by gabriel_sales | Nov 4, 2011
It’s almost 2017, and the economy is continuing to incrementally improve and show signs of picking up momentum. If you have not already started your sales planning, now is the time to start thinking about how to increase your sales performance in the coming year.
As a sales outsourcing company, here are our top outsourcing sales strategies you may want to examine in the coming year to increase sales.
- Build an ideal customer profile. Look at your current customer mix and decide what companies make you the most money and are the easiest to service and scale the quickest.
- Improve the quality of your lead targeting. Build on your ideal customer profile and improve the quality of your leads. Step one in building a pipe is to improve the quality of what you are putting into it.
- Analyze your sales process. Look at what worked for your top performers in 2016 and share those sales processes across your organization. As a sales outsourcing partner, a great deal of the outsourcing sales efficiencies we drive are replicating what works for top sales producers and sharing those both internally, and externally, with our sales clients.
- Start measuring your sales pipe velocity. Part of analyzing your sales process is putting the metrics in place to measure the velocity of your pipe. Understand what message and content moves your prospect from one stage in your sales pipeline to the next stage faster.
- Look at marketing automation software. If you have not already implemented a marketing automation platform, you need to start looking at them now. As a sales outsourcing organization, the insights and efficiency gains are critical for us to compete in the new sales engagement model.
- Nurture your sales pipe. Do not ignore past prospects, especially for complex sales. From our own data and other studies, in some industries we have seen over 50% of purchases are coming from prospects we educated last year.
- Sell money. You need to be able to demonstrate the Return on Investment you can drive with your product or service. The more complex your sales, the clearer you need to be able to explain how your buyer can measure their return.
- Sales and marketing alignment is critical. You need to give your marketing “a sale quota’, and create a team environment. Don’t just measure what marketing puts into the pipe and then what sales closes. Create shared success metrics so everyone has their eye on closing business with customers ready to buy and also nurturing prospects that are not quite ready. Create content that supports the sale across its lifecycle.
- Collaborate with partners. With the advent of social media, digital content, marketing automation, webcasting and SEO tools, it might make sense to look at how a top sales outsourcing and marketing operations company can help you augment capability and increase capacity, to increase your sales in the coming year.
Depending on your stage of sales and marketing alignment, there are multiple sales and marketing strategies and tactics with the potential to drive sales growth. A strategy or tactic is most effective when anchored in an overarching strategy based on real numbers as well as targeting specific sales goals. The best sales and marketing operations outsourcing company will help you to create a unique plan to improve what is not working and build what is working based on hard sales targets. Contact us for a free consultation to see what we can do to improve your sales performance and pipeline velocity in 2017.
by Glen Springer | Oct 20, 2011
The first thing you need to keep in mind when considering outsourcing your Professional Services sale, is that no one can replace your Top Producing or Lead Consultant. They are required to close business. At the end of the day, they are the product your customers are buying. The one challenge that Consultants and Professional Service folks face that can really twist the sale into knots is the fact that the often need to sell the deal to the buyer and then turn around and put on the delivery and then service the account. This sometimes requires two completely different skill sets and two completely different postures.
We realize it’s cliché, but for Professional Services Firms time literally is money. When outsourcing sales, especially outsourcing sales for professional services or building your own sales machine, your top priority needs to be maximizing the bandwidth of your top producers. What follows, is a little deeper dive into the complexities and challenges, as well as some approaches you can take to address the issue that in many cases for professional service firms, Seller and Deliverer are one in the same.
Seller and Deliverer are the Same Person – One of the largest challenges in scaling sales in a Professional Services Firm is that Seller and Deliverer are often the same person. This creates multiple issues:
- As a seller/deliverer – you are tasked with selling yourself. If you are too much of an expert you can come off arrogant, self-absorbed, and self-serving, and the buyer does not want to work with you on the delivery side. If you are too humble, you are not an expert. Catch 22.
Challenge: The Seller needs to position the Deliverer to be a Trusted Resource.
Solution: You can leverage a sale rep (call them an engagement consultant or account rep) to sell your deliverers exceptional greatness. You need to support your rep with digital content in your deliverer’s voice (educational webcasts, highlights of live speaking events) and video testimonials that support those claims. Supply your inside rep or outsourcing sales rep with success stories that support the results your team can produce.
Benefits: The seller can now generate anticipation and excitement around the first meeting with your Top Producer and sell as hard as they want to without sounding arrogant. The sellers excitement about the Top Producers talent will translate into excitement for the customer.
