The Benefits of Marketing Automation

The Benefits of Marketing Automation

by | Jul 13, 2018

Marketers say that the biggest benefits of automation are saving time (74%), increased customer engagement (68%), more timely communications (58%) and increased opportunities including up-selling (58%) (Adestra).

While marketing automation has been a legitimate business solution for more than five years now, it’s not until recently that’s it’s gathered more interest from small- and medium-sized B2B businesses. And why not, it’s a proven tool for your sales process – producing an average of 14.5% increase in sales productivity and reducing overall sales and marketing overhead by an average of 12.2%.

And these gains are realized even when most SMBs fail to leverage the true power of marketing automation to take care of the early stage sales funnel/buyer’s journey customer education. Because unfortunately, most SMBs only use marketing automation tools to send newsletters. In fact, more than 60% of marketers limit the use of their platform for email blasts to stay in touch with existing customers, and only 13% are using automation software in more advance ways (Autopilot).

Marketing automation platforms produce the best return on investment when they are used to run lead development campaigns, to score leads and to capture information about your potential customers to make your sales staff more productive. Marketing automation can make your sales and marketing operations more effective and efficient by attracting leads, educating them about your products and solutions, identifying and measuring their interest, and providing their level of real interest in your product or services. Sales may then cherry-pick the leads that express the most interest and are most likely to buy.

Here are five ways marketing automation can help you grow your sales at a lower cost.

Marketing Automation enables you to nurture not-yet-ready-to-buy prospects.

It takes an average of between 7 and 13 touches to develop a buyer before a sale is made. Marketing automation can become a stand-in for a junior level sales and marketing person, sharing company information and knowledge directly with your potential buyers. For those leads that are already aware of your solution, but aren’t yet ready to buy, marketing automation allows you to stay top-of-mind and build trust with your leads by offering educational content about industry trends and developments. It allows you to further boost your online presence, highlight product enhancements, and establish industry-leading influence. And it works: nurtured leads produce an average of a 20% increase in sales opportunities versus non-nurtured leads (DemandGen Report).

Research has shown that only 5% of B2B prospects are ready to buy at any given time. And 50% of qualified leads are not ready to buy either (Gleanster Research). And yet, many B2B companies today do not have a strategy to develop these opportunities; so sales reps simply discard them as ‘not interested.’ However, by nurturing your leads with light, educational content on a regular basis, you can stay top-of-mind and over time, develop real active interest (and deals) from leads you generated 6 to 12, to even 18 months ago.

Marketing automation allows you track and manage your early stage prospects and their content engagement on an ongoing basis as they go through the buyer’s journey over and extended period of time. The tool then reports data back to your team about their overall interactions, rather than by each individual campaign. This data is pushed to your CRM and used to more accurately identify and communicate to sales what leads need attention.

Lead nurturing works: 67% of B2B marketers say they see at least a 10% increase in sales opportunities through lead nurturing. And 15% companies report seeing an increase of 30% or more (Demand Gen Report). The top companies that excel at lead nurturing, generate 50% more sales ready leads at a 33% lower cost (Forrester Research).

Marketing Automation allows you to track content engagement by prospect.

96% of visitors who come to your website aren’t ready to buy (yet) (Marketo). And only 25% of those leads are legitimate and should advance to sales (Gleanster Research).

One of the greatest features of marketing automation is the ability to measure each piece of content a prospect has consumed throughout their interaction with your emails and website. These measurements help you monitor and analyze the buyers journey, allowing you to better understand customer buying behavior, identify your most engaging content, and pinpoint the preferred and most active distribution channels.

Marketing automation allows you to score prospects according to the type of content they’ve engaged with. Different types of content are scored based on how predictive they are in relationship to a buyer stage in your sales cycle. Basic educational content is not as highly scored as video webcasts about a specific buyer pain/need or demo videos relating to a specific solution. Each email sent within an automation campaign is scored to identify what content is interesting to buyers and how frequently they are engaging with it.

This type of data allows you to see when specific prospects have shown enough interest, so it makes sense for a sales rep to reach out with a personal email or phone call to move the deal forward. By using this type of dynamic lead scoring, you will have the ability to rank and score formerly unquantifiable implicit digital activities and take the appropriate sales action. The use of explicit data – higher scores for different lead criteria – allows you to grade your prospect compared to your ideal customer profile, making your sales team more armed and effective when they make first contact. These sales automation efforts seamlessly pass top scoring prospects over to well-prepared sales reps with background information on the leads interest in real-time.

