B2B Buyer Trends

B2B Buyer Trends

by | Apr 26, 2024

B2B Buyer Trends — Seven Things to Know

(Watch Time – 8:00 Minutes)

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Summary of B2B Buyer Trends video

In this short educational  video we will give you a quick overview of B2B Buyer Trends, including:

  1. Why B2B leads and buyers need and want lead nurturing and digital pre-sales education
  2. Why buyers now expect ongoing lead nurturing and content marketing at every stage of their buyers’ journey
  3. The specific types of contents buyers use during their pre-sales education and buying process
  4. Buyers increased desire to avoid sales development reps (SDRs) until they feel educated and are ready to buyer
  5. When video is the most preferred and successful type of content
  6. How far and committed the top sellers are to sales automation and digital first sales
  7. The ROI companies committed to lead nurturing and a digital first sales are experiencing

This video (an expert from our extensive four part On Demand Training Seminar – The Digital First Transformation and Sales Automation)

Transcript of B2B Buyer Trends Seven Trends — Seven Things to Know.

Why Leads/Buyers Need Lead Nurturing

First, most buyers are not ready to buy when they first start their digital education. Initially, most buyers are just trying to figure out how to solve a problem. Less than 3% of initial email opens are ready to buy, and even more surprisingly, less than 20% of your pay per click or SEO leads or active buyers. But the positive here is that about 80% of all these early stage leads, we call them marketing qualified leads, will spend money within three to 18 months. So once they engage, you have a short list of potential buyers that expects you to educate and nurture them for an extended period of time, which means your marketing team can’t just run lead gen campaigns and expect the same sales results.

Buyers Now Expect Ongoing Lead Nurturing and Content Marketing at Every Stage of Their Buyers’ Journey (0:48)

Buyers now expect you to share content at every stage of their buyer’s journey to help them move systematically through their process. This starts by you helping them to identify and understand what problems your solution is designed to help them solve through their shortlisting process and even into their validation and consensus building stages. This means you need lead generation campaigns to create awareness to help the buyer understand what problems you solve. Then buyers also expect you to run nurturing campaigns, including both buyer education campaigns and sales automation campaigns to help them with their consideration stages and their preference stages.

Successful Lead Nurturing and Sales Automation Requires Multiple Types and Formats of Digital Sales Education (1:33)

And during these different types of campaigns, buyers want you to share the appropriate type of content in multiple channels so they can control their own buyer’s journey, and they expect you to be prepared to touch them at least 21 times for you to earn their brand awareness and initial trust in to start that process. Most buyers still overwhelmingly prefer to learn about new solutions in email marketing campaigns that are supported by educational content.

However, if you don’t eventually support these email campaigns with paper per click, social media and SEO campaigns, you’ll miss 33% of the market who prefer these channels. And at this stage, the type of content buyers prefer in all three channels are short. How-to videos, educational blog articles in industry insights and stats that help educate the buyer and also help you to demonstrate thought leadership. Then once that lead is generated, you need to be prepared to share multiple types of content to nurture and create demand for your solution. Because buyers leverage all types of content to move a decision forward if they’re consideration and preference stages to become educated enough to make a decision. So what’s required for success? In a recent Merkel survey of B2B buyer trends, 78% of buyers stated they used case studies and use cases in their process, 76% used webcast educational videos and educational blog articles.

68% used white papers, and in 20 21, 50 4% of B2B buyers are now using podcasts. So you need to be prepared to use a wide variety of content in multiple channels to make it easy for the buyer to buy using your buyer education in sales automation campaigns

Buyers Want to Avoid Sales Development Until They Feel Educated and are Ready to Buyer (3:43)

Perhaps the biggest impact of this digital transformation is that buyers now want to avoid sales reps until they feel educated. As a result of this buyer preference for digital first education, 64% of sellers state, they’re now less dependent on sales reps. 80% of buyers don’t want to speak to an SDR until they have completed their pre-sales research. 33% moving to 44% for millennials want to avoid sales completely if possible, and most buyers won’t engage with a sales rep until they’ve consumed at least six to 12 pieces of content. Digital content is now replacing some of the most time consuming in historical tasks of the sales development rep, first and foremost, being all the time and money it takes for pre-sales education of the buyer.

