Core Marketing Competencies Required for Sales Outsourcing Success

by Carol Springer | Nov 9, 2016

“Buyers now complete two-thirds of their purchase journey online before ever contacting a vendor or seriously engaging with sales.”

(Forrester Research)

The seismic shift we are seeing right now in how buyers buy using digital content requires that marketing now needs to remain accountable for the prospect much deeper into their buying process and your sales funnel. The line between sales and marketing as it applies to demand generation and engagement is getting blurred and this trend is not going to abate any time soon. So when outsourcing sales you need to consider who is going to do this work? Do your marketers understand sales outsourcing success? And do sales appreciate marketing? This is where an outsourced sales and marketing company may be able to help.

Sales outsourcing success is no longer about hiring reps to bang the phone and then hard close. You cannot expect sales outsourcing success without substantial marketing support. Below are the basic marketing competencies and blended sales outsourcing and marketing team you should expect any sales outsourcing partner to provide.

Content Strategist: You can no longer depend solely on sales outsourcing reps to move leads through your sales funnel. Sales success now requires a content marketing strategist that can clone what works for your best sales reps – who are the buyers they want to target, what are the best early offers, and what are the most frequent objections or questions in the early stage sales cycle. You then need to create content that replicates that story digitally and create a content calendar to to create and distribute that content. We have developed a simple to use set of tools to help with this process.

Sales Automation Content Production: It’s cliché but content is king in early stage selling. Content builds trust with your early stage leads and converts leads into prospects. Quality content production should make it easier for your buyer to buy without the need of a sales rep for a buyer to understand what problems you can solve for them and how. Your content does not to be produced with “Clio” award winning production value but it does need to be done professionally and it does need to be done consistently. You need to commit to 1 webcast per quarter (and you can typically turn that webcast into a white paper), and you need to create at least 2-3 shorter pieces of content per month (videos or blog posts). Your sales outsourcing company should have the resources or partners to help you take care of this if you do not have your own production team or resources. You should expect your sales outsourcing team to have a clear vision of the content they will need for success.

Content Management: The ability to use a CMS like WordPress is just one step in the content management process. You should expect your sales outsourcing partner to have at least a part time resource to maintain your content calendar, to add and edit content and to publish that content for your sales reps. You also need to have the capability and capacity to create landing pages at will for specific verticals and decision makers. You should expect your sales outsourcing partner to have a strategy to organize content for their own campaigns.

Email Management: Learning the rules, regulations and best practices of email marketing and management is now critical. A “Ready Fire Aim” approach doesn’t work for leveraging email to generate leads and is even less productive when using a marketing automation platform to develop leads. Proper messaging, design (e.g. mobile compatibility), list segmentation, spam regulations and rules, auto-responder optimization and more are all major factors in successful email marketing and deliverability.

CRM Integration: Making sure that your automation and lead scoring information is synchronized with your CRM correctly and spot checking on a regular basis is critical for lead scoring success. Correct sharing of information in your systems can be the difference between converting a hot lead or losing a deal. Your sales outsourcing partner should take ownership of the quality of this integration.

Database Management: Keeping your database clean and optimized on a weekly basis is critical to maximize the effectiveness of your sales outsourcing team’s calling efforts. Companies spend incredible amounts of money for automation tools and lists but lose a great deal of the ROI by not investing in the staff and education to actually utilize the tools and demonstrate meaningful insights for the sales reps. You should not rely on sales reps to manage the database. You should expect your sales outsourcing partner to have a resource that over sees the quality output of the tools.

Social Media Management: Your content should be shared in social media channels. It is a simple step that takes a little extra effort and it will maximize your exposure and brand with content that is already being deployed as part of other sales and marketing efforts. Interested buyers may look in social media channels even after engaged even if it is to simply prove that you are at least addressing younger buyers.

Marketing Automation: These tools are now critical to score leads to prioritize who callers should spend their time calling. Aside from investing in one of these tools you also need the human resources to optimize your marketing automation. The added intelligence gained by lead scoring, real-time visitor analysis, notifications and drip campaigns will transform your lead generation and sales prospect prioritization beyond anything you’ve done before. If you are unfamiliar with marketing automation that’s ok. Your sales outsourcing partner should be able to completely carry the load.

Phone Resources: Lead generation, nurturing and selling still require business development reps to pick up the phone. But what is accomplished on the phone changes based on the buying stage your buyer is in. Educating buyers now requires more of a customer service approach. This is now a science. When a buyer wants to buy is when you should start to be more aggressive and break out the art of the close. Having both types of phone resources available from your sales outsourcing partner is now critical.

