by Glen Springer | Jun 28, 2017
Over the past several years, the lines between sales and marketing have been blurred. This is especially true when it comes to qualifying B2B leads. As an outsourced sales and marketing company, we see both good and bad B2B lead qualification processes. And with the new digital buyer, we believe that the most successful path to qualify leads is now a combination of sales and marketing working together to get the most from your sales and marketing budget. We believe this is one area where considering an outsourced team may make sense. Here is how outsourced sales and marketing qualify leads.
Call B2B Leads Immediately
We all know that there are huge advantages to following up immediately. Buyers have short memories, so you need to strike while the iron is hot. If a call is made instantly after a webinar or a form fill, the buyer may not be ready to buy, but they will be more likely to answer a handful of initial qualification questions about time frame, budget, and why they’re interested. The added bonus is, if the buyer is ready to start evaluating vendors, the first several vendors to reach out will be at the front of the line and the likelihood of getting on their short list increases dramatically.
It is also important that when you get and inbound lead or generate an outbound lead, you immediately drop it into your marketing automation platform. This will keep you top of mind and allow the buyer to learn more about your company (and brand your company) on their own time – not on your caller’s time.
An outsourced sales and marketing company can provide the staff to help you stay on top of all inbound leads.
Understand who you’re qualifying
Do your homework. Research shows, only 2 out of 10 callers take the time to do even a minute or two of research prior to making a qualifying call. Take the time to understand whom you’re qualifying and what the company does.
This is especially true when calling senior executives. The more you demonstrate your knowledge about their company and industry, the more likely they’ll share information about their needs and challenges.
An outsourced sales company will already have the necessary tools and the trained staff to make researching the buyer easier and more cost efficient.
Be Smart About Whom You Call
Building a buyer persona and an ideal customer profile is now critical to getting the most out of your marketing and sales budget. If you hit the mark targeting the right industries and companies, you’ve already qualified for the first level of fit.
Calling is the most expensive part of B2B lead qualification, so you need to focus on buyers and influencers most likely to buy. Today, you absolutely need to separate the buyers most likely to buy, so you can focus your time on these buyers first, and the easiest way to do this is to use your marketing automation platform to score the buyers most engaged with your digital content.
Outsourced sales and marketing qualify leads faster because they will have a blended team in place that can target correctly, acquire databases faster, and have the automation best practice expertise to help you use your marketing automation to score leads more effectively.
You No Longer Need to Qualify Immediately
BANT is dead. If a potential buyer doesn’t have the budget and authority immediately, it doesn’t mean the lead is dead – it simply means it may take more time to qualify. If a prospect has the need, you can now drop them into your automation campaigns, and over time, as their interest starts to grow, the timeline and budget will start to appear.
Not to state the obvious, but new leads need to be prioritized, but only 10% of qualified leads convert into immediate sales. Granted, there is tremendous gratification in that, but 90% of your B2B leads now take time to develop, which often requires a combination of continued marketing and occasional phone calls. Keep leads in your system until they opt out.
About Gabriel Sales Outsourced Sales and Marketing
Gabriel Sales build modern sales and marketing operation for small businesses and startup. We use best outsourced sales and marketing practices and modern sales and marketing to qualify leads and run intergrated sales and marketing campaigns to build a consistent flow of quality leads.
To learn more about our outsourced sales and marketing and decide if this may be the right approach for you please visit our new approach to outsourced sales page.
by Glen Springer | Jun 26, 2017
In this accelerating and highly competitive business environment, innovation is critical for continued growth. As Bob Dylan aptly wrote, “Those not busy being born are busy dying.” In some cases, this is adding additional services for existing clients; while in other cases, this can mean a new product launch.
When your new product is ready to launch, you have a decision to make. You can give the product to your existing sales team, but this may distract them from staying focused on your core business. Or you may consider hiring a new sales rep – or multiple sales reps; however, the challenge with this approach is that hiring and training a new sales team that understands the market takes time and costs money. And with everything else surrounding a new product launch, most executives will already have a great deal on their plate.
This is when considering an outsourced sales product launch may make sense. An outsourced sales product launch will have the following key advantages:
- Quick and effective go to market strategy – an outsourced sales company will be able to work with your executives to craft a go to market strategy.
- Content production support – an outsourced sales company can recommend and cover gaps in the content required to take a new product to market.
- No recruiting costs – you can tap into a blended team of sales and marketing professionals, reducing the costs of launching your new product.
- Faster to market – with a team ready to go you will get to market faster, giving you a competitive advantage or keeping a competitor within distance.
- No hiring and training new salespeople – you will not need to spend valuable time training a team.