Overall, lead scoring allows your sales team to focus on the most interested buyers and allows you to prioritize buyers that are the best fit for your company’s solution.

Marketing Automation allows you to use analytics to refine and improve your content and sales process.

One of the most valuable things marketing automation provides is data. Using the platform’s analytical features, you can track and monitor engagement at a more detailed level in order to understand when and how to improve. For example, platforms provide data for when a video is watched. This allows you to identify which pieces of content are being consumed, and which are not.  Your marketing team can create more of what works, making pivots to making the right marketing investments easier to understand and execute.

Real-time lead alerts via email allow your sales team to follow-up faster when buyers are actively engaged in your content and submit a request.  And we all know, time is money: there’s a 10x drop-off in lead qualification when sales waits longer than five minutes to respond to a lead – and a 400% decrease when sales waits 10 minutes or more (HBR, Insidesales).

With these alerts and summaries sales reps can more easily:

  • Prioritize their day with the most active prospects
  • Call buyers when they know they are sitting at their desk
  • Click on links to trigger CRM profile lookups for buyer insights
  • Send custom emails to active prospects with a few quick clicks

Additionally, marketing automation provides buyer intelligence for your marketing team. It shows what topics/pains buyers are most motivated by.  And many of these reports are available in your CRM. Information like original lead source, specific page views, how long they spent on the page, webinar attendance and video views can also be tracked and analyzed. This type of data allows sales and marketing to work effectively together to drive sales as a team.

Marketing Automation Improves Lead Generation

Demand Gen’s State of Demand Generation study shows, 77% of buyers want different, targeted content at each stage of their research. Marketing automation allows you to send certain messages at designated times to your database Nurturing campaigns communicate with buyers through every step of the buyer’s journey – staying in front leads not yet ready to buy.  This lowers cost dramatically  and reduces lead churn rate, and helps you get the most from your lead generation efforts because it enables your company  to stay in touch with buyers over a long period of time without the expense and time of regular check in phone calls by sales reps. With lead nurturing, sales reps don’t waste time chasing leads not yet ready to buy, while the marketing team prevents cold leads from slipping through the cracks.

Marketers using automation software generate 2x the number of leads than those using blast email software and are perceived by their peers to be 2x as effective at communicating with buyers (Autopilot, 2015; Hubspot Marketing Statistics). Enough said.

About Us

Gabriel Sales specializes in helping SMBs and Startups grow their business with modern sales and marketing operations.

Our team can augment gaps in your existing sales and marketing operations or we can be leveraged for full-service campaigns that include:

  • Integrated Sales and Marketing Strategies
  • Database Research and Targeting
  • Automation and CRM Systems Best Practices Implementation
  • Inbound Lead Generation
  • Outbound Lead Generation and Lead Scoring
  • Sales Qualification
  • Closing

To learn more about how we can help you grow your business (or decide if we are the right fit for you), we invite you to visit our page that details our integrated approach to sales and marketing outsourcing. Or feel free to contact us for free initial consultation and discovery session to see if our approach is the right fit to help you hit your revenue targets.

 

 

Marketing Automation Implementation Checklist

Marketing Automation Implementation Checklist

by | Jul 5, 2018

The Science of Fast and Effective Marketing Automation

 

Marketing Automation is the simplest and most effective way to instantly improve lead generation and conversion. Implementing a marketing automation solution will streamline your sales and marketing efforts into one easy-manage process.

By downloading this checklist, you will learn:

  • WHAT is involved in the technical set-up of marketing automation software
  • WHO in your organization each implementation task is delegated to
  • HOW to automate your marketing content to generate leads and ROI

 

 

8 Marketing Automation Tips

8 Marketing Automation Tips

by | Mar 6, 2018

Businesses that use marketing automation to nurture prospects experience a 451% increase in qualified leads. (Propeller)

B2B marketers say the number one benefit of marketing automation is the ability to generate more qualified leads (Pepper Global). They experience these great results because, marketing automation allows you to educate buyers, build trust, and stay in touch with prospects as they search for solutions to their problems. However, while more than 60% of marketers use email to stay in touch with their prospects, only 13% use marketing automation tools so they put in some of the effort but only get a fraction of the results. They also miss out on early stage leads, since marketers using marketing automation generate twice as many leads than those who just use one off blast emails. It’s statistics like these that spurred us to share some of Gabriel Sales’ automation best practices that have benefitted our firm and our clients.