Summary

Gabriel Sales has been supplying both sales outsourcing and outsourced marketing services for SMBs and start-ups since 1999. To learn more about the tactics we use please check out additional educational Sales Outsourcing resources in our Sales Outsourcing Blog. Or to learn more about our philosophy and approach to sales outsourcing success please check out the About Us page.

Sales-Ready Lead Campaign to Cure Marketing Automation Woes

by Carol Springer | Oct 4, 2016

In one phrase: A Sales Ready Lead Campaign helps you overcome the barriers of marketing automation and produce sales-ready leads faster and with less risk.

Risk 1 – Lack of an effective strategy (52%) – A Gabriel Sales’ Sales Ready Lead Campaign is designed from the best practices of over 40 marketing automation implementations. Your strategy should be proven and tested, and it can be with our historically successful deployments.

Risk 2 – Complexity of the system (42%) – An outsourced sales and marketing company like Gabriel Sales can implement a system in a matter of days with a focus on what is critical. We will not get distracted by all the bells and whistles that are not critical to the ultimate goal of generating sales ready leads for your sales reps.

Risk 3 – Inadequate contact data quality (38%) – Each Sales Ready Lead Campaign starts with a cost effective awareness and top of funnel lead generation campaign to ensure that your engine is fueled with enough volume of real targets from day 1.

Risk 4 – Lack of employee skills (32%) – An outsourced sales and marketing company like Gabriel Sales will bring a blended team of experts to the table including:

Strategists
Content Producers
Systems Integrators
Marketing Coordinators
Database Managers

And once your engine is up and running you can lower costs downstream by hiring and training a coordinator to manage your engine.

Risk 5 – Lack of relevant content (31%) – If you do not have enough content to fuel your automation process we can run a quick and intensive content production workshop to create both sales automation and thought leadership content.

Risk 6 – Marketing and sales alignment (30%) – We understand that the digital conversation and the sales conversation are the same conversations with the same shared goal of putting sales ready opportunities into the hands of your closer.

Risk 7 – Budget constraints (27%) – With a sales-ready lead campaign you don’t need to commit to an annual software agreement with a marketing automation software company that will quickly run you $20K to $30K before you even get started. Your automated campaigns can start month to month, which allows you to use your budget for more content and more leads to fuel the funnel and not the software to develop the funnel.

Why You Should Consider Outsourced Sales and Marketing to Generate Sales Ready Leads and to Build Your Sales Automation Engine

by Glen Springer | Oct 4, 2016

Preface

This article will eventually detail why we believe a Sales Ready Lead Campaign is the best way to implement a sales and marketing automation engine for first-time users. Before jumping into that business case, we wanted to share some facts and figures that explain why automation systems are now a requirement for sales success.

Automation Facts & Figures

Marketing Automation Systems are quickly becoming standard best practices for sales and marketing success. Here are some recent statistics:

Best-in-Class companies are 67% more likely to use a marketing automation platform. – Aberdeen Group “State of Marketing Automation Processes that Produce”
63% of companies successful in marketing automation plan to increase their marketing automation budget. The companies with successful marketing automation programs will invest in further success in the coming year. – Marketo & Ascend2“Marketing Automation Strategies for Sustaining Success” (2015)
63% of companies outsource all or part of marketing automation strategy planning. With t. 37% using in-house resources only. – Ascend2 “Marketing Automation Trends Survey” (2016).
79% of top-performing companies have been using marketing automation for more than 2 years. – Gleanster “2016 Marketing Automation Benchmark”

Automation and lead scoring are critical because more and more products and solutions are first bought through digital education, and then sold when your buyer is ready to be sold. And you need automation systems to address this shift in buyer behavior.

Over time marketing automation helps you win more business faster and at a lower cost. But the time delta for success ranges between 3 months to well over a year depending on your existing sales cycle.

And according to Ascend2, “Marketing Automation Trends Survey” (2016), the most significant barriers to marketing automation success are:

Lack of an effective strategy (52%)
Complexity of the system (42%)
Inadequate contact data quality (38%)
Lack of employee skills (32%)
Lack of relevant content (31%)
Marketing and sales alignment (30%)
Budget constraints (27%)

With those types of barriers and timelines, this makes proving that marketing automation will work for your business and getting it right the first time is at least as equally critical as hiring the right sales reps the first time to avoid sunk costs with no results. But what makes getting this marketing automation team hire right even more difficult than finding and hiring the right rep is the fact that marketing automation is just starting to become mainstream. There is simply not enough talent out here with the requisite experience (with the bumps and bruises and wins and losses) to ensure your initial success. Bottom line, demand for talent and experience is not keeping up with the supply of talent to ensure success.