Video is the Preferred Content for Pre-Sales Education and Mid-Stage Buyer Education (4:33)

And in large part, most of this pre-sales education is now being done with video because when it comes to content, we’re both video and text are available on the same page. 72% of buyers would rather use video to learn about your solution using video and email campaigns boost open rates and clickthroughs and video posts have the highest engagement in social media campaigns. And probably the biggest bonus of video is that it leads to conversions or at least predicts conversions because 25 to 45% of buyers that watch a webcast convert into a sales opportunity, and most buyers state they’re ready to engage with sales after watching three to five videos.

Your Most Successful and Largest B2B Sales Competitors are Already Striving for Sales Automation (5:22)

The next thing that’s important to understand about this transformation is the competitive landscape. So Gabriel Sales has been dealing with tech and tech marketing for a long time, and we’ve seen the pendulum swing back and forth between giving SMBs an ability to compete effectively and giving the enterprise the advantage. And right now, the enterprise companies have an edge because they’ve taken meeting the needs of the digital buyer seriously and have driven digital content deeper into the sales process faster.

This was one of the really big changes that occurred during the pandemic because the enterprise was better equipped to immediately be able to deploy their existing marketing resources to digital marketing to support the virtual and remote sales process, and they were able to fund new technologies faster and more effectively when travel budgets were cut. As a result, 75% are now leading with Digital First to support their entire pre-sales process, and in a few short years, the majority of enterprise companies already believe that these new sales processes are as or more effective than their historical processes. In a full 85% of enterprise companies are now committed to building a digital first go-to-market sales process moving forward. And over the next several years, digital spend is once again predicted to double Gartner’s future of sales. Research is now predicting that by 2025, 80% of B2B sales interactions will occur in automated in digital channels.

To compete for and win business will require a commitment to content marketing and nurturing.

Sellers that Implement Lead Nurturing and Digital First Sales Automation Win More Business and Drive More Revenue (7:13)

Finally, what can your business expect when you embrace this digital first transformation? Buyers are already dramatically rewarding sellers for a digital first sales and nurturing process. Sellers that are committed to content marketing after the initial lead has been generated, see their sales team’s opportunity pipeline grow by over 450% in nine to 18 months. It’s harder to get a seat at the table with your buyers if you don’t provide content after you generate that initial lead. And most importantly, and most exciting sellers that do a good job helping buyers buy digitally are now closing at two x the rate of sellers that don’t.

 

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Seven Trends For Lead Nurturing

Seven Trends For Lead Nurturing

by | May 2, 2023

What’s Are the Seven Things You Need to Know About Lead Nurturing for Successful B2B Sales and Marketing Operations? 

The world of sales and marketing is transforming at an unprecedented rate. This change is being driven the B2B Buyer’s desire for a Digital First sales process. This article will discuss the seven trends for lead nurturing and B2B demand generation every business owner should know to help their business thrive.

This shift in B2B Buyer’s desires has caused businesses of all shapes and sizes to rethink how to sell more effectively. And the Fortune 500 moved to meet the Buyer’s desires first. To address this new set of expectations, Enterprise companies took responsibility for pre-sales education away from the traditional role/responsibility of the sales development rep and passed that accountability to the marketing operations team.

This change is so rapid, that according to a recent Adobe research project, 82% of marketing professionals overwhelming agree that marketing has changed more in the past two years than in the past 50.  And 89% to 92% of these same marketers agree on three other facts as they take on these new pre-sales education responsibilities:

  • You need to focus on digital education first
  • Marketing operations needs to educate Buyers much deeper in their buying process
  • Marketers will need to keep learning on the job as new trends and patterns emerge

Smart Decisions Require Understanding the Modern B2B Buyers’ New Behaviors 

In this current environment, it’s difficult enough for even the most skilled marketers to keep up with all these changes. As a result, business owners and sales professionals are at even greater disadvantage.  Most sales professionals are confused and struggle how to most effectively fill their sales funnel with well-educated Buyers in the short term while making critical long term strategic marketing and sales operations decisions that will allow them to thrive in the long term. 

