by Glen Springer | May 26, 2017
There are multiple reasons to consider an outsource sales company for lead generation and lead qualification to help you grow your revenue and shape your company’s growth strategy.
For example, a tech start up that has a proven product may need to accelerate its sales efforts prior to a round. Or an established business may need to test a new market. Employing an outsource sales company will help you get to market faster – an experienced sales outsourcing and marketing firm enables the startup to hit the ground running with an experienced sales team, rather than wait six months or longer to recruit and train an internal team.
Another typical reason involves testing a new solution or a new process or strategy. An outsourcing team can take on the blocking and tackling of generating leads and sales opportunities for the new product. This allows your existing sales force to stay dialed in on the established product line. With an outsource sales team, you can fine-tune your process for the new solution, document the process and lay the groundwork and infrastructure for a full-scale roll out with your existing team.
Sales outsourcing can also immediately improve a company’s targeting capacity, cold-calling efforts, email marketing tactics and inbound lead generation approach. All this will increase your capability and capacity to identify qualified leads and drive deals into the sales funnel.
So once you’ve decided hiring an outsource sales company makes sense for your company, here are 3 tips to help ensure you make an intelligent decision about which company is right for you:
Evaluate the outsource sales team’s credentials
When choosing any vendor, it’s important to understand who they have successfully worked with in the past. Most sales outsourcing companies will have case studies online and will also have testimonial videos available. And before you make the final purchase, they should be OK with you checking references from other clients. Ask questions about the specific sales and marketing gaps you would like them to cover.
Determine if there is a strategic fit
A solution only works if the vendor’s capabilities meets your organization’s needs. When you outsource sales this means different things to different companies. Ask direct questions about their areas of strength. Some focus primarily on lead generation. Some focus end-to-end sales services. Others, like Gabriel Sales, build modern sales and marketing operations that can be transitioned over to the company. It’s also important to consider a firm’s flexibility in adapting to changes in your sales needs. Will they transition teams or systems to you?
Examine processes expertise
Take a close look at what they are best equipped to service. Can they help you implement a process for pure transactional sales? Are they experts in solution sales where a senior rep needs to manage the close of the transaction? Examine how they report on sales metrics and if they can help you forecast. Will they share data or hide data? Do they help you grow your business? Or do they just put deals into your pipeline? Do they do both?
Assess the sales outsourcing and marketing technology stack
An outsource sales firm’s technology capabilities and expertise is now a key factor in the selection process. What type of demand-generation technologies does the firm employ? Are they using marketing automation? How will it make use of CRM and analytics to achieve your objectives? Are they tied to a set of platforms or are they flexible?
Other factors when selecting an outsource sales company
Other issues evaluate a potential an outsource sales company:
- Experience in your industry
- Experience with your decision maker type
- What type of feedback do they provide?
About Gabriel Sales Outsource Sales Solution
Gabriel Sales helps companies build modern sales and marketing operations to help small businesses and start ups build a consistent and sustained flow of qualified leads. To learn more, please visit our outsource sales approach page.
by Glen Springer | May 24, 2017
Telemarketing has been around almost half a century and remains one of the oldest forms of generating leads. And over the past decade, with the growth of inbound lead generation tactics like Google AdWords, Facebook Ads, and outbound lead generation tactics like social media and email marketing, cold calling has lost its luster. Now more than ever, telemarketing makes sense.
More importantly, cold calling has decreased in efficiency, and consequentially its ROI, for one primary reason: buyers simply do not pick up the phone as often as they used to. As a sales outsourcing company that has been around for close to 20 years, we’ve slowly watched calls to connect ratios slide from 20 percent of calls resulting in a connection in 2009, to a call to connect ratio of between 8 and 12 percent in 2016. This means that front of the funnel calling is half as effective and twice as expensive as it was less than a decade ago.
However, if you look at telemarketing with a different perspective – as your competitors are abandoning calling – working the phone can turn into a distinct competitive advantage if approached in a more modern way. The ability of an outsourced sales company to help you build modern sales and marketing operations, while combining outbound marketing tactics with smarter calling, is why telemarketing makes sense.
