2B Sales Outsourcing Calling Team
Finally, a lead is only valuable if it turns into an appointment. The days of old school smile and dial and throwing bodies on the phone to generate more leads is over. A B2B sales outsourcing company will be able to help you immediately staff a trained team of sales development reps that understand how to use content and marketing automation the most effective way possible to set appointments for your closers.
About Gabriel Sales B2B Sales Outsourcing Lead Generation Tactics
We specialize in helping SMBs and start-ups build modern sales and marketing operations. To learn more about our lead generation tactics and how we now view the sales challenges B2B companies now face and how we solve them we invite you to check out our new approach to outsourced sales page or visit our B2B sales outsourcing lead generation starter campaign page.
by Glen Springer | Jun 7, 2017
Many small businesses reach a point in their growth where the owner and/or founders of the small business have:
- Established an effective business model
- Have gained traction with a product or solution
- Have run out of bandwidth to continue to both sell and run the company
- Simply need capacity help and expertise to ramp their sales efforts
This is when many small businesses will start to evaluate if an outsource sales organization will make sense for their business and growth goals. They will measure this against the costs associated with hiring, recruiting, training, and managing their own team vs. going with an outsourcing company that can immediately build modern sales and marketing operations.
Once you have made the decision to outsource sales you will then have a variety of different types of companies to work with. This article will give you some less obvious tips to address what you should consider when making a final decision on what outsource sales company you should work with. In many cases, these issues are intuitive, but they should not be overlooked as a conscious part of your final decision.
Here are tips for selecting an outsource sales company
Decide what part of the sales funnel you want to outsource. Sales outsourcing can entail many functions. You can focus on new awareness campaigns, outbound lead generation campaigns, opportunity development, and appointment setting and closing.
Choose complementary sales partner. Once you have decided what stage of the sale funnel you want to outsource, it’s important to find the right fit. To short list, its important to understand what types of sales processes the outsource sales company has experience in. SaaS sales that can be completed online with no involvement from a sales rep requires a different type of expertise than more complex sales that require a sales rep to manage the transaction of the sale. Short sales cycles function differently from sales cycles that are 90 to 180 days. Understand what type of experience the outsource sales company company has, to ensure you’re making the right decision on your sales partner.
What technology do they have experience using. One of the keys to long-term success is getting the right sales and marketing technology stack in place. At a minimum, this now requires a CRM and marketing automation technology to stay top of mind with buyers not ready to purchase immediately. It’s important to understand if the company will be:
- Using systems
- What systems they will be using
- Will you have access to these systems during the engagement
- What happens if the partnership ends – will they transfer the system or will the system go away?
Are they willing to start slowly and build gradually? Outsourcing all of your sales and marketing activity can be high risk immediately. Costs can quickly run into the hundreds of thousands of dollars if you staff marketers, lead gen reps and closers immediately. As discussed above, you should find out if the sales outsourcing company is willing to start with developing the front end of the funnel, and then as the volume of leads increases, are they willing to add resources as needed. This will allow your business to establish relationships and build the working rapport to grow the partnership organically within your organization.
How will you monitor and evaluate your progress? Once your sales outsourcing activities begin, depending on your sales cycle, it can take months or even a year to evaluate how many deals it produces to measure your true ROI. It is important to keep track of meaningful measurements prior to this to understand the relative short-term success or failure of your sales outsourcing strategy. It’s important to understand how and at what frequency your sales outsourcing will provide these metrics – what they will be measuring and why?
About Our Outsource Sales Services
Gabriel Sales helps small business and start-ups build modern sales and marketing operations.
