by Glen Springer | Jul 20, 2017
Because the rules of sales engagement have changed for good.
Time is money. Your buyer now expects you to make your content relevant and available so that they can educate themselves, digitally. They expect you to service them early in their buying process, not just put them in front of hard charging closers. You need marketing and sales talent with experience and expertise to integrate content and sales professionals seamlessly.
You can build out a $600K/year sales and marketing organization internally that may take 18 months or longer to come up and running, or you can foster a sales alliance partnership which can help you not only help you a campaign up-and-running in as little as 5 days. We believe a proven team that has all the skill sets and a proven track can help your team become successful faster.
We believe the buyer’s journey is as important as your sales process. This means you need senior strategists that understand both to streamline your process.
We know that creating content to keep up with the demands of your buyers is often hard to get off the ground. Experienced creative talent that specializes in the needs of fueling automation engines is difficult to find. We add specialized talent to your existing team immediately.
Today’s marketing departments are increasingly technology-powered. We have experienced this ourselves and are experts in these various analytics programs, marketing automation and salesforce automation platforms. This allows us to work with what you have in place, or we can help you build best practices from scratch.
Simply throwing bodies at the problem and generating more leads won’t solve the problem. We have well trained reps that understand how to use the automation tools to identify the hottest opportunities and buyer education reps that understand the nuances and desires of the new buyers.
We know that the right team with the right skills will provide you with better data and robust quantitative & qualitative analysis. This is an essential step that’s required to quickly make this challenging market shift and automate as much of your sales and marketing process as possible without losing sales… or your shirt!
by Glen Springer | Jun 28, 2017
Over the past several years, the lines between sales and marketing have been blurred. This is especially true when it comes to qualifying B2B leads. As an outsourced sales and marketing company, we see both good and bad B2B lead qualification processes. And with the new digital buyer, we believe that the most successful path to qualify leads is now a combination of sales and marketing working together to get the most from your sales and marketing budget. We believe this is one area where considering an outsourced team may make sense. Here is how outsourced sales and marketing qualify leads.
Call B2B Leads Immediately
We all know that there are huge advantages to following up immediately. Buyers have short memories, so you need to strike while the iron is hot. If a call is made instantly after a webinar or a form fill, the buyer may not be ready to buy, but they will be more likely to answer a handful of initial qualification questions about time frame, budget, and why they’re interested. The added bonus is, if the buyer is ready to start evaluating vendors, the first several vendors to reach out will be at the front of the line and the likelihood of getting on their short list increases dramatically.
It is also important that when you get and inbound lead or generate an outbound lead, you immediately drop it into your marketing automation platform. This will keep you top of mind and allow the buyer to learn more about your company (and brand your company) on their own time – not on your caller’s time.
An outsourced sales and marketing company can provide the staff to help you stay on top of all inbound leads.
Understand who you’re qualifying
Do your homework. Research shows, only 2 out of 10 callers take the time to do even a minute or two of research prior to making a qualifying call. Take the time to understand whom you’re qualifying and what the company does.
This is especially true when calling senior executives. The more you demonstrate your knowledge about their company and industry, the more likely they’ll share information about their needs and challenges.
An outsourced sales company will already have the necessary tools and the trained staff to make researching the buyer easier and more cost efficient.
Be Smart About Whom You Call
Building a buyer persona and an ideal customer profile is now critical to getting the most out of your marketing and sales budget. If you hit the mark targeting the right industries and companies, you’ve already qualified for the first level of fit.
Calling is the most expensive part of B2B lead qualification, so you need to focus on buyers and influencers most likely to buy. Today, you absolutely need to separate the buyers most likely to buy, so you can focus your time on these buyers first, and the easiest way to do this is to use your marketing automation platform to score the buyers most engaged with your digital content.
Outsourced sales and marketing qualify leads faster because they will have a blended team in place that can target correctly, acquire databases faster, and have the automation best practice expertise to help you use your marketing automation to score leads more effectively.
You No Longer Need to Qualify Immediately
BANT is dead. If a potential buyer doesn’t have the budget and authority immediately, it doesn’t mean the lead is dead – it simply means it may take more time to qualify. If a prospect has the need, you can now drop them into your automation campaigns, and over time, as their interest starts to grow, the timeline and budget will start to appear.
Not to state the obvious, but new leads need to be prioritized, but only 10% of qualified leads convert into immediate sales. Granted, there is tremendous gratification in that, but 90% of your B2B leads now take time to develop, which often requires a combination of continued marketing and occasional phone calls. Keep leads in your system until they opt out.
About Gabriel Sales Outsourced Sales and Marketing
Gabriel Sales build modern sales and marketing operation for small businesses and startup. We use best outsourced sales and marketing practices and modern sales and marketing to qualify leads and run intergrated sales and marketing campaigns to build a consistent flow of quality leads.