Marketing automation is not necessarily difficult, but it does require a bit of a learning curve and some planning. Here are eight best practices we use that will ensure you’re marketing automation will be used wisely.

Start with a Strategy

Without a strategy, your marketing automation tool will inevitably become an ordinary email tool, blasting one-off messages and newsletters. The process of creating a strategy requires defining your value proposition, targeting your audiences, outlining the buyer personas of your ideal customers and mapping your buyer’s journey to your sales process. This allows you to tell your story, establish thought leadership and build trust with your potential buyers without the expense of sales reps doing this one customer at a time. A DemandGen study found that 95% of buyers consider content as trustworthy (and in some cases at early stages more trustworth then sales reps) when evaluating a company and its offerings.

Framework to Tell a Powerful Sales Story with Simple Messages

A critical part of the strategy will be a series of simple messages that tells your sales story in a way that resonates with your buyer’s needs.  This message framework will anchor your marketing efforts.  This framework  will deliver the right message at the right time based on where your buyer is at specific stages their buyers journey. As the table shows, there are different pieces of content topics and different types of media that work best for certain stages. While educating your potential buyers  about your perspective on challenges they face in the marketplace, who you are, and how you may be able to solve their problems, your content will be organized in a systematic way to help them  understand if you are the right fit to help them solve their challenges .  This builds trust with buyers looking to buy and keeps your brand and your solutions top of mind, for those not yet ready to purchase with helpful educational content.

Use Lead Nurturing to Create Opportunities

On average it takes, on average between 7 and 13 touches by both sales and/or marekting before a sale is made. This does not count the 47% of buyers who want to view 3-5 pieces of content before they even want to engage with a sales rep. (DemandGen). All this takes time.  And if you rely on sales reps to carry the load it can also take a significant amount of money. For those leads that already know about your solution, but aren’t yet ready to buy, lead nurturing allows you to stay top of mind through offering educational and thought-leadership content about industry trends and developments without the expense of a sales rep. Establishing thought-leadership is critical to an overall effective cost of sales percentage, since 96% of B2B buyers want content with more input from industry thought leaders which includes the company’s selling solutions that solve their problems (Demand Gen Report, 2016). Companies that excel at lead nurturing generate with educational thought leadership generate 50% more sales ready leads at 33% lower cost (Source: Forrester Research).

Integrate Social into Your Distribution Network

While marketing automation is associated with email marketing, modern automation tools are now easily connected to help you publish your content to additional networks in social media. That said, those channels are merely that, distribution outlets where it exposes your content to additional buyers so you can educate and build trust with your audience in additional areas across the web.  If you make the investment in content it also makes sense to share that content in social media.  Blog articles are leveraged by your automation platform to generate and score leads by educating and building trust.  But since you already have the content you can post it to social media to solidify a relationship with your leads and to make additional buyers aware of your solution.

Use Lead Scoring to Identify Who’s Engaging

Lead scoring is the least used feature by most businesses but it is the most critical for small and mid sized companies to increase productivity and lower their cost of sales. Lead scoring is the ability to figure out where someone is in their buying process and when they are getting actively interested in purchasing.  Lead scoring allows  sales and marketing to quickly flag who should be getting more attention from higher-end sales reps. Lead scoring will generate more revenue because better leads (buyers with high scores that are ready for sales interaction) will bubble to the top and be pritorized for you sales team, allowing your sales team to contact your most potential buyers at the right time. Lead scoring saves you money because leads with low scores that are not yet ready to buy, can be managed and developed by less expensive reps or in some case just by nurturing with marketing automation during their early education stages of your sales cycle. Lead scoring works. 68% of top marketers report lead scoring as the most responsible feature for improving thedirect revenue contribution of their content marketing efforts (Lenskold Group).

Integrate your CRM to Capture Lead Data

Capturing data and valuable information about your buyers is one of the key drivers to help you drive sales.  Marketing automation allows you to capture both key sales and marketing metrics. When you have collected this information in your CRM system you sales reps will have direct access to it.  This allows your sales reps to easily organize and sort prospects by any number of criteria including, points accumulated,  predict location in the sales funnel/buyer’s journey and to see what educational content the buyer has consumed.  This data allows you to sort buyers and then to sell to them more effectively because they will have a jump start on their level of education and business needs.