Most marketers that are in-house talent only have one or two implementations under their belt. We believe that working with an outsourced sales and marketing company like Gabriel Sales is worth strongly considering for four reasons:

We have multiple implementations under our belt across multiple verticals selling multiple solutions with varied sales cycles so we can cross-pollinate best practices.
Outsourced sales and marketing companies appreciate marketing metrics but understand the only metric that counts is closed revenue.
We understand how to create and use content to automate the sale and leverage the technologies to score leads.
We can build your engine and sales automation process faster at a lower cost and then transition the engine when it is fully productive.

How Gabriel Sales Outsourced Sales and Marketing Capacity and a Sales Ready Lead Campaign Can Help

Gabriel Sales has more than 40 Marketing Automation implementations under our belt. We bring both the capability and capacity you need to get it right the first time with a blended team of:

Strategists
Systems integrators across most automation platforms and Salesforce
Our own low-cost tools if you are not initially ready to commit 20k+ annually for a full marketing platform like Pardot, Hubspot, or Marketo
Content producers
Marketing coordinators
Database marketers
Trained business development reps

More importantly, we can have you to market in weeks with Sales Ready Leads flowing so you avoid the quarters it takes to build on your own.

And once the engine is built and functioning we can continue to sustain or scale indefinitely or you can take over in-house with a seamless transition of your engine and systems.

To learn more about our approach and how it all works check out this short 3-minute educational video and educational microsite. Watch the embedded video below. Or contact us for a free readiness assessment that evaluates how large a market you can target, your content readiness and a preliminary result forecast.

Sales Ready Lead Campaign and Starter Sales Automation Engine

by Glen Springer | Sep 1, 2016

Sales Success Requires Consistent Sales Ready Leads

70% of your buyers prefer to learn about your solution through email. And 60% of your buyers are shortlisting with digital education before engaging with sales reps. Sustained Sales Ready Lead generation now requires integrated campaigns to produce a cost effective ROI, including:

Top of Funnel eProspecting Campaigns
Educational Nurturing eMail Campaigns
Lead Scoring & Content Management Technologies
Trained Business Development Reps

Watch our educational video to learn how to build and run a successful campaign and build your sales automation engine at a lower cost at the same time. Check out additional educational articles below.

The New Rules of Buying and Selling – Short Webcast

by Glen Springer | Jul 25, 2016

Increase Annual Revenue by 157%

In this digital age, B2B buyers take more control of their purchasing journey, entering and exiting the sales pipeline at various points in the buying process. As a marketer, it’s important to know where they are in the journey, so you can speak to them appropriately.

This 3:00 video breaks down the new buyer dominated world, where B2B consumers engage in content to research their product options to know before they buy.

We are Passionate About Filling Sales Funnels. Contact Us to Learn More

How to Improve Your B2B Demand Generation [Webcast]

by Glen Springer | Jul 25, 2016

B2B Demand Generation

This 4:00 video frames how B2B Demand Generation approached in the right way can:

Give Marketing a “Sales Quota”
Maximize your Marketing Spend
Accelerate your Pipe Velocity
Close Business Faster
Increase your Inside Sales Team’s Efficiency

Also, we explore if an outsourced sales or outsourced demand generation partner is the right fit for your organization.

How to Create a Lead Nurturing Workflow

by Marketing Team | November 8, 2024 | Uncategorized | 0 Comments

Creating a Lead Nurturing Workflow Creating an awesome lead nurturing workflow involves careful planning, personalized content, and continuous optimization. By having a deeper understanding of your customer, you are better positioned to identify their specific needs,...

What is a lead nurturing workflow?

by Marketing Team | October 30, 2024 | Outsourced Marketing, Outsourced Sales, Uncategorized | 0 Comments

What is a lead nurturing workflow work and how does it work? Consider the ways in which we encounter the word nurture. It’s generally used to describe relationships where a person is entrusted with the role of caregiver. A parent nurtures their child, a teacher...

How to Move Prospects Through B2B Sales Funnel

by Marketing Team | October 23, 2024 | Uncategorized | 0 Comments

Moving Prospects Through Your B2B Sales Funnel Now that we understand that we can educate prospects to become buyers, we need a clear and consistent strategy to move prospects through the B2B sales funnel from the Awareness stage and convert them into a new,...