- Sales experts who can help you hone your strategy – an outsourced sales company will have a team that knows how to work together and how to communicate and share new strategies that may help your business as they’ll know what sales and marketing tactics work best.
- Tools for measuring success – an outsourced sales company that specializes in running new product launches will understand how to implement CRM and Marketing Automation Systems. Furthermore, they will be able to run these tools in parallel, or they can help you to refine your existing tools to measure the key metrics for success, so you get smarter faster.
- Lower cost to test multiple lead generation tactics – an outsourced sales company will be able to run multiple types of campaigns simultaneously, including:
- email campaigns to generate leads and build awareness
- PPC campaigns to generate leads and build awareness
- Cold Calling campaigns to generate leads from your most important targets
- Marketing automation campaigns to develop and score leads
- Follow up calling campaigns to qualify leads and set appointments
About Gabriel Sale Outsourced Sales Product Launch
If you aren’t sure how to effectively build a strategy or launch a campaign for a new product, an outsourced sales company may help get you to market faster and more effectively at a lower cost. Many companies have pursued this strategy effectively in the past. You can learn more about Gabriel Sales outsourced sales results from our outsourced sales case studies.
Gabriel Sales provides sales outsourcing and marketing services to help Start Ups and SMBs modernize their sales and marketing operations. To learn more about our approach to helping companies address the new digitally-driven buyer, you can also check out our About Us page.
by Glen Springer | Jun 21, 2017
2017 has gotten off to a solid start for most B2B companies and the economy is continuing to gain momentum quarter after quarter. So what company would’t want to have more qualified sales opportunities every month. Even with the economy headed the right direction, almost every sales executive and sales rep we speak with can still handle more quality sales appointments. In fact, when surveyed at the end of 2016, my Marketing Profs generating and setting appointments with qualified opportunities continues to be the number one focus of most small businesses trying to scale. It’s also become one of the most challenging parts of the sales process for similar reason at most small businesses:
- Buyers have so many lead gen reps approaching them daily, it’s harder and harder for a sales person to break through and connect.
- Sales reps don’t have the time required for generation leads on a daily basis
- Prospects require sales reps to share quality content once they do connect
- More and more buyers are educating themselves online, trying to avoid talking to a sales rep until they are well educated – prospects are doing so much of the fact-finding on their own. They are looking for ideas, suggestions, and resources online, and not even involving a sales person at that stage of their journey.
What would happen to your revenue growth if you had a consistent flow of leads coming into your organization on a monthly and weekly and basis? And what if these leads were prioritized, so if your closers or Sales Development Reps had limited bandwidth, they could call the buyers most likely to be interested first.
This is now possible by integrating sales and marketing functions to run sales and marketing campaigns. It is not a magic bullet; it takes hard work, but the idea is simple. A B2B sales outsourcing can help you do the hard work. A B2B sales outsourcing and marketing company can help you take the information that used to be exclusively be shared by a sales rep and a sales engineer early in the sales process and create digital content that in effect clones that sales process. You then need to share the content with your buyers in multiple ways. In doing this, buyers can find your information online, or you can share it in email campaigns, or your sales development reps can share with the buyers early in the sales conversation.
Granted the concept is not a new one. You use marketing to attract buyers, but the way you now have to put all the pieces together is more important than ever. . Here are 5 steps you need to take to generate more leads on your own or with a B2B sales outsourcing partner:
Map Your Sales Process and Your Buyers Journey – Document every step in your sales process. Document each step in your Buyer’s Journey. Create a content map of the questions and information you share at every stage of the buyer’s journey.
Create Content to Share Your Expertise. Commit to creating digital content that replicates the information needed for the buyer journey. Use a combination of head shot videos, screencast videos, short webcasts, blogs and checklists. A B2B Sales outsourcing company like Gabriel Sales can run a content production workshop to help you create enough content for three to six months of your initial effort over a quick several day period. Long-term (after you get through your first wave of content), you will need to be prepared to continue to create two to four additional pieces of content per quarter.
Share the Content through a Marketing Automation Platform – Start sending content on a regular basis with a marketing automation platform.
Score the Leads – Use the marketing automation to score lead engagement with the content you send and any other content they find on their own on your website.
Share Content as Part of Your Calling Efforts – Have a piece of content to share when you cold call. Sharing is caring and you will generate more early stage leads this way.
Share it in social media – You can publish directly on LinkedIn, and push through Twitter, as well as host videos on your website and in your YouTube channel. And don’t forget about Google+.
When your prospects see you as an expert who can add real value, they will be happy to take your call and meet with you. And with scored leads, you can prioritize the buyers most likely to buy.
