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 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.
by Glen Springer | Apr 18, 2017
Outsourcing is growing and it is no longer uncommon to outsource sales and marketing for a small business.
When many small business founders reach their bandwidth capacity and contemplate growth they have two choices, they can build their own team or they can outsource sales. If you are considering outsourcing the sales and marketing functions and you understand your basic direct sales process, here are three reasons why outsourcing makes sense.
When to Outsource Sales and Marketing for a Small Business
There are three top reasons to consider outsourcing any function: saving money, freeing up time to focus on core strengths and more mission-critical functions, and gaining access to specialized skills.
When you outsource sales and marketing you first need to decide what it is you need. In most cases we find that the founder or business has plenty of time to close business. What they lack is the time to develop and qualify leads. So when you outsource sales and marketing it’s important that you don’t think of this has simply replacing one internal hire with another internal hire. Instead you need to think of it as replacing one hire with a blended team that has experience in both sales and marketing.
With that stated let’s look at each of these three reasons to outsource sales and marketing:
Outsource Sales and Marketing for a Small Business can Save Money
Expense is the primary reason why most companies consider outsourcing over hiring sales reps. If the current market for a quality business development rep is, as an example, a total compensation package of around $10K to $12K per month then outsourcing at $8k to $10K per month will be a substantial savings.
Instead of looking at this as one full time employee (FTE) vs. another outsourced employee you can look at it as getting a team of multiple employees that are part time. An outsourced sales and marketing company will provide phone reps, content marketers, database marketers and management. Most small business could not afford to staff and manage a part time team (let alone full time employees in all these functions). So depending on your lead volume, needs and growth targets, a blended outsourced sales and marketing team often represents a substantial savings.
Outsource to Focus on Core Functions
Beyond the core business operations and services a small business delivers, there are two goals and support functions in most small business: gaining clients and adding value to those clients. Most of the remaining support functions of finance, human resources, and information technology are the obvious candidates for outsourcing. We also believe that introducing the business to new prospects is also a function that makes sense to consider outsourcing. This is true now more than ever because the decision to outsource sales and marketing for a small business success requires understanding:
- Inbound lead generation tactics
- Outbound lead generation tactics
- Phone skills
- Automation technology
- Content marketing
Outsource to Gain Access to Specialized Skills
Most companies’ closers have specific domain knowledge and sales expertise. There is no way this knowledge (especially domain expertise) can be easily replaced. However a seasoned outsourced sales and marketing company will be able to extract this knowledge and add their expertise in the marketing tactics mentioned above to allow your organization to automate and increase the volume of conversations you are having through digital channels and over the phone.
Gabriel Sales specializes in building moderns sales and marketing operations for companies that already understand the core steps in their sales process. We help small business build scalable engines that address the new digital buyer. To learn more about how we work with companies to build these engines we invite you to reach out today.
by Glen Springer | Mar 24, 2017
Why choosing to outsource sales and marketing might be the wisest option
When many small business founders eclipse their bandwidth capacity they ask themselves the question, “Why outsource sales?” It is obviously our belief that it can with the following caveat. The founder should have a rough idea of the steps required to take a deal from the first sales conversation to transaction. If you are considering outsourcing the sales and marketing function and you understand your basic direct sales process, here are three reasons why it may make sense to outsource sales and marketing.
Why Outsource?
There are three top reasons to consider outsourcing any function: saving money, freeing up time to focus on core strengths and more mission-critical functions, and gaining access to specialized skills.
When you outsource sales and marketing, you first need to decide what it is you need. In most cases we find that the founder or business has plenty of time to close business. What they lack is the time to develop and qualify leads. So, when you outsource its important that you don’t think of this by simply replacing one internal hire with another internal hire. Instead, you need to thinks of it as replacing one hire with a blended team with experience in both sales and marketing.
With that stated, let’s look at each of these three reasons why outsourcing may be the smartest option:
Outsource Sales and Marketing to Save Money
Expense is the primary reason why most companies consider outsourcing over hiring sales reps. If the current market for a quality business development rep is, as an example, a total compensation package of around $10k to $12K per month then outsourcing at $8k to $10K per month will be a substantial savings.
Instead of looking at this as one FTE vs. another outsourced employees you can look at it as getting a team of multiple employee that are part time. An outsourced sales and marketing company will provide phone reps, content marketers, database marketers and management. Most small business could not afford to staff and manage a part time team (let alone full time employees in this function). So depending on your lead volume needs and growth targets, a blended outsourced sales and marketing team often represents a substantial savings..
- Outsource to Focus on Core Functions
There are two goals and functions in most business: gaining clients and adding value to those clients. Most of the remaining jobs to be done are the support functions of finance, human resources, and information technology are the obvious candidates for outsourcing. We also believe that introducing the business to new prospects is also a function that makes sense to consider outsourcing. This is true now more than ever because sales and marketing success now requires understanding:
- Inbound lead generation tactics
- Outbound lead generation tactics
- Phone skills
- Automation technology
- Content marketing
Outsource to Gain Access to Specialized Skills
Most companies’ closers have specific domain knowledge and sales expertise. There is no way this knowledge (especially domain expertise) can be easily replaced. However, a seasoned outsourced sales and marketing company will be able to extract this knowledge and add their expertise in the marketing tactics mentioned above to allow your organization to automate and increase the volume of conversations you are having through digital channels and over the phone.
Gabriel Sales specializes in building moderns sales and marketing operations for companies that already understand the core steps in their sales process. We help small business build scalable engines that address the new digital buyer. To learn more about how we work with companies to build these engines we invite you to learn more about our team and our new approach to outsourced sales and marketing.
by Glen Springer | Feb 17, 2017
Content marketing is now a critical component for successfully outsourced sales and marketing. Supporting your outsourced sales and marketing team with content allows you to effectively:
- Demonstrate the character of your company
- Communicate the business problems your company solves for your potential buyers
- Build trust with your buyers digitally
Quality content also helps you to increase visibility in search engines, can be used for email marketing campaigns and in social media. Not only will buyers find you with greater ease but when they do engage with your outsource sales reps and conduct a search of your company (typically when on the phone with your outsource sales rep) they will discover some of your content and advice lending greater credibility to your outsourced sales and marketing sales phone and digital conversations. Here is a quick list of how to approach content when working with an outsourced sales and marketing company.
Plan for the type of content your outsourced sales and marketing team needs
Create content for every stage of your sales process and buyer’s journey. Below is a framework we leverage to help our outsource sales and marketing clients.
Early stage content should be educational
Content should be created with the goal of engaging and educating your potential buyers. Don’t simply push features and benefits of your product. Technical specs and businesses cases are important later in the sales process. But early in process its important to make sure that your content has the goal of educating the customer about issues or concerns they have, and/or problems they may need to solve to improve their business.
Use all types of content
Not all buyers engage with all formats of content. Some buyers will want to read blogs, some checklists and some whitepapers. Live webinars are a fantastic source of deep and rich educational material but many busy business executives may prefer a recorded video they can watch in the evening. And finally don’t forget short education videos.
Use all types of video
Videos can be created in short and impactful bursts. As an outsource sales and marketing company we can run half day to full day workshop and typically create 7 to 12 impactful videos that can be used over and over again in an outsource sales process. Types of video we recommend are
- Short video demos – screen casts of your solution or product being used.
- Headshot videos – of your thought leaders sharing information
- Short intro pitch video – take your initial PowerPoint presentation and compress into short animated video
Gabriel Sales helps company build modern sales and marketing operations to help you more effectively outsource sales. To learn more about how we build our sales engines and use content to build trust with your potential buyers feel free to check out our new approach to outsource sales and marketing engagement.