Here are the three top reasons outsourced sales just makes more sense for using telemarketers to generate leads.
Outsourced Sales Company has Targeting Expertise
An outsourced sales company will live and breathe database acquisition and database management. Most companies will not have the subscriptions or relationships they need to build and construct a solid database. An outsourced sales company will have access to lists for both email marketing and/or straight cold calling.
Other Tactics Outsourced Sales Company Use to Generate the Leads
Many outsourced sales companies will have expertise beyond telemarketing. An outsourced sales company will have support staff with expertise in email marketing, social media marketing and PPC advertising to help you generate leads through multiple channels.
Marketing Automation Experience
Marketing automation is a great way to prioritize leads for telemarketers to focus. You can use a marketing automation technology to prioritize what leads are most likely to buy from email marketing campaigns and to prioritize leads after a cold callers first contact with a new lead.
Cost-saving and Cost Effective
When it finally comes time for you to staff callers, you can outsource intro sales calls on a month-to-month basis as needed. When carried on your own payroll, you will have more overhead costs. And when you hire an outsourced sales caller, the team will be well managed by executives with years of experience hiring, recruiting and training that team.
Outsourced Sales Maximizes ROI
Outsourced sales companies will have a track record to deliver a better ROI because they are hired on a contracted basis, so you will receive consistent, reliable and quick delivery without all the recruiting costs of hiring your own team. This is why telemarketing makes sense.
About Our Integrated Outsourced Sales Campaigns
Gabriel Sales builds modern sales and marketing operations for Small Businesses and Start Ups with complex B2B solution sales. To learn more about our approach to marketing and why telemarketing makes sense, we invite you to check out our services page.
by Glen Springer | May 22, 2017
When you are running a small business, time is your precious commodity. And generating leads and working the phone with smart and modern content can quickly suck your time and bandwidth. If you are reading this article you may be considering an outsourced sales and marketing solution. When you decide to outsource sales and marketing, you will gain several advantages:
Your lead generation won’t oscillate because of staff problems. One of the critical parts of successful lead generation is consistent effort. The challenge you face is that employees are not machines and they are not always reliable – especially if they are not full time and are not dedicated to the one task of generating sales leads. You can’t suddenly stop blogging for a few weeks or you will pay the price on Google. You cannot stop sending emails or you will feel the impact two months from now in your closing results. An outsourced sales and marketing company will not allow a gap in any tasks. Using an outsourced sales and marketing company will ensure the job will always get done.
You get a blended team of experts Employees have salaries, so instead of just paying one person with one set of skills, you will get a team of experts. This outsourced sales and marketing team will be able to research the right strategy, execute that strategy, manage that strategy and report on that strategy.
An outsourced sales and marketing company gives you outside insight into your business. Working on your company everyday gives you a deep understanding of your business, your sales process and your buyers. Sometimes it is helpful to gain an outside perspective to help you see the forest through the trees. Hiring an outsourced sales and marketing company can give you a new perspective on your business and provide the lift or simple nudge you may need to take lead generation to the next level.
Outsourced sales and marketing helps you keep up with new approaches Outsourced sales and marketing companies live lead generation and opportunity development every day. With all the automation and digital solutions being applied today, an outsource sales and marketing company will be able to help you decide what is right for your business and make recommendations on the most appropriate new techniques.
You get to focus on the core of your business An outsourced sales and marketing company can help you keep processes integrated with your company, yet remain independent from the core day-to-day activities of the company. With the right information and access to your key executives, your outsourced sales and marketing partner can help you plan, develop and execute strategies that yield results without taking your time away from your daily duties to manage this function. You can focus on account growth, sales growth and product development, while your outsource sales and marketing partner deals with the heavy lifting.
About Gabriel Sales’ Outsourced Sales and Marketing Services
Gabriel Sales builds moderns sales and marketing operations for small businesses and technology companies that execute a solution sale and requires a closer to manage the close of a deal. To learn more about how we help you address the new digital buyer to close more business faster we invite you to check out our new approach to outsourced sales and marketing.
by Glen Springer | May 21, 2017
The digital buyer’s new best friend is the outsourced sales company
If you are like most companies, you have probably noticed that the days of simply cold calling buyers to generate leads is no longer as effective as it once was. In fact, most buyers now prefer to learn about new products by searching on the web or, in the case of 70% of buyers, to get an educational email that is then followed up by thoughtful reps with additional content. An outsourced sales company could help you navigate these tasks, saving you time and energy that could be spent on other projects.