Use Data to Improve How Your Target Markets

You can learn a lot about your target audience by measuring the people who are engaging with your content through your website and emails.  To better understand the interactions you can split them into two data categories, explicit and implicit. Explicit data tells you who’s volunteered information to you via web forms, events or other interactions such as phone calls. Implicit data measures online behavior such as emails opened, click-throughs, form submissions, and downloads of your marketing collateral.  If an activity is predictive of buying the lead can be scored appropriately and can be highlighted in your CRM.  In many cases you can send real-time alerts to sales reps once a prospect reaches a certain point threshold or if a certain activity takes place. And timing is everything. In some types of sales 35-50% of all sales are won by the vendor that responds first (InsideSales.com).

Keep it Simple

Many SMBs we talk with say they haven’t made the leap to real marketing automation yet because they believe it’s too difficult. And while successful marketing automation involves many moving parts – contact us forms, downloadable assets, social and CRM integration, lead scoring, etc. – it’s important to start small and slow, while always keeping the end goal of the purpose of marketing automation top of mind. And the ultimate point of marketing automation is to put more sales qualified opprotunities into the hands of your closers. Decide on your goals for each campaign and the few KPIs to measure your success and design accordingly. Three simple KPIs to start with are:

  1. Contact volume.Automation helps marketers manage greater lead and prospect volume with more efficiency and effectiveness. So, it’s important to keep an eye on how many contacts, prospects and leads are engaging with your content to better understand where they are in the buyer’s journey and if there are any actions to be taken.
  1. A common goal is to better move contacts through your buyer’s journey and into your sales reps’ funnels, and track progress to identify what content is working and what’s not. Measure how campaigns impact MQLs, SQLs, and unsubscribes: are your campaigns better qualifying leads, improving the marketing-to-sales lead delivery volume, generating deals that are actually interested and helping nurture leads and prospects not yet ready to buy?
  1. Track engagement – email opens, click-throughs, website visits, shares, etc. – to identify the most effective messages and content that moves the needle with your audiences. Tracking engagement also allows you to identify the most active contacts and whether they need attention from sales.

Keeping it simple will only require you to focus on the buyers and purchase influencers you want to engage with right now.  There are all sorts of advanced features and complex segmentation that is possible but this is a distraction in the short term.  When you are just getting started we recommend that you leave the segmentation, tagging, etc. for later campaigns, once you’ve warmed up your audience with your educational, trust-building content.

No matter how you slice it, the move to marketing automation is growing and will be a requirement to compete for sales successfully in the next several years. Currently, 67% of marketing leaders use a marketing automation platform, while over the next two years, an additional 21% of marketing leaders plan to use a marketing automation platform (Salesforce “State of Marketing” 2017). Those numbers are not surprising because marketing automation works and saves time and money for organizations that leverage the technology to their advantage – 80% of marketing automation users saw their number of leads increase, and 77% saw the number of conversions increase by 2X over the first 18 months of implementing a platform (VB Insight “Marketing Automation, how to make the right buying decision” 2015). It’s no wonder, 91% of the most successful users agree that marketing automation is “very important” to the overall success of their marketing across channels (Marketo & Ascend2).

 

About Us

Gabriel Sales specializes in helping SMBs and Startups grow business with modern sales and marketing operations. Our team can augment gaps in your existing sales and marketing operations or we can be leveraged for full service campaigns that include:

  • Integrated Sales and Marketing Strategies
  • Database Research and Targeting
  • Automation and CRM Systems Best Practices
  • Systems Implementation
  • Inbound Lead Generation
  • Outbound Lead Generation and Lead Scoring
  • Sales Qualification
  • Closing

To learn more about how we can help you grow your business (or decide if we are the right fit for you), we invite you to visit our page that details our integrated approach to sales and marketing outsourcing. Or feel free to contact us for free initial consultation and discovery session to see if our approach is the right fit to help you hit your revenue targets.

B2B Content Preference Report What your B2B buyer consumes before making a decision

by | Feb 15, 2018

B2B Content Preference Trend: “A typical firm with 100-500 employees, involves an average of 7 people in most buying decisions” (Gartner Group).

In today’s B2B marketplace, time-starved buyers are using digital content to research solutions for their current pains – 67% of the buyer’s journey is now done digitally (Sirius Decisions). So as a modern marketer, it’s critical to understand your B2B buyers’ journey and then to create educational and thought-leadership content around each buyer stage. Content is critical because 80% of business decision-makers prefer to get learn about new solutions from company articles versus a advertisements or cold callers (B2B PR Sense Blog).

