by Glen Springer | May 21, 2017
The digital buyer’s new best friend is the outsourced sales company
If you are like most companies, you have probably noticed that the days of simply cold calling buyers to generate leads is no longer as effective as it once was. In fact, most buyers now prefer to learn about new products by searching on the web or, in the case of 70% of buyers, to get an educational email that is then followed up by thoughtful reps with additional content. An outsourced sales company could help you navigate these tasks, saving you time and energy that could be spent on other projects.
Here are several challenges the new digital buyer presents followed by ways an sales outsourcing company may be able to help you address them.
Challenge #1 – Your buyers want and expect to be educated first. Buyers want to understand what you do without always relying on a sales reps to explain it. This means you may need to develop some new tactics and commit to content marketing. Marketing needs to support sales with content that shares your thought leadership digitally. If your marketers can leverage your thought leaders, they can optimize support of your sales team and keep them focused on selling while your content explains what you do. Marketing can take care of early stage sales engagement with the right content.
An outsourced sales campaign from Gabriel Sales will include creating content that can be leveraged by the sales rep and by your lead generation team to make it easier for the buyer to buy.
Challenge #2 – Sales and marketing need to work together with one goal of creating qualified sales opportunities through buyer education. The days of hard selling and simply marketing the features and benefits of your solution are over. For many businesses, this is the biggest hurdle because it’s cultural. Sales and marketing both need to work together toward the goal of educating the customer. To do this you are going to need to align sales and marketing with the tools, content, and processes you need to support your inside sales reps with the content you need to demonstrate your thought leadership and differentiators. There needs to be mutual respect between sales and marketing because the buyer no longer cares who educates them they just care about being educated. And in most cases as the graphic above demonstrates they expect it to be both sales and marketing with a consistent story.
An outsourced sales and marketing campaign can help you run an integrated sales and marketing campaigns that has both callers and content marketing tactics keeping you in front of and top of mind with your customer.
Challenge #3 – Using automation technology correctly. With the advent of marketing automation platforms, Google Analytics, and CRMs, you can now define and implement a repeatable sales process that uses technology to manage and score the effort. The right technology stack provides complete transparency and accountability throughout your entire sales and marketing process. It also helps sales and marketing keep score together.
This isn’t astrodynamics. Just head out to any Little League or Soccer Field on a Saturday during a game and compare it to what happens during practice. During practice, the energy level and focus waxes and wanes. Put them on the field when they are accountable for a score and measured on the results and everything changes.
An outsourced sales and marketing company will have the experience and expertise to help you set the right benchmarks in your automation platforms and CRM immediately.
Summary – The line between sales and marketing is getting blurred
- Your buyer now wants to be educated digitally and by reps
- They want access to your thought leadership on their time and not yours
- Your buyer does not want to engage with sales until they are educated and ready to buy
- You need to demonstrate you understand their situation and pain before your prospect will engage with sales
Sales and marketing now need to work together for sale success. Modern sales and marketing operations means your entire team needs to educate buyers.
If you want to learn more about what gaps in your sales and marketing operations, we invite you to visit this page that address what gaps outsourced sales can help you cover in your sales and marketing operations
by Carol Springer | Nov 2, 2016
Digital marketers have an analytical issue when it comes to video performance on platforms like YouTube, Vimeo, or Wistia. How many times have you asked yourself this question – ”How many views means my video is successful?”
The “scorecard” that your video is rated on is the number of views. Unfortunately, doing an analysis on just “views” is not always the best way to track your brand’s progress on the goals you are trying to achieve. This is especially true if your goal to drive real sales opportunities’ into your closers pipe (which is our top priority as an outsourced sales and marketing company).
So instead of asking yourself the previous question, ask yourself – “Which KPIs should we be tracking to understand if our video campaign is successful moving deals into the pipe?”
Question #1: How Do I Identify My Primary Outsourced Sales Video Goals?
Marketers typically want video advertising campaigns to increase awareness about their product and influence online sales. While buyers no longer have a simple experience with your brand anymore thanks to product reviews, mobile engagements, social media, etc.—most marketers and salespeople agree their target audience fits into one of three categories: unfamiliar, on the fence, or ready to buy.