- As a seller/deliverer – The buyer is buying you (and your team). Once you get the deal done, especially in this economy, the buyer expects more of your time than ever to get the initial project of the ground. Handing deals over to other team members to service is not as easy as it once was. The buyer wants the advantages of direct involvement of the top producer, at the expense of you growing your own business. That crushes your top producers sales bandwidth to generate more business, so the peaks and valleys are more pronounced than ever before.
Challenge: Keep your Top Producers pipe filled when they get sucked into delivery.
Solution: Use a lead sourcing rep equipped with a script that asks open-ended questions around the business pains your solution solves. Essentially, take the initial light discovery your top producers would do and pass that process to a less expensive resource. The questions need to be smart and demonstrate that as an organization, you understand the potential client’s pain. As you are getting started, keep that outsourced lead gen rep targeting companies that are in similar verticals and decision makers that you already have a proven track record making happy. Supply that lead sourcing rep with short case studies and success stories as collateral.
Benefits: Your Top Producer gets rid of about 80% of the time required to generate and initially qualify new business and can save backend delivery time also. When the Top Producer does start to engage, you also have the opportunity very early in the relationship with the client to prove your own internal communication is fluid and the customer will be getting serviced by a team and not just the Top Producer. This sets precedent downstream, so you will deliver the solution for the client without the Top Producer needing to be involved in every step of delivery.
- As a seller, you need to close the deal; and as delivery, you need to bill yourself and your team at 2X to 3X of salary. This can be a tough conversation for the “deliverer” to have.
Challenge: Closing the business and getting top dollar without encroaching on “deliverer” credibility.
Solution: Staff a Senior Sales/Sales Account Rep to manage the logistics of closing of the business selling ROI/Opportunity and presenting the initial offer to give your Top Producer a little distance. Leverage this rep to deal with parts of the “commercial relationship”. There is then a clear division of responsibility.
Benefits: Keep margins up with the following additional benefits: First, the initial cost can be presented by the sales rep. If there is an issue with the cost, the Top Producers knows this before he enters into that conversation. Second, the sales rep can take the first pass at negotiating the price and sell the value of the top producer again, if necessary, to keep your margins up. When the Top Producer comes in for the final negotiations, if you choose to discount, they are the hero and have avoided most of the mildly adversarial parts of the negotiation. Finally, the sales rep can deal with chunks of logistics like Non-Disclosure Agreements and navigating purchasing.
So to summarize, the job to be done in addressing the challenges of Seller and Deliverer as one in the same, is not to remove the Top Producer from the close. It is to remove the Top Producer from the parts of the sales cycle that can be done with a more cost effective resource and to support the Top Producer strategically to maximize your margins. In our next blog in this series, we will tackle the challenge of how Professional Services Sales can educate the customer without taking up a great deal of the top Producers time and energy.
The first thing you need to keep in mind when considering outsourcing Professional Services sale, is that no one can replace your Top Producing or Lead Consultant. They are required to close business. At the end of the day, they are the product your customers are buying. The one challenge that Consultants and Professional Service folks face that can really twist the sale into knots is the fact that the often need to sell the deal to the buyer and then turn around and put on the delivery and then service the account. This sometimes requires two completely different skill sets and two completely different postures.
We realize it’s cliché, but for Professional Services Firms time literally is money. When outsourcing sales, especially outsourcing sales for professional services or building your own sales machine, your top priority needs to be maximizing the bandwidth of your top producers. What follows, is a little deeper dive into the complexities and challenges, as well as some approaches you can take to address the issue that in many cases for professional service firms, Seller and Deliverer are one in the same.
Seller and Deliverer are the Same Person – One of the largest challenges in scaling sales in a Professional Services Firm is that Seller and Deliverer are often the same person. This creates multiple issues:
- As a seller/deliverer – you are tasked with selling yourself. If you are too much of an expert you can come off arrogant, self-absorbed, and self-serving, and the buyer does not want to work with you on the delivery side. If you are too humble, you are not an expert. Catch 22.
Challenge: The Seller needs to position the Deliverer to be a Trusted Resource.
Solution: You can leverage a sale rep (call them an engagement consultant or account rep) to sell your deliverers exceptional greatness. You need to support your rep with digital content in your deliverer’s voice (educational webcasts, highlights of live speaking events) and video testimonials that support those claims. Supply your inside rep or outsourcing sales rep with success stories that support the results your team can produce.
Benefits: The seller can now generate anticipation and excitement around the first meeting with your Top Producer and sell as hard as they want to without sounding arrogant. The sellers excitement about the Top Producers talent will translate into excitement for the customer.
