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.

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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%)

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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.

What is Modern Sales and Marketing

What is Modern Sales and Marketing

by | Nov 10, 2017

There’s been a lot of buzz lately about adjusting sales and marketing techniques, tactics and alignment to meet the needs of the modern B2B buyer. But what are the needs of this new type of buyer as they search and move toward purchase? What is Modern Sales and Marketing?

Before the days of the internet, people became aware of products in the physical world – traveling to a tradeshow, answering calls from and engaging with a sales person to gather information and learn about a product or service. And if the sales person was knowledgeable about the solution features and benefits, then they bought it.

Obviously, those days are gone, and now the internet gives people the opportunity to self-educate about products and services before communicating with a sales person. Now, if the buyer can avoid a sales person completely (which occurs frequently with SaaS products), they will. If a buyer does need to work with a sales person to complete the transaction, the buyer now expects that sales person to understand their needs and to customize a solution that meets their needs.

The paradigm has shifted and now products are bought first – with digital content that proves you understand your buyers’ needs and pains – then sold by closers or sales reps who take orders, once buyers feel educated enough to engage in deeper discussions.

The numbers continue to prove the acceleration of this trend: CEB Global finds, 77% of B2B buyers say they don’t talk with a sales rep until after they perform independent research. Sirius Decisions says, 67% of the buyer’s journey is now done digitally as today’s modern buyer self-evaluates the value of a product or service on websites, social networks, review boards and other digital resources of choice. And when they’re ready to engage with a sales rep, they’re already more than half way through the traditional journey. So, businesses must now embrace content marketing, marketing automation, content distribution and social posts to keep up with the demands of the modern consumer.

In essence, modern sales and marketing bridges the gap between sales and marketing and aligns the sellers sales process with the buyers’ journey, to sell solutions, not features and benefits. The goal of modern sales and marketing is to map your sales process with the contemporary buyers’ journey to make it easy for the buyer to purchase at each stage of the process.

Aligned Sales and Marketing

Today, a company that wants to succeed in the modern marketplace, must demand its sales and marketing departments work together collaboratively, get along and partner for one goal – increase the bottom line. With the multiple moving parts involved in the modern sales and marketing machine, both entities must work together to bring in an audience, educate that audience and move that audience towards a purchase decision. Equally important, they must also remove segments of that audience that are not interested in purchasing to maximize the time of the sales rep. It seems like an arduous task, but the effort is worth it because the rewards are tangible: Marketo finds that companies with an aligned sales and marketing strategy are 67% better at closing deals.

In order to align the two departments, sales must talk to marketing and clearly articulate the types of people (targets) who are most likely to buy and which ones are the right fit for the company. They also need to be able to clearly convey the problems these buyers need to solve. Then, marketing must take those items and craft a strategy, produce content (both educational and content that facilitates easier transactions) and distribute it in an organized, timely manner.

On the flip side, marketing needs to craft powerful sales stories and value propositions for the products or services, so the sales team can be consultants and offer solutions to consumers, rather than pushing product features and benefits.

It’s also marketing’s job to attract and nurture prospects with quality and authentic content that makes it easy for buyers to understand the company story, what makes them unique, and what makes them different. Additionally, marketing must track the buyers consumption of this content to pass the most qualified leads to the sales reps, so they can convert those prospects into customers.

At Gabriel Sales, we make it mandatory for the sales and marketing teams to meet weekly to review results and provide feedback regarding processes, content campaigns and other sales and marketing tactics. We often go through call verbatims, to learn what works and what does not work to adjust and fill gaps in both the sales process and marketing process where needed. This type of open communication and collaboration ensures our content is customized to our target audience – which the sales team knows best – and is being utilized in the correct stage of the buyers’ journey. In addition, this open communication and collaboration aligns our marketing and sales efforts, which helps generate inspirational and creative ideas for new content and sales and marketing tactics to attract qualified leads. Finally, it allows us to provide our target audience with incredible value and a clear understanding of our clients’ products or services. This level of collaboration accelerates our ability to hit sales goals and to generate the results our clients need.

Content Production, Curation and Distribution

As content marketing matures, the ROI is now becoming established. Demand Metric finds that content marketing costs 62% less than traditional marketing and generates about 3-times as many leads. But content marketing only works if you aim to educate your buyer and allow them to move towards a purchase. And again, the numbers support this approach as a Demand Metric study reports, 60% of buyers are inspired to seek out a more information on a product after reading about a business approach to the solution.