So, B2B content preference tells us what types of content are B2B buyers looking for to learn about solutions? Understanding the answer to this question is key to sales success  because  57% of B2B buyers have already made their short list for purchase decision before ever speaking to a sales person (CEB Global).  

So as content marketing continue to increase in importance and becomes more competitive – 90% of B2B buyers say online content has a moderate to major effect on purchasing decisions (CMO Council) – and we move full-speed ahead in 2018, we wanted to look back at the trends of 2017 to gauge where we should concentrate our efforts according to the research performed by Demand Gen, in its 2017 Content Preferences Survey Report.

We sifted through all the data and pulled out our top 5 B2B content preference statistics for 2017-18 – we’ll keep it short because as the report states: 34% of buyers have less time to devote for reading and research on purchases than last year.

1. 78% say they prefer case studies because it allows them to benchmark themselves against their peers and study real-world examples of a potential solution.
B2B Content Preference

2. 71% prefer content that’s easier to access – 62% want more benchmarking data 87% of buyers give more credence to industry influencer content.

Picture2

3. Email remains the channel most buyers employ to share content, while LinkedIn remains the leading social network.Picture3

4. 97% of B2B buyers prefer prescriptive content that recommends a formulaic solution.Screen Shot 2018-01-29 at 2.08.45 PM

5. 95% of buyers said they are willing to share their name, company, and email in exchange for the following content types:

  1. white papers (76% said they will share information),
  2. E-books (63%), webinars (79%),
  3. case studies (57%)
  4. third-party/analyst reports (66%).

They’re less willing to register for asset types such as:

  1. podcasts (19%),
  2. video (19%)
  3. infographics (24%)

Picture5
Summary

Content is the most effective way to educate buyers about your solution and ignite meaningful conversations. It is important to share relevant and educational material. And it is important to share that content consistently and at the right time. Great content organized in a way that creates a memorable experience keeps your buyers engaged and allows them to easily choose the solution that makes sense for them. Delivering content in a calculated and coordinated process allows you to educate and build trust with prospects and move them through the buyers’ journey and into your sales funnel at the same time. And the modern B2B buyer prefers receiving content digitally before engaging with a sales rep. Content can help sales reps sell faster because 63% of consumers need to hear company claims 3-5x before they actually believe it (Edelman Trust Barometer).

 

About Us

Gabriel Sales specializes in helping SMBs and Startups grow business with modern sales and marketing operations. Our team understands B2B content preference and can augment gaps in your existing sales and marketing operations or we can be leveraged for full service campaigns that include:

  • Integrated Sales and Marketing Strategies
  • Database Research and Targeting
  • Automation and CRM Systems Best Practices
  • Systems Implementation
  • Inbound Lead Generation
  • Outbound Lead Generation and Lead Scoring
  • Sales Qualification
  • Closing

To learn more about how we can help you grow your business (or decide if we are the right fit for you), we invite you to visit our page that details our integrated approach to sales and marketing outsourcing. Or feel free to contact us for free initial consultation and discovery session to see if our approach is the right fit to help you hit your revenue targets.

 

Why Outsourced Sales and Marketing Works

Why Outsourced Sales and Marketing Works

by | Feb 12, 2018

Outsourced Sales Integrated Campaign

How Outsourced Sales and Marketing Works to Keep You Focused on What Matters Most

 

Goethe shared the maxim “Things which matter most should never be at the mercy of things that matter least.”

Vince Lombardi was a champion because he lived by the creed that “Success demands a singleness of purpose.”

And the greatest lesson Garry Keller learned when building one of the largest real estate agencies in the world in a little over a decade is this: “Multitasking is a lie…You can do two things at once, but you can’t focus effectively on two things at once.” In his book “The One” he makes a compelling and succinct argument for focus:

“Success demands singleness of purpose. You need to be doing fewer things for more effect instead of doing more things with side effects. It is those who concentrate on but one thing at a time who advance in this world.” He goes on to state, “Passion for something leads to disproportionate time practicing or working at it. That time spent eventually translates to skill, and when skill improves, results improve. Better results generally lead to more enjoyment, and more passion and more time is invested. It can be a virtuous cycle all the way to extraordinary results.”