Fortunately, for today’s small and mid-sized businesses owners, we now finally have a great deal of information about what these new Buyers want from Sellers, expect from Sellers and how these Buyer’s behave when their needs are met. 

And – after launching over 150 successful sales and marketing automation implementations and sales and marketing ops teams – there are two things we know about business owners and entrepreneurs.

  • First – once business owners understand the needs of their Buyers, they know how to meet the needs of their Buyer.
  • Second – once business owners are armed with the right information and insights, most can make smarter growth decisions quickly and can prioritize their budgets intelligently.

With both of these facts in mind, we wanted to share the most recent information on how the Digital First Transformation has permanently altered Buyer behavior. And why the Modern Buyer prefer.

 

The B2B Digital-First Sales and Marketing Trends Everyone Needs to Know and Address

One – Most Buyers Start Their Digital Education Months or Years Before They Are Ready to Buy

First, most Buyers are not ready to buy when they first start their digital education. Initially, most Buyers are just trying to figure out how to solve a problem. According to the most recent research by Aberdeen Research, less than 2% of initial email opens are close to being ready to buy. And even more surprisingly, less than 20% of your pay per click or SEO leads are active Buyers.  

On the negative side, this means ad hoc lead gen campaigns, awareness campaigns and appointment setting campaigns have lost a great deal of their effectiveness and impact.

But the positive fact is that about 80% of all these early-stage leads, we call them “Marketing Qualified Leads” (MQLs) will spend money within 3 to 18 months. So once a lead engages with you, even if they are not ready to buy immediately, you will have a short list of Buyers:

  • That you know will be spending money within the next 3 month to 18 months
  • That expect and want you to educate and nurture them for an extended period of time

You know these future Buyers are receptive to your thought leadership. You know that some will welcome your support as you help them move systematically through their buying process.

Two – Buyers Don’t Really Want to Talk to Sales Reps Until They Are Digitally Educated (And Ready to Shortlist)

According to Forrester, your typical Buyer now consumes 7-15 pieces of digital content prior to engaging with a sales rep. And they do this with 3 to 5 different solution providers.  And as noted in the intro of this article:

  • 80% of Buyers want to delay dealing with Sales Reps until they have completed their initial research and are ready to short list for a decision. (Marketing Sherpa)
  • 62% will try and reach a decision without talking to sales rep, if possible. (Content Marketing Institute)
  • And in 2022 33% to 44% want to avoid a sales rep completely, if possible. (Merkle B2B Study)

This further impacts the long-term effectiveness of ad hoc lead gen campaigns and means nurturing your later stage funnel is now required for Digital First success.

 

Three – Buyers Rarely Short List Sellers Without Sustained Lead Nurturing and Digital Pre-Sales Education

As Gartner’s latest survey and chart above clearly details, “Content is King”.  This now applies to the entire sales funnel. Success now requires Sellers to continue to market the entire funnel after the lead has been generated.  This means you need to use content marketing tactics through the pre-sales process because this pre-sales process is now often happening without the direct involvement of your Sales Development Rep.

This nurturing process is no longer optional because according to the 2022 Demand Gen Report,  95% of Buyers short list a solution provider that “Provides them with ample content to help navigate through each stage of the buying process”.

If your content marketing campaigns don’t move beyond the appointment setting and lead gen stage, it will be exceedingly difficult to survive and you will have little chance to thrive in the near future.

 

Four – Buyers Overwhelming Prefer Video and the Trend is Accelerating

During the pandemic lock downs, with face-to-face meetings impossible to execute and with Buyers moving to home offices (and with direct lines typically going straight to voice mail), video adoption was an experience all B2B Buyers and Sellers shared during the pandemic.

Zoom normalized video for all of us.  It also normalized video adoption for pre-sales education.  According to both Wistia and Vimeo, downloads jumped by 380% in 2020.  And if you thought this adoption would slow down exiting the pandemic, you would be wrong.  In the first quarter of 2022, video consumption increased by another 148%.  Video is growing because video works.

