by gabriel_sales | Dec 13, 2013
There comes a time for every B2B business owner where they must decide how to approach their sales and marketing. There are many different routes you can take: hiring part-time or full-time staff, purchasing consulting services, outsourcing to a third party or some combination of these.
The best option for your company is going to depend on your resources, your specific situation and your goals. If your goal is to dramatically increase revenue through your sales efforts, an outsourced sales team might be your best option. By leveraging a B2B outsourced sales team, you gain access to sales talent that you generally could not afford to hire internally. Additionally, the experience and expertise that comes with an outsourced sales team will help support and optimize your marketing efforts for greater effectiveness and efficiency.
Here are 5 ways an outsourced sales team can help your marketing team:
1. Content development
There have been a few articles recently that talk about the need for B2B companies to act like publishers in terms of their marketing content. For many companies, coming up with fresh content on a regular basis (that provides real value for prospects) is an extremely time consuming task.
At Gabriel Sales, one of the ways our sales outsourcing services support marketing teams is by providing detailed feedback from prospects on the value or effectiveness of different pieces of marketing content. Based on our analysis of phone calls with prospects and marketing analytics data, we provide recommendations for content that your prospects will find engaging and valuable (we can also produce the content for you if you have the need).
2. Augment your under staffed sales team
In recent years, budget limitations and other factors have left many B2B sales teams understaffed. In addition, cold calling just isn’t as effective as it used to be—making it much more expensive to succeed with this tactic. By going with an outsourcing option, you can gain access to an entire sales team for approximately the cost of one internal rep.
Despite how incredible an individual may be in terms of talent and skill, that person can never match the combined training, experience and established relationships that an outsourced sales team can provide. So, instead of spending money internally to hire someone new, it may be more cost-effective to outsource a whole team.
3. Leverage your investment in CRM and MA software
For many B2B companies, technologies like marketing automation and customer relationship management (CRM) software may still be relatively new and confusing. For an outsourced sales team like we have at Gabriel Sales, navigating these technologies is now second-nature. By leveraging an outsourced team, you can therefore bypass months or even years trying to figure it out on your own.
Additionally, one of the top two reasons for dissatisfaction with marketing automation is poor integration with sales. By leveraging an outsourced sales team with over 10,000 hours of marketing automation experience, you gain access to best practices and tips for better sales and marketing alignment. In other words, you let the experts show you how to succeed and what to avoid without having to go through all the headaches of learning on your own.
4. Provide qualitative and quantitative feedback on all tactics.
Every outsourced sales team needs to provide evidence of the value of their work. At Gabriel Sales, we provide our clients twelve different types of reporting on our efforts—from data on conversion ratios to verbatim transcripts of cold calls. We also have weekly meetings with each of our clients to discuss our successes and areas for improvement.
This much transparency and visibility allows your marketing team to easily understand how best to support sales with content and determine what campaigns would be most effective. With the detailed reporting of an outsourced sales team, determining how and where to optimize is greatly simplified.
5. Convert quality inbound leads to qualified prospects
Even when inbound leads come in with a high level of perceived interest, they still need to be qualified. By using an outsourced sales team, you can follow up on inbound leads and nurture them until they are sales qualified for a much lower price than handling it internally.
With a dedicated and experienced outsourced sales team at your service, your marketing team gains the data, technological skills and overall expertise they need to do their jobs as efficiently and effectively as possible.
You can learn more about the value of a B2B outsourced sales team here. To learn about the outsourced sales solutions we offer, visit our services page. Feel free to contact us with any questions.
by gabriel_sales | Dec 4, 2013
This is part-two of a two-part blog series on the advantages of hiring a B2B sales outsourcing company in 2014. Click here for part one.
Identify or Confirm Appropriate Market Segmentation and Ideal Customer Profile
Understanding who you are selling to and who your best customers are is much harder in B2B than it is in B2C—mostly because B2B products/services are generally more complex and abstract. In addition, there are generally now multiple decision makers involved in the buying process, each of whom often having different needs and concerns.
Coming up with the right combination of segmentation and messaging is a task that can overwhelm many B2B sales and marketing teams. Getting audience segmentation right often requires a lot of experimentation and small adjustments, and many teams simply do not have time for this. Leveraging a sales and marketing outsourcing company allows you to identify your ideal customer profile and perfect your market segmentation while keeping your top producers focused on revenue generating activities.
Leverage Proven Sales Methodologies and Years of Sales Experience
IT firms live and breathe IT. Real estate companies live and breathe real estate. The same goes for sales outsourcing companies—sales is what they know. By hiring a sales outsourcing company, you gain the years or experience and expertise of a team who spends their days fully immersed in selling.
A quality B2B sales and marketing outsourcing organization also keeps constant track of the changes and trends happening in selling and buying. The fast-pace of the internet and web technologies means changes now happen constantly, and being ahead of the curve can give you a huge edge on the competition. By hiring a sales outsourcing team, you don’t have to worry about keeping up with every trend and change happening in sales and marketing. Your outsourced sales team will take care of that for you—leaving you to focus on serving your customers.