If you need assistance scaling your company’s revenue, building modern sales and marketing automation or just need to put more sales qualified leads in your closer’s sales funnel, Gabriel Sales may be able to help. To learn more about our approach to outsourced sales, we invite you to check out our sales outsourcing services page.
by Glen Springer | Jun 5, 2017
Outsourcing your company’s sales and marketing efforts is now a more mature and viable decision for many businesses in many industries. An outsourced sales and marketing solution addresses the early part of your pipeline development. And for technology and professional services firms this is now more than a trend. Outsourced sales and marketing is now mainstream. Many business now understand when they outsource sales and marketing to generate qualified sales opportunities, their sales team will have a consistent flow of business, so they can focus their energy on closing deals and scaling account revenue. Here are some reasons for outsourced sales and marketing:
Outsourced Sales and Marketing Gets You to Market Faster
When you outsource your lead generation and development efforts, your outsourced sales and marketing company has all the best practices and resources available to get your team, your solution, and your sales story to market quickly.You save time because your team is hired and trained faster, which means your pipeline is growing.
Immediate Sales and Marketing Infrastructure
One of the keys to success in selling to the new digital buyer is technology to support revenue generation. This requires both experience and expertise – but it’s often overlooked by the decision makers. An outsourced sales and marketing solution provider will have both the experience and expertise of multiple implementations. More importantly, they will have professionals that run and manage these sales and marketing tools everyday. This means you will spend less time and money experimenting, and your team can focus on scaling your business and growing accounts.
Diverse Sales and Marketing Expertise
Companies who manage outsourced sales and marketing team will be able to supply a blended team of sales and marketing experts. They will also have experience selling multiple solutions with multiple sales cycles and sales processes, giving you access to a diverse experience set, that will allow you to innovate faster.
Sales Reps with Experience
When hiring and outsourced sales and marketing team, they will know who to hire, how to motivate, and how to train your team to use the tools and effective selling techniques. This results in a better return on investment and a reduced sales cycle as your closers are focused on buyers most likely to buy.
An Alternative Sales Growth Strategy
Like any outsourcing solution, when you outsource sales, it can be a great option to erase the need for additional office space, capital, and management layer. It will also remove the soft costs of hiring and recruiting an in-house sales team. You can focus your internal sales budget on closers and your outsource sales partner will take care of the rest.
About Gabriel Sales Outsourced Sales and Marketing
Gabriel Sales provides sales consulting & outsource sales and marketing services to companies to help them build modern sales and marketing operation that continues to produce results. To learn a little more about our approach, how we can help, reasons for outsourced sales and marketing and how we help you build a sales and marketing revenue engine from start to finish, please visit our new approach to outsource sales page.
by Glen Springer | Jun 2, 2017
Gabriel Sales builds modern sales and marketing operations for B2B companies with solution sales that require a senior sales rep to manage the transaction of the sale. Over the past several years, we have seen the effectiveness of cold calling decrease substantially, but when executed the right way, it can still yield results. Here are some tips for companies that have worked for our B2B outsourced sales lead generation clients that you can implement on your own, or with our outsourced sales and marketing support.
B2B Outsourced Sales Lead Generation Tips
First, invest the time upfront to ensure you’re calling the right buyer. Spend as much time as you can, building databases of the right type of buyers at the right types of companies. A recent Gartner Group Study show that a typical business with less than 500 employees has an average of seven to ten people who are responsible for most buying decisions. Connecting with the right people is critical to your success – a simple, but sometimes overlooked, first step.
Try to start with calling at least a warm lead – ideally the phone call is a conversation. A conversation is much easier to have with at least someone that is slightly aware of your company. Whenever possible try to introduce yourself in advance. The most cost effective way to do this is with an email marketing campaign prior to the call.
Keep the first call educational, and share value first. Cold calling doesn’t mean that you are cold selling. The goal of the first call is to get your prospects attention, and you will only have 10 to 15 seconds to do that. When you call, be armed with something of value – it could be a webcast, a white paper, or a video to share. Sharing is caring and you will set yourself up for success downstream.
Use a marketing automation platform to prioritize leads. One of the most under-used feature of a marketing automation system is its lead scoring function. You can use marketing automation platforms to see what content your buyers is engaging with. Calling time is precious time, so you can use a marketing automation platform to prioritize it.
Remember that the first two to three calls are not going to result in closed business, especially for more complex sales. Studies continue to show a typical sales cycle requires at least five to seven customer touches from the sales rep and engagement with at least that same amount of digital content. Use these calls to build value, not to sell features.
