by gabriel_sales | May 1, 2012
Outbound calling on Inbound leads is radically different from straight cold calling. It takes a personality that is more customer service focused (the rep truly needs to want to help) and that needs to take priority over setting the meeting on that first live contact. This is especially true with a lead that has been in a marketing automation nurturing campaign. Here are some B2B sales tips for outbound follow up on inbound leads.
Your sales rep needs know that the prospect is coming from an online source. This means they understand that the prospect is researching and has already more than likely downloaded multiple content pieces—some from you and some from your competition. The reason that person is researching online is that they don’t have a proclivity to speaking with sales reps or it could be too early. So understand that this is probably not how they would prefer to be contacted and they are probably (or would rather have) an email contact vs. direct contact like a phone call. So as a best practice as an outsourced sales and marketing company we find you should do both:
- Make your initial follow-up contact via an email. Share your name and a little reminder of the content piece they downloaded.Let them know the reason you are contacting them because you have helped other people solve a similar problem. Let them know and offer up some additional content in the email.
- When you get them on the phone make sure the rep knows what they have already researched and what piece of collateral they have already shared.
- If you are using a marketing automation platform make sure the rep has access to all the pieces of content they have already consumed.
- When you follow up stress the fact you have helped others solves similar problems.
- Finally always have script ready. Nothing is worse than being caught off guard.
If you want to see if we can help you get more out of your inbound efforts and are curious if an outsourced sales and marketing company can get you on a faster track to sales results feel free to contact us for a quick consultative call.
by Glen Springer | Apr 16, 2012
As an outsourced sales and marketing company we handle inbound leads and also produce outbound leads with integrated campaigns. Often when we first engage with a company that is looking for more sales ready B2B leads we discover that there is not alignment, or in some cases, has never been a discussion, about what make a lead sales ready. This blog is just a quick overview of some of the lessons we have learned as an outsourced sales and marketing company producing B2B leads for technology, SaaS and professional services firms.
Start with a Definition of What Makes a B2B Lead Sales Ready – As an outsourced sales and marketing firm we have the opportunity and the advantage of working with multiple companies and we find that about 50% of the time your sales team, your marketing team and your management may all have different view of what they think makes a lead sales ready. No two companies will have the same criteria so we recommend that you get your team together so there is at least general consistency in when it make sense to transition leads to your sales reps (generally your most expensive resource) to that their time is as productive as possible. As and outsourced B2B lead generation company here are the questions we like to ask of ourselves internally before we transistion a lead to a customer:
- Do you have a basic understanding their Need/Pain
- What is the Potential Opportunity identified and have we been able to match it to a product or solution? product matched to pain
- What is the timeline for making a decision?
- Do we know who all the stakeholders are?
- Do they have budget or do we know how they will champion a path to funding and/or getting budget? Initial Budget defined or path to budget
- Is their a specific challenge or compelling event that make them interested in purchasing the solution? (Nice to haves are now tougher to close)
- Are all the decision makers identified and how will the decision made? Is it one person, a committee? Who are the gate keepers?
Outbound B2B Lead Generation Needs to Be Smart to Ensure ROI so Start with an Ideal Customer Profile – In a blog post several months back we discussed the ROI of cold calling. In that blog we discussed when as an outsourced B2B lead generation company we felt outbound calling made sense so we won’t go through those number again here. We just want to reiterate here that when you are going to execute an integrated email and cold calling campaign you need to start with an Ideal Customer Profile to maximize your investment. We wrote several blogs on this topic which we invite you to visit for more details and as a quick recap here are some of the crtierea we recommend your team explores before launching an outbound campaign:
Hard criteria related to both the company and the specific decision maker:
- Annual revenue of the company
- Number of employees
- Level of Contact – C-level, senior Manager, middle manager
- Functional Area – business Area, technical Area
- Title
- Revenue Responsibility – budget maker or budget spender
- Geography – global, national, local
- Technology Adopted – in some cases knowing what ERP, CRM, and if they have virtualized may be critical
- Their Clients – e.g. are they doing business with a Procter and Gamble, Federal government, education (local gov.) Walmart, Intel, EMC etc.
