by gabriel_sales | Sep 27, 2012
B2B Lead Generation Requires Content and Reps to Educate Your Buyers and Sales Reps to Engage Your Buyers
In Part 1 of this specific series on B2B lead generation we discussed how you can align your content marketing to educate buyers and your telesales reps to generate qualified leads and create demand for your product. In this blog we will discuss how as part of that process that is supporting your buyer’s needs you can also support your internal sales organization needs by engaging them in your sales process. In this blog we will discuss the questions your inside reps should be asking at specific stages of your B2B lead generation process to support your sales efforts.
In a book way back from 2004 Think Like Your Customer, Bill Stinnett pointed out that “…your customers don’t buy solutions. They buy results.” Ultimately it’s your sales teams’ job to sell your buyer these results. While content marketing and your telesales team are building trust with your buyer your inside reps also need to be getting ready to “sell” results. Or more importantly setting up your closer to sell results. While your inside sales and/or telemarketing reps are helping your buyer become educated they should also be answering the following questions at the following stages:
Stage A of B2B Lead Generation- Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL)
Typically your first touch you should be discovering:
- What is buyer’s urgency for getting educated right now?
- Is there an impending event?
Stage B of B2B Lead Generation – Telesales Accepted Lead
Typically your second live touch discovering:
- Who will be involved in the decision?
- How are decisions made?
- Who ultimately approves budget?
- What’s the real business motive for buying? Replace something? Cut costs? Increase topline?
- Who/what else are you considering?
- What are the consequences of doing nothing?
Moving From Stage B to Stage C of B2B Lead Generation
Typically buyer has stated they are not ready to talk to a senior rep yet. Your inside reps job is to start drilling down on how engagement will occur:
- Is there budget available? Does a case need to be made for budget?
- What is the impact, ROI or payback required?
- What is the risk associated with making a decision?
Content and marketing automation is great for education. It’s great for helping you to score where leads are in the buying cycle. The tactics are great for saving your reps time nurturing your pipe. But don’t confuse content consumption for engagement. Your investment in content marketing and thought leadership is a must but so are sales reps that are skilled in the science and art of making it easy for your buyers to both consume and engage. If you are not using telesales reps to ask these questions to help your buyers engage more deeply in your B2B lead generation process you are missing the boat. And if your buyer has digested 6- 8 pieces of content and they are not willing to engage and answer at least some of these questions then they are still educating and its more than fair for you to flat out ask what they “think the risk is in making the decision” and then feed them some content to help assuage that risk.
For more tips on how to align your sales and content marketing efforts around B2B lead generation feel free to check out our previous blog – B2B Demand Generation Requires Your Lead Gen Team to Pick Up the Phone, or Digital Content to Automate your Sale – A crash course in integrating sales and marketing efforts.
And feel free to contact us for a free benchmark review.
by gabriel_sales | Sep 24, 2012
B2B Demand Generation Requires More Than Just Content Marketing
This blog is part of our regular series of posts on what we have learned over the past several years, as an outsourced B2B demand generation company, to help to align sales and marketing. This first post will be part of a short two part series that frames what your content marketers can do to generate demand. And what your sales reps can do to get your buyers to engage.
As an outsourced B2B demand generation company we are committed to marketing automation platforms and content marketing. Over the past year we have seen across clients a typical buyer consume 14 plus pieces of educational or verification content before they purchase. We believe Joe Pulizzi, author of Get Content, Get Customers that “The one who has the more engaging content wins, because frequent and regular contact builds a relationship because done correctly the content you create will position your company not as just a seller of stuff, but as a reliable source of information.” As a source of reliable information you will build trust. However that content and trust will only take you so far. At some point you need to take the buyers that are consuming your content, buyers that are developing trust, and get them to engage to increase that level of trust. And the best way to get them to engage is by picking up the phone and actually engaging them in helpful conversations.
Below is a quick framework of how you can align your content marketing with the efforts of your phone reps to support moving buyers deeper into the pipe.
- When your buyers are early in the buying process they are trying to figure out what their problem is. Your job as a content marketer is to help them define their problem. The job of your inside rep is to help your buyer figure out if your company can even help and then share some additional content to help them define their problem a little more. Your telesales reps should not be ‘selling’ yet. They should be asking “how can we help”.