With each new campaign, it’s important to know where your audience lies in these three areas. Which of the three possible brand goals is your #1 priority?
Question #2: What are the KPIs for that marketing goal?
The next stage after identifying your goal is to take a closer look at the data that is being mined for each video.
Here is a breakdown of what KPI to analyze for each goal:
Awareness goal KPIs:
- Views
- Impressions
- Unique Users
Consideration goal KPIs:
- View-Through Rate
- Watch Time
Action Goal KPIs:
- Clicks
- Calls
- Signups
- Sales
Question #3: Where and How do I properly analyze my data for my videos?
Now that you have identified your primary goals and your KPIs for those goals, you now need to identify the tools that you going to use to help you become more data-driven as a marketer.
Depending on the platform, analytics usually comes with these video platforms, and spearheading the Big Data field with its extensive metrics and capture points is Google’s YouTube. Vimeo and Wistia have great metrics platforms to run reports on analysis, and even heat mapping for what part of the video the viewer engagement was highest. Google Analytics will help you measure clicks and conversions for sales KPIs.
You can also use other platforms proprietary to the video service to measure clicks and engagement if they are not being seeded with an Adwords campaign. But nothing is more valuable than correlating videos viewed to what is occurring in your opportunity pipeline.
Question #4: Now that I have done the marketing analysis, how to I correlate videos to sales analysis – deals hitting the pipe?
Now that you have identified the KPIs for your video campaigns and where and how to measure them, the next step in this exercise is to identify what impact is video having on my sales pipeline. This is where automation software like Pardot that integrates into a video platform like Wistia is critical (and one of the reasons we love a company that specializes in outsourced sales and marketing).
One of the key features of the combined Wistia and Pardot Integration is the ability to see what videos are:
- Producing the most conversions
- Drill into that videos individual performance
- Drill into how early it is driving that conversion
This level of analysis allows to you do three things:
- Identify what videos you should consider pushing harder into the market
- Identify what content you should create more of
- Identify what videos are predictive of buying that need to have their score increased in your lead scoring engine.
Gabriel Sales specializes in aligning our outsourced sales and marketing efforts around driving more sales qualified opportunities’ into our client’s sales funnels. We can help with refining your existing programs with content production workshops, we can launch a full blown engine for companies just getting started or we can run a turnkey pilot lead scoring and sales automation starter campaign to help you decide if lead scoring is right for you. To learn more about our philosophy, what we believe and who we can help we recommend checking out our About Us page.
by Glen Springer | Dec 23, 2015
A sales story not only is a tool to guide your prospects through the buying process but it is also a tool to keep your sales and marketing team aligned. This infographic outlines 4 simple steps to make a sales story effective and the 3 main reasons it is beneficial.
To learn more about a successful sales story and how to align sales and marketing, check out the following blogs or contact us.
A Successful Sales Script Starts with Building a Winning Sales Story
Advice from a Sales Outsourcing Company: How to Get Sales and Marketing on the Same Page
by gabriel_sales | Aug 26, 2015
If you would like to learn more about how we can help your B2B video efforts, please contact us.
by gabriel_sales | Aug 19, 2015
This is the second blog in our series outlining the steps we take to build a successful outsourcing lead generation strategy and the sales consulting options we provide in identifying the Ideal Customer Profile. We also hope to provide the appropriate steps that you may take if you have the sales bandwidth.
In the first blog of the series, we discussed the importance of the sales consulting step, and how critical is has been to our success as an outsourcing sales company. As a refresher, it provides the opportunity to find and target your potential prospects based on a number of metrics related to both the company, and the actual decision maker you are engaging with.