Qualitative criteria:
- Business Pain/Need
- Vertical Industry Trend – established or in transition, growth or decline
- Competitive – large competitors or a volume of competitors
- Psychographics – company culture, leadership style, corporate values
It is also important to know who you don’t want to sell to:
- Decision makers whose jobs could be threatened
- Internal Support Functions – for example, if you are selling data analytics you may want to avoid MR groups, or if you are selling operational efficiency services you may want to stay away from operations managers and start with supply chain directors
Finally with the increased maturity of different database companies and even our own internal databases if you are a technology company and your solution works better with some technologies than others it is now possible to segment lists based on your targets existing technical infrastructure. If this is a possible you should jump on this competitive advantage.
Inbound Inquires are not necessarily Sales Ready Leads – Gabriel Sales has been doing some really interesting work over the past 6 months integrating Content Marketing, Marketing Automation and Telesales Account Profiling and Inside Sales. As part of this integration we have benchmarked several types of sales and over the course of the first quarter of 2012 we have generally found across verticals and solution types that between 15-20% of leads generated from SEO and Pay-Per Click are sales ready and that the number is hold steady with leads generated by email campaigns as well. That means that about 1 in 5 leads are actually ready for your Sales Reps to work. What does this means for your business? You can’t afford to pass these leads to sales reps and you also can’t afford to send them to sales because they will either be abandoned or you will be wasting too much time educating customers not ready to buy. We have three recommendations here:
Follow Up with Every Lead within 24 hours – If someone is ready to engage you will be first in line. But follow up with an inside reps whose job it is to profile that account. Pass the Sales Ready leads up the food chain and…
Be Ready to Offer those Not Ready to Buy More Educational Content – Have at least a couple of blog posts, a white paper or a webcast ready to offer your customer if there not ready to engage right now.
Consider a Marketing Automation Software – Depending on the size and volume of your database and the amount of sales content you have already produced it may make sense to invest the 15K to 30K it would take to automate your lead nurturing process. For more detailed ROI metrics feel free to pick up a copy of our White Paper – Sell Smarter, Sell Faster. If you are not familiar with Marketing Automation check out this quick 5 minute demo from one of our partners Pardot for a quick overview.
If you have any questions or feel like a conversation makes sense to learn how Gabriel Sales can help you pull together a more effective demand generation program whether you are mid cycle or building a new effort feel free to CONTACT US.
For a quick look at what a B2B demand generation engine looks like to get a sense if you could benefit from some quick sales and marketing automation process consulting we invite to CLICK HERE you to check out our short 4 minute video.
by Glen Springer | Apr 11, 2012
Why Are My Sales Flat?
In Part 1 of this little snapshot of facts and figures we discussed the pillars of sales and marketing alignment and shared some facts and figures discussing the challenges of implementing a marketing automation platform. In Part 2 we discussed, from our vantage point of providing you with outsourced sales and marketing insights, why we feel like your leadership buy in is important to getting a sales process off the ground that sells to the buyer the way the buyer wants to buy.
As an outsourced sales and marketing company it’s our job to stay on top of the latest research data so you can stay focused on your business. What follows are some facts an figures about the current state of sales and marketing alignment:
According to Marketing Sherpas 2011 State of B2B Demand Generation report:
- 80% of leads that are turned over to sales people are raw leads.
- Of these leads 77% are long term leads (future opportunities) often ignored by sales people (which makes sense because its their job to transact this quarter).
- 80% of marketing leads consequentially wind up lost, ignored or discarded
- 73% of companies have no process for re-engaging or nurturing leads after sales. (e.g. no nurturing process).
What all this means is that about 80% of the leads marketing turns over to sales reps are not qualified. The buyers is not ready to buy yet. So this means that as much as 60% t0 70% of your companies potential revenue is being squandered.
What Can Your Company do to Turn this Around Immediately
With the right resources you don’t necessarily need an outsourced sales and marketing solution long term. In our White Paper Sell Faster and Sell Smarter 12 Tips you can implement immediately to turn around your B2B Demand Generation Team today we get into some detailed tactics. What follows below are some high level approaches we advocate exploring to start to shift your culture now.
Aligning Sales and Marketing – Best in Class companies know that both Sales and Marketing must get on the same page.
