by gabriel_sales | Feb 28, 2013
It is 2013 at last, and finally the economy is starting to show steady signs of improvement and increased momentum. Your sales plan should use this momentum to increase your sales performance in the coming year. here are our b2b marketing strategies and sales tips you may want to take into account in 2013 to increase sales.
10 B2B Marketing Strategies and Sales Tips for 2013:
- Evaluate your sales process. In order to improve your process in the future, you need to have a clear understanding of your process as it is now. Work to ascertain what worked for your top performers in 2012, and share their techniques and processes with your entire company. In our work as a sales and marketing outsourcing company, we have found much success in improving efficiency by replicating what works for top sales producers.
- Measure your sales pipe velocity. Putting the metrics in place to analyze your sales pipe velocity is a part of evaluating your sales process. These metrics will help you understand what specific message or piece of content causes someone to move from one stage of the sales process to the next.
- Nurture your sales pipe. Our data at Gabriel sales, along with other research, suggests that over 50% of closed deals come from leads educated a year ago. This means you should not ignore past prospects, especially for complex sales.
- Align your sales and marketing. The last thing you want to do in 2013 is measure what marketing puts into the pipe and what sales closes separately. You need to give your marketing team a “sales quota” and foster a team environment. You should also create shared success metrics in order to make sure everyone is focused on closing business with customers ready to buy and at the same time nurturing prospects that are not quite ready. In other words, you want to create content that supports the sale across its lifecycle.
- Sell money. If you have a complex sales process or multi-dimensional product or service, you need to make sure your buyer can clearly understand and measure their return. You need to somehow be able to prove the ROI you can deliver with your product or service.
- Build an ideal customer profile. Analyze the demographics of your current group of customers. Use this information to determine what companies give you the biggest profit, are the least demanding and quickest to scale.
- Improve your lead targeting quality. Once you understand your ideal customer profile, you can immediately use this information to improve the quality of your leads. The first step in creating a successful pipe is improving the quality of what you put into it.
- Use Social Media. In 2013, every B2B company needs to be plugged into the social media world. This means that (depending on your specific products or services), you need to have active profiles on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Google+. You may also want to start a company blog that works in concert with the rest of your digital marketing strategies.
- Consider marketing automation software. Now that it is 2013, marketing automation is becoming a standard for B2B sales. In our experience as a sales outsourcing organization, the insights and efficiency gains are critical for us to compete in the new sales engagement model.
- Join forces with others. With the increasing use of social media, digital content, marketing automation, webcasting and SEO tools in B2B sales, it might make sense to look at how a top sales outsourcing and marketing outsourcing company can help you augment capability and increase capacity, to increase your sales in the 2013.
In B2B sales and marketing, there are numerous strategies and tactics that have potential to drive sales growth, which correlate to what stage you are at in terms of sales and marketing alignment. Our experience has shown that a tactic is most effective when anchored in an overarching b2b marketing strategy based on real numbers and has the objective of targeting specific sales goals. A sales and marketing outsourcing company can help you create these types of strategies and tactics by working to create a unique plan to improve what is not working and build what is working based on hard sales targets.
If you would like to know more B2B Sales & Marketing Tips for 2013, please contact us.
by gabriel_sales | Feb 21, 2013
As a B2B sales outsourcing company, current industry trends may have you wondering what sales outsourcing and marketing outsourcing is and what it could do for you. Many businesses in recent years have found success hiring the best sales outsourcing company in developing a clear strategy and achieving business goals.
When considering whether or not outsourcing is right for you, it is important to know that no two sales outsourcing companies are the same. This means some companies are better than others at what they do, and you need to know how to spot the best sales outsourcing company.
Here are some basic tips to help you in your search for the best sales outsourcing company possible to fit your business’s needs.
Look for their achievements
You should first determine what they have done in the past. Go to their website or do other research to see if they have a list of successes or accomplishments. Look for their average ROI statement and ask if the same could be expected for your company.