- As a seller/deliverer – The buyer is buying you (and your team). Once you get the deal done, especially in this economy, the buyer expects more of your time than ever to get the initial project of the ground. Handing deals over to other team members to service is not as easy as it once was. The buyer wants the advantages of direct involvement of the top producer, at the expense of you growing your own business. That crushes your top producers sales bandwidth to generate more business, so the peaks and valleys are more pronounced than ever before.
Challenge: Keep your Top Producers pipe filled when they get sucked into delivery.
Solution: Use a lead sourcing rep equipped with a script that asks open-ended questions around the business pains your solution solves. Essentially, take the initial light discovery your top producers would do and pass that process to a less expensive resource. The questions need to be smart and demonstrate that as an organization, you understand the potential client’s pain. As you are getting started, keep that outsourced lead gen rep targeting companies that are in similar verticals and decision makers that you already have a proven track record making happy. Supply that lead sourcing rep with short case studies and success stories as collateral.
Benefits: Your Top Producer gets rid of about 80% of the time required to generate and initially qualify new business and can save backend delivery time also. When the Top Producer does start to engage, you also have the opportunity very early in the relationship with the client to prove your own internal communication is fluid and the customer will be getting serviced by a team and not just the Top Producer. This sets precedent downstream, so you can deliver the solution for the client without the Top Producer needing to be involved in every step of delivery.
- As a seller, you need to close the deal; and as delivery, you need to bill yourself and your team at 2X to 3X of salary. This can be a tough conversation for the “deliverer” to have.
Challenge: Closing the business and getting top dollar without encroaching on “deliverer” credibility.
Solution: Staff a Senior Sales/Sales Account Rep to manage the logistics of closing of the business selling ROI/Opportunity and presenting the initial offer to give your Top Producer a little distance. Leverage this rep to deal with parts of the “commercial relationship”. There is then a clear division of responsibility.
Benefits: Keep margins up with the following additional benefits: First, the initial cost can be presented by the sales rep. If there is an issue with the cost, the Top Producers knows this before he enters into that conversation. Second, the sales rep can take the first pass at negotiating the price and sell the value of the top producer again, if necessary, to keep your margins up. When the Top Producer comes in for the final negotiations, if you choose to discount, they are the hero and have avoided most of the mildly adversarial parts of the negotiation. Finally, the sales rep can deal with chunks of logistics like Non-Disclosure Agreements and navigating purchasing.
So to summarize, the job to be done in addressing the challenges of Seller and Deliverer as one in the same, is not to remove the Top Producer from the close. It is to remove the Top Producer from the parts of the sales cycle that can be done with a more cost effective resource and to support the Top Producer strategically to maximize your margins. In our next blog in this series, we will tackle the challenge of how Professional Services Sales can educate the customer without taking up a great deal of the top Producers time and energy.
by Glen Springer | Sep 27, 2011
This blog builds on a previous blog titled Sales and Marketing Alignment Requires Agreement on Lead Definitions. It describes a metric driven approach to get sales and marketing excited about working as a team to put qualified deals in your sales team’s pipe.
Whether you are building your sales team, outsourcing sales, outsourcing lead generation, outsourcing sales nurturing or sales qualifying, all the focus needs to be closing business. As we discussed in Sales and Marketing Alignment Requires Agreement on Lead Definitions, there are three steps in sales and marketing alignment that that will ultimately give your marketing team a sales quota:
The first step in building Sales and Marketing Alignment is to agree on your Ideal Customer Profile.
The second step is to agree on definitions for early stage leads, which are:
- Marketing Qualified Leads (MQL) – Accepted information.
- MQL Hot – They are actively digesting the right message and content in multiple ways.
- Sales Accepted Leads (SAL) – There is a fit between the customers pains or needs and your product or solution. It makes sense for telesales to invest time in.
- Sales Qualified Lead (SQL) – Established decision making process, budget and/or path to budget
- Nurture – Have expressed interest and legitimately not yet ready to buy.