So, what type of content should you produce for the modern sales and marketing process to move a buyer towards a purchase? It’s important to create several types of targeted content for all phases of the new buyers’ journey, which is broken into three parts:

  1. Awareness phase: to help buyers realize their need for a product or service to fix their problem
  2. Consideration phase: to help buyers research solutions for their problem and to compare and contrast a solution they’re interested in
  3. Decision phase: to help assure buyers the product they’ve identified as a solution is the right choice

Any content device is useful, blogs, videos, webcasts, product demos, case studies, white papers, checklist, etc. But not all buyers like the same type of content. A Demand Gen report notes 95% of B2B buyers choose solution providers that offer relevant types of content at every stage of the buying process. So, it’s good to use several pieces for each stage. It’s also important to not over spend on content production. In many cases authentic communication at a lower cost works just as well as highly produced, expensive content. Blogs articles work just as well, in many cases, as expensive white papers. In fact, a Demand Metric study shows, companies that have a blog platform produce 67% more leads per month than those that do not have one. And video works too: Hubspot finds 70% of B2B buyers watch a video sometime during their buying journey.

The most important criteria is not expensive production, but aligning your content pieces to your buyer’s journey process, so you ensure each consumer interested in your solution is receiving the right message at the right time. As content is pushed out, it turns outbound leads into inbound leads that help your buyers decide if they are the right fit, while at the same time, either qualifying them as prospects for your sales team or disqualifies them (a no is as good as a yes) according to your target identification within your strategy. Remember, unqualifying leads is just as important as qualifying them, as it mitigates time wasted on people who will eventually fall out of the buyers’ journey themselves. This ensures you’re speaking to the right people and increases effectiveness and conversion rates, which, Aberdeen finds are nearly 6x higher for content marketing adopters than non-adopters – 2.9% vs 0.5%.

Marketing Automation and Lead Scoring

Content marketing takes commitment to ensure steady production. But simply churning content to increase your volume of marketing assets no longer makes sense. Creating the right content and using it as effectively as possible to maximize your investment is now critical. To do this, a company needs to leverage the right marketing automation tool to execute a systematic automation and digital communication plan that includes lead scoring. Marketing automation allows you to implement your buyers journey content strategy, roadmap, or digital sales process (whatever you want to call it) within a system that automatically sends messages at a desired cadence. Lead scoring then allows you to identify what buyers are most interested and actively considering buying a solution by assigning a score to the buyers’ digital activities and engagements. Leads are ultimately scored by correlating a buyer’s digital conversation to a buying stage. For example, form fills and pricing pages demand higher scores than educational blog pages. As a user self-educates, it continues to compile points and bubbles buyers most likely to buy to the top of the lead funnel.

When a buyer hits a certain threshold, they are then prioritized by the sales team for follow-up calls and discussions.

And because the automation software keeps a history of the pages visited, a sales rep can jump into that digital conversation and already understand the pains and problems a buyer is trying to solve. This allows a sales rep to become more of a consultant, rather than one that “feature dumps” and/or highlights the benefits of the solution.

At the same time, marketing can constantly study data and improve results with smarter reporting, in the forms of real-time content consumption, dynamic reporting of email activity and correlating campaign results to stages in the sales funnel. Ultimately, marketing automation allows for more accurate data, which allows teams to pivot when needed.

What is Modern Sales and MarketingDedicated Sales Consultants and Engineers

Top performing modern sales and marketing systems optimize workflows to make it easy for sales reps to follow-up with the right leads at the right time.

As Velocify finds, organizations with the fastest lead follow-up have the highest inbound lead conversion. In order to accomplish this, teams must dedicate sales consultants to qualify and contact high-scoring leads immediately, while understanding which “solution ballpark” the prospect is interested in, from the information provided.

Think of this as smart lead distribution – sending the right lead to the right sales rep to optimize the sales rep’s time. As Hubspot’s analysis of more than 2,200 American companies finds, those that attempt to reach leads within an hour of when a buyer looks ready to buy, are nearly 7x likelier to have meaningful conversations with decision makers than those that waited even 2 hours or more.

Summary

While this is a simplified synopsis of modern sales and marketing, there are key pieces SMBs can use to begin to build a process of making modern consumers aware of its products and solutions, while picking up some quick wins along the way.