- At some point your buyer is going to have their problem framed. Ideally with the help of your content. At this point you need to “start engaging”. Don’t start selling yet. But you can start talking more about your solution specifically and move away from pure thought leadership. At this point your content marketers job is to be supplying your telesales engaged leads with content that allows them to share what other companies experience or have experienced with your company. Your content needs to start giving your buyer a sense of what it would be like to “own” your product or solution.
- Finally we move to a Sales Qualfied Lead. Your buyer is engaged and its time for content marketing and inside telesales reps to step out of the way and transition over to the closers.
This blog post has been written from the perspective of what you need to do to support your buyer. However its also important to support your sales effort. In Part 2 of this series we will discuss how you can use these early stages of telesales engagement to provide your closers with the information they need to:
- Understand where the buyer is in their buying cycle
- Capture information that allows your closer to do their job more effectively for your company and your buyer to make the final transaction as seamless and professional as possbile for your buyer and your senior sales executive so everyone wins.
To visit Part that discusses where to integrate your telesales reps CLICK HERE.
To see if Gabriel Sales outsourced B2B demand generation can help you close more business creating a seamless and aligned sales and marketing process that sells to your buyer the way they want to buy please feel free to contact us for a free benchmark review.
by Glen Springer | Sep 9, 2012
A Successful Outsourced Sales and Marketing Company can take Tips from a Rock Star?
As a successful outsourced sales and marketing company it’s important that we keep our outsourced sales reps and marketers up beat and motivated. Success in life no matter what your pursuit all take the same basic building blocks. This quote was particularly helpful in demonstrating that with our sales team so we felt like we would share it with a wider audience.
Bono In response to the question about U2’s drive for huge worldwide success:
“Be honest. Are you really telling me that you’d never contemplated failure before?”
Responded:
“I don’t remember it. I would get angry, I would get upset that we weren’t what we could be. I don’t remember thing that we never would be successful. I always thought we would. And as soon as we did, it would be clear. Doubt, self doubt, was about the current material we could improve, but the destination was never a doubt. See, there is a chasm between envy and desire, OK? Envy is like wanting something that’s not yours, not worked for. But desire is different. Desire comes out of wanting what is yours, and still wanting it even if it’s not yet there. When desire becomes envy there is a difference. And there is a difference between the point of view of the fan. When (a fan) looks up at desire they think I can be”
Great quote but what does this have to do with sales and marketing. We think the difference between desire and envy, where you are coming from in your heart and head is often the difference between success and failure. Obviously you can’t get much more successful then U2 has. And its clear from this quote that this was not an accident.
What does this quote demonstrate to help create a successful outsourced sales and marketing company?
- Success requires passion but not anger. A drive to push yourself and your team.
- Success requires knowing what your chief aim is. Visualizing it.
- Success requires never doubting that you are capable of it.
- Success requires coming from a place (desire) where you believe in what you are doing (selling, marketing)
- Success is about never forgetting that your success requires that you genuinely care about your fan (customer).
If your sales pipe could use a boost feel free to contact us to see if one of our programs can help.
by Glen Springer | Sep 5, 2012
The entire purpose of a demand generation engine is to align sales and marketing to put more Sales Qualified Leads in your closers hands. To do this requires your inside sales team helps with your marketing automation implementation. As part of this process Gabriel Sales typically executes a 90 day lead generation campaign that can fuel your initial Demand Generation Engine. Your campaign combines email marketing, outbound telesales reps and in some cases PPC and SEO campaigns. Your dedicated campaign helps to accelerate the production of your engine producing “Sales Qualified Leads” ready for your sales reps and increases your initial volume of earlier stage leads to support your telesales and sales team with earlier stage deals if necessary. These 10 tips for a productive marketing automation implementation will also help to accelerate your investment in your marketing automation platform and to help with the cultural shift to a more mature demand generation process. They should help you to avoid false starts and turn quarters of effort into months.