Here are several challenges the new digital buyer presents followed by ways an sales outsourcing company may be able to help you address them.
Challenge #1 – Your buyers want and expect to be educated first. Buyers want to understand what you do without always relying on a sales reps to explain it. This means you may need to develop some new tactics and commit to content marketing. Marketing needs to support sales with content that shares your thought leadership digitally. If your marketers can leverage your thought leaders, they can optimize support of your sales team and keep them focused on selling while your content explains what you do. Marketing can take care of early stage sales engagement with the right content.
An outsourced sales campaign from Gabriel Sales will include creating content that can be leveraged by the sales rep and by your lead generation team to make it easier for the buyer to buy.
Challenge #2 – Sales and marketing need to work together with one goal of creating qualified sales opportunities through buyer education. The days of hard selling and simply marketing the features and benefits of your solution are over. For many businesses, this is the biggest hurdle because it’s cultural. Sales and marketing both need to work together toward the goal of educating the customer. To do this you are going to need to align sales and marketing with the tools, content, and processes you need to support your inside sales reps with the content you need to demonstrate your thought leadership and differentiators. There needs to be mutual respect between sales and marketing because the buyer no longer cares who educates them they just care about being educated. And in most cases as the graphic above demonstrates they expect it to be both sales and marketing with a consistent story.
An outsourced sales and marketing campaign can help you run an integrated sales and marketing campaigns that has both callers and content marketing tactics keeping you in front of and top of mind with your customer.
Challenge #3 – Using automation technology correctly. With the advent of marketing automation platforms, Google Analytics, and CRMs, you can now define and implement a repeatable sales process that uses technology to manage and score the effort. The right technology stack provides complete transparency and accountability throughout your entire sales and marketing process. It also helps sales and marketing keep score together.
This isn’t astrodynamics. Just head out to any Little League or Soccer Field on a Saturday during a game and compare it to what happens during practice. During practice, the energy level and focus waxes and wanes. Put them on the field when they are accountable for a score and measured on the results and everything changes.
An outsourced sales and marketing company will have the experience and expertise to help you set the right benchmarks in your automation platforms and CRM immediately.
Summary – The line between sales and marketing is getting blurred
- Your buyer now wants to be educated digitally and by reps
- They want access to your thought leadership on their time and not yours
- Your buyer does not want to engage with sales until they are educated and ready to buy
- You need to demonstrate you understand their situation and pain before your prospect will engage with sales
Sales and marketing now need to work together for sale success. Modern sales and marketing operations means your entire team needs to educate buyers.
If you want to learn more about what gaps in your sales and marketing operations, we invite you to visit this page that address what gaps outsourced sales can help you cover in your sales and marketing operations
by Glen Springer | May 18, 2017
How Does Sales Outsourcing Use Marketing Automation to Generate Qualified Leads?
Marketing automation is at almost full adoption in most B2B technology companies. Larger companies will see as many as 20 new technologies in the marketing department. But many other small businesses are just getting started or do not yet understand how automated tools can make their sales and marketing operations modern and more efficient. Sales outsourcing and marketing automation combined is one way to quickly create modern and more effective sales and marketing operations.
In this blog post, we will touch on how a sales outsourcing company will use marketing technology to produce better results. We will touch on the following areas:
- Capturing Sales Leads
- Lead Scoring
- Email Automation
- Lead Intelligence
- Sales Lead Prioritization and Notification
Lead Capture
One feature of a marketing automation platform is an integrated form builder that allows you to capture leads. You can embed these forms and customize them anywhere on your website. This includes landing pages on your main website and even within HTML code in your emails.
Lead Scoring
There are two main ways to qualify leads:
- Using implicit behaviors and activities
- Explicit data and demographics
Using implicit information allows you to rank and score activities like opening emails, click through and also seeing what content the buyer is reading. It is very valuable especially if they are visiting pages that predict purchase intent. You can also use explicit data like company size, title and business vertical.