The keys are to target the right decision maker units through communication and collaboration, set a strategy that clearly outlines the buyers’ journey and automate message delivery for a certain, decided cadence. Top performers solidify a consistent process and leverage technology to help execute it, while simultaneously mitigating wasted time and effort through insightful analytics. Another key is getting all teams on the same page for the same goal, to increase company revenue. Because when organizations achieve that, the results are astounding. Hubspot finds, when sales and marketing teams work together, companies see 36% higher customer retention and 38% higher sales win rates. Hubspot also reports, companies with good sales and marketing alignment practices, generate 208% more revenue from marketing efforts. And that’s good for everyone.

 

About Us

Gabriel Sales helps companies build modern sales and marketing operations. We are committed to marketing automation as one of the critical tools for sales success. We have over 50 marketing automation deployments under our belt. And we have implemented over a half dozen different marketing automation technologies so we can help you decide on the best fit at the right price to meet your sales goals and stage of sales maturity.

To learn more about the gaps we can help you in building modern sales and marketing operations with sales outsourcing we invite you to visit our sales outsourcing approach and philosophy page or our blog post about how we leverage sales outsourcing to build modern sales and marketing operations.

15 B2B Email Marketing Tips

15 B2B Email Marketing Tips

by | Nov 5, 2017

15 B2B Email Marketing Tips for SMBs to Generate Demand and Real Sales Opportunities

 

For ten years, email has delivered the highest ROI for marketers over any other form of marketing, returning $44 for every $1 spent. A June 2016 survey of U.S. marketers conducted by the Direct Marketing Association (DMA) and Demand Metric found that email had a median ROI of 122% – more than four times higher than other marketing channels, including social media, direct mail and paid search. (Source: eMarketer, 2016)

What drives the success of email marketing?

A 2017 Marketing Sherpa report revealed, 70% of buyers prefer to learn about a new product or solution by email first, and then prefer to receive additional educational material even after being initially engaged by a business development representative.

And according to a 2016 Hubspot study, email is the third most influential source of information for B2B audiences, behind only colleague recommendations and industry-specific thought leaders.

email marketing icon

With these eye-popping numbers, it’s no wonder 59% of B2B marketers say email is their most effective channel in terms of revenue generation.

So, what do these statistics really mean about the state of email and how it should be used?

As part of Gabriel Sales integrated B2B sales and marketing campaigns, we leverage emails at multiple stages of our clients’ sales funnel development program to generate new leads. We also use email marketing to develop buyers not yet ready to purchase, and over time, we use lead scoring tactics to identify which leads become qualified sales opportunities. Subsequently, we do a lot of research, and analyze a lot of our own data.

What the data tells us is, B2B email marketing does not always function in the same way as B2C marketing. B2C is typically focused on direct response and an immediate transaction, as opposed to generating leads and developing them over time. Thus, click-through rates (CTRs) are 47% higher for B2B email campaigns than B2C email campaigns. That being the case, B2B has a slightly different set of best practices.

So, here are our 15 B2B Email Marketing Tips that can help you with improving your B2B sales prospecting campaigns across every stage of your sales funnel development.

1. Don’t Expect Immediate Results

Emails are a great way to introduce your solution and make buyers aware you exist. They are also a great way to:

  • Start a digital dialogue with the buyer
  • Educate buyers about the problems you solve
  • Kick off an outsourced sales lead generation campaign
  • Move a buyer deeper into the sales funnel
  • Build a short list of early stage buyers for buyer development reps to call

But buyers rarely buy, or immediately schedule an appointment after getting one email from you, so don’t expect overnight success. You will get some quick wins, but this will be a marathon or middle-distance race and not a sprint.

2. The Ability to Score Leads is Critical for Most B2B Companies

Most B2B companies are not straightforward transactional sales, selling concrete commodities that can be closed in one phone call. But that stated – if your sale is at a low price point and every buyer that shows interest can and should be closed, then lead scoring is not critical. What is critical: you need to call every lead as soon as they show interest, so all you need is the ability to track opens.

  • However, if you are like 90% of B2B companies, with longer sales cycles and a heavy need to educate buyers to build trust, then lead scoring may be critical for you to prioritize which buyers are most likely to buy. In fact, a recent Eloqua study of 10 B2B companies using lead scoring systems showed close rates increased by 30%, company revenue increased by 18% and the revenue per deal increased by 17%. Finally, according to Aberdeen Research, companies that get lead scoring right have a 192% higher average lead qualification rate than those that do not.