To learn more about our outsourced sales and marketing and decide if this may be the right approach for you please visit our new approach to outsourced sales page.
by Glen Springer | Jun 19, 2017
Seeing your vision become a concrete reality ready to take to market is both a fun and rewarding experience for the executives and teams turning that vision into a reality. During the incubation period of most startups, the executives and founding team will typically work on every detail to reassure themselves the product works and is well designed, the books are in order, the office is running fluidly, and the early customers are satisfied with the solution. But eventually, the day-to-day responsibilities of running the business and the continued product development, and managing accounts, recruiting, and business development will leave them with so many responsibilities, they’ll be so inundated, they’ll start to look for help.
One of the key areas executives and founding teams will start to consider is outsourced sales for startups.
Here are three common outsourced sales for startups strategies for your start up business that will immediately give you more time to focus on your core areas of competence and interest:
Build a Proven Go To Market Strategy
Most start ups reach a point where they are ready for aggressive growth. But most companies new to the market will have limited metrics and no historical track record to access to craft an effective sales strategy. An outsourced sales company will be able to help you develop plans, strategies and forecasts based on their best practices and track record of taking similar products and solutions to market.
Most Start-Up Companies are not Prepared with the Tools Needed for Growth in the New Digital Buyer Market
The days are over when you can simply hire sales reps and have them cold call to generate a sales funnel and close business. The new digital buyer now uses digital education and your content (and your competitors content) to self-educate prior to even speaking to a sales rep. An outsourced sales for startups company will be able to immediately provide the tools required to scale your sales pipeline including:
- CRM implementation to manage your sales pipeline
- Databases to help you target specific markets
- Content production for you to share with your buyers
- Marketing automation implementation to simplify sharing content and scoring buyer’s interest
- Reporting tools to help you measure your progress
Blended Team to Run Your Go To Market Campaign
There’s no universal recipe for a scalable, repeatable sales process, which is why an outsourced sales for startups company is so helpful to a start-up company.
An outsourced sales for startups company will not just create the strategy, they’ll also turn that strategy into an executed sales process. They will staff the marketing automation experts, the database managers, the email-marketing experts, the cold calling reps, the sales development reps, and the management layer to turn your strategy into a fully functioning sales engine.
Gabriel Sales Builds Modern Sales and Marketing Operations with Outsourced Sales for Startups
Gabriel Sales specializes in working with Start-ups and Small Businesses looking to build modern sales and marketing operations. We help companies transform their sales and marketing with:
- Sales Consulting
- Outsourced Sales and Marketing
- And Sales Automation Systems Implementation
To learn more about our philosophy and how we may be able to help you, we invite you to visit our approach to outsourced sales for start-ups Or you can check out our outsourced sales and marketing services here.
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 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 | May 29, 2017
Dealing with the new digital buyer is now a requirement for most businesses. And keeping your sales and process flowing daily is now critical to a sustained flow of sales opportunities. So a wise choice now may be to look for an outsourced sales and outsourced marketing automation service provider.
This article will address what you can expect by combinining outsourced sales and marketing automation company.
Top four issues addressed by an outsourced sales and marketing automation service provider to help you get started
Issue #1 Sales and marketing automation technologies are constantly evolving. Marketing automation is designed to generate leads and develop leads not ready to buy. Some campaigns can take more than six months to develop the digital buyer, so it takes both time and experience to learn how to do both well to optimize the tools and campaigns. An outsourced sales and marketing automation service provider will have both experience and skills to boost sales while nurturing leads throughout the buying process.
Issue #2 Sales and marketing automation technologies come in multiple product stacks and many price points. Some technologies are better for B2C campaigns. Other technologies are designed for B2B campaigns. Some tools are designed more for inbound lead generation and others are designed for sales development. Finally, tools are now offered at a wide variety of price points and some features of the pricier tools are overkill for a small business, while other, larger companies with large sales teams can use additional features. If you are not familiar with the landscape, you could under spend or over spend and not get the results you need at the right ROI. You’re not familiar enough with the ecosystem of solutions to assemble a seamless optimized revenue engine.
Issues #3 You and your team have your hands full already. You could be developing product, serving customers, creating content and recruiting. If you are too busy to implement the technology, run the technology, build the database or run campaigns and even following up with the leads, an outsourced sales and marketing automation company can do this for you if are too busy to do all the legwork that goes into campaigning and lead development.
Issues #4 If your company’s sales team has never sold to leads that have been generated by marketing automation, your sales reps may lack the skill and the training to deal with well-nurtured leads. Well-nurtured digital buyers do not typically have the same needs in the sales journey that cold leads and inbound leads require. Well-nurtured leads need to be treated with a softer touch, while at the same time more aggressive touch. A company that provides both outsourced sales and marketing automation sales talent will have the skills and/or the ability to train your team in the best practices of both using the software to find scored leads, and how to best qualify and develop those leads.
If these issues are familiar, you may already be thinking about an outsourced sales and marketing automation company. If this is the situation you find yourself in, an outsourced solution on a temporary basis may be worth exploring.
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.