In Marketing Automation Implementation Best Practice – Agree on Lead Definitions we discuss how sales and marketing can quickly reach agreement on early stage pipe. We also discuss scoring criteria so your sales executive can help frame the engine without needing to be involved or distracted by the minutiae of the implementation. In this blog we discuss the simple steps and recommendations to make the effort as productive as quickly as possible and to give your sales team access to the increased lead volume sooner rather than later.
Don’t disrupt what already works – As you implement your demand generation engine we recommend that you don’t disrupt your existing lead flow to sales. If you have SEO, PPC or email campaigns in motion don’t stop that practice.
Involve Sales Executive Early – Get your sales executive involved in the Early Stage Pipe scoring criteria. See Agree on Lead Definition Blogs
Have Your Sales Executive Work with Telesales Team to Develop Smart Questions – By giving your outbound telesales reps the right probing questions, need assessment questions, open ended questions and leading questions you can script and accelerate your telesales ability to effectively score leads. We have a quick 1 hour process to make this seamless.
Use Leads Generated from One Designated Campaign to Initially Feed the Engine – It does not make sense to immediately take all your leads directly into your Marketing Automation Platform out of the gate. We strongly recommend you start with one source. Ideally a campaign dedicated specifically for this purpose. Gabriel Sales has several campaigns designed specifically for this purpose. This allows you to feed your demand generation and Marketing Automation tool in a methodical way with a clean set of leads.
Designate One Person to Assign Leads Coming Out of Your New Program – Typically your SVP, VP or Director of Sales is already assigning leads to your sales reps that come from other campaigns. Its generally a best practice to keep that person designated to assigning leads the same and that this person gets trained in the use of Pardot to assign leads as well so the understand how lead scoring works. In some cases we understand that sales needs more leads faster and doesn’t always want to wait for leads to be Sales Qualified. In some cases Sales Accepted or even new leads to the pipe may meet your immediate needs. During your initial campaign designed specifically to feed your engine the SVP of Sales (or whoever you have designated to assign leads) can assign leads from the initial campaign effort at multiple stages noted above as A, B and C based on their short term lead volume needs. However we simply strongly recommend that you don’t take all the leads and assign them at stage A or B so the engine has time to do its job and marketing can learn how to optimize the engine.
Note – Telesales Engaged Leads typically have indicated they are not ready to speak with a Sales Rep yet as part of their qualifying process so these we would recommend you nurture with telesales reps and your automation platform.
Marketing Should Train your Sales Reps on the New Lead Scoring Criteria – Before handing leads to sales reps it’s important that they understand the new scoring criteria so they can maximize and intelligently approach the buyer in the most effective way.
Marketing Should Train your Sales Reps on the Source of the Lead and How to Use Pardot – Have your marketing manager train sales how to use the insights and tools a marketing automation engine provides. (e.g. how to find the buyer information in your CRM, how to use the lead deck, etc.) Pardot has great online training for this as well.
Execute a Wake the Dead Campaign from your Marketing Automation Platform – Once your marketing automation platform is working and you have your initial leads flowing from Gabriel Sales the first campaign we recommend your marketing team executes with your existing opt in database (leads not generated through Gabriel Sales initial campaign) is a “Wake the Dead” campaign. This is a drip campaign that your marketing team or Gabriel Sales will execute to leads that no sales reps have touched for a quarter or more and/or dead leads sitting in your database that are not currently assigned to a specific rep. Typically the Wake the Dead campaign will parallel the initial drip campaigns that are being created as part of your initial campaign with Gabriel Sales. Companies generally see a solid bump in volume with these campaigns and they are a great way to start to wrap up your initial implementation.
Don’t Over Complicate Your Initial Drip Campaigns – This is probably one of the biggest lessons we learned. When we first started we came up with a very complex IF/ then workflow so if they opened this piece of content on a topic area we would send them another piece of content on topic area B and then if they didn’t open that we would send them content Z. It was too much and just writing about it confuses me. What we found is about 80% of the value you are going to get from your initial drip campaigns is going to come from simply implementing them. It takes time to learn a new software and the biggest value the software provided initially is simply keeping your brand and solution in front of your buyers over time so your reps don’t have to. A simple five to seven touch campaign without any IF/then work flows was enough to get more deals flowing at less cost. Don’t frustrate yourself. You will quickly learn from your wins.