• A Mutual Definition of a “Lead” – agreed upon by Marketing and Sales
• Service Level Agreement (SLA) – Sales commits to timely follow up and closes the loop on every Marketing Generated Lead, agrees to reject unqualified leads back to marketing for nurturing
• Measure – Ongoing communication between both parties to evaluate progress toward goals and gaps in the process
Prompt Follow Up – Forrester says 46% of marketers at firms with mature lead management processes have sales teams that follow up on more than 75% of marketing-generated leads. As a sales outsourcing organization we staff sales account profilers and B2B lead profilers to support our own internal sales reps and your sales reps
Higher Conversion Rates –Gartner says when greater integration is accomplished between marketing and sales, conversion rates for leads (defined as earning the designation as qualified and/or committed to the sales pipeline) can increase by as much as 50%. We have our B2B lead profilers follow up with all leads to determine their readiness in a friendly and customer service oriented way.
Why is all this critical. Because bottom line you end up with More closed deals – CSO Insights says – Companies with mature, defined lead generation and management practices have 7% higher sales win rate.
Implement a Marketing Automation Platform and take some of the pressure off your sales team. You can nurture your not ready to buy customers and ensure that when they do you are the first in line. If you have not checked out what these platforms can do here is a quick overview from Pardot 5 Minute Overview of Marketing Automation. You can also start to leverage your content consumption to determine if the buyer is ready to buy by scoring that consumption, which a marketing automation platform allows you to do. Here is a quick sample.
To see if an outsourced sales and marketing solution or sales and marketing sales process consulting engagement may be able to help you accelerate your ability to take advantage of the current competitive advantages that technology and a quick cultural shift can provide please feel free to contact us for a quick consultative call.
We also invite you to visit our knowledge centers for more detailed tips:
Tactics to Lift or Launch B to B Demand Gen
New Product Launch Sales and Marketing Tactics
Digital Content Strategies to Give Marketing a “Sales Quota”
Sales Strategies for Tech, Software and SaaS Sales
Sales Strategies for the Professional Service Sale
by Glen Springer | Apr 6, 2012
Sales and Marketing Outsourcing Alignment is More than Marketing Automation
As a company that specializes in sales and marketing outsourcing, Gabriel Sales is now a staunch advocate of pulling together an integrated sales and marketing technology stack to align sales and marketing around the one goal of helping your buyer to buy the way your buyer wants to buy. However the technology stack is only about 20% of the challenge we all now face. Getting that technology stack to do what it was designed to do may require significant shifts in both sales process and overall company culture (often from the top of the organization). This blog and the following blogs addresses those challenges at a very high level to arm you with some facts and figures to convince you to take a look at marketing automation and to help you understand that simply implementing a sales and marketing technology stack is no magic bullet.
First here is what a sales and marketing technology stack looks like:
Marketing Automation Software can tie together your inbound and outbound efforts data sets with your sales force database.
Second here are the challenges a sales and marketing stack will present for your business according to Gleanster:
As company known for its sales and marketing outsourcing prowess, we understand that implementing a sales and marketing technology stack requires that you align sales and marketing around the new rules of sales engagement that have the following five pillars:
- Sales Content and Marketing Content designed for helping your buyers where they are in their decision making process.
- Sales reps that are trained in the new rules of sales engagement and closing (hard closing no longer works) that is process driven.
- Giving Sales and Marketing a Shared Sales Quota that rewards putting sales qualified leads in the pipe that close that is metric driven
- Implementing the right technology stack for your sales and marketing organization to leverage as a team.
Success requires that you examine your sales and marketing outsourcing process. Technology doesn’t work unless your team has the incentive, desire, motivation and skill set to make it work.
If any of these struggles or challenges hits a register that resonates for you and your organization it may make sense to consider working with a business that is highly proficient in sales and marketing outsourcing. For more specific tactics you can implement right now we invite you to explore the discrete tactics in our Sell Smarter, Sell Faster White Paper of visit our B2B Demand Generation Knowledge Center. If you would like to receive a benchmark feel free to contact us directly to schedule a quick discovery session.
In the next blog in this series we will comment on some additional research that discusses some of the cultural challenges you may face as reported by Marketing Sherpa and finally we will look at what this means in terms of closing business so you can evaluate if you may be blowing your budget by not implementing the right sales and marketing process.
