by Glen Springer | Jan 9, 2017
This article should help you decide if an inside sales outsourcing team make sense for your business.
For decades the typical sales organization was comprised of sales reps cold calling and working in the field. They set their appointments and then meet face-to-face with potential buyers. And in recent years we have started to see a transition to those outside reps getting support from “inside reps” who assist in setting the appointments. And once again typically a company would build this organization internally.
However over the past several years both CRM and marketing automation technologies have become technology staples of most modern B2B sales operations. These technologies enable companies to control visibility of each stage of their sales process. These same technologies now allow companies to seamlessly consider sales outsourcing for their inside sales activities. Here are a few of the advantages to evaluate to help you decide if an inside sales outsourcing team is a good fit for your company:
Sales Training – There are multiple benefits that can be realized from shifting to an inside sales outsourcing model. One of the biggest advantages is that your sales training will become more effective with inside sales outsourcing. When a company uses an outside sales model, sales reps do not come into contact with each other on a regular basis. But with an inside sales outsourcing team your reps will be working in the same office space. It’s much easier to quality control sales training for new reps, share “best practice” sales tips, and disseminate new information. For smaller businesses that only have the need for one or two inside reps this advantage can be even more significant because your inside sales outsourcing team will be surrounded by other reps selling other products. You will gain access to a part time sales manager that will keep your team on track and well trained without the expense of staffing a full time sales manager.
Scaling Faster – As an inside sales outsourcing company we believe when a company is just getting off the ground it makes sense to staff a closer on the client side to gain insights into the entire sales process start to finish. An internal sales executive also allow you to more effectively build the personal relationships a company just getting off the ground needs. In many cases this resource is also one of the executives in the company, often the founder. And then as the company understands its sales process an inside sales outsourcing company can craft a repeatable sales process to generate the lead, develop the lead and qualify the lead using content and well trained business development reps. Switching to an inside sales outsourcing model may make sense, since it provides the ability to integrate new staff more effectively and allows for more rapid growth.
Complexity of the Sale Another highly influential factor that determines how to deploy an inside sales outsourcing team is the complexity of the company’s sales cycle – how many buyers and influencers are involved, deal size and value, and the complexity of the product itself.
For example – an enterprise sale is a long cycle involving multiple individuals at various levels of the organization. In these cases, external sales reps are required – again, because selling extremely high-value products over a long period of time is something that relies on the development of more personal business relationships. If this is the type of sale you need we typically recommend using inside sales outsourcing for the initial lead generation and the early stage introduction of your solution to multiple buyers across the target organizations. Once the buyer becomes engaged your outside sales rep should take full ownership of the sale.
On the other hand if you have a short and simple sales cycle this is where an inside sales outsourcing model can take the sale further. Inside sales outsourcing can generate the lead, develop the lead and educate the buyer. In some cases you can simply staff a sales engineer with technical or business domain expertise to answer technical or deep domain questions and your inside sales outsourcing team can manage the final close of the sale.
If outsourcing sales makes sense for your business then choosing the right inside sales outsourcing model is key to ensuring it sales outsourcing will help to grow your business. In many cases a hybrid model may make the most sense. To learn more about how Gabriel Sales approach sales outsourcing and marketing feel free to visit our sales outsourcing services page.
by Glen Springer | Jan 6, 2017
Today’s buyer is overwhelmed. The buyer is being pitched nonstop by countless vendors selling countless products and solutions. And buyers have less time than they did to make a decision than even three years ago.
So in many cases buyers don’t even have the time to figure out what products they need. So calling a buyer and pitching your features and benefits or making the claim that you have an “award winning” or “number one rated” product or service is a waste of your time and your buyers time.
In the face of the ever-changing B2B technology and services landscape, many sellers overwhelm customers with useless information about products that buyers don’t even know they want or need. This is especially true when you are pitching a busy executive or manager.
So here are five ways an outsourced sales and marketing company can help you stand out from your competition:
An outsourced sales and marketing company can help you do your research:
An outsourced sales and marketing company can work with you to understand your Ideal Customer Profile. They can then help you acquire the databases, phone numbers and email addresses of these buyers and load your CRM with buyers to target that have the need for your product or solution so you are focused on selling to the right buyer.
