by Glen Springer | Jan 4, 2017
If you are a small business or a start-up building a sales and marketing team can be a daunting task. This is especially true if you do not have an executive on your team that has the experience or proven track record. Most executives are already swamped with addressing other critical areas of their business so if you do not have this sales and marketing experience and background it may make sense to consider an outsource sales and marketing team.
Here is a short list of 3 things you can expect from an outsource sales and marketing team to help you build a high performing sales effort.
Your outsource sales and marketing team will hire the right people
An outsource sales and marketing team will hire individuals with the right attitude, right personality for their assigned task and the right work ethic. An outsource sales and marketing company will understand how to recruit the right talent for the right job. This gets rid of a great deal of your time and investment building a team on your own.
Your outsource sales and marketing team will close competency gaps quickly
An outsource sales and marketing company will already have the sales and marketing support functions in house to cover any gaps you have in your internal team. This includes:
- Sales and marketing strategists
- Content production specialists
- Database managers
- Database marketers
- CRM and marketing automation technologists
- Marketing coordinators
- Cold calling and buyer education reps for prospecting
- Business development reps for qualifying and developing buyers
You will be able to access a blended team that you would not be able to quickly build on your own even if you have the budget.
Your outsource sales and marketing team will measure what matters
Beyond closed deals many small businesses and startups often will not have enough data to benchmark what matters to take a lead through the sales funnel to closed revenue. Obviously closed deals is the most critical measurement but to scale a sales effort you need to have a disciplined approach to lead generation, lead development and lead qualifying on a daily basis. We’ve all heard that what gets measured gets done. An outsource sales and marketing company will know how to use CRM and marketing automation technologies to hold your entire outsource sales and marketing team accountable for hitting these targets and accomplishing these tasks on a daily, weekly and monthly basis.
When all three of these qualities are aligned, your outsource sales and marketing team will help you build a high-performing sales effort. The end result is that an outsource sales and marketing team will help you build a sales culture of continuous improvement. They will recruit and retain the right people, create metrics that are meaningful at the individual, team, and organizational level. And they will help you measure and pursue what matter most.
To learn more about Gabriel Sales outsource sales and marketing services we invite you to check out our outsource sales and marketing services page.
by Glen Springer | Jan 3, 2017
How outsourcing sales can accelerate revenue for your business
With 2017 just getting started, most companies will be considering how to accelerate revenue production. If you and your sales and marketing team killed it in 2016 congrats…now is a perfect time to consider how you can leverage that momentum and build on it.
If you didn’t hit targets, we encourage you to ask yourself what you can do differently in 2017 to get sales back on track and Accelerate Revenue production.
Here are a just a few tactics that you can implement quickly in Q1 to help get off to a flying start. And if you are a little pressed for resources we briefly explain how outsourcing sales may be able to help with specific functions to help you build more modern and productive sales and marketing operations.
Top of funnel lead gen campaign
As an outsourcing sales company we find that many of our clients have a great solution that fills a need in the market. But many companies fall prey to the misguided notion that increasing sales means hiring more sales people. Instead we encourage you to consider if your closers are getting enough leads into the top of their sales funnel. If not, you may want to consider running a top of funnel lead generation campaign with email marketing and PPC tactics to arm your team with more early stage opportunities.
Sales Function Specialization
Beyond a quality product, your closers are your most valuable asset. Outsourcing sales can allow your closers to specialize on closing and you can leverage an outsourcing sales team to focus on qualifying your top of funnel leads.
Revisit your targeting
When was the last time that you examined if you were targeting the right market or if there are new markets to explore? Have you taken the time to create a buyer persona to understand who your best customers were in 2016 and have you examined why they purchased your solution? As an outsourcing sales company we can run a quick buyer persona workshop and provide quick market segmentation to see if there are markets you could expand to in 2017. We can then help to target those markets will laser focus. To learn more about how to build an ideal customer profile you can check out our blog article here.
Create content that delivers value
If you have not committed to content marketing yet, now may be the time to start. What you consider to be common sense often has tremendous value for potential buyers. Content marketing takes time and effort but in this age when 70% of buyers shortlist vendors with one or fewer conversations with a sales rep, making it easy for your buyers to buy with digital education is now a must have. Once you’ve created your buyer personas and documented their buying process you can create targeted content for each stage of the buyer journey. Make sure you have one or two pieces for each stage of the decision-making process. As an outsourcing sales company, Gabriel Sales can help you get this off the ground with a quick 2 day content production workshop.