The third step is to make sure that the marketing team and telesales team understand that they have a shared job, which is:
- to put deals in the pipe that can eventually close
- to keep as many leads in play until they are ready for sales
- to get deals out of the pipe that will never transact
- to avoid generating leads that will never transact
- ultimately to keep the steady state pipe at a volume that keeps the sale team at maximum effectiveness
The way we frame the jobs for our outsourcing lead generation and marketing teams is they always need to be creating measurable momentum with a focus on moving deals towards qualification and ultimately, the close. The different jobs are:
- MQLs = Momentum Makers – have the effect that starts momentum
- SALs = Momentum Builders –have the effect that increases momentum
- Nurture = Momentum Sustainers – have the effect that prolongs momentum
The other positive outcome is the lead generation reps stop filling the pipe with leads for lead volume’s sake and they become self-critical of squandering time, energy and resources on tactics that they deem as:
- Momentum Breakers- have the effect that stop momentum
- Momentum Takers – have the effect that sap momentum
- Momentum Fakers –have the effect that stage momentum
The lead generation reps, inside sales reps and marketing coordinator’s collective scorecard is based on Sales Qualified Leads. What emerges are statistics the team can leverage on a daily, weekly and monthly basis to identify what’s working vs. what isn’t working. . Here is what the early stage metrics would look like specifically for an aligned marketing and telemarketing organization following up on a Webcast.
The power of measuring it this way is manifold, but quickly here is how I would read this:
- Total calls to contact means the list is solid. Good phone numbers. A momentum sustainer.
- The ICP profile is solid as is the initial script because 65% of the conversations we are having are moving forward and that’s a momentum builder.
- The content is a winner because over half of the conversations we are having are accepting additional information.
- Voice mail as a tactic is definitely a momentum maker because we have a 3% return.
- Finally, Voice Mail is now a strategy that we need to totally commit to because 67% of those return calls are hitting the pipe.
Bottom line with this approach: you can measure both the team and the individual tactics so both the individual and the team successes are acknowledged simultaneously.
by gabriel_sales | Sep 2, 2011
This blog is to help companies thinking about sales outsourcing to improve the long-term results and effectiveness.
Gabriel Sales is an sales outsourcing company in the truest sense of the word. Sales outsourcing is not necessarily cheaper (at least in the short term). It’s about making your investment work harder and smarter. Sales outsourcing should make you more effective. You get access to shared tools, sales and marketing expertise, sales management expertise and processes required for success.
Companies don’t generally come to us because they are wildly successful on their own. They come to us because they want to close more business faster. In most cases, that requires consulting upfront. This blog is designed to help you be as honest as possible about how much consulting you might need prior to starting a sales outsourcing relationship.
There are a multitude of options for companies to drive sales other than of building their own internal team. Wikipedia has great overviews of your options -from channel sales, to resellers, to manufacturer rep to outsourced sales companies. When discussing outsourcing sales, where we like to start the conversation is the word “outsourcing” itself:
Outsourcing involves the contracting of a business process – previously performed in-house – to an external provider.
Outsourcing = Process previously performed transitioned
By this definition very few companies are looking for pure sales outsourcing, which is why we define ourselves as a sales execution, sales consulting and sales content marketing company. We execute while we consult.
During our initial conversation with potential clients looking for “outsourced sales”, what we discover with a little back in forth is some of what they are currently doing works and some of it does not, so we separate the issues. We quickly discover what they really need is a combination of 2 to 5 of the areas below:
- Sales scripting
- Outsourcing lead generation
- Outsourcing lead nurturing
- Outsourcing sales qualifying
- Outsourcing sales closing
- Sales Consulting
- Commission only reps
- Contracted Sales Reps
When someone is looking for a contracted rep or commission only, they are not really interested in a repeatable sales process which means by definition it’s not outsourcing (at least our definition).
When we talk to most companies we work through a formal process to identify how much consulting they need, so we can figure out how fast we can start executing to fill their pipe. Generally we can start executing and consulting concurrently. We have a formal process called the Gabriel System™ that makes this easy for our clients. We can generally get through this discovery process within the first week of launch and be on the phone filling the pipe within two weeks. What follows below is an abridged overview of what we extract during Gabriel System™ discovery process. Unless you are a pure start up launching from scratch, something you are doing is already successful. It’s our aim to figure out what is working, so we can improve on that for exponential growth.
Our first set of questions surrounds how mature that sales function and process really is:
- What is the historical sales cycle?
- How accurate was last years forecast?
- How many meetings does a typical sale take?
- What is the material presented in each one of those meetings?
- What digital content is being consumed are part of the sale?
- How many cold calls does it take to put a prospect into the pipe?
- How many prospects are currently in their nurture pipe?
- What are their typical conversion metrics? (Including: lead generation to sales qualified prospects, sales qualified prospects to sales proposals, sales proposals to closed sales, closed sales to upsell)
- Do they have cold call script? Do they have first call scripts?
- Is the pricing model fixed? When was the last time it was changed?
- Who are there top three direct competitors? Who are there top three indirect competitors? Why do you win? Why do you lose?