How does all this impact sales and demand generation for your business? It appears to be a daunting challenge. Especially when we all know that no “one thing” works in isolation to generate qualified sales opportunities because:

  • Cold Calling stopped working on its own because buyers simply pick up the phone less.
  • Email marketing is a great and cost effective way to generate early stage leads, but the leads then need to be nurtured, then prioritized to maximize your calling budget.
  • Email spam filters are making it harder to deliver messages without following best practices.
  • You need systems expertise and best practices to get the most from your CRM and marketing automation platforms.
  • LinkedIn is still valuable, but requires more focus because it is becoming cluttered and pushed as a marketing tool after it’s acquisition by Microsoft.
  • Other social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram work until they don’t, and are slowly embracing PPC business models to compete with Google, which is driving up costs of acquisition.
  • For all these marketing channels you need a consistent flow of quality and substantive video and digital content to educate buyers, improve your visibility on search engines and to generate leads.
  • Finally, success requires that you don’t get distracted by what you could do. With the proliferation of social media adoption and content marketing, there are quite simply too many choices; we are all flooded with the latest “magic bullet” daily. These distractions can have us chasing our tails, thinking about what we could do vs. what we should do.

There are no new magic bullets. Generating sales opportunities still requires sharing your truth authentically with substantive content using multiple methods. You then need to have conversations with buyers that are interested in speaking with you.  And these fundamental tactics work best if they are done simultaneously. Success requires hard work, done consistently for an extended period of time.

As John Wooden, former UCLA basketball coach and owner of the most consecutive championships of any coach all time, puts it: “If you keep too busy learning the tricks of the trade, you may never learn the trade…I discovered early on that the player who learned the fundamentals of basketball is going to have a much better chance of succeeding and rising through the levels of competition than the player who has talent but doesn’t focus on developing fundamentals daily and was content to do things his own way.”

Picture12The challenge that many stretched executives face when they push through growth stages is, there are an infinite amount of things they “could” do to have a positive impact on their business.  And often the things they “could” do are more comfortable, sit in their core skill sets, more innovative and often more fun. As a result, the mundane (and frankly boring) fundamental tasks required on a regular basis for successful demand generation and growth start to slip through the cracks. At first, it happens occasionally. Long term some of these fundamental tasks are often neglected completely.

With all these moving parts, fundamental tasks and distractions, it’s no surprise executives and senior sales professionals trying to grow sales demand struggle. Lack of consistent focus on “should do” tasks creates inconsistent results, especially when the tasks are assigned to existing employees without the passion, experience or expertise.

Executives and employees often have the best intentions, but sales and marketing success requires a commitment a set of fundamental  demand generation tasks on a daily, weekly and monthly basis. For resources that are already stretched, these “should do” tasks quickly become interruptions and are reprioritized and turned into “could do” tasks.  And “could do” tasks are ignored for more primary responsibilities. Ultimately, demand generation is like athletic training – if you don’t put in the time, you don’t reap the benefits.

Because of distractions, inconsistent commitment to fundamental daily, weekly and monthly tasks, and a lack of focus, we see businesses across the country with great sales and marketing strategies, great stories to tell and great products, struggle to take sales to the next level.

When you work with an outsourced sales and marketing company, you can be confident and expect that your team will be passionately focused on one thing – putting qualified sales leads in your sales team’s funnel.

You can also expect that your outsourced sales and marketing team will focus on the following fundamental tasks on a daily, weekly and monthly basis.

Your Content Marketing Team – Will help you turn your thought leadership into substantive content in multiple formats including; Articles, Checklists, Videos and Webcasts that:

  • Can be used for email marketing and lead nurturing in your automation systems
  • Can be leveraged for SEO and PPC
  • Can be leveraged by business development reps and sales reps to use as part of their sales processes
  • Can be shared on social media

And that content will be created in the right formats and distributed consistently at the right cadence to meet your specific competitive needs.

Your Email Marketing Lead Generation Team – Will source the best lists from vetted vendors to produce targets and leads to feed the top of your sales funnel with leads that can buy or influence the purchase of your product.

Your Inbound Marketing Team – Will focus on your PPC, SEO and Social Media results.

  • Your PPC resource will track your results weekly, and analyze your results monthly, to optimize campaigns incrementally when possible to ensure you maximize your budget.
  • They will create quality content that Google and your buyers appreciate and consistently optimize it for specific keywords to help you climb in natural search when possible.
  • They will consistently distribute your content in social media channels for additional exposure.

Your Marketing Database Admin and System Technologist – Will keep your system optimized to produce sales results and make sure your automation and CRM systems are running smoothly, ensuring your automation tools are scoring and prioritizing effectively for your callers.