Ability to Execute Quickly and Understand Results
By leveraging a sales and marketing outsourcing company, you not only gain the ability to quickly execute effective campaigns, but you also gain a clearer understanding of the impact of those campaigns. At Gabriel Sales, we use multiple measurement and analytics tools to help our customers get a clear picture of the effectiveness of all of their efforts and work with them to optimize everything we can.
By combining the insights from search data, marketing automation, sales technologies and website analytics, you can get a clearer picture of your market, your prospects, your competitors and your overall impact. By hiring a sales outsourcing company to help, you can derive insights from data more quickly in order to maximize efficiency and optimize ROI.
If you are interested in learning about the integrated B2B sales and marketing outsourcing services we provide, you can visit our services page. Feel free to contact us with any questions.
by gabriel_sales | Dec 4, 2013
Why a sales outsourcing company?
As 2013 nears its end, it is time to start looking to how to make 2014 your best sales year ever. B2B digital sales and marketing gets more and more complex and competitive by the day, and staying ahead of the game in terms of the latest tactics and techniques is a difficult task. We may be biased, but we believe the best way to dramatically increase revenue and decrease your cost of sale is to leverage a B2B sales outsourcing company.
Here are top 5 advantages of hiring a B2B outsourced sales company:
Speed to Success
In the world of B2B sales and marketing, web technologies, search platforms, measurement tools and more have made the landscape increasingly complex. You can no longer simply put up a website and expect to win business. Sales and marketing now involves website development and management in as well as sales pipeline management, digital content marketing, lead nurturing, customer relationship management and more.
If you are still in early stages of development in terms of a fully integrated and digital sales and marketing strategy, a B2B sales outsourcing organization may be a great option. Trying to develop and implement a strategy on your own can be extremely time consuming, and that long of a learning curve is more than many companies can afford. By leveraging a sales outsourcing company to help you develop and execute sales and marketing campaigns, you can reduce your learning curve dramatically and start seeing your revenue increase much faster.
Help You Navigate or Perfect Marketing Automation Software
Regardless of what industry or market you are in, if your competitor is leveraging marketing automation and you aren’t, you are in trouble. Industry reports now show that almost two-thirds of marketers are currently using marketing automation software as a part of their sales and marketing strategy, and 81% plan to fully adopt in 2014 (MarketingProfs).
As marketing automation consultants, we are true proponents of marketing automation and the tremendous value it can bring to a company. However, this value can only be realized if significant time and effort are put into the implementation and ongoing management of the platform. This is where hiring a sales outsourcing team with marketing automation experience can give you an enormous advantage. Instead of spending a year or more trying to learn the functionalities and best practices of a foreign platform, you can hire a team who knows that platform inside and out to help you expedite the entire implementation process and get you set up for ongoing success.
To continue reading click here.
by gabriel_sales | Sep 10, 2013
In the world of B2B sales, many people are starting to notice that the sales and marketing strategies that worked a few years ago (trade shows, cold calling, etc.) are no longer as effective as they used to be. With no visibility into how and why this is, it is hard to determine how to rectify the issue. However, Outsourcing Sales Reps can be solution.
As a sales and marketing outsourcing company with over 13 years of experience helping B2B companies jumpstart their sales and grow their revenue, we have been on the front lines of these changes and can therefore offer some insight into what has happened and how to proceed.
From our perspective, selling is no longer as effective as it used to be because more and more products are “bought” then “sold” everyday. This is because the democratic and participatory nature of the internet put power into the hands of the buyer, who now controls the sales process from start to close. B2B buyers now educate themselves about their buying options online and only engage with sales reps when it is absolutely necessary.
In order to adapt to the way B2B leads now like to buy, many companies are choosing to look into outsourcing sales reps who have experience with this new kind of selling. By taking on an outsourced sales force, you gain the knowledge and expertise of a team that lives and breathes sales as well as their experience selling to consumers in a digital landscape.
Here are several instances when outsourcing sales reps from a sales and marketing outsourcing company can be an effective strategy:
- Your core competency is something other than sales/marketing (i.e. manufacturing, new product development, etc.)
- You haven’t updated your marketing strategy since “branding” and “positioning” were the hot buzzwords
- You have yet to look into how a marketing automation platform impacts sales
- Your top employees are currently stuck focusing on sales instead of innovation or serving customers
- You are a startup who has yet to break into the market
- You have a new product to launch and need help getting it in front of your ideal customers
While there are many more instances when outsourcing sales reps can help, these are some of the most common. If you are considering an outsourced sales team to help your B2B sales, there are several things you need to consider to make sure you choose the best team for your business.
If you would like to learn more about how the rules of B2B buying and selling have changed and what you need to do to adapt, you can download our white paper. If you are interested in learning about the sales and marketing outsourcing services we offer, you can visit our Services page.
If you have any questions please feel free to contact us.
by gabriel_sales | Aug 16, 2013
This blog is a short overview of the advantages your company can gain when outsourcing B2B sales.
For many B2B companies, selling is not as straightforward as it used to be. These companies are realizing that their sales and marketing tactics from ten years ago (telemarketing, tradeshows, etc.) are no longer as effective as they used to be.