Start nurturing and scoring leads
Over the course of 2016 statistics have shown that the majority of leads generated are from prospects not ready to buy right away. The trick to closing those leads is not throwing more budget at phone calls to buyers that aren’t ready to buy. Instead, you can stay top of mind by simply sharing educational content that helps buyers learn more about the challenges they face, how others are overcoming those challenges and how your solution may be able to help to accelerate revenue.
And to send these emails you will need a marketing automation platform that scores those leads so when a buyer is ready to buy you’ll know.
As an outsourcing sales company, Gabriel Sales specializes in helping small business implement and then manage their sales automation processes to accelerate revenue production. We have expertise in managing entry level and more complex software solutions so we can also help you decide on the right solution for your sales targets and budget. To decide if lead scoring is right for your business feel free to download our eBook here.
Be educational, not aggressive
More and more products are first bought through digital education and then sold when the buyer is ready to be closed. Generating great leads is an awesome start but if you don’t convert them into real sales opportunities all those invested resources go to waste. If your close rate is lower than you would like, ask yourself am I being too aggressive with the close?
In this age of digital education, buyers are now in control and hard closing before a buyer is ready to buy no longer works. By focusing instead on being helpful you can stand apart from your competition. An outsourcing sales company can help with your nurturing and we can also staff buyer education reps to monitor the scored leads for timely follow up that keeps the conversation helpful to help give you extra capacity for the middle of your sales funnel. To learn more about how modern business development reps engage buyers you can check out this quick overview here
How We Can Help
Gabriel Sales builds sales automation engines for B2B companies and helps support marketing efforts by also supplying insides sales outsourcing teams that combine both marketers and reps following up with highly scored leads. If you would like to learn about our approach visit our About Us Page or feel free to Contact Us to learn more about how we can help with your insides sales outsourcing and outsourced marketing needs.
by Glen Springer | Jan 2, 2017
As an outsource sales and marketing company we speak to many small business owners that are struggling to increase the efficiency of their sale and marketing processes. It’s understandable that some small businesses that have been selling for years can be a little anxious with keeping up with modern sales and marketing operations and the advances in online business models and digital marketing. And according to a recent survey of 1200 buyers 85% of most organizations now prefer to make all are part of their purchase decision through digital channels. But it’s important to note that 75% of those buyers will not make a purchase decision without engaging with a sales rep at the end of the buying process.
As an outsource sales and marketing company we help companies address these challenges by helping companies build digitally integrated sales and marketing sales/buyer processes. When it comes to empowering companies with their outsource sales and marketing efforts we focus on four core digital areas:
Creating enough content to support the buyer journey and the outsource sales and marketing process
We help companies to create digital content that supports their sales process at each stage of the buying process.
We look at creating content for four different stages:
- Creating content to share educational facts and information that helps them start to frame their problem and the challenges they will need to address
- Content that helps buyers realize that we understand their problems
- Content that frames how we help them to solve the problem
- Finally content that discusses how the problem was solved and the business results you can gain from solving that problem
We provide our Outsource Sales and Marketing clients with the content management tools to make it easy for buyers to self-educate.
Once you have your content created it’s important that you make it easy for your buyers to access that content. Getting your content on the web is only the first step. In today’s digital media age you also need to make it easy for buyer to self-discover information about your solution easy and simple. So we have created a simple to manage tool called Digital Demand Center™ that makes it easy to organize all 4 stages of your content on one microsite.
Organizing your content this way allows your buyer that is hungry for self education to go through all states of their buying process to solve one specific problem easy and simple. It also gives buyers that prefer one format over another (video, blog articles or downloadable assets) to educate themselves the way they prefer.
Allow your outsource sales team to access that digital conversation
The final step in the process is leveraging a marketing automation platform to:
- Track the buyers engagement with your content
- Score buyers based on what content they are consuming (the later the buying stage the higher the score)
- Notifying your outsource sales team when the buyer reaches a Sales Ready Lead Score
Embracing a digital workflow, scoring leads and sharing that information is not a replacement for sales – it’s a way to free up more of their time to focus on revenue-generating activities.
These digital tools are a way to boost the performance of your outsource sales team.
