Outsourced Sales Strategies To Increase Sales for 2017

Outsourced Sales Strategies To Increase Sales for 2017

by | Dec 11, 2016

Outsourced Sales Strategies and Marketing Tips for Small Businesses 2017

2017 is fast approaching. Here are several quick ways Small Businesses can kick off 2017 to build a sustained and productive sales and revenue engine.

Build an Ideal Customer profile. Analyze the demographics of your current group of customers. Use this information to determine what companies give you the biggest profit, are the least demanding, and quickest to scale. Target more of these buyers for the top of your sales funnel.

Run a Campaign to put a Fresh Set of Leads into Your Sales Funnel. The start of the calendar year is not just a new beginning for your sales and marketing team. It’s also a new start for your buyers. January is a great time to build awareness to a large a group of decision makers and influencers, so as new initiatives are launched they are aware of you your solutions can help them achieve their goals and solve their pains.

Consider a Marketing Automation Platform – Marketing automation is becoming a requirement for successful B2B sales and marketing. In our experience as an outsourced sales marketing company, the insights and efficiency gains are critical for us to compete in the new new buyer driven economy. Marketing automation platforms allow you to stay top of mind with buyers that are not ready to buy with more cost effective email marketing. These platforms also allow your sales reps to measure a buyers digital engagement so you understand what a buyer is most interested in prior to them becoming a sales ready lead.

If You Are Using a Marketing Automation Platform Commit to More Content Marketing to Nurture your Sales Pipe. 60% of companies have now committed to using content for top of funnel lead generation and are 72% are planning on increasing this budget using content marketing. But 80% of companies that are using marketing automation platforms are not even experimenting with lead nurturing and lead scoring and even fewer are actually leveraging these platforms for any sort of personalization. By understanding outsourced sales strategies, your company may be able to gains a competitive advantage with a basic lead scoring and nurturing program in 2017.

Start Using Video to Help Buyers Understand How Your Solution Will Help Them Solve Their Problem – Once a buyer aware of your solution and the problems you can solve for them video is a great way to make it easier for the buyer to buy. If a software demonstration is critical to closing the sale, as an outsourced sales and marketing company we recommend that you create two to three short videos that demonstrate how your product solves a specific problem, and helps your potential client get a visual of how it works.

Revisit Your Overall Sales and Marketing with Outsourced Sales Strategies – In B2B sales and marketing, there are numerous strategies and tactics that have potential to drive sales growth, With the advent of new technologies, the adoption of new content marketing strategies, and the change of buyer behavior, now may be a great time to take advantage of the sales consulting services and outsourced sales and marketing company provides. An outsourced sales and marketing company stays on top of best practices, and a brief consulting engagement may provide the two or three nuggets you need to transform your sales and marketing in 2017.

Gabriel Sales helps companies transform their sales and marketing with:

  • Sales Consulting
  • Outsourced Sales and Marketing
  • And Sales Automation Systems Implementation

To learn more about outsourced sales strategies and how we may be able to help we invite you to visit our About Us page.  Or you can check out our outsourced sales and marketing services here.

Outsource Sales and Marketing for Effective Marketing Automation

Outsource Sales and Marketing for Effective Marketing Automation

by | Dec 5, 2016

When you outsource sales and marketing to help transform and modernize and scale your sales and marketing operations, one of the greatest benefits you will realize in the short term will be the outsourcing of your marketing automation systems.

First let’s look at the benefits of hiring an agency to implement your marketing automation platform vs. hiring a full time employee (FTE). Hiring an FTE to implement and manage a marketing automation platform used to mean that you had a person sitting in your office available right next door. However in today’s business environment odds are that one or both of you are working remotely, so that’s no longer the upside it used to be. Also, hiring a single FTE would mean they would have one or two key strengths and skill sets – it could be systems integration, copy writing, content management, content production or sales messaging. Successful sales automation requires all of these skills sets to have the greatest impact. When you outsource sales and marketing, you will have access to a blended and dedicated team experts in automation with both depth and breadth in marketing automation, content marketing, databases management, CRM and sales. So you will be accessing a wealth of insight, strategy and skill.

So your next concern would be that this blended team will be more expensive than an FTE. That’s not the case because the costs of hiring that one employee with the limited skill set can go as high as $120,000.

Let’s start with simply finding that person. Marketing automation as a discipline is in high demand so you will need to start by advertising, hiring a recruiter, and interviewing. Your employee hasn’t even started yet and you’ve already spent weeks or months on the search and $1000s of dollars.

Next they join the team. You’ll have the regular salary, and benefits package that will be between 25% to 40% of their income including typical benefits like insurance, dental plans, paid vacation etc.

Once established in the office, you’ve got to allow time for ramp up; which takes an estimated 20 weeks for professionals and 26 for executives. One survey of CEOs in Harvard Business School estimated that the average mid-level managers require 6.2 months just to offer break-even value.