In light of recent technological innovation and cultural evolution that has changed the buying and selling game for everyone, many B2B companies are turning to experts to help them transition into the digital marketing era. A sales and marketing outsourcing company can help you develop a clear sales process, execute marketing campaigns efficiently, and give you the metrics you need constantly refine your strategy.
Here are three advantages for outsourcing B2B sales:
- History of Experience
While your B2B company has expertise in the products or services you offer, a B2B sales outsourcing company has expertise in selling things. The world of selling is the water they’re swimming in, so they have been keeping track of all the new sales tactics and strategies that you’ve been ignoring while building your business. By hiring an outsourcing company for B2B sales, you get access to this experience and expertise.
- Marketing Automation Expertise
A new survey from MarketingProfs showed that 62% of marketers are now leveraging a marketing automation platform as a part of their sales strategy. For non-experts, marketing automation implementation is not an easy task, and it can be difficult to know if you are getting the most out of your investment. By outsourcing B2B sales, you get access to a sales outsourcing team that has gone through dozens of marketing automation implementations and knows the software in and out.
3. Measurable Results
One of the great things coming out of the recent technological innovations in marketing is the ability to measure results. Using a marketing automation platform and sales technologies (cold calling software programs, customer relationship management software, etc.), you can start to attach numbers and percentages to all of your B2B sales and marketing tactics—eventually giving you the ability to forecast your sales cycle with greater accuracy.
Overall, outsourcing B2B sales can add enormous value to your business with relatively little risk. Leveraging a B2B outsourcing sales company will give you the ability to act as an expert in the digital content marketing landscape and help drive revenue in ways you may not have even heard of yet.
We Can Help
Gabriel Sales was created and founded by Glen Springer in 2001 to accelerate sales and market growth for new products and services, and fill strategic gaps in companies’ sales and marketing operations. Gabriel Sales has continued evolve best practices with a focus on sales and marketing alignment. We integrate digital content and social media into every reps sales process to increase accountability and metric driven results.
Our team has a diverse experience and deep domain expertise selling software, hardware, professional services, analytics and media. Our core focus is taking products and sales efforts through multiple stages of maturity in their path from $0-$20M in annual revenue. We continue to be selective in our partnerships, ensuring that each client gets a dynamic, measurable plan to meet sales and growth projections.
If you would like more information on how selling and buying have changed and what you need to do to adapt, you can download our new white paper called, “New Rules for B2B Sales & Marketing in 2013”. If you have any questions, please feel free to check out our services page or contact us.
by gabriel_sales | Jun 24, 2013
As B2B sales and marketing continues to adapt to paradigm shifts in technology and culture, marketers are finding new ways to communicate with prospects and deliver engaging content.
One of the most popular ways to deliver messages in the new digital sales space is through the use of B2B sales or marketing videos. Videos can be effective for B2B sales for many reasons.
The first reason is that unlike a white paper or text-heavy blog article, videos can make use of color, motion and sound to grab and hold your viewers attention. Second, you can use infographics and visually engaging representations of data to tell your brand story in a completely new way. Third, by putting your voice and or face on screen, your prospects feel that they are getting to know you, which will help you earn their trust.
The first thing you need to do when creating a B2B sales or marketing video is determine what you want the video to do for your company. Do you want to educate, entertain, build trust, differentiate or sell? Once you have decided your desired function for the video, you need to pick a structure and format conducive to your choice.
Are you trying to position yourself as a thought leader in the industry? Then you need an educational video that talks about industry news, trends or insights. In the example below from Gabriel Sales, CEO Glen Springer addresses the recent purchase of SalesForce by ExactTarget. His video answers a question many people in the industry are currently asking (“Why did Salesforce Buy ExactTarget for 2.5B?”) in a way that also demonstrates value for Gabriel Sales’ services. This video is therefore able to showcase Springer’s industry expertise while simultaneously educating prospects for Gabriel Sales.
Another way to educate your prospects with video is to simply explain what you do. In the B2B world, many products and services are not self-explanatory and require a fair amount of education to get the prospect to understand value. In the example below, Gabriel Sales’ COO Carol Springer explains what B2B demand generation is and the process Gabriel Sales goes through to generate demand for our clients. While the video does attempt to sell Gabriel Sales services, it is still educational in tone and content.
Click here to watch the video.
If your aim with B2B video is instead to build trust or convince your prospect to transact, client testimonials are a great option. By having someone else sing your praises, you get to sell without being the annoying and pushy salesman that everyone hates. In the example below, Gabriel Sales’ customer Solution Dynamics talks about the value that Gabriel Sales services have brought to the company during their 18-month relationship.
Click here to watch the video.
In summary, creating B2B sales videos can be an effective way to engage new customers and even close deals. It is important to remember to determine the purpose or function of the video you want to create and then match the tone and content accordingly.
If you would like more information on B2B sales videos, or have any questions about Gabriel Sales services, please feel free to contact us.
There comes a time for every B2B business owner where they must decide how to approach their sales and marketing. There are many different routes you can take: hiring part-time or full-time staff, purchasing consulting services, outsourcing to a third party or some combination of these.