About Gabriel Sales B2B Sales Outsourcing
Gabriel Sales helps companies transform their sales and marketing with:
- Sales Consulting
- Outsourced Sales and Marketing
- Sales Automation Systems Implementation
To learn more about our philosophy and how we may be able to help we invite you to visit our About Us page. Or you can check out our outsourced sales and marketing services here
by Glen Springer | Jun 19, 2017
Seeing your vision become a concrete reality ready to take to market is both a fun and rewarding experience for the executives and teams turning that vision into a reality. During the incubation period of most startups, the executives and founding team will typically work on every detail to reassure themselves the product works and is well designed, the books are in order, the office is running fluidly, and the early customers are satisfied with the solution. But eventually, the day-to-day responsibilities of running the business and the continued product development, and managing accounts, recruiting, and business development will leave them with so many responsibilities, they’ll be so inundated, they’ll start to look for help.
One of the key areas executives and founding teams will start to consider is outsourced sales for startups.
Here are three common outsourced sales for startups strategies for your start up business that will immediately give you more time to focus on your core areas of competence and interest:
Build a Proven Go To Market Strategy
Most start ups reach a point where they are ready for aggressive growth. But most companies new to the market will have limited metrics and no historical track record to access to craft an effective sales strategy. An outsourced sales company will be able to help you develop plans, strategies and forecasts based on their best practices and track record of taking similar products and solutions to market.
Most Start-Up Companies are not Prepared with the Tools Needed for Growth in the New Digital Buyer Market
The days are over when you can simply hire sales reps and have them cold call to generate a sales funnel and close business. The new digital buyer now uses digital education and your content (and your competitors content) to self-educate prior to even speaking to a sales rep. An outsourced sales for startups company will be able to immediately provide the tools required to scale your sales pipeline including:
- CRM implementation to manage your sales pipeline
- Databases to help you target specific markets
- Content production for you to share with your buyers
- Marketing automation implementation to simplify sharing content and scoring buyer’s interest
- Reporting tools to help you measure your progress
Blended Team to Run Your Go To Market Campaign
There’s no universal recipe for a scalable, repeatable sales process, which is why an outsourced sales for startups company is so helpful to a start-up company.
An outsourced sales for startups company will not just create the strategy, they’ll also turn that strategy into an executed sales process. They will staff the marketing automation experts, the database managers, the email-marketing experts, the cold calling reps, the sales development reps, and the management layer to turn your strategy into a fully functioning sales engine.
Gabriel Sales Builds Modern Sales and Marketing Operations with Outsourced Sales for Startups
Gabriel Sales specializes in working with Start-ups and Small Businesses looking to build modern sales and marketing operations. We help companies transform their sales and marketing with:
- Sales Consulting
- Outsourced Sales and Marketing
- And Sales Automation Systems Implementation
To learn more about our philosophy and how we may be able to help you, we invite you to visit our approach to outsourced sales for start-ups Or you can check out our outsourced sales and marketing services here.
by Glen Springer | Jun 14, 2017
Why are Marketing Metrics so important for success? Athletes have known the answer for years. Quite simply, you can’t improve what you don’t measure. This is why of the six teams leading early in the 2017 MLB season, five are advocates of the data-driven systems advocated in Michael Lewis’s, Moneyball.
Over the past ten years, we have seen data transform the way businesses are run – and sales and marketing are no different. You can use data to help you to improve what is working, remove what is not working, and make smarter business decisions in the future. Capturing this data is one of the key drivers of the recent adoption of CRMs like Salesforce.com, and Marketing Automation Systems. It’s also why working with an outsourced sales company may be a smart move for many companies because they can help them capture key outsourced sales and marketing metrics.
So how does all this impact your business? In sales, like sports, consistent wins don’t happen by accident. Repeatable results are driven by repeatable math—numbers that define your sales team’s past performance will predict future performance.
Here are the key outsourced sales and marketing metrics you can expect from an outsourced sales company.
Outbound Calling Metrics
The first key metric an outsourced sales and marketing company can help with is, how much outbound activity does it take to generate a lead. An outsourced sales company will measure the results of every call and track the connection ratios (how many calls does it take to get a person on the phone). Your outsourced sales reps will also track how many calls result in someone that is mildly interested in your solution, and willing to accept Marketing Material (Marketing Qualified Lead – MQL), and how many buyers have a potential need for your product (Sales Accepted Lead – SAL)
In most cases, cold calling alone may not be the most effective way to generate leads and you will understand these metrics clearly. Below is a chart of the cold calling metrics you can expect from an outsourced sales company.