When these two are combined, it becomes very powerful in helping your sales reps to decide who they should prioritize to call first. This makes your sales process much more effective and also helps you save thousands to hundreds of thousands of dollars a year not calling buyers that are not interested.
Email Automation
You can stay top of mind by sending email to buyers on a regular basis. This ensures you remain top of mind with the buyer not ready to buy. And when they are ready to buy, their lead score will increase. This saves you time and money and also makes sure a lead does not slip through the cracks.
Lead Notifications Alerts
The automation system can be set up to send daily email digests to help buyers prioritize who they should call. Lists can be set up to score:
- Most recent activities
- Highest scores
- Best fits
With these lists and summaries a Sales Development Rep 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
Lead Intelligence
Once you transition the lead you will have a record of all the activities of the buyer. This digital footprint is valuable to the sales rep as they start to develop the deal and set themselves up to both be helpful to buyer and to close the sale. Activities like original lead source, specific page views, 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.
About Gabriel Sales Sales Outsourcing
Gabriel Sales helps companies build modern sales and marketing operations. We are committed to marketing automation as one of the critical tools for sales success. We have over 50 marketing automation deployments under our belt. And we have implemented over a half dozen different email marketing and lead scoring technologies so we can help you decide on the best fit at the right price to meet your sales goals and stage of sales maturity.
by Glen Springer | May 16, 2017
Staged Process to Get the Most from an Outsource Sales Outbound Campaign
One of the challenges facing most businesses trying to scale their sales and revenue is having too few leads in there automated nurturing campaigns. This is especially true for small businesses where cold calling and Google Adwords is extremely competitive or simply too expensive. This is why we often create leads with an outsource sales email campaign to help ramp our client’s sales funnels.
In most cases, email can be the fastest way to ramp a sales funnel. But simply buying a list and then blasting that list is no longer effective. Can-SPAM laws and Google blacklisting make this a high risk tactic.
Below are six steps you can take on your own or steps an outsource sales company will take to fill your top of funnel with a successful email lead generation campaign.
1) Define your goals
An outsource sales company will help you define your goals. How many leads do you need? How many leads can you handle? They will also work with you to understand how quickly you need these leads and set the proper expectations of what you can expect a campaign to produce:
- In the short term – immediately after the campaign
- In the mid term – with nurturing
- In the long term – once outsourced sales reps start to follow up
2) Target Your Ideal Audience
After defining your goals, an outsource sales company will be able to approach multiple third-party vendors to develop a campaign that hits the right audience at the right price. In most cases, this will include both decision makers and influencers because the best email marketing campaigns target the widest audience possible. This is because more and more decisions are now not make by a single decision maker but by decision making units that include:
- A business buyer
- A technical buyer
- An end-user
3) Build your campaign engagement plan
After you identify your target audience, an outsource sales company will help you prepare the copy and create the landing pages for the educational content offers you will be using as part of your campaign. The most effective campaigns are typically run in a series of three messages that will resonate with all the different types of buyers and influencers in your target audience.
4) Deploy your email campaign
An outsource sales partner will then deploy the campaign through the third-party vendor. This includes managing the tests and the best times to deploy. Typically the best campaigns includes testing messages on the first two parts with A/B split tests and then using the best performing offers and messages in the final campaign.
5) Measure KPIs
Identify the most relevant KPIs for each campaign and be sure to track results and performance. This also includes prioritizing what are the best leads to follow up with first if you do not have a nurturing campaign or if you are under immediate pressure to bubble up some early stage opportunities.
6) Move them into a nurturing campaign
In most cases, an eProspecting Email campaign is only the first step in a lead generation campaign. Once you have generated the lead, you will need to move them into your marketing automation campaign. An outsource sales company can help you with this as well.
About Gabriel Sales Outsource Sales Services
Gabriel Sales help companies generate a sustained flow of leads using multiple tactics as part of modern sales and marketing operations. To learn more about our approach we invite you to check out our page that discusses our integrated sales philosophy and our 20 years of history of helping companies scale sales with outsource sales services.