Related Content:
B2B Demand Generation Engine How To Video
by gabriel_sales | Jan 27, 2012
As discussed in our Series on Aligning Sales and Marketing with smart outsourced b to b demand generation, our core job as an sales and marketing outsourcing company is to fill the pipe with sales qualified leads. Then with an outsourced sales engagement our job is to close that business. To do this we are required as an outsourced inside sales team to support or execute to the following marketing goals and objectives. And we are also tasked with creating the following deliverables to ensure our clients success (which are significant value adds) for our New Product Launch sales outsourcing clients:
1. Creating a Marketing Qualified Database of Customers – As part of a launch we consult with our clients to go after a very focused set of targets. By the time we are done your core market will know who you are, what you offer and what makes you different. The market will be ‘branded” and profiled so that your marketing team can continue to nurture the right accounts “not yet ready to buy” and ignore those accounts that will never transact.
2. Digital Sales Content – The quickest way to create “sales” content that will move the deal forward is to leverage digital platforms with authentic content that supports what prospects are being told by sales reps. This can be short video clips, quick blog posts and webcasts. By the time we are done with an initial campaign your content will be tested and proven (or dis-proven) and can continue to be used by the sales team or additional channels to drive efficiencies and accelerate pipe velocity. You have created content that you know works. These messages and initial content can be shared with a creative agency to polish and refine. It can then be taken to the mass market or leveraged with a publisher as part of a media spend.
3. Tested Messages for Direct Marketing Team – As part of our initial B2B demand generation efforts we will have tested messages, tested pains and tested some nurturing campaigns. You will know what messages will drive opens (and ideally conversions) as you decide on how and what to budget for direct marketing, pay per click and SEO efforts.
4. Sales Process Map – As we build an outsourced b 2 b demand generation and sales outsourcing solution understanding the key events in a buyers cycle is critical. Once this is mapped and proven this map can be used for creating a longer term digital content strategy and social media outreach campaign. The map can also be used to set work flows in a a marketing automation platform for lead nurturing campaigns to reduce your inside rep head count costs as the pipe grows.
5. Ability to Forecast the Sales Cycle – As we are measuring all the key success metrics, as deals flow through the pipe, we are also able to start evaluating the key buying signals for the client. This data is also anchored in cold call metrics. This allows our outsourced sales partners to understand what causes and a customer to move. It also helps them to understand when a customer is moving from “educating” themselves to getting serious about ‘making a decision and evaluating vendors”. We provide hard data that helps our clients to decide what digital content is most important to invest time and effort developing with a publisher or creative agency.
For more information on the additional strategic benefits of working with a sales outsourcing company like Gabriel Sales, and what we can do to put deals in your pipe with a b to b demand generation program, please feel free to CONTACT US. For additional strategies and tactics you can leverage for a New Product Launch feel free to visit our Resource Center dedicated to Go-To-Market approaches.
by gabriel_sales | Jan 19, 2012
In the technology industry, having a great new product is no longer enough. You need to know how to get the information about it into the right hands to close deals. In order to make this happen, you need a clearly defined sales strategy that sets you apart from the competition.
Once you have your new product ready to launch, it’s time to start selling. Your sales team needs to fully understand both the product and the current conditions of your target market. They need to understand the benefits and strengths of your product, and be prepared with answers to possible sales objections they may be faced with.
If you’re not sure how to make this all happen, outsourcing your sales and marketing may be a viable option. A sales and marketing outsourcing company like Gabriel Sales can help you improve productivity, increase revenue and grow your business.
A Sales and Marketing Outsourcing company allow you to:
- Have access to a team of experienced sales professionals working directly for you
- Understand your target market and build a custom ideal customer profile
- Spread media content about your product efficiently and effectively
- Have access to sales professionals already experienced in the markets you wish to sell to
- Stay ahead of the competition by constantly pushing relevant sales content through your pipe
Outsourcing sales and marketing may still sound like a foreign concept to some. But, many companies, especially in the high-tech industry, are finding that outsourcing sales has increased revenue and growth both during and after new product launches.
Sales and marketing outsourcing companies help put a sales strategy in place that understands your specific needs as a company, and sets up a process that will quickly and efficiently close deals. If you are interested in learning more about how this process works, feel free to contact us for a free pipe velocity review.
Outbound calling on Inbound leads is radically different from straight cold calling. It takes a personality that is more customer service focused (the rep truly needs to want to help) and that needs to take priority over setting the meeting on that first live contact. This is especially true with a lead that has been in a marketing automation nurturing campaign. Here are some B2B sales tips for outbound follow up on inbound leads.