An outsourced sales and marketing company can help you create compelling content that addresses the buyers needs
An outsourced sales and marketing company will have a team of content production experts that can help you create blog articles, videos and webcasts that provide valuable education for buyers about the problems you solve for customer and how you solve them for the customer.
An outsourced sale and marketing company can help you share that content.
An outsourced sales and marketing company can supply the team and the inbound and outbound marketing efforts to share your educational message with companies in a non-threatening and educational way. This approach builds trust with the buyer without requiring the time of your closers who should be focusing on closing and not educating early stage buyers.
An outsourced sales and marketing company can help you automate your marketing
Technology now makes it possible to share content with buyers through email marketing, your website and across social media. An outsourced sales and marketing company will have the technologists and the marketing automation best practices and expertise to help you build trust with buyers not ready to buy digitally. And these tools will allow you to track a buyer’s digital footprint so when they are ready to buy your closers will be notified so they will never miss a deal.
As technologies evolve and the noise continues to grow you need to shift your sales and marketing efforts to making it easy to build trust and drive value for your buyers digitally before you “sell”. An outsourced sales and marketing team can make this shift to modern sales and marketing operation fast, easy and effective.
Instead of being the irritant that bugs the buyer with information about why they are so fantastic you can shift your organization to one that help the buyer and builds trust first with effective outsourced resources and automated tools.
To learn more about how an outsourced sales and marketing team can help you stand out from your competition and build modern sales and marketing operations we invite you to check out our About Us page.
by Glen Springer | Jan 4, 2017
If you are a small business or a start-up building a sales and marketing team can be a daunting task. This is especially true if you do not have an executive on your team that has the experience or proven track record. Most executives are already swamped with addressing other critical areas of their business so if you do not have this sales and marketing experience and background it may make sense to consider an outsource sales and marketing team.
Here is a short list of 3 things you can expect from an outsource sales and marketing team to help you build a high performing sales effort.
Your outsource sales and marketing team will hire the right people
An outsource sales and marketing team will hire individuals with the right attitude, right personality for their assigned task and the right work ethic. An outsource sales and marketing company will understand how to recruit the right talent for the right job. This gets rid of a great deal of your time and investment building a team on your own.
Your outsource sales and marketing team will close competency gaps quickly
An outsource sales and marketing company will already have the sales and marketing support functions in house to cover any gaps you have in your internal team. This includes:
- Sales and marketing strategists
- Content production specialists
- Database managers
- Database marketers
- CRM and marketing automation technologists
- Marketing coordinators
- Cold calling and buyer education reps for prospecting
- Business development reps for qualifying and developing buyers
You will be able to access a blended team that you would not be able to quickly build on your own even if you have the budget.
Your outsource sales and marketing team will measure what matters
Beyond closed deals many small businesses and startups often will not have enough data to benchmark what matters to take a lead through the sales funnel to closed revenue. Obviously closed deals is the most critical measurement but to scale a sales effort you need to have a disciplined approach to lead generation, lead development and lead qualifying on a daily basis. We’ve all heard that what gets measured gets done. An outsource sales and marketing company will know how to use CRM and marketing automation technologies to hold your entire outsource sales and marketing team accountable for hitting these targets and accomplishing these tasks on a daily, weekly and monthly basis.
When all three of these qualities are aligned, your outsource sales and marketing team will help you build a high-performing sales effort. The end result is that an outsource sales and marketing team will help you build a sales culture of continuous improvement. They will recruit and retain the right people, create metrics that are meaningful at the individual, team, and organizational level. And they will help you measure and pursue what matter most.
To learn more about Gabriel Sales outsource sales and marketing services we invite you to check out our outsource sales and marketing services page.
by Glen Springer | Jan 3, 2017
How outsourcing sales can accelerate revenue for your business
With 2017 just getting started, most companies will be considering how to accelerate revenue production. If you and your sales and marketing team killed it in 2016 congrats…now is a perfect time to consider how you can leverage that momentum and build on it.
If you didn’t hit targets, we encourage you to ask yourself what you can do differently in 2017 to get sales back on track and Accelerate Revenue production.
Here are a just a few tactics that you can implement quickly in Q1 to help get off to a flying start. And if you are a little pressed for resources we briefly explain how outsourcing sales may be able to help with specific functions to help you build more modern and productive sales and marketing operations.