  • Video is more convenient for the Buyer – 64% of Buyers stated they prefer video because its more convenient for education. (Gartner)
  • Video drives better engagement – Video posts have the highest engagement in Social Media (AdWeek) and using video in the email subject line, boosts open rates by 19% and increases click through rates by 65%. (Pardot)
  • Video is preferred over text when exploring solutions – Given the choice between text and video, 75% of Buyers will choose video to learn more about a solution. (Hubspot)

And according Vidyard and Vimeo, this shift to video is going to continue to accelerate in 2022 and 2023.

  • In 2022 80% of the Fortune 500 is moving towards internal vs. external production.
  • Video is being used later in the sales funnel, with the average video created coming in at 9 minutes and 48 seconds in length.
  • And the average company that has been using video as part of their nurturing process is planning to double to triple their use of video in 2023.

To learn more about how to leverage video as part of your sales and marketing operation check out our two articles –  Six Important Videos to Fill Your Sales Funnel with Sales Ready Leads and What Videos Are Most Effective B2B Lead Scoring and Sales Automation.

 

Five – Buyers Reward Sellers Committed to Digital First Lead Gen, Pre-Sales Education and Lead Nurturing

B2B Buyers are already dramatically rewarding Sellers for a Digital First sales and nurturing process:

Sellers have more opportunities to do business – Businesses that implement a content workflow and use marketing automation to nurture prospects, experience a 451% increase in qualified leads in 9 to 18 months. (ANNUITAS Group)

Sellers win more business – 95% of Buyers chose a solution provider that “Provided them with ample content to help navigate through each stage of the buying process.” (DemandGen Report)

Sellers win more business more frequently – You are 2X as likely to win business over your competitor if you provide a substantive digital education experience for your prospects throughout their buying process. (McKinsey)

 

The Impact of Lead Nurturing vs. Lead Gen on Your Business (Watch Time 4:00 Min)

 

Watch this 4 minute video to learn what the sales impact is of an effective lead nurturing and demand gen engine

Six – Enterprise Companies are All In on Digital First

According to McKinsey’s survey, “The Future of Sales”, close to 9 in 10 enterprise companies confirmed that the new Digital First go-to-market sales practice was going to be a fixture of their business moving forward.  And 85% stated they were going to stay committed to this process throughout 2023 and beyond.

They are committed to this process because it works; i.e., it meets the desires of their Buyers.

Trends For Lead Nurturing

And they plan to accelerate the adoption of this Digital First process by their Buyers because they are planning on almost doubling their spend over the next 4 years. 

Seven – This Will All Lead to Pre-Sales Automation

Among the important trends for lead nurturing is the combination of B2B Buyers preference for Digital First pre-sales education over speaking with a sales rep, combined with the success of this process, and the investment being made by the Fortune 500 is why:

“Gartner’s Future of Sales research shows that by 2025, 80% of B2B sales interactions between Suppliers and Buyers will be automated and occur in digital channels”

Conclusion

Replacing your historical sale rep driven process and ad hoc lead gen tactics with a comprehensive content marketing strategy and nurturing process  is not an “if” decision – it’s a “when” decision.  The B2B Buyer and the Enterprise market are both driving towards Sales Automation and the cost savings that this shift will represent.

Many small businesses, young companies, mid-size companies, and even under-resourced sales and marketing groups are struggling to keep up with this Digital First transformation.  Many have an initial lead gen program in place, but that program is not producing the results it used to, or it’s not producing to expectations.

In many cases, SMBs struggle to craft a solid strategy deeper into the funnel, or they’re flying blind with a scattershot strategy.  They lack the bandwidth to make informed decisions around the right marketing and sales tech to leverage.  They lack the talent and resources to create quality content on a consistent basis, or they lack the time or can’t afford to assemble an experienced team of proven sales and marketing operation experts that are required to run a sales engagement engine consistently.  To learn even more about the advantages of outsourcing you lead nurturing and demand generation process you can read Why Outsource Demand Generation and Lead Nurturing.

When you’re ready, we have developed Digital Demand Center™ , a turnkey solution designed specifically for SMBs that turns the Digital First Transformation into an opportunity for SMB Sellers to survive and thrive.

 

How it Works – Turnkey  Lead Nurturing and Demand Gen with Digital Demand Center

 

(Watch Time – 5:00 Minutes) – Quick overview of how a our turnkey demand generation engine fill your CRM with well educated sales ready leads.