- What markets have you targeted? What is the market size? What decision maker do you sell to in that market? Why do they buy your product? What is there Return on Investment?
- What technology platforms are you using for sales force automation, marketing automation, direct marketing, cold calling, database providers, list management, webcasting, video?
- Do you have a creative agency and how will we collaborate with them? Is marketing an internal function?
Our second set of questions (really just one question): How much of this is documented?
- If its fully documented you are ready to outsource
- If its not you need some sales consulting too
Our third set of questions is specifically about each stage of the discrete part of the sales process -happy, not happy, needs improvement- grouping them as follows:
- Lead Sourcing and Targeting?
- Lead Generation?
- Sales Qualifying?
- Sales and Marketing Alignment?
- Sales Engagement and Sales Pipe Velocity?
- Sales Metrics?
- Sales Closing and Sales Upsell?
Our final set of questions is about how message and content readiness:
- Do they have a positioning document
- Do they have a messaging document
- How much collateral do they have and what type of collateral
What does this all boil down to? The more honest you are upfront with an outsourcing sales partner the faster they will be productive. We encourage you to be honest and clear about what is broken that you need fixed:
- Be clear if you are happy with specific sales processes. If you you are happy your process and your process is documented, then you are completely ready to outsource with no consulting
- If you want to improve specific sales functions or specific tactics to compete more aggressively, then you may need a little consulting in specific areas
- If you are looking for an overhaul, you probably need full sales, sales process, and/or sales message and content consulting upfront
The value Gabriel Sales brings to the table as a sales outsourcing partner is that we don’t wait to start executing. We lead with execution and support with consulting. We execute to fill the pipe to shorten your sales cycle, while we simultaneously consult to improve your strategy. Doing both simultaneously gives everyone the hard data, metrics and qualitative insights required to create a winning and competitive sales machine without costing us valuable time getting to the market. We execute and consult simultaneously because Gabriel Sales generally works with teams that want to win and want to double sales growth year after year, so we understand:
- Unless you are on the field taking shots on goal you don’t get 2X growth and…
- If they are bad shots on goal you don’t get 2X growth
If you are interested in getting to the market with speed and would like to learn more about how we can get you into the market fast with the right sales strategy please CONTACT US for a free pipe velocity review.
by Glen Springer | Aug 16, 2011
Selling money and how outsourcing sales can provide useful leverage
Because we are an outsourcing sales organization for technology, professional services and complex sales, we have to do our job with the most efficiency and effectiveness possible; so, it is critical that we are exceptional in selling money early and fast. We do this by creating a clear ROI Value Statement. This is key if you are committed to a repeatable and scalable sales process. As an outsourcing sales company, we are all about sales process. When you get this right it allows you to leverage your outsourcing sales team to do five things simultaneously:
- Qualify the business opportunity with the technical buyer and get the technical buyer to involve the business buyer in the decision at the beginning of the sales process.
- You can do this without involving your team’s sales engineer or the top professional service producers.
- Quickly figure out if the technical buyer has the juice to get budget if no budget exists.
- Set the precedent that access to your company’s senior talent (especially with professional services) will be limited until you are talking about transacting.
- Set the expectation that until you know there is budget or the potential budget available, you won’t go into significant technical discussions.
The formula is simple:
- My company /service will create an X (month, quarter, year) program that over the life of that program will produce and estimated $X dollars (go for the big deal upfront).
- This will mean an estimated % increase in profitability or % decrease in cost.
This part of the formula and ROI value statement can be used early in the sales cycle. It saves both parties time. The prospect is either interested in the return or they are not. If they are interested, you can then offer to do a more detailed analysis of their specific return after you understand their specific needs. After doing that scoping, you will add the following:
- Over the course of the program we will drive:
– Time period 1 $X
– Time period 2 $X
– Time period 3 $X
– Year 4 ~ $ 1,935,000
- Cost of delay of 1 quarter would be $X (which would require more detailed analysis)
- Cost of delay of 1 year would $X (which would require more detailed analysis)
In addition to shortening the sales cycle and getting deals that are going nowhere out of the pipe, the ROI value statement also has the following ancillary benefits downstream.
- Generally, you will get a meeting with the Business Buyer early in the sales process
- Demonstrates that your company’s senior talent is valuable. This builds credibility and value
- Expectation that you expect full boat on the deal
- Allows you to leverage digital content in parallel to do the technical qualification
- If there is not already allocated budget, it gets the budget allocation process started at the start of your sales cycle to increase your sales pipeline velocity by months or quarters (depending your sales cycle).