Business Development Reps –  Your first touch callers:

  • They will call prioritized leads with call volume targets on a daily basis
  • They will start to build helpful relationships with potential buyers
  • They will conduct pre-qualification calls for need and potential interest
  • They will ask for an appointment with a senior rep when it makes sense

Sales Reps/Managers – Will move and steward deals through the funnel on a daily basis.

  • They will stay on top of the hottest leads
  • They will qualify for needs, budget process and decision making process
  • The will schedule appointment with sales engineers and your team’s senior resources
  • They will manage deals through the sales process to closing

Account Managers – Keep the entire team aligned and “Account”able for hitting targets and milestones.

  • They will ensure calling and conversion targets are intelligently set and met
  • They will ensure callers are focused on prioritizing calls correctly
  • The will keep the marketing team on track and on time producing the right content and filling the pipe with new leads at the right cadence
  • They will manage the feedback loops with your executive team so the right insights are shared and the right pivots are recommended

As John Wooden put it: 

 “The star of the team is the team and it takes ten hands to score a basket. Time lost is time lost. It’s gone forever. Some people tell themselves that they will work twice as hard tomorrow to make up for what they did not do today. If they work twice as hard tomorrow, then they should have also worked twice as hard today. That would have been their best.”

An outsourced sales and marketing team will allow your team to focus on what they do best. Because an outsourced sales and marketing team will consistently focus on the fundamental daily, weekly and monthly tasks required for your demand generations success.

About Gabriel Sales

Gabriel Sales specializes in helping SMBs and Start Ups launch modern sales and marketing operations and build successful and custom best practice strategies to consistently generate sales qualified leads. To learn more about our outsourced sales and marketing services, we invite you to visit our outsource sales and marketing services page.

 

 

 

The Team You Need for Modern Sales and Marketing

The Team You Need for Modern Sales and Marketing

by | Jan 18, 2018

Today, SMBs ready to expand sales and marketing efforts beyond their current capacity often consider hiring an outsourced sales and marketing team to assist in scaling the business. These days, organizations can hire an experienced team of marketers and sales people for a fraction of the cost of recruiting, hiring, training, and managing its own internal team. But, keeping your sales and marketing process flowing daily is more critical than ever to deliver a sustained flow of leads and opportunities. Therefore, it’s more important than ever to have the right members of your modern sales and marketing team to ensure all the bases are covered.

Many companies are now realizing how effective (and expensive) forming a modern sales and marketing team can be to increase sales. The right team makes all the difference and can have a significant impact on the growth of a company’s bottom line. But assembling the right team of heavy-hitters can come at a cost.

Many SMBs that are just getting started don’t quite grasp how modern sales and marketing operates, therefore, they don’t understand the pieces needed to effectively build and run a modern sales and marketing team themselves. As a result, some look to outsource sales and marketing efforts to learn modern sales and marketing best practices and exactly what tools and efforts it takes to run successful campaigns that keep the funnel flowing.

First, building a team – or hiring an outsourced team – must have the same focus and goals, including:

  1. Shifting sales and marketing efforts to making it easy to build trust and drive value for your buyers digitally before you “sell.”
  2. Building trust through shifting your organizations messaging from what your product/service does and how awesome it is, to helping the buyer understand how it fits within the market and what problems it solves.

A modern sales and marketing team rigorously communicates about these goals and the status of the messaging, lead development, and failures and successes in the particular areas of interest. Marketers and sales people collaborate and discuss data points and information each is hearing from the industry, which can be used to educate users, while establishing thought-leadership and trust. Developing trust with your buyer early in the buying and selling process is one of the top reasons for forming (or hiring) a modern sales and marketing team.

Here’s the team we’ve found success with and what that team looks like.

Account Coordinator

A sales and marketing account coordinator (AC) is responsible for all the project management and reporting for accounts, including all modern sales and marketing team efforts. Deploying and managing drip campaigns and coordinating one-offs, follow-up emails and micro-campaigns dominates the ACs time. Most importantly, the account coordinator is in charge of transitioning all qualified leads to the sales reps or internal closers, and share what they have learned from the buyer – digital content engaged with and what they have learned about the buyer’s needs. Communication is key, as it saves time and ensures the collaboration of data and the accuracy of reporting.