If you feel like you would like a much deeper crash course on all challenges and tactics required for success, we invite you to check out our Educational Video Series on The Digital First Transformation.

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Lead Scoring for B2B Demand Gen & Lead Nurturing

Lead Scoring for B2B Demand Gen & Lead Nurturing

by | Feb 9, 2023

Lead Scoring for B2B Demand Gen — a Critical Tactic for Lead Nurturing Success

Background – The Adoption of Demand Generation and Marketing Automation

During the pandemic we witnessed a dramatic shift towards content marketing and the pursuit of multiple digital channels to generate leads. And according to Gartner’s latest survey, we also witnessed a dramatic shift to a Digital First sales process to replace the historical pre-sales education tasks of the Sales Development Rep with extremely positive results. That’s where lead scoring for B2B demand gen comes in.

 

Lead Scoring for B2B Demand Gen

The Impact on Leads

As a result, Buyers have now started their digital education far in advance of being ready to buy.

  • Less than 5% of Email Click Throughs are Ready to Buy – 96% of leads are not ready to buy when they first hit your website or landing page. (Aberdeen)
  • Less Than 25% of Inbound Form Fills are Ready to Buy – 78% of buyers requesting information on your company today will not purchase for at least 3 to 6 months – and 28% will take 12 or more months to buy. (Sirius Decisions)

And simultaneously, Buyers started to expect Sellers to provide digital pre-sales education much deeper into the sales funnel.

  • Buyers conduct over half their pre-sales education online. 74% of business buyers conduct more than half of their research and solution education online before engaging with a sales rep.
  • 80% of Buyers want to avoid Sales Reps until they have done their pre-sales research. 80% of Buyers want to delay dealing with sales reps until they have completed initial research and are ready to shortlist for a decision. (Marketing Sherpa)

Lead Nurturing and Marketing Automation Are Now Requirements

As a result, successful marketing operations teams have moved beyond content marketing for lead gen and are now accountable for providing well educated buyers to their sales reps as part of an integrated pre-sales and content marketing process. These marketing teams now implement Digital Demand Generation programs to nurture buyers through the pre-sales process to provide their sales team with well-educated buyers.  

Lead Scoring for B2B Demand Gen

According to Gartner, over 58% of successful B2B sales and marketing operation teams are now leveraging a marketing automation platform to manage this nurturing process (and another 12% are planning to implement an automation platform within the next twelve months).

They use a marketing automation platform because it is the central technology required to successfully execute Demand Generation with the sustained nurturing that is now required for success.  A marketing automation platform is critical for demand generation because it allows you to do four things:

  • Email Marketing – Send sustained email nurturing campaigns to targeted leads
  • Track a Buyer’s Digital Engagement – The platform allows you track the digital engagement of your lead’s activities, as well as their interaction with specific pieces of online content
  • Lead Scoring – Allows you to score leads and they engage with your digital content and nurturing campaigns
  • Alert/Prioritize Sales to Hottest Leads – Send alerts, notifications and prioritize leads for your sales team once a lead is “Sales-Ready”

What is Lead Scoring for B2B Demand Gen and How Does it Work?

Lead scoring is the process of giving each lead a numerical score to predict and rank the sales-readiness of each lead.

That numerical score is calculated in three ways:

  1. Explicit Contact Data
  2. The Buyer’s activity
  3. Predictive Content Engagement

 

Video – Nurturing, Lead Scoring for B2B Demand Gen and How it Works with Digital Demand Center™

(Watch Time – 3:00 Minutes)

One – Explicit Contact Data

Targeting the right market should already be a top priority for your sales and marketing operations team. Great targeting leads to better results and a better ROI on your marketing investment. A well-built database of targeted leads can help make this easier, but having a perfect lead database is not a realistic goal.

If you are targeting a broad market or generating a great deal of suspect PPC inbound leads, the first step is to give the best targets a higher score. This can be done directly in the Marketing Automation Platform based on your ideal fit. Below is a quick example of the customization that can be programed in the Marketing Automation Platform.