Use Existing Content or Quickly Produced Content to Kick Start Your Engine – The whole point of a marketing automation platform is to drive more business in a more effective way. This starts with how you are speaking with your buyer. If your content is still all about your product – tech sheets, features and benefits etc. its -time to think about being “customer centric rather than product centric.” Your drip campaigns will drive more business if you talk to your customers about their problems and their needs. You may need to look at the “voice” of your messages and refine your language a bit. As a starting point look at how many times you talk about “Our” product, “our” team vs. “your” needs, “your” business and “your” customers. If you are working with Gabriel Sales you can implement Gabriel Sales Digital Sales Base Camp Content Management System you can quickly create context for your existing content. This CMS allows you to immediately take your existing material to start being customer centric by recontextualizing existing offers and content with easy to construct landing pages. Finally we really love webcasts to kick start these programs because you can typically cut one webcast into several blog posts with graphics you have already created.
We hope you find these 10 Tips to align your sales and marketing efforts to accelerate the production of your marketing automation implementation. Hopefully these basic tips and best practices help you avoid some headaches and helps you learn from our mistakes and successes. If you have not checked out what these marketing automation platforms can do and the benefits to your company here is a quick overview from Pardot 5 Minute Overview of Marketing Automation and this post will make a whole lot more sense.
Please feel free to CONTACT US with any additional questions, more tips on your marketing automation implementation, and to see if we can help you as you ramp your sales pipe short term and build for long term success.
by Glen Springer | Sep 1, 2012
I am a huge fan of David Foster Wallace. In a commencement speech he tells the story of three fish:
“There are these two young fish swimming along, and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says, “Morning, boys, how’s the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes, “What the hell is water?”
The immediate point of the fish story is that the most obvious, ubiquitous, important realities are often the ones that are the hardest to see and talk about…A huge percentage of the stuff that I tend to be automatically certain of is, it turns out, totally wrong and deluded. Here’s one example of the utter wrongness of something I tend to be automatically sure of: Everything in my own immediate experience supports my deep belief that I am the absolute center of the universe, the realest, most vivid and important person in existence. We rarely talk about this sort of natural, basic self-centeredness, because it’s so socially repulsive, but it’s pretty much the same for all of us, deep down. It is our default-setting, hard-wired into our boards at birth. Think about it: There is no experience you’ve had that you were not at the absolute center of.”
Wallace’s insight is truly brilliant and something sales and marketing professionals in the world of online B2B marketing can never forget. Stated another way:
Your Customer IS the Center of Your Universe
In the new rules of sales and marketing engagement we need to always remember this universal truth and fight our hard wired biological drive to be the narcissistic self-centered creatures we were designed to be.
Here is a quick and easy test to see if your team is getting it right
Read your sales content and see how many times you use the words “We”, “Us”, “Our”, or your brand or product names and then compare it to how many times you use the words “You”, “Your” and your targets Title or Job Function. Below are two real world examples of a first emails that have gone out from our team.
How this slip occurred in our process is the topic of a second blog (and cautionary tale) entitled Best Practices Integrating Your Outbound Sales Team into Your Marketing Automation Program to be published in a couple of days.
Email 1
- Narcissistic and Self Centered Being The Creatures we Hard Wired to Be: -11
- Customer is the Center of the Universe Score +2
- Success Score – 9
From:
Date: Wed, Aug 29, 2012 at 10:06 AM
Subject: Your Inquiry to Gabriel Sales
To:
Hi XXXXXXX,
Thank you for your inquiry regarding outsourced sales. Gabriel Sales has been helping companies bring their products to market via lead generation, lead nurturing, closing deals as well as managing the entire sales team for over 10 years. We have worked with many offshore companies, U.S. start-ups as well as the Fortune 100. We have deep domain experience selling Marketing Services and Technology. Our most recent success has been bringing an Indian data analytics firm from $500K-$12M in revenue in 3 years. They then sold for $65M.