Simply stated you’re paying out long before you will start to see a return. Even more detrimental is that only 50% of hires pan out the first time, so you could be out twice that investment.

So now to the kicker when it comes to marketing automation and ROI. Marketing automation requires that you also invest in software. Marketing automation typically takes 3 to 6 months to start producing a more consistent set of leads. So while you are also waiting for your new FTE hire to:

  • Implement the system
  • Create the content use to fuel the system
  • Generate the leads to put into the system

You are burning through valuable resources and delaying the net return on your investment by not getting the tools and system as productive as quickly as possible. When you outsource sales and marketing along with marketing automation you will have sales ready leads before an FTE will even have your engine off the ground.

Bottom line, when you outsource sales and marketing in combination with outsourced marketing automation you will hit the ground running, with no training costs or ramp-up period required.

Having a blended teams collective experience, tactics, best practices and expertise at your disposal will give you access to a marketing automation and lead scoring brain-trust no single FTE can match. Especially when you consider that this blended team will have the collective experience of over 20, 30, or even 40 implementations under their belt to cross-pollinate best practices and set benchmarks from their past implementations.

So yes, when you outsource sales and marketing you will get all the benefits detailed above. But when it comes to building an automation system, the return will be even greater because ultimately all the investment will be returned even faster when your new and improved marketing automation program delivers a higher ROI faster because your blended team put the right skills behind the technology.

Gabriel Sales provides sales consulting & outsource sales and marketing automation services to companies committed to modernizing that sales and marketing operations. To learn more about our  outsource sales philosophy and how we can help you build a sales and marketing revenue engine from start to finish, please visit our outsource sales and marketing services page.

5 Indicators Sales Outsourcing and Marketing Makes Sense

by | Nov 30, 2016

This article will address five indicators that may suggest that it could be a good time to consider sales outsourcing and marketing.

Outsourcing different functions to service providers is becoming more and more accepted.  Companies can now outsource a variety of tasks like HR, staffing, product development and finance.  But companies are often more cautious when outsourcing sales and marketing.   But when executed correctly by an experienced provider, sales outsourcing can have a meaningful impact especially in helping you to build a modern sales and marketing organization.

Here are several reasons you may want to work with a modern sales outsourcing and marketing company:

Feature selling is not working – You need to start selling against pains with solutions.  A sales outsourcing and marketing company will be able to help you quickly shift your early stage messages and process to focus on the buyer instead of your product.

Your Rolodex Reps have stopped producing – A fair amount of companies are able to grow their business through their founders or the early sales hires’ set of relationships.  At some point this runs out of steam.  A sales outsourcing company can provide a process that generates a more consistent flow of leads.

Sales model must change – Startups and small businesses grow markets in different ways.  But most companies reach a stage where they need to go after a new market quickly.  A sales outsourcing and marketing company can help you quickly shift:

  • Selling to the enterprise to selling to SMB
  • Generating leads for larger enterprise companies
  • Transitioning your sales process from an outside sale to an inside sales
  • Using content marketing to do your early stage sales education

You need to build a repeatable sales process – After a company has closed their initial 6 to 12 deals there you will have enough information and experience to build a repeatable sales process. A modern sales outsourcing and marketing company will have the frameworks to quickly help you build a repeatable and integrated process that can be scaled.

You have gaps in your internal team – A sales outsourcing and marketing company will be able to help by supplying:

  • The right marketing talent and a sales talent to execute parts of your sales process
  • The right automation and CRM systems experts
  • Access to a database to market to and the talent to help you manage that database
  • Content marketing and content production specialists

The right strategist and consulting experts for marketing, lead generation, lead qualifying and closing assistance are also typically part of any sales outsourcing and marketing engagement.  These strategists will be able to provide a fresh perspective to help you remove barriers to your sales.

Conclusion

Sales outsourcing and marketing provides a number of benefits, like controlling costs, providing access to highly skilled sales talent, sales and marketing strategists, technologists and marketing professionals.   You also avoid the costs and delays of building on your own.  You get a team up and running faster that will be aligned around enabling growth.

Gabriel Sales specializes in helping Start Ups and Small and Mid- Sized Business build modern sales and marketing operations.  To learn more about our approach we invite you to check out our About Us page or you can also check out our Sales Outsourcing and Marketing  Case Studies to evaluate if we may be able to help

Outsourced Sales and Marketing and Webinars

by | Nov 28, 2016

In 2015 Live Webinars were one of the top 3 content formats leveraged by buyers to help them learn more about a company’s solution.  But according to DemandGen’s 2016 Content Survey webinars slipped slightly from this position in 2016 for the following reasons:

  • Lack of time to view a full webinar: 88% of buyers surveyed said they prefer shorter content formats
  • Too much content available in general: 83% of respondents said they are overwhelmed by the amount of available content
  • The need to watch webinars live: 73% of respondents said they prefer to access audio/video content on-demand.