To learn about how Gabriel Sales can work with you to outsource sales and marketing please visit our outsource sales and marketing services page.
by Glen Springer | Dec 30, 2016
Here are three habits you should expect from and outsourcing sales and marketing team. But first lets define a habit. A habit (or wont) is a routine of behavior that is repeated regularly and tends to occur subconsciously. … Habitual behavior often goes unnoticed in persons exhibiting it, because a person does not need to engage in self-analysis when undertaking routine tasks. Habits are sometimes compulsory.
If you are working with an outsourcing sales team you can often predict their success in lead generation, prospecting and the development of real sales opportunities based on the habits embedded in the culture of the organization. In fact having these habits embedded in the culture if they do not exist in your culture can be one of the key advantages of working with an outsourcing sales team.
Here are the habits we believe you should expect from a sales outsourcing team:
Weekly Meetings to Discuss Sales Pipeline
Your sales outsourcing meeting should meet with you weekly to discuss the number of deals moving through the pipe and entering your sales pipeline:
- Highlights of the best successes of the weekly efforts
- What new leads have moved forward into the pipe
- What new leads have entered the pipe
And your team should be prepared to share the following with your outsourcing sales team:
- What deals have closed
- What deals have fallen out of the pipe
You and your sales outsourcing partner should also have a clear scorecard they are working towards on a weekly, monthly and quarterly basis that tracks all these goals.
This habit aligns both you and your outsourcing sales team around the most important goal of consistent deal flow because pipeline focus drives production for everyone.
Following Up with Inbound Leads Immediately
In this age of digital education 85% percent of buyers research multiple vendors when they have a business problem they are trying to solve. And the average amount of inbound inquiries they submit when they finally short list the companies they are interested in ranges from three to five..
You have a distinct advantage when you get back to those inbound leads immediately. Especially if you are a small business competing against larger companies (since you are already at a disadvantage with headcount) and need to demonstrate that your size will not impact the responsiveness the buyer can expect. In fact the ability of a sales outsourcing team to provide you with this responsiveness is a nice advantage a sales outsourcing team can provide.
Daily Use of the CRM by your Outsourcing Sales Team
Your sales outsourcing team should be active users of the CRM. If your sales outsourcing team is prospecting you should expect every call to be recorded even if there is no connection. If there is a connection you should expect the results of the calls to be recorded regardless if that call moves forward with a next step or not. This habit ensure that your sales outsourcing team remains accountable on a daily basis for moving deals through the pipe and ensure you have:
- The data you need to forecast and make projections accurately
- Have the visibility you need to coach your outsourcing team on:
- Where to focus their prospecting
- How to overcome objections
- And evaluate what deals they should focus to develop real opportunities
As a company you should also be committed to using the CRM on a daily basis. This is critical because it will help if you need to pass a lead back to your sales outsourcing team for further development.
Gabriel Sales takes a methodical approach to building sales outsourcing teams and marketing programs. To learn more about our philosophy and approach we invite you to check out our outsourcing sales services page.
by Glen Springer | Dec 28, 2016
When a company has a product ready to go to market the next step is taking it to market. While there is no right or wrong answer, there are multiple ways you can kick off a sales and marketing effort and for some companies an outsource sales effort may make sense. This article presents some food for thought for startup companies wrestling with that decision.
Building a Team on Your Own
Facing reality, if you can afford it, building your own in-house sales team can be a great way to go to market for a startup and to scale. You can hand pick, recruit and train your team; you can control the pace of their work from your own office and micro manage what they are working on.
However this can be an idealized vision. Most startup executives are being pulled multiple directions and it’s unusual for the founder of a startup to have the bandwidth to build and then manage what is required for success. And many entrepreneurs that have not been through several startups often struggle building the right initial team. And this error can cost the company valuable time and capital.
Outsource Sales and Marketing Services
For a time-crunched or first time entrepreneur, the attractiveness of outsourcing multiple functions and aspects of their business carries at least some appeal. This include engaging consultants to help with sales strategy, HR firms to help with recruiting, outsourced payroll companies and accountants, technology development firms to build their product, or outsource sales and marketing agencies to assist with inbound and outbound sales efforts.
When it comes to outsource sales and marketing we often find that most startup companies lose a great deal of the data, and direct feedback from customer that the sales effort provides. So while it may seem counter intuitive we often recommend that a startup company leverages an outsource sales and marketing company to address the heavy lifting of short terms tasks to build infrastructure. We also recommend that a startup uses outsource sales and marketing to deal with the grinding tasks of filling the funnel. And that the startup company staffs closer on their team to close the pipeline the outsource sales and marketing company is developing.