Main Duties:

  • Project Management
  • Deploy Email Campaigns
  • Manage Drip Campaigns
  • Oversee Nurture Campaigns
  • Report Conversions
  • Manage Weekly Meeting

Content Producer

Content is king for modern sales and marketing, so a content production specialist (in-house or contract) is an essential part of a modern sales and marketing team. The content producer creates and manages content designed for various campaigns and different stages of the buyers’ journey. Producing thought leadership content and explaining how an organization approaches industry trends and issues is necessary to fuel the automation engine and move consumers through the stages coherently. The content producer will be able to integrate frameworks to help you create thought leadership content in the form of webcasts, videos, blog posts and checklists and present it logically on landing pages and microsites. This digital content can act as a surrogate for your senior reps early in the sales process, while scoring the content users engage with most and measuring their interest. Your “digital thought leader” will demonstrate and share educational content and expertise early in the sales conversation to display solutions and build trust.

Main Duties:

  • Produce Educational Assets
  • Write blogs, emails, white papers, case studies, etc.
  • Produce Screencasts and Webcasts Videos
  • Build Microsites and Landing Pages

Database Analyst

Successful modern sales and marketing requires campaign performance analysis to measure best practice KPIs such as click-through rates, click-to-open rates, etc. Look for high performance click through rates (CTR), click-through percentages and unsubscribe rates and adjust your campaigns accordingly. If a particular piece of content is triggering an above-average unsubscribe rate, remove it from the campaign and monitor the updated flow of buyers through the journey. If there is an email that has a high CTR, optimize the corresponding landing page and consider using it as part of an inbound campaign. There are many ways to interpret the provided data and make the appropriate changes to campaigns, the key is having a marketing database expert to ensure the system is set up correctly to capture the coveted data sets.

Main Duties:

  • List Acquisition
  • List Management
  • List Suppression
  • List Appending
  • List Delivery

Automation Expert

A modern sales and marketing team needs an automation expert to manage the execution of your drip and nurture campaigns, and to ensure your database is moving through the appropriate buyer’s journey. A marketing automation expert will implement best practices and provide expertise to help build trust with buyers not ready to buy digitally. A marketing automation expert will set up the automation system to allow you to track a buyer’s digital footprint, so when they are ready to buy, your closers will be notified, never missing an opportunity.

Main Duties:

  • Implement Systems
  • Integrate Systems
  • Manage Systems

Business Development Reps

Depending on your needs, your modern sales and marketing team may include callers, acting as business development reps, to generate interest and manage the early stage education of buyers. Effective callers will execute light discovery to qualify lead interest (from no interest to sales accepted interest) and set appointments with reps or closers responsible for managing the completion of the sale. How your team is staffed will depend on the size of the market you’re targeting and the volume of revenue you need to generate. This will also determine if you should hire a fully dedicated modern sales and marketing team internally for your organization or if it’s more cost-effective to hire a blended team of outsourced of resources.

Main Duty:

Follow up with inbound lead immediately – Senior sales resources and executives are busy, in meetings, running operations, managing accounts and leading the company. Your business development rep will ensure you’re focused on potential needs when the buyer expresses them with an inbound request. Your rep will help you get to the buyer faster – if he/she follows up in a timely manner. And as multiple studies continue to explain, the first person back to the buyer has a 50% advantage closing that deal over competitors.

Executive Oversight

Finally, you will gain access to a senior executive and strategist. This resource will be a peer that can help you to steward your sales strategy and your marketing strategy and will ultimately be accountable for your overall success.

An outsourced sales and marketing company can work with you to understand your Ideal Customer Profile. They can then help you acquire the databases, phone numbers and email addresses of these buyers and load your CRM with buyers to target that have the need for your product or solution so you are focused on selling to the right buyer.

About Us

Gabriel Sales specializes in helping SMBs and Startups grow business with modern sales and marketing operations. Our team can augment gaps in your existing sales and marketing operations or we can be leveraged for full service campaigns that include:

  • Integrated Sales and Marketing Strategies
  • Database Research and Targeting
  • Automation and CRM Systems Best Practices
  • Systems Implementation
  • Inbound Lead Generation
  • Outbound Lead Generation and Lead Scoring
  • Sales Qualification
  • Closing

To learn more about how we can help you grow your business (or decide if we are the right fit for you), we invite you to visit our page that details our integrated approach to sales and marketing outsourcing. Or feel free to contact us for free initial consultation and discovery session to see if our approach is the right fit to help you hit your revenue targets.