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3. Increase Your Results by Implementing the Right Marketing Automation or Email Marketing Software for Your Business 

B2B companies these days are implementing marketing automation systems to communicate regularly with potential buyers for product launches, solution education, and to keep their products or services top of mind. And why not, businesses that use marketing automation to nurture prospects see a 451% increase in qualified leads. (The Annuitas Group)

So as businesses shift to automation software, it’s important to keep these statistics in mind:

  • 80% of marketing automation users saw an increase in the number of leads, and 77% had an increase of conversions. –VentureBeat
  • Companies using marketing automation generate twice as many leads as those using just email software. –Autopilot
  • Marketing automation drives a 14.5% increase in sales productivity and a 12.2% reduction in marketing overhead. –Nucleus Research
  • 78% of successful marketers say that marketing automation is most responsible for improving revenue contribution. -The Lenskold Group

4. Have a Specific Intention for Your Buyer for Every Email

In this era of content marketing and access to digital education, email is being used for multiple purposes, so it is important that each email has a specific intention. If it’s an initial email lead generation campaign, you may just want to introduce a new solution or highlight a problem you help solve to identify buyers interested in the solution or need that problem solved.

If the goal is to communicate with a buyer you have been developing for a while, and who has opened multiple emails, or has engaged with your content in the past, you may want to ask for an appointment or send them a more specific piece of content to move them deeper into the funnel.

The key is to know what your goal is for every email, and don’t try to do too much at one time in a single email.

5. Set a Business Goal for Your Company for Every Email 

In this era of content marketing and access to digital education, email is being used for multiple purposes, so be sure you have a goal for each email. Is it for nurturing? Is it for generating a new lead? Or is it for developing a lead? Knowing the end goal for each message allows you to convey each message more precisely to your audience and often leads to better open rates and click-through results. As a best practice that’s produced great results for us we craft the copy of the email to the specific target audience and offer them the right educational piece according to the content framework below:

6. Use Trade Shows as an Opportunity to Generate New Sales Leads

Emails are a great way to build awareness and to fill your booth prior to a trade show. But over the past several years, we have discovered that a trade show is a great “artificial” event to also fill your database with a fresh set of leads.

The benefits of trade show audiences is three-fold: first, the average trade show attendee has travelled 400 miles, so your audience is truly national (Source: CEIR report ACRR 1153.12), second, more than 90% of trade show attendees say they are looking for new products (source: Exhibits Survey Inc.), and third, 46% of trade show attendees are in executive or upper management roles (source: CEIR).

We have had great results running campaigns to a rented, opt-in list of potential attendees – not necessarily registered attendees. Sending to this broad list of potential attendees, we have seen the following results:

  • 3X to 5X the typical unique open-rates of a cold outbound email campaign – because non-attendees are still curious about what will be happening at the show and what they will be missing
  • 2X to 4X the typical email click-through-rate
  • Emails are often forwarded to known attendees within the company by the original recipient
  • Inside reps are able to set meetings with buyers both at the show and buyers that are not even attending the show

7. Design For Mobile First

In 2017, the Apple iPhone leads email client market share with 33% of opens, so design your emails for mobile first. And over the past year, we have seen a rise in senior executives opening early sales pipeline emails on their mobile phones, so this becomes even more important. We became curious about why this was so we asked and the answer was simple: Executives tend to open these emails and check out the educational content offers when they are in between meetings, (in meetings, too, which they loathed to admit) and in the evenings at their kids extracurricular events.

8. Keep Subject Line Short

Buyers use smartphones over 60% of the time to view emails. In general, we put too much copy in the subject line, and often bury the point of the email at the end of the subject line. Our research shows, shorter subject lines are opened more often, especially when the point of the email comes first.

9. Keep Email Copy Brief and to the Point

Once again, more than 60% of buyers check email on mobile phones, so keep this top of mind when you write your copy. Your emails should be short, easy to read, and broken into paragraphs – no more than three short paragraphs is ideal. You can also use bullets to catch your buyer’s attention and highlight key points.

10. A/B Split Test Subject Lines

When we run outsourced sales lead generation campaigns, we run a series of three emails to the same list, as a best practice. We often use the same educational content offer for that three-part campaign, which allows us to perform a comprehensive A/B subject line split test as part of the first effort. We will often test as many as three to four subject lines in the first email, which allows the subsequent email blasts to drill down on the topics most likely to engage the buyer.