Determine their specialty
Most sales and marketing outsourcing companies have a certain area of focus. Some outsourcing company’s expertise is with the high-tech industry, while some are best at telesales outsourcing or setting appointments. When looking for the best fit for your business, you should make sure the company has experience selling in the markets you sell to. You should also look to see whether they have experience working with the type of product or service you provide and whether or not they have found success working in your specific industry.
Find out how they recruit
It is important to understand how a sales and marketing outsourcing company recruits their sales people. This is because if the company uses a third-party recruiter, you will likely be paying for this sometimes quite expensive service. If you do not have unlimited funds for outsourcing, you may want to looking to a company that does their recruiting in-house.
Ascertain their training process
In B2B sales, most sales teams need a fair amount of training. If you are going to outsource, you want to make sure training is something provided by your outsourcing company. Look into whether or not the company provides this extra sales training to its sales reps and how it is executed.
Verify their success with evidence
During your search for an outsourcing company, you should ask for success stories or case studies. If they have at least several immediately available to you, it is probably a good sign. On the other hand, if you cannot find any positive remarks from past clients about a company, you can walk away with confidence.
While this list of tips for finding the best sales outsourcing company is not exhaustive, it is a good place to start. The most important part of finding a good fit for you is to establish the reputation of the company and qualify the specific ways the company can help you.
If you’d like to look into Gabriel Sales as a sales and marketing outsourcing option, please check out our services and client success stories, or contact us for more information.
by gabriel_sales | Jan 30, 2013
How to Increase the success of your B2b sales and marketing approach
If you are a part of the sales world, you know that the sales cycle does not look anything like it did a few years ago. In our work at Gabriel Sales, a B2B outsourced sales company and B2B sales and marketing company, we have been closely following these changes in order to help our clients navigate the new sales landscape.
The first thing we have discovered is that in some instances, buyers are buying faster. Buyers now often make decisions immediately following their budget approval, shortening the decision process to less than 60 days in some cases.
However, while about 20% of buyers are now reaching out faster for smaller purchases, there are still buyers who prefer buying via more traditional buyer relationships. There are also buyers who are now spending more time in the research phase, preferring to explore all of their options thoroughly before making a decision.
What all of this comes down to is that buyers are no longer as predictable or homogenous as they once were. If your business is not able to adapt to the changing trends of the B2B sales industry, you stand to lose up to 10%-20% of your revenue to competitors who have adapted their process and techniques. In order to make sure you can sell to your customers regardless of how they prefer to buy, you need to have a strong content marketing program in place, strong inbound and strong cold calling. The rest of this blog will briefly discuss the best practices for meeting the demands of today’s B2B sales landscape.
Marketing Automation Implementation
Our experience as a B2B marketing and sales company tells us that using Marketing Automation Software is quite possibly the most effective thing a business can do to improve its sales and give them an advantage over their competitors. Marketing Automation can increase your B2B demand generation across different buying cycles.
This type of software permits marketers to generate, score and nurture leads in a new, more efficient way. For some smaller businesses, we have even been able to combine this software with some of our proprietary tools in a way that eliminates the need for marketing as a function. This allows you to give the demand generation tools to your sales reps in order to decrease cost and increase productivity.
We believe the main reason many B2B companies do not find success with this type of software is they do not allow the sales team to propel its implementation. These companies have not yet seen the value of incorporating a top salesperson’s process as a part of their overall demand generation process.
Lead Scoring
One of the biggest advantages of implementing marketing automation software is improved efficiency in terms of scoring leads. This allows your sales reps to concentrate their phone time on the most qualified leads. These marketing software tools have lead scoring and nurturing features that allow you to watch and score the way your prospects are interacting with your online content and follow-up emails. Once a lead has a score that suggests they are ready to buy, your lead generation reps can make that lead a priority. They can then contact these leads directly for final qualification steps to convert them to sales qualified leads.
Committed Demand Generation Team
We believe having a team dedicated to converting marketing qualified leads into sales qualified leads is the key to success in terms of demand generation. Many companies try to have the sales team complete this task in order to shorten the cycle, but we have found this rarely achieves long-term success. While working this way may put you at an advantage with the 20% who now prefer to buy quickly, you lose all of the buyers who like to buy differently. Demand generation programs only work when the level of commitment from the demand generation team matches the capacity of the tools they are using.