Two – The Buyer’s Activity

Lead scoring allows you to track a Buyer’s activity in a number of ways including:

  • Email Opens
  • Email Clicks
  • Video Plays
  • Duration of Video Watched
  • Form Visits
  • Number of Page Views
  • Visits to Your Website
  • Repeat Visits
  • Time on The Website

These scores continue to accrue over time every time your potential buyer comes back to your site(s).

Three – Predictive Content Engagement – The Most Critical Lead Scoring Step

Not all types of activities and engagement are created equal. An effective demand generation program requires that you nurture a buyer deeper into their pre-sales journey using different types of content to meet the buyers increasing needs as they get closer to a decision.

The deeper the buyer moves into the sales funnel the higher the numerical score associated with that that specific type/piece of content becomes.

Lead Nurturing Engagement Model

Your marketing automation platform then allows you to weight your content score based what stage the content indicates they engaged with as part of their Buyer’s Journey. If the buyer is still at the “Awareness” stage that engagement will get a score of 10. If they move on to checking out a piece of content (like a Demo Video) that indicates they are at the “Preference” stage they will get an additional score of 250”.

In addition to prioritizing leads that may be “Sales Ready” directly in your CRM. Lead Scoring also allows your marketing team to trigger alerts for leads that are Buyer that are demonstrating buying signals for quick and/or immediate follow up so they never miss an opportunity.

One of the most effective ways to score leads and predict when a buyer is ready to buy is a buyer’s  engagement with video.  You can learn more about this in our article –  What Videos Are Most Effective B2B Lead Scoring and Sales Automation.

These alerts are typically shared via email and are predominantly one of three types of notifications.

  • Predictive Engagement – The lead is engaging with content that typically indicates they are moving from “Consideration” to “Preference” or “Decision” stages.
  • Predictive Score – The lead is engaging with digital education in a meaningful way. The “Buyer” is becoming a “Well Educated Buyer” and their engagement and activities indicates they are trying to solve a problem in a way in which your solution looks like a potential fit.
  • Inbound Request – Sales team is immediately notified when any inbound requests are made by a potential Buyer.

Conclusion

Lead Nurturing is quickly becoming critical to the success of B2B Sales and Marketing Operation because B2B Buyers reward Sellers for a Digital First Pre-Sales Education process.

  • Businesses using marketing automation to nurture prospects experience a 451% increase in qualified opportunities.
  • 95% of buyers short list a solution provider that “Provided them with ample content to help navigate through each stage of the buying process” (DemandGen Report)
  • You are 2X as likely to win business over your competitor if you provide a substantive digital education experience for your prospects throughout their buying process (McKinsey)

And Leads Scoring is the critical process to capture the most sales value from this process. Nurturing without Lead Scoring is like ordering food and then leaving the table when it’s time to eat.

 

About Digital Demand Center™ (and Gabriel Sales)

 

Gabriel Sales has been helping companies build successful sales and marketing operations for over 20 years.  As part of these efforts, we have implemented marketing automation platforms over 150 times for companies ranging in size from Start Ups, through Small and Mid-Market businesses as well as serving the Fortune 500.

Digital Demand Center is a turnkey solution designed specifically for the small and medium sized businesses.  Our cost effective solution is engineered for companies that are serious about meeting the challenges and capturing the rewards of executing an automated digital first sales process.   DDC allows us to deploy our expertise and lead scoring best practices (cross pollinated) across all the successful organizations we support and serve.  For a detailed overview of the needs of the modern buyer, more about the problems we can help you solve and how that happens you can watch the video below and read our quick article Why Outsource Demand Generation and Lead Nurturing?.

 

 

Video – The Modern Digital First B2B Buyer and Digital Demand Center™

 

(Watch Time – 10:00 Minutes) Learn How to Successfully Meet the Needs of the Modern B2B Buyer with Digital Demand Center™ and Provide Your Sales Team with a Steady Flow of Well Educated “Sales Ready” Leads

If you are still not convinced nurturing, pre-sales automation and lead scoring is critical or feel like you would like a much deeper crash course on all challenges, budget, technology and tactics required for success, we invite you to check out our Educational Video Series on The Digital First Transformation.

 

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Download our Free Ebook - The Digital-First Sales Transformation
Learn How Digital Demand Center™ Works - Watch Demo Video
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.