The Hybrid Outsource Sales and Marketing Model
In this model a startup company would outsource the following tasks:
- The initial research to target the market and acquire the initial databases
- The initial push to create enough content to support lead generation, lead nurturing and initial buyer development content
- The initial CRM and marketing automation systems implementation
- The initial lead generation campaigns
- The initial sales qualifying and appointment setting
This allows the entrepreneur to hire a seasoned high caliber closer to manage the deal flow or in some cases if high volume sales are not required, to manage the initial close themselves. With all the blocking and tackling of building modern sales and marketing operations off their plate they can focus on more mission-critical tasks like core product development, scaling accounts to higher revenue and building the overall operations, support and customer service teams to retain customers.
There is not one approach that is right for every startup. Every startup has a founding team with different skillsets. But if your team lacks the experience and/or bandwidth to get a sales effort off the ground a hybrid model may be right for you.
To learn more about the areas Gabriel Sale can help you launch a go to market sales effort we invite you to learn more about us on our outsource sales and marketing services page.
by Glen Springer | Dec 26, 2016
Startups and small businesses are always stretched for bandwidth. So startup and small businesses outsource multiple functions today like product development, bookkeeping and HR. Eventually most companies will consider what sales and marketing functions can be outsourced. Here are the 8 functions that can be considered for sales outsourcing and outsourced marketing.
Outbound Lead Generation
This is one area where a sales outsourcing and marketing company will help you gain quick traction. They will have the database marketing, email marketing and outbound calling reps you need and will be able to turn them on in a matter of weeks. You will not need to invest in the recruiting, hiring training and management of this team.
Inbound Lead Generation
If you have a large audience to target this is an important part of any strategy. Inbound leads are a combination of SEO, social media andSEM. One of the keys to inbound lead generation is a consistent effort and a constant monitoring of spend. This is where an outside company that specializes in this one particular area can be a huge advantage to keep you on track. It is also an area where the rules are always changing and most startups and small business will benefit from working with a company that lives and breathes inbound marketing all day and every day.
Buyer Development Reps
Buyer development reps are there to manage the leads that have been generated. Not as senior as closers, they will be able to educate the buyer about what you do and qualify the leads for your sales reps and closers. Many sales outsourcing companies can provide this person as a part time resource until there are enough leads in your sales funnel to develop.
Sales Reps/Closers
Products and solutions are getting more specialized and more niched. Because of this we believe it’s important for the executive of a start up to steward their business through the early sales efforts. There is critical learning for founders that can help define the solution and improve the product. The executives will also learn more about the key selling points and direct feedback from customers will help them to position the company.
For startups (after those initial sales are closed) and for small businesses it then typically makes sense to hire a full time closer but only after you have a process for filling that closers funnel with deals. We find that it the expense doesn’t make sense for a dedicated closer unless there are deals for them to close (i.e.. you won’t be able to hire top talent without providing a process to fill their sales funnel). This extra sales rep walking into a full funnel will accelerate your revenue and be a huge productivity and time saver for startup executives and small business owners.
Marketing Leadership Outsourcing
Marketing is now a requirement for any company. Creating a marketing strategy that is aligned with sales is one area where sales outsourcing and marketing companies shine. Creating a marketing strategy hand in hand with a sales outsourcing plan will ensure that all your efforts are focused on driving the right deals into your pipeline. A sales outsourcing and marketing company will give you the access you need to marketing strategy when you need it and will be able to scale back those costs once your sales outsourcing efforts are launched. You should expect your sales outsourcing to provide a marketing leader to monitor the effectiveness over time and to optimize that strategy from time to time when necessary.
Marketing Technologist
You may need the part time support of a marketing automation and CRM specialist. A sales outsourcing company will be able to provide this part time support.
Marketing Support
There are many different marketing tactics that will need to be managed; including database management, content marketing support and the day to day management of your marketing automation system. You will also need reporting on all of your efforts on a regular basis. A sales outsourcing and marketing company will be able to provide this support.
Sales Management
For most companies short term and long term success requires sales oversight. An outsourcing sales team will have senior oversight as part of their package. They will keep your sales lead generation and your callers on task on a daily basis and keep them focused on your revenue and marketing goals.
Sales outsourcing does not need to be an all or nothing proposition. Most sales outsourcing companies will be able to provide a hybrid model if you have some of the team, talents and tools in house.
To learn more about how Gabriel Sales can help you craft a custom sales outsourcing and marketing team we invite you to check out our sales outsourcing service page.