If you would like to learn more about how sales outsourcing for B2B can help you align your inbound and outbound efforts for a fatter pipe and more closed revenue please feel free to CONTACT US for a free initial strategy conversation.
by gabriel_sales | Jan 6, 2013
During this time of year, many B2B companies are pursuing their 2013 sales goals with full force and speed ahead. A lot of companies make lofty goals in January, but are then unable to reach them because of weaknesses in their overall strategy or process. If you are having problems reaching your sales goals or growing as a business, you may want to consider looking into an outsourced sales option.
Here are some of the ways outsourcing B2B sales and marketing can help your company achieve their sales goals in 2013:
- Gained access to an entire sales team for approximately the cost of one internal sales 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.
- Accelerate your sales process by deploying an experienced sales team for specific projects. When you set your sights high in terms of sales goals, you do not leave yourself a lot of time to spend locating and training new salespeople. Anyone with experience in sales knows training a new rep takes a good deal of time and effort on your part. If you do not want to spend the first quarter training, hiring an outsourced team with plenty of prior experience is your best option.
- Time to investigate new markets and establish new territory prior to hiring new in house sales reps. If you do not have years of experience finding salespeople in your specific market, it can be quite difficult to build a successful internal sales team. This is because most great salespeople have a specialty that they unwilling to deviate from. Using outsourcing can help with this dilemma because it allows you time to become more familiar with the market you wish to enter to make connections and entice the best salespeople your way.
- Experiment with new offerings while retaining the focus of your in house team. The launch of a new product or service is one of the best times to use an outsourcing sales and marketing company. This is because you can keep your internal team focused on your current products and proven strategies for success while the outsourced team can test the response of your new product and make adjustments.
- Build a platform for direct sales without affecting your sales channel, or create a sales channel without impacting direct sales. Similarly to the way outsourcing is effective during a new product launch, an outsourced sales team can also be leveraged during a transition between sales models. When attempting to add or transition between sales models, you can keep your internal team focused on the old model and let the outsourcing team navigate the new one. The outsourcing team can assess any concerns or dangers, flush them out and make sure your new sales model is set up to succeed.
If you would like to know more about the benefits outsourcing B2B sales, please reach out to us at Gabriel Sales by contacting us here. For more information on the services we provide, you can check out our Services Page.
by gabriel_sales | Nov 29, 2012
Understanding the difference between a Sales Cycle vs. Buying Cycle may be the most critical shift an organization needs to make to see significant and sustained revenue growth, especially for complex or highly competitive sales.
In a nutshell, the Sales Cycle is how your company looks at moving deals through their own sales pipe and sales process to close deals. Typically the flow looks something like a lead, marketing qualified lead, sales qualified leads, needs analysis, proposal, negotiation, verbal, and closed. This is a company centered view.
A buying cycle is looking at your sales cycle from what the customer needs. Probably the best example we have seen of a buying cycle is from Robert Jolles book Customer Centered Selling. Below is our brief explanation of how we look at this cycle, addressing some of the implications it has for us as an outsourced sales and marketing company with how we divide the sales and marketing functions.
Phase 1 – Intention to Buy
- The buyer starts satisfied with their current solution
- The buyer acknowledges to themselves that they are not satisfied
- The buyer makes the decision to do something about it
- The buyer starts to think about “what are the criteria” to consider moving forward
As a lead generation and a demand generation company, we understand that intention is meaningless without action. The world is full of people with great intentions that never actually take any action. Your job as a sales person and marketer is to understand that your first task in generating demand for your solution is to help educate a buyer on the “criteria” they need to consider. You need to appreciate that given a choice, most buyers will sit on the fence for as long as possible. They want to move forward, they know it’s good for them to move forward, so you need to help educate the buyer enough so they do in fact move forward. Your first job as a sales and marketing professional is to inspire and catalyze the desire that gets your buyer to move from the passive buying process to the active buying process. More and more, this is becoming the function of your content marketing and inside team.