Qualify early. You should also use the first couple of calls to qualify the buyer. Is the company the right size? Do they have a need for your services? You can be blunt and direct here as it saves both you and the buyer time – and a no is as good as a yes early in the sales process.
Ask questions, especially open ended questions. Sales relationships and qualified B2B sales leads are built through conversations, and conversations are started when you ask questions. You should be asking questions at least three times more than you are pitching.
Do your homework for the second call. LinkedIn is now only a quick search away, and marketing automation systems will allow you to see what content interests your buyer most. Both these are invaluable tools for a second and third call to help you move your conversation forward.
About Gabriel Sales B2B Outsourced Sales Lead Generation
We specialize in building modern sales and marketing sales operations. We combine sales strategy and modern B2B marketing and sales best practices with a blended team of email marketing and content production specialists, marketing technology experts, and a team a sales development and market execution professionals to help with companies with B2B outsourced sales lead generation results. To learn more about our approach visit our outsourced sales case studies or our approach to B2B outsourced sales lead generation page.
by Glen Springer | May 31, 2017
Successfully Outsourcing Sales for Start Ups and SMBs
Successfully outsourcing sales as a business strategy can provide benefits and cost-savings for your company with process improvements, expanded talent pools, cost containment, improved focus on core business, and reduced time-to-market, to name a few.
However, there are risks in an unsuccessful sales outsourcing engagement that can diminish the benefits. How do you minimize those sales outsourcing risks? First, don’t expect a magic bullet at the beginning of the engagement. Number two: make an informed decision.
If your company is initiating an outsourcing strategy for the first time, the following set of five steps will help you to minimize the risks and maximize the opportunities for outsourcing success.
Define clear objectives. Successfully outsourcing sales strategy starts with clearly defined objectives and measurable goals. Objectives state the reasons for a sales outsourcing program, define its business value, and provide a functioning framework for making decisions about which outsourcing company to work with, which model to use, what stage of the funnel development to outsource, and what levels of risk to assume. Measurable goals are the events and functional metrics by which management can monitor progress, take corrective action, and project future performance.
Count the true costs. Just as important as setting realistic expectations is, your expectations reflect all related costs if you both build and internal sales and marketing organization, or go with an outsourcing marketing and sales firm. These hidden costs and savings need to be evaluated:
- Selecting an outsourcing partner vs. building one on your own: Selecting a vendor could take 5 to 40 hours depending on how long it takes to find the right fit – but this pales in comparison to recruiting a team of sales reps and marketers.
- Transitioning work and sales processes: Knowledge transfer can take time. Make sure your outsourcing sales company has a process well defined to transition sales from your team and/or organization to theirs.
- Technology costs: A CRM and marketing automation platform are now critical for success. Understand who will implement, integrate, and manage those technologies.
- Managing: How will the engagement be managed on both sides? Does your outsourcing sales partner make reporting and managing the engagement easy? The costs of maintaining a finished contract can be surprisingly high.
Manage Risk. Another critical factor in executing a sales outsourcing program is deciding how much of your sales process you want to immediately shift to your outsourcing sales process. For companies with mature products and a mature sales process, it may make more sense to outsource your sale from lead generation to closed deals. The sales process and the marketing process will already be well defined with a script, technologies, and content to support it. But for many small businesses and start-ups, it may make more sense to focus on filling the pipe and developing qualified leads before staffing a team of closers, because closers are the most expensive resource to staff both internally, or with an outsourcing sales partner.
Lead Generation and Content Marketing Outsourcing: this function is often the most effective way to manage risk for a small business, as it can be executed with a fixed start date and will include hard and measurable results. It will also include a hard and tangible process, as well as the construction of modern sales and marketing operations that will be a valuable asset for years to come. Most importantly you will have hard data and success metrics to measure on a monthly and weekly basis to track progress.
About Us
Gabriel Sales builds modern sales and marketing operations including, sales outsourcing of your lead generation and lead development. We have been successfully outsourcing for SMBs and Start Ups for 20 years. We provide both full service solutions and point solutions. To learn more visit our approach to successfully outsourcing sales page.