Email Lead Generation Metrics
Marketing Sherpa found, 70 percent of buyers now prefer to learn about new products and services from email first. For about the cost of a cold caller for one month, you can now make 25,000 to 75,000 potential buyers and influencers aware of your solution. What is important from a data perspective is, you can also test up to nine different messages as part of these campaigns. The key outsourced sales and marketing metrics in this case will be:
- What messages and subject lines resonate most in the market
- What offers were most engaging
This information can help you to determine:
- What messages your callers should focus on
- What content should you create to help digitally educate your buyer
Key Outsourced Sales and Marketing Metrics Scorecard
Building a consistent flow of leads is the most critical first step in scaling a sales effort. But if you’re over spending or underspending on your lead generation efforts, you will not be keeping your closers’ (your most expensive sale cost) time maximized. A scorecard will tell you:
- How much and what type of activity is required to generate a lead
- How much outbound activity is required to generate a single qualified sales opportunity
- How many of those opportunities will result in a proposal
- How many proposal does it take to win a deal
Gabriel Sales Provides outsourced sales and marketing metrics
Gabriel Sales specializes in helping SMBs and Start-ups launch modern sales and marketing operations. As part of building, launching, and executing sales campaigns to fill your closers sales funnel, we provide key outsourced sales and marketing metrics. To learn more about our outsourced sales and marketing services we invite you to visit our outsource sales and marketing services page.
by Glen Springer | Jun 12, 2017
Having useful B2B lead generation tactics is one of the top sales challenges facing many small business that want to grow their sales revenue. And generating a consistent flow of leads is critical in a competitive market. To grow the sales of a solution, establish or maintain a competitive advantage to thrive in today’s sales environment, which requires innovative approaches and hard work.
This is where a B2B sales outsourcing solution may be able to help. A B2B sales outsourcing company can assist you in framing and executing the most current and effective campaigns using modern sales and marketing operations. This will allow you to move faster, implementing the right research, lead generation techniques, and technologies. Your sales team can focus on selling, while your B2B sales outsourcing partner can focus on sustained and consistent lead generation to improve your sales results and help you meet your sales revenue targets.
With so many possible tactics available right now, your B2B sales outsourcing team will help you select the best direction for your business.. The following lead generation tactics are some of the options that will now be at your company’s disposal.
Content Marketing
Content marketing is now a requirement for lead generation success. Over 70% of buyers now prefer to learn about new products or solutions with educational information shared through email. You can share this content through social media campaigns, email-marketing campaigns, and with cold callers on first calls.
Over time, a bonus effect of quality content will enable you to slowly start moving to a higher and higher position in search engine results. A B2B sales outsourcing lead generation company like Gabriel Sales will be able to help you craft educational content that your buyers will enjoy in a short, one to two day content workshop.
Social Media Marketing
Once you have your quality content, you can share that content on social media. For most B2B companies, we recommend starting slowly and saving your best content for social media. The two most effective tools for B2B campaigns are LinkedIn and Twitter (in that order). It is also helpful to share that same content on Facebook and Google +. Google+ is very helpful to improve search engine results.
Email Marketing to Generate a New B2B Leads
Email marketing is all about communicating through a structured email to generate leads and establish a relationship with potential clients. A B2B sales outsourcing lead generation company will be able to help you navigate through multiple vendors to target as many as 75,000 potential targets for about the fully-loaded costs of one sales development rep for one month. This will typically generate 2000 to 4000 early stage leads.
Email Marketing to Develop and Prioritize B2B Leads
One of the most significant developments in sales and marketing over the past decade is marketing automation platforms. Marketing automation allows you to share your thought leadership to develop trust and stay top of mind with consumers that are not quite ready to buy. These same tools also allow you to score leads and predict their readiness to buy based on the content they are engaging with. A B2B sales outsourcing company will be able to help you implement these campaigns and technologies the right way the first time with planned lead generation tactics.
B2B Sales Outsourcing Calling Team
Finally, a lead is only valuable if it turns into an appointment. The days of old school smile and dial and throwing bodies on the phone to generate more leads is over. A B2B sales outsourcing company will be able to help you immediately staff a trained team of sales development reps that understand how to use content and marketing automation the most effective way possible to set appointments for your closers.
About Gabriel Sales B2B Sales Outsourcing Lead Generation Tactics
We specialize in helping SMBs and start-ups build modern sales and marketing operations. To learn more about our lead generation tactics and how we now view the sales challenges B2B companies now face and how we solve them we invite you to check out our new approach to outsourced sales page or visit our B2B sales outsourcing lead generation starter campaign page.