11. Don’t Overuse Your Company Name

Similar to your sales calls, spending too much time talking about yourself or referencing yourself does not get the most effective results. Keep your attention on the buyer, their challenges and their needs. Use your name once or twice. Don’t begin every sentence with your company. Email should not typically be an advertisement.

12. Lead with Educational Content Offers

B2B offers perform best when you offer something of value, so lead with an educational offer. Emails are the preferred way buyers wish to learn about new solutions, so attach a link to a valuable blog article, white paper or video that talks about the solution and not a product pitch. When buyers get a link with an interesting asset, they are more likely to save it and/or share it.

13. Use Customer Success Stories

At later stages of pipeline development, once a buyer has some familiarity with your solution, it will make sense to talk about yourself. When you do, use a case study as an example of a key success. This allows a buyer to understand how your solution has helped solve problems for customers like them, and helps them start to visualize and consider how your solution can help them solve a similar problem.

14. Use Your Buyers Name and Company in the Email

With the adoption of marketing automation tools, data merge fields are now the norm. It’s not acceptable not to personalize, so use the prospect’s first name in the email. You can also include the company name if it makes sense, however, only do this if you have a database you know is accurate. By doing so, your email stands out.

For most companies this is all the personalization you need. Personalizing email campaigns with different content offers, color schemes, etc. is not typically worth the effort unless you have database segments over 10,000 plus. If you do need to personalize, and deal sizes support this level of investment, it probably makes sense for your sales rep to manage this directly.

15. Always Have a Call to Action

Your email should always have a clear call to action. When we run an outsourced sales campaign, it should be as specific as possible and require the least amount of effort from your prospect. For example, briefly describe the value of the educational content and clearly display the link to it, or give them a day/time for a 10-minute call to discuss the value you can provide to their business. If you have a calendar app, such as Calendly, use it to let prospects set up their own meeting with you.

How Gabriel Sales Help?

Gabriel Sales specializes in helping B2B companies build modern sales and marketing operations.

We do this for companies with a wide variety of technology, service businesses and manufacturers that have a non-transactional solution based sales process. What this means is, to close the sale, you must build trust with the buyer, which typically requires a thought leader, consultant, sales engineer or demonstration of the product to engage the buyer and close business

Email marketing is just one piece of what we do. We can also help with strategy, automation systems implementation and other tactics required for demand generation.

Feel free to contact us to schedule some time to discuss how Gabriel Sales can help you grow your business.

Top 10 Sales Strategies for New Product Launches Sales Outsourcing Best Practices

Top 10 Sales Strategies for New Product Launches Sales Outsourcing Best Practices

by | Jul 23, 2016

Magic bullet for sales outsourcingTop 10 Sales Outsourcing Strategies for New Products

There is no grey area for Gabriel Sales that sales outsourcing for new product launches is ultimately about closing business.  However as a sales consulting firm that has driven millions in closed deals and over 200M in exits with successful new product and service launches over the past 10 years we also understand that we can drive wealth for the entrepreneurs, executives and investors that we serve by empowering the entire organization. This is done with the right feedback loops and insights so our clients can make the right strategic decisions for their business. Below are ten business intelligence and strategic areas that the right sales outsourcing partner for new product launches can  and should execute against as sales consultants drive the entire enterprise.  For additional resource for new products launches and go to market strategies please visit our Sales Strategies for New Product Launches Resource Page.

Sales Strategies for New Products

Rapid Communication – It’s critical that direct feedback loops are created from the sales team directly back to product development, the marketing team, and the CFO.  These feedback loops need to be available all the time.  Speed directly from the market back to the team is critical.  One of the advantages of a sales outsourcing firm that specializes is new product launches is that we have designed our internal systems to provide these feedback loops and are contractually accountable for them. The right internal feedback loops will improve the product and align sales and marketing for shared success.

Commit to Digital Content…especially Blogging – We are a sales outsourcing firm making 1000s of outbound calls a day.  Customers are not waiting for us to call.  If we get them on the phone being able to share a quick piece of content (video, landing page, short demo) goes a long way to getting them to spend more time with us on call two and the same content can also be leveraged to disqualify prospects.   The average customer leveraged 10.7 pieces of content in their buying decision in 2011 and this is projected to increase in 2012.  If you have a limited budget we have strategies and tactics we leverage for our customers that allow them to take advantage of our sales outsourcing for new product launch tactics that turn your blog into a virtual sales rep.