Top of funnel lead gen campaign
As an outsourcing sales company we find that many of our clients have a great solution that fills a need in the market. But many companies fall prey to the misguided notion that increasing sales means hiring more sales people. Instead we encourage you to consider if your closers are getting enough leads into the top of their sales funnel. If not, you may want to consider running a top of funnel lead generation campaign with email marketing and PPC tactics to arm your team with more early stage opportunities.
Sales Function Specialization
Beyond a quality product, your closers are your most valuable asset. Outsourcing sales can allow your closers to specialize on closing and you can leverage an outsourcing sales team to focus on qualifying your top of funnel leads.
Revisit your targeting
When was the last time that you examined if you were targeting the right market or if there are new markets to explore? Have you taken the time to create a buyer persona to understand who your best customers were in 2016 and have you examined why they purchased your solution? As an outsourcing sales company we can run a quick buyer persona workshop and provide quick market segmentation to see if there are markets you could expand to in 2017. We can then help to target those markets will laser focus. To learn more about how to build an ideal customer profile you can check out our blog article here.
Create content that delivers value
If you have not committed to content marketing yet, now may be the time to start. What you consider to be common sense often has tremendous value for potential buyers. Content marketing takes time and effort but in this age when 70% of buyers shortlist vendors with one or fewer conversations with a sales rep, making it easy for your buyers to buy with digital education is now a must have. Once you’ve created your buyer personas and documented their buying process you can create targeted content for each stage of the buyer journey. Make sure you have one or two pieces for each stage of the decision-making process. As an outsourcing sales company, Gabriel Sales can help you get this off the ground with a quick 2 day content production workshop.
Start nurturing and scoring leads
Over the course of 2016 statistics have shown that the majority of leads generated are from prospects not ready to buy right away. The trick to closing those leads is not throwing more budget at phone calls to buyers that aren’t ready to buy. Instead, you can stay top of mind by simply sharing educational content that helps buyers learn more about the challenges they face, how others are overcoming those challenges and how your solution may be able to help to accelerate revenue.
And to send these emails you will need a marketing automation platform that scores those leads so when a buyer is ready to buy you’ll know.
As an outsourcing sales company, Gabriel Sales specializes in helping small business implement and then manage their sales automation processes to accelerate revenue production. We have expertise in managing entry level and more complex software solutions so we can also help you decide on the right solution for your sales targets and budget. To decide if lead scoring is right for your business feel free to download our eBook here.
Be educational, not aggressive
More and more products are first bought through digital education and then sold when the buyer is ready to be closed. Generating great leads is an awesome start but if you don’t convert them into real sales opportunities all those invested resources go to waste. If your close rate is lower than you would like, ask yourself am I being too aggressive with the close?
In this age of digital education, buyers are now in control and hard closing before a buyer is ready to buy no longer works. By focusing instead on being helpful you can stand apart from your competition. An outsourcing sales company can help with your nurturing and we can also staff buyer education reps to monitor the scored leads for timely follow up that keeps the conversation helpful to help give you extra capacity for the middle of your sales funnel. To learn more about how modern business development reps engage buyers you can check out this quick overview here
How We Can Help
Gabriel Sales builds sales automation engines for B2B companies and helps support marketing efforts by also supplying insides sales outsourcing teams that combine both marketers and reps following up with highly scored leads. If you would like to learn about our approach visit our About Us Page or feel free to Contact Us to learn more about how we can help with your insides sales outsourcing and outsourced marketing needs.
by Glen Springer | Jan 2, 2017
As an outsource sales and marketing company we speak to many small business owners that are struggling to increase the efficiency of their sale and marketing processes. It’s understandable that some small businesses that have been selling for years can be a little anxious with keeping up with modern sales and marketing operations and the advances in online business models and digital marketing. And according to a recent survey of 1200 buyers 85% of most organizations now prefer to make all are part of their purchase decision through digital channels. But it’s important to note that 75% of those buyers will not make a purchase decision without engaging with a sales rep at the end of the buying process.
As an outsource sales and marketing company we help companies address these challenges by helping companies build digitally integrated sales and marketing sales/buyer processes. When it comes to empowering companies with their outsource sales and marketing efforts we focus on four core digital areas:
Creating enough content to support the buyer journey and the outsource sales and marketing process
We help companies to create digital content that supports their sales process at each stage of the buying process.