But on the positive side…if you create compelling webinars buyers that do invest the time are more likely to convert into Sales Qualified Opportunities.  So as an outsourced sales and marketing we still love webinars because they are a killer piece of content to make it easier for your buyer to buy and a great predictive tool in your lead scoring strategy.

So as an outsourced sales and marketing company here are 5 tips we give our clients to ensure they get the most out of their Webinars to maximize their content marketing investment.

Turn one webinar into multiple pieces of content Outsourced Sales and Marketing Team can leverage  

We can get a dozen pieces of content because that one webinar can typically be repurposed into:

  • 4 to 5 Short Weblette Videos
  • 4-7 Blog Posts
  • A White Paper and/or an Ebook.

These also are shorter pieces of content which buyers now prefer.

You don’t need to always have live webinars. 

Having live events are a great way to generate leads but you don’t  need to always go into the extra work of making these live events.   If you do have live events you should expect as many as 50% to 60% not to show.  But this does not need to be a huge cause of concern. You can still follow up with these with additional content marketing.  Remember to send them a notification when the live webinar is recorded.  And we have also found that if senior buyers sign up its worth as many as seven follow up calls to these senior decision makers because they signed up for the event because they had a problem they needed to solve.   It’s worth as many as 7 calls.

Simply Start with an On-Demand Webcast

Building on two of the points above, doing webcasts live puts more pressure on the presenter and the moderator.  Now that buyers prefer on demand webcasts you can start there..   Simply simulate a live webcast.  With video editing software it is now easy to clean up any mistakes if you don’t like how you presented a section.  So in one session with some basic editing you can create an impactful piece of content that can be used for an extended period of time faster and with less pressure.

On-demand webinars are essentially DVRed TV shows, Demand Gen Report’s 2016 Content Preferences Survey showed that 73% of respondents prefer to access audio/video content on demand.

Send Email Promotions Strategically: Blasting multiple emails with the same message and content is not the right strategy. Send the first mail about two weeks prior to the event, the second two days before the event and the last mail the day of the event.  And articulate what they will learn from the event with slightly different subject lines and content.

Conclusion

Webinars should be a staple of any marketing, education and lead scoring program.  But they are just one important part of an integrated outsourced sales and marketing program.  Marketers should stop thinking about them as events and start thinking and using them as part of an overall strategy to tell their sales story to the market in a substantive way.

To learn more about how Gabriel Sales can help you get more out of your webcasting and overall content marketing and sales efforts and how we can help you build more modern sales and marketing operations we invite you to check out our  outsourced sales and marketing outsourced sales and marketing or the About Us section of our website.

Outsourced Sales and Marketing Can Help with Automation

by | Nov 18, 2016

Why Outsourced Sales and Marketing Makes Sense for Marketing Automation Implementations

So you have decided that you want to transform your sales and marketing operations. This means you need a lead scoring system and marketing automation platform.  But you are still a little leery because of the sizeable investment in the software and team of marketers this commitment will represent. You have the following concerns:

  • You want to test a marketing automation platform but you don’t have the internal resource to run it
  • You want to limit your investment until you know it will work before you make that commitment to both talent and software
  • You have enough content to generate leads but not to nurture leads
  • You don’t understand the best practices or how to baseline that return

Essentially you want to get started and prove you can get a return on your efforts before you pull the trigger and build your own team.

Here are 5 ways outsourced sales and marketing can help with Marketing Automation as you execute this strategy.

Automation Platform Selection

Most outsourced sales and marketing companies will have deep expertise across the platforms.  They will have preferred providers but you can expect them to make solid recommendations based on your needs, sales cycle and budget. .

Outsourced Sales and Marketing Allows You to Try Before You Buy

You can always contract directly with a marketing automation software supplier if you wish.  And once you have decided that marketing automation works for you that is what we typically recommend.  However almost all the software providers require at least an annual commitment and in some cases an annual payment. They want you to commit because it takes marketing automation about six months to a year if you are building a team on your own. Most substantial outsourced sales and marketing companies will be able to negotiate shorter commitments or in Gabriel Sales case will be able to provide solutions on a month to month basis until you prove concept.   This frees up budget to spend on generating leads to help you produce an ROI from your marketing automation process faster.

CRM Data Integration

Key to successful marketing automation is connecting the automation system to your CRM so you have one clean buyer record.  This make it possible for your sales reps to see the value from the automation platform without needing to learn another system.  An outsourced sales and marketing company will have processes to clean your data and will be able to connect all the data required.  This makes the system useful to your sales team immediately. .