Be Prepared to Educate the Market – Most new products are offering a new solution that is disruptive to the market.   Many new product companies are enamored with their technology (since they have passionately developed it) and forget that in many cases before you get to share those technical specs you need to help the customer understand and define the business problem they are trying to solve. You also need to be prepared to educate your customer how to calculate return.  Don’t underestimate the value of keeping it simple for the prospect especially in the early stages of the sales cycle.    For more info on how to frame your content strategy, please check out our B2B content framework graphic in our blog What is Successful Sales Collateral?

Sell from Scripts – This is one of several areas where a new product launch sales outsourcing firm has some strategic value over hiring individual internal reps or rolodex reps.  Outsource sales firms are designed to sell using a repeatable process so selling from scripts is critical.  It gives us something to measure and a way to anchor the success of the sale in the message and the story as opposed to the personality.

Commit Focused Energy to your Initial Ideal Customer Profile – If you don’t know what this is we have a short blog series dedicated to this.  CLICK HERE TO READ MORE.  You need to take your best guess at what verticals and what decision makers will buy and champion your product.  And then test those assumptions and measure those results.

Document the Buying Process and the Sales Process –  As you take your first customers from MQL or Cold Call through Sales Accepted to Sales Qualified to Closed deal you need to understand the key events in that cycle.   As a sales outsourcing firm this is one of the sales consulting functions we offer our clients.   We believe it’s critical because when combined with the right sales metrics (see below),  mapped to the Ideal Customer Profile (see above) it gives us the ability to start to more accurately forecast dollars in and dollars out investments for the entrepreneurs and boards we serve.  It’s also critical to remember that the same digital content we discussed in point 2 at the top of this blog is contributing to the sale.   You need to get your sales reps and marketing team to score that as part of the buying process as well.   Documenting the buying process allows you to build a sales process that allows the buyer to buy on their terms which means a sales ramp that consistently moves up an to the right and we are all in this entrepreneurial business to build sales machines that turn growth rates into hockey sticks.

Measure the Right Success Metrics – You need to measure the success of your early pipe efforts from day one.   A sales outsourcing solution for new product launches has the advantage of having years (at least 10 years in our case) of historical data to benchmark your efforts against similar sales to similar markets and similar decision makers.   This is especially critical for new product launches that have no historical data to benchmark against.  To learn more about the metrics Gabriel Sales feels are most critical feel free to reach out to us to Learn if you can Build a High Velocity Sales Machine.

Know Why You Win and Why You Lose – If you are measuring the right data you will already be well on the way to knowing why your new product launch is successful.  Its also important to understand why you are not winning when you lose.  One value-add we provide as a sales outsourcing consulting service for new product launches is that after losing a deal we will call the decision maker if possible and ask “ for own learning, is there anything we could’ve done better?”  We will take notes and pass that information on to our clients.

Commit to Marketing Automation and Nurturing Prospects “Not Yet Ready to Buy” – Our clients are investing in more than closed deals when they are choosing to outsource part or all of their sales and marketing operations.  We are not going to win every deal the first shot we take especially for new products.   Some may not have budget immediately, others may be waiting for our clients to have a couple more customers, others may need to champion into their organization.   Data from Forrester states that 70% of Marketing Qualified Leads will buy in a solution area they invest time in exploring within 18 months.  If nurtured correctly 25% of your MQLs will hit your pipe within a year according to Aberdeen.   If you put 400 MQLs into the pipe in your pipe during your initial launch this means (assuming your product hits the mark) that you will have 100 SALs by year if you invest in nurturing out of the gate.  Gabriel Sales provides sales consulting to assist with multiple nurturing from lead scoring, to social media outreach, content testing and marketing automation software implementation.

Lead with Value Proposition but Sell with Differentiators –   Selling starts when a customer says “No” and arguments are never made in a vacuum. Value propositions are a great lead but they only take you so far.  To close a deal your business case needs to make sense in the context of a category. We take all of our new product launch sales outsourcing clients through a quick and proprietary process that helps us and them to tell that story.  This does not mean that you need to sell directly against the competition it simply means that the story will include what the prospect/marketplace has heard from the competition.  In many cases we find that that competition is an internal competitor.

To see if our Sales Consulting and/or Sales and Marketing Outsourcing Solution is right for taking your new product to market we invite you to visit our New Product Launch Sales Strategies Resource Page.  CLICK HERE

For a custom Go-To-Market Evaluation please feel free to CONTACT US to benchmark the market and see if a High Velocity Sales Machine is a possibility for you.