We look at creating content for four different stages:
- Creating content to share educational facts and information that helps them start to frame their problem and the challenges they will need to address
- Content that helps buyers realize that we understand their problems
- Content that frames how we help them to solve the problem
- Finally content that discusses how the problem was solved and the business results you can gain from solving that problem
We provide our Outsource Sales and Marketing clients with the content management tools to make it easy for buyers to self-educate.
Once you have your content created it’s important that you make it easy for your buyers to access that content. Getting your content on the web is only the first step. In today’s digital media age you also need to make it easy for buyer to self-discover information about your solution easy and simple. So we have created a simple to manage tool called Digital Demand Center™ that makes it easy to organize all 4 stages of your content on one microsite.
Organizing your content this way allows your buyer that is hungry for self education to go through all states of their buying process to solve one specific problem easy and simple. It also gives buyers that prefer one format over another (video, blog articles or downloadable assets) to educate themselves the way they prefer.
Allow your outsource sales team to access that digital conversation
The final step in the process is leveraging a marketing automation platform to:
- Track the buyers engagement with your content
- Score buyers based on what content they are consuming (the later the buying stage the higher the score)
- Notifying your outsource sales team when the buyer reaches a Sales Ready Lead Score
Embracing a digital workflow, scoring leads and sharing that information is not a replacement for sales – it’s a way to free up more of their time to focus on revenue-generating activities.
These digital tools are a way to boost the performance of your outsource sales team.
To learn about how Gabriel Sales can work with you to outsource sales and marketing please visit our outsource sales and marketing services page.
by Glen Springer | Dec 30, 2016
Here are three habits you should expect from and outsourcing sales and marketing team. But first lets define a habit. A habit (or wont) is a routine of behavior that is repeated regularly and tends to occur subconsciously. … Habitual behavior often goes unnoticed in persons exhibiting it, because a person does not need to engage in self-analysis when undertaking routine tasks. Habits are sometimes compulsory.
If you are working with an outsourcing sales team you can often predict their success in lead generation, prospecting and the development of real sales opportunities based on the habits embedded in the culture of the organization. In fact having these habits embedded in the culture if they do not exist in your culture can be one of the key advantages of working with an outsourcing sales team.
Here are the habits we believe you should expect from a sales outsourcing team:
Weekly Meetings to Discuss Sales Pipeline
Your sales outsourcing meeting should meet with you weekly to discuss the number of deals moving through the pipe and entering your sales pipeline:
- Highlights of the best successes of the weekly efforts
- What new leads have moved forward into the pipe
- What new leads have entered the pipe
And your team should be prepared to share the following with your outsourcing sales team:
- What deals have closed
- What deals have fallen out of the pipe
You and your sales outsourcing partner should also have a clear scorecard they are working towards on a weekly, monthly and quarterly basis that tracks all these goals.
This habit aligns both you and your outsourcing sales team around the most important goal of consistent deal flow because pipeline focus drives production for everyone.
Following Up with Inbound Leads Immediately
In this age of digital education 85% percent of buyers research multiple vendors when they have a business problem they are trying to solve. And the average amount of inbound inquiries they submit when they finally short list the companies they are interested in ranges from three to five..
You have a distinct advantage when you get back to those inbound leads immediately. Especially if you are a small business competing against larger companies (since you are already at a disadvantage with headcount) and need to demonstrate that your size will not impact the responsiveness the buyer can expect. In fact the ability of a sales outsourcing team to provide you with this responsiveness is a nice advantage a sales outsourcing team can provide.
Daily Use of the CRM by your Outsourcing Sales Team
Your sales outsourcing team should be active users of the CRM. If your sales outsourcing team is prospecting you should expect every call to be recorded even if there is no connection. If there is a connection you should expect the results of the calls to be recorded regardless if that call moves forward with a next step or not. This habit ensure that your sales outsourcing team remains accountable on a daily basis for moving deals through the pipe and ensure you have:
- The data you need to forecast and make projections accurately
- Have the visibility you need to coach your outsourcing team on:
- Where to focus their prospecting
- How to overcome objections
- And evaluate what deals they should focus to develop real opportunities
As a company you should also be committed to using the CRM on a daily basis. This is critical because it will help if you need to pass a lead back to your sales outsourcing team for further development.
Gabriel Sales takes a methodical approach to building sales outsourcing teams and marketing programs. To learn more about our philosophy and approach we invite you to check out our outsourcing sales services page.