We are very process oriented. We will develop the best way to sell your product, (messaging, packaging and pricing if necessary), begin selling, track all the ratios related to the sale, and create a repeatable forecast-able sales system and Marketing plan for you to then to run yourself or continue to outsource with us. We will cold call, buy lists, or manage a marketing campaign to get leads; or work leads provided by you.
In regards to selling similar products, we have sold many marketing solutions to VPs of Marketing in the SMB and Fortune 1000 markets.
Our model is based on a retainer and consulting fees. We believe in automating the sales process as much as possible to reduce the human resource requirements. We do this through creating landing pages and content that can “sell” as much as possible as well as utilizing Marketing Automation software.
We look forward to your response.
Email 2
- Narcissistic and and Self Centered Being The Creatures we Hard Wired to Be: 0
- Customer is the Center of the Universe Score +9
- Success Score +9
From:
Sent: Wednesday, August 29, 2012 10:03 AM
To:
Subject: A Couple Other Recent Best Practices from Gabriel Sales
Hi XXXXXXXXX
Hope you find some tips your team can leverage from the “Sell Smarter, Sell Faster” White Paper.
Here is a quick blog post on some Best Practices you can leverage to keep your Email Marketing aligned with your buyers’ goals and your sales team’s efforts Keep it Conversational – Best Practices for B2B E-Mail Marketing that the team put together after receiving some questions from sales and marketing professionals that liked the White Paper.
Also in case you missed it here is 4 minute video How to Accelerate Your B2B Demand Generation Engine that describes how your team can start to align your sales and content marketing to lift your results for both.
Look forward to connecting to see how else we can help. If you have any questions about any of the educational resources we are sending across don’t hesitate to reach out.
Regards,
With this one simple approach to your outbound communication, from both your sales reps and your marketers, you will see a sales lift across the board.
As a little additional backstory we got this wrong at Gabriel Sales this week because we did not correctly train one of our sales reps when they were promoted. That’s another story for a blog that will soon follow. The incident was also a strong reminder that sales and marketing alignment is not always seamless. Hopefully this post makes it a little more seamless for your team.
For additional Best Practices regarding online B2B marketing, feel free to check out our White Paper – Selling Smarter and Selling Faster.
Also wanted to give a plug to David Foster Wallace and would highly recommend that if you are into literature and great story telling that you read Infinite Jest. Written in the 90s its an incredibly predictive future version of North America, and touches on competitiveness, aspiring to excellence, addictive and compulsive behavior, advertising, media, film theory and popular entertainment. Here is a link to his Wikipedia site. Have fun.
by gabriel_sales | Aug 5, 2012
In the last six, months, we have seen a big jump in iPhone and iPad opens in our email blasting efforts. After following up by phone, we have noticed that many of my “opens” did not even see the email. We’ve since learned that iPhones open emails differently than other email applications.
For Mailchimp, per their site, they “use a tiny, one pixel graphic (or web beacon) that gets downloaded when a subscriber turns on images to track which emails have been opened and which haven’t. When someone uses their iPhone to open your email, it automatically opens images, downloading the tracking graphic. Most email applications turn images off by default and force users to click a button to display them, resulting in lower open rates. This can result in an inflated percentage of iPhone users showing up in your User Agents stats. We’ll see every user who uses their iPhone to open your email, but we only catch the subscribers that turn on images in other email applications.”
This completely aligns with what we have seen by follow-up calling. So take it easy on your reps if they are not converting the “opens.” I would not stop calling on them, as the probability that that “opens” actually opened is greater than those that do not show open, and typically we have found that those folks are still with the company. So, this is definitely better than straight cold calling.
Question: What is the ultimate solution?
Answer: Aligned Sales and Marketing Efforts
In a nutshell you cannot give up on any one tactic. You simply need to be more diligent. We do recommend making sure your videos and emails are designed for mobile and as another quick tip you can monitor Google Analytics and the time emails are opened with your email blaster to judge if mobiles are actually opened or not.
If you are interested in seeing if your efforts pay off, Gabriel Sales, outsourced sales company for B to B sales and marketing automation implementation specialists, we recommend indulging in a marketing automation tool. Pardot is our platform of choice. For more information on marketing automation see our blog on Marketing Automation for B2B Sales and Sales Small Business.