Outsourced Sales and Marketing for Campaign Deployment

An outsourced sales and marketing company will have the technical skills to deploy a campaign through your platform in a fraction of the time it would take to learn this systems on your own.  This includes; customer and prospects segmentation, best practices for how to launch your campaign, how to scale, and the frequency of your email communications. .

Lead Scoring Best Practices

Lead scoring requires a combination of sales and marketing alignment, a strong content matrix and a strong definition of both implicit and explicit qualification criteria.  An outsourced sales and marketing company will be able to work through these issues in a fraction of the time ensuring that your engine identifies buyers most likely to buy.

Sales Team Adoption

Your automation platform only has value if your sales reps follow up with leads.  An outsourced sales and marketing company will be able to train your sales reps how to leverage the system and also provide appointment setting support if your team lacks the time to follow up with your new volume of leads.

Reporting

Many of the marketing automation platforms give you the ability to run hundreds of reports,  Most executives only want to see dashboards and a handful reports that demonstrate how many contacts you’re marketing to, how they’re segmented and what scores are leading towards pipe velocity and sales conversions. An outsourced sales and marketing company will be able to cut through the noise and provide these reports to you for ROI measurement out of the gate.

 

Gabriel Sales help companies transform their sales and marketing operations by providing the team and tool you need to generate,  score and qualify leads faster at a lower cost.  To learn more about our outsourced sales and marketing approach and philosophy visit our About Us page.  Or feel free to contact us for complimentary assessment.

Outsource Sales and Marketing for Effective Marketing Automation

Marketing Automation Helps Sales Outsourcing Team

by | Nov 16, 2016

Summary of 4 Benefits of Marketing Automation for Sales Outsourcing Reps

The goal of any sales outsourcing engagement for Gabriel Sales it to put a consistent flow of real sales opportunities into the sales pipeline of the companies we work with. Our aim is to do this at a lower cost. As we help our clients build a modern and repeatable sales and marketing process an automation technology is now a requirement for 4 specific benefits that are directly related to the productivity of your sales outsourcing team:

  • Email Automation
  • Lead Scoring
  • Lead Intelligence
  • Real Time Lead Alerts

Here’s a brief explanation of how each of these features will help your sales outsourcing team:

Lead Scoring and your Sales Outsourcing Team

There are two main ways to qualify leads using an marketing automation technology: using implicit behaviors and activities and explicit data and demographics.

Automation technologies allow you to rank a leads level of interest based on the content they are consuming on your website. Different types of content are scored based on how predictive they are as it relates to where a buyer is in their sales cycle.  Basic educational content is not as highly scored as video demos relating to a specific solution.  You can also score by what emails buyers are engaging with and how frequently they are engaging.

We also use explicit data to score leads.  This is typically demographic data.  A CEO gets a higher score than IT managers.  A company with 1000 employees gets a different score than a company with 50 employees. You can also change grades up and down based on industry, revenue size and other factors.  This is grading prospects against an ideal customer profile that your sales and marketing team identifies.

This scoring allows your sales outsourcing team to focus on the most interested buyers and allows you to prioritize on buyers that are the best fit for your company’s solution.

Email Automation

Email automation helps increase the volume of communication for your sales outsourcing team to a new level. Your sales outsourcing team can use emails send bulk emails that appear to be  “personal” emails through your marketing automation tool.  This allows your sales outsourcing team to personally track opens and clicks with automatic notifications.

Your marketing team can craft a message to segment prospects, and dynamically assign the “From” and “Email” field of the lead’s assigned rep.  This serves two main purposes: 1) the sales outsourcing rep will get the credit for a pleased buyer being sent valuable content (yet the rep didn’t have to do anything – marketing and software took care of the touch for them) and 2) all replies to the content will go directly back to the rep.

Buyer Intelligence for Sales Outsourcing Team

Your outsourcing sales rep will be able to see all online behaviors and that information will be available in the CRM that the sales rep works from.  Information like original lead source, specific page views, how long they spent on the page, webinar attendance and video views can all be tracked.  This allows your sales outsourcing team to frame conversations, voicemails and follow-up emails based on those specific prospect activities and areas of interest and need.

Real-Time Lead Alerts for Sales Outsourcing Reps

Real-time lead alerts allow your sales outsourcing team to follow up faster when buyers are actively engaged in the sales education content.  In some cases they can receive instant alerts via email, text messaging, mobile apps, and desktop apps, whichever they prefer.

With these alerts and summaries Reps can:

  • Prioritize their day with the most active prospects
  • Call buyers when they know they are sitting at their desk
  • Click on links to trigger CRM profile lookups for buyer insights
  • Send custom emails to active prospects with a few quick clicks

If you would like to see the tools reps will have at their disposal we invite you to contact us for a free demo of the tools in action.

If you want to learn more about how Gabriel Sales can combine your product knowledge and thought leadership with our sales and marketing automation expertise to get you in the lead scoring game faster, request a complimentary review.