Phase 2 – Active Buying
- The buyer needs to figure out how to measure the solution to: justify the purchase, understand the impact of doing nothing vs. changing, see the impact on topline, recognize the implications for bottom line, feel subjective relief of pain or risk
- The buyer investigates deeply, typically with short list of solutions and a deep dive into one or more solutions
- Selection is made; a front-runner is chosen
- The buyer reconsiders their decision
During the “Active” buying process, your sales team is typically on point. It’s at this point that marketing should take a back seat – with one exception: marketing needs to continue to support the sales team with the content they need to help deal with the reconsideration phase of the sales cycle. Your marketers need to be prepared to help the buyer remember why they were no longer satisfied and embarked on their buying cycle in the first place.
by gabriel_sales | Sep 21, 2012
Outsourced Sales and Marketing can help you to achieve your sales targets faster and at a reduced operational cost. This is especially true if you are just getting out of the gate. In a previous blog we discussed the time and money it can save you in recruiting, sales management and marketing management. However you cannot expect to under fund your sales and marketing efforts and still compete in the market. This is especially true if you are a young company, a technology start-up or new to the market. An outsourced sales and marketing solution has the advantages of a fully functioning organization that is already in motion but you need to consider your competition and understand that if there is competition in the market that you need to invest enough to allow your sales and marketing team the ability to compete and win.
Some Strategic Issues that Shape Successful Outsourced Sales and Marketing
Here are some of the areas you should expect your outsourced sales and marketing company to explore with you:
Market dynamics – What is your understanding of the market and selling dynamics of other companies – Do you understand your differentiators. What is your core value proposition? How deep is your understanding of the competitive landscape?
Do you have realistic goals – Do you have any existing conversion metrics and sales pipe history to support those goals? Is one of the top priorities of your sales and marketing outsourced vendor to help with this?
Key events in your sales cycle – What are the key events that occur during your customers buying cycle? What is your win loss ratio? Do you need your sales and marketing outsourcing solution to help you figure this out. In that case you may want to position this as a consulting engagement to your board. If any of the past several issues has left you wondering what is the difference between outsourced sales vs. sales consulting here is a quick overview from a past blog post…Sales Consulting vs. Outsourced Sales.
What does your existing customer set look like – The prospects an outsourced sales and marketing company like Gabriel Sales will be targeting for you will want to understand who your current buyers are. Prospects will want to know what vertical markets you are in and you will need to be able to provide your outsourced sales partner with reference clients in other verticals if they are opening a new vertical or market for you.
Do you have the budget and the patience to successfully execute to a successful plan – While and outsourced sales and marketing company can get you into the market faster and more effectively, a well executed plan takes time to ramp. Obviously using an outsourced sales and marketing company will allow you to gain traction quickly but they will not be able to dramatically change a company’s typical buying cycle for your product. If your typical sales cycle takes 6-12 month you can expect an outsourced sales and marketing company to shave a month or two off that cycle at best but you need to account for the initial 90-120 days to ramp the initial pipe. Do you have the patience to wait for the sales engine to ramp? We typically see our efforts take significant hold at 9-12 months. We do have some tactics to gain traction with key accounts quickly. To help on this front you need to have an ideal customer profile but realistic timing needs to be factored into the overall strategy.
The right level of funding approved– All this boils down to the right level of funding. Sales and marketing outsourcing help get you out of the gate faster and cheaper but it does not absolve you from the need to fund your efforts at levels where you can compete. You need to make sure that senior management and your board are aware of this and do not set false expectations. As with any strategic initiative you need to have buy-in and appropriate funding from the senior management team, and sales and marketing outsourcing is no exception.
There are many strategic decisions that you need to consider in executing a successful sales and marketing strategy. This blog addresses a handful that we work through with you. For additional tactics we use to ensure your long term success we invite you to check out a couple of our education series here:
Selling Smarter and Selling Faster White Paper
Build a Successful B2B Sales and Marketing Engine – Educational Resources
For more information on how Gabriel Sales has helped dozens of companies enter a market successfully please feel free to contact for us an initial review.