When we launch, the first step we advocate for as part of our initial sales consulting (especially with Professional Services and highly complex sales) is to apply Pareto’s Principal to your existing pipe. Also known as, the “law of the vital few,” or the 80:20 rule; it states that 80% of your revenue will be derived from 20% of your customer base. These are the ideal customers we want to go after. You can then score the customers based on the metrics outlined in the first blog, with a specific focus on
- Title and level of contact
- Functional area
- Annual revenue and number of employees
- Vertical market
We also suggest that you look at the prospects that you want to avoid, which means looking at your failures. Significant information can be gained from prospects that do not want to engage, or are not qualified. Who makes up the 80% of your customers that drive 20% of revenue? These areas are the two biggest drivers:
- Functional area
- Level of contact
When we identify trends here, as a basic principal, we avoid them at all costs and label them as WCP (Worst Customer Profile). Next a decision has to be made about what should and shouldn’t be replicated in future lead targeting.
You can’t properly understand who you are trying to target if you don’t have a good picture of the market that they operate and live in. To identify the markets most conducive to providing opportunities, not just leads, Gabriel Sales does a three-part approach:
- We take your internal Ideal Customer Profile and map it against our historical data to examine connect ratios. This helps us to determine how many calls it typically takes to get the decision maker. From this we can do a semi-accurate forecast of how often they will pick up the phone or open an email. This lets us determine the ease of reaching.
- We do a deep dive leveraging Hoovers and other Database Research Tools to match SIC codes to your existing ICP to determine the target market size based on the criteria, a decision maker count by vertical and determined ease of reach.
- You look at Social Media including Linked In, You Tube and Influential Blogs to do a preliminary landscape of ancillary tactics to determine Social Media Adoption.
Finally, we recommend that you do an honest assessment about how well-prepared and equipped you are to Sell Money and provide true Success Stories for your new targets.
It’s about selling to the prospects you are best equipped to service. Winning comes out of alignment. So, we suggest you ask yourself: where does this customer alignment meet existing sales and marketing alignment, and how can we capitalize on it, and win deals faster? This step will make your outsourcing lead generation or internal lead generation more efficient and effective, and your ability to qualify sales prospects and increase your pipe velocity will grow.
The bottom line is simple: an Ideal Customer Profile starts with the end in mind. It will drive sustainable and exponential returns to your business by helping you:
- Find deals faster
- Close greater volume and higher deal size
- Build a strong pipe to nurture for future deals
- Eliminate customers that are a waste of time
- Increase your profitability
- Create a focus that drives sales and marketing alignment
Other blogs we suggest checking out if all the above makes sense:
by gabriel_sales | Mar 20, 2014
This is the second half of a blog series on B2B content ideas to move your deal forward. For Part 1, click here.
2. Case studies/Testimonials
More and more, we are finding that engagement with content like case studies, reviews and testimonials is a prerequisite to purchase. In the B2C world, it is now almost second nature to check reviews before making a purchase (Yelp!, Rotten Tomatoes, Angie’s List, etc.). Search Engine Journal recently found that “nearly 63% of consumers indicate they are more likely to purchase from a site if it has product ratings and reviews.”
The behavioral impulse to check for social proof prior to purchase exists in the B2B world as well, and your buyers will appreciate you for providing them this type of content. Sometimes, hearing confirmation of your success from your customers is the final motivation needed for purchase, and your happy customers are generally more than willing to provide you with this type of content. While written testimonials and case studies work well, you may want to try a video or webcast format for increased engagement.
3. Demo videos
While not appropriate for every B2B solution, brief demo videos can be an extremely valuable sales asset. For more complex sales like enterprise software solutions, providing short videos that give overviews of the most important features or capabilities helps prospects both understand your solution better and visualize using the product themselves.
By keeping the demo videos short and relatively high level, you can create an incentive to ‘schedule a live/custom demo’ that goes more into depth. One thing to remember with demo videos is to keep the content focused on how you solve problems rather than a straight feature/benefit description. Especially for more complex technology sales, the technical jargon of feature/benefit selling can go over the head of some prospects without some grounding in day-to-day value.
While the right combination of content will vary from company to company, we have found these types of content to be effective in a variety of B2B contexts. For more on creating marketing content that achieves sales results, read our series titled, “7 Types of B2B Content for Ongoing Content Production.”
Feel free to contact us with any questions.
