Strategy and Execution Archives

Ten Strategies to Increase Professional Service Sales in 2016 – Sales Tips for Professional Service Firms

by Glen Springer | Sep 27, 2011

Industry Intelligence from First Research, a division of Hoover’s (a D&B company), sees professional services industry growing at 2X plus of the rest of the economy through 2016. As an outsourcing sales company, we have seen this momentum build in the second half of 2015 and we are bullish on the potential for Professional Service Sales in 2016.

If you are responsible for growing your practice and have not already started lead generation and sales strategy planning for the coming year, the time to start is now. Below are some of the recommendations we have to improve your sales or inform a sales outsourcing strategy (specifically for professional service firms) in the coming year.

Understand who your best customers are. To do this, you can build an Ideal Customer Profile. Ask yourself, what companies eventually produce annuities and are the stickiest after the initial engagement? What clients can be serviced without monopolizing your high-end resources?
Focus on targeting the right markets. The greatest impact you can have on your pipe is investing in putting in the right type of leads to start with. Take the insights you gain from building an Ideal Customer Profile and take action.
Mine your Dead Database. Sales cycles are getting longer. If you have invested time and energy building a relationship with a potential customer in the past, make an effort to reach out to that prospect again. As an outsourcing lead generation company, we have a specific “Wake the Dead” campaign that allows us to reach out to and attempt to re-engage as many as 1000 “dead leads” in a little over 3 weeks. For several of our clients, we have seen half our deals come from prospects we wrote off as dead in the first half of 2016.
Establish Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). Establish metrics that measure the velocity of your pipe. What content moves deals? What conversations move deals forward? What key events (both internal and external) move deals forward?
Examine your Sales Process. Once you have established your KPIs, look at what works in your sales process and increase your focus there; get rid of what is not working and automate whatever you can.
Digitize, Digitize, Digitize. If you give a speech, make a presentation or hear the same objection more than once a quarter create a podcast, record a webinar or write a blog about it. Then give it to a less costly resource to push into the market for you. Odds are that if one prospect finds it valuable, so will another 100 prospects. There is no excuse not to share your expertise, tools have come down in price and the average buyer now looks at 12 pieces of content before making a purchase decision. Make it easy for your buyer to buy.
Look at marketing automation software. If you make contact with someone not ready to buy (e.g. make initial contact when they are still educating themselves), keep your first mover advantage and stay top of mind. Subscriptions to these products dropped dramatically in 2011. An investment in nurturing your leads the first half of the year can pay huge dividends the second half of the year.
Sell money. Create a solid ROI calculator. If your customer gives you $100, when will you return that $100? When will you return $120? When will your return $200? What are the topline impacts of a relationship with you, and what is the cost of your client waiting a year to do business with you?
Make sure your message is consistent. Sales and Marketing Alignment is critical to your success in a professional services sale. Buying professional services often requires selling intangibles. This increases the risk for the buyer, so they are looking for a reason to say no. Don’t give them one.
Focus on your core competency. Day to day details of sales operations and marketing operations can be taxing and dilute focus. Digital content, marketing automation, webcasting, SEO tools and Social Media, are changing the way buyers buy. 2011 introduced a host of sales and marketing technologies that can be leveraged for effectiveness. Create a sales strategy and or lead generation strategy and consider partnering to augment capability and increase capacity, to grow your sales in the coming year.

As a top professional service sales outsourcing company, we have the expertise and experience to help you intelligently and methodically build a sales machine that scales and makes your revenues increase. Contact us for a free consultation to see what we can do to improve your sales performance and pipeline velocity in 2012.

Gym Jones Salvation Site

by gabriel_sales | Sep 15, 2011

A few weeks ago I was reading a forum thread on the Gym Jones Salvation Site, an excellent resource for training and stimulating intelligent discussion. The first post in the thread contained a list taken from a Prestressed Concrete Design Handbook, and was so thought provoking that I decided to share it with the inside sales and lead generation team here at Gabriel Sales.

Here is the list:

1. You cannot have everything.
2. You cannot have something for nothing.
3. It is never too late.
4. There is no progress without considered risk.
5. The proof of the pudding is in the eating.
6. Simplicity is always an advantage, but beware of oversimplification.
7. Do not generalize, but rather qualify the specific circumstances.
8. The important thing is how good, not how cheap, a product is.
9. We live and learn.
10. There is nothing completely new.

I have confidence this list can be applied to personal relationships, athletics and anywhere else you invest your time but for me, a Sales Executive tasked with managing outsourced sales and outsourced lead generation team helping drive growth and profitability for companies, the first connection that I personally made applied to sales strategy and accountability. Some of the questions that came to my mind about how I can improve results were:

Is this sales team spreading itself to thin?
Are we focused on improving the right areas of the sales process?
- Lead sourcing and lead generation, Sales Qualifying, Sales Engagement, Closing
Where can the lead generation team become more efficient?
- Message, Call Volume
What are the real sales objections that my process is raising?
- Technical, Business
Are we staying ahead of the competition?
- Sales content strong enough

The great thing about what we do here at Gabriel Sales is that I have real time data and tools to provide sales insights to answers to these questions. We are able to take these insights and create sales and sales content strategies about how to most effectively tweak the sales messages and automate the process with digital content to move forward.

It struck me how much we treat our job like training for sport, the results can be recorded, measured and adjusted based on individual needs to move you closer to your goals. In sports you have aerobic, anaerobic, nutrition and rest. One slips and it all slips. In sales execution it’s lead generation, sales qualifying, sales engagement and closing. In sales strategy it’s targeting, sales content, sales message and sales execution. We treat sales as a sport so aligning sales and marketing strategy is anything but guess work. You can improve what you measure and focus on the gaps. All you need to do is invest some time looking at the data, adjusting strategy, and pushing through peaks and valleys. This gives you the ability to compete at your peak when race day comes.

Nick Fagan – Director of Sales and Account Management

Selling Money – Make It Simple for Your Champion

by Glen Springer | Aug 16, 2011

Selling money and how outsourcing sales can provide useful leverage

Because we are an outsourcing sales organization for technology, professional services and complex sales, we have to do our job with the most efficiency and effectiveness possible; so, it is critical that we are exceptional in selling money early and fast. We do this by creating a clear ROI Value Statement. This is key if you are committed to a repeatable and scalable sales process. As an outsourcing sales company, we are all about sales process. When you get this right it allows you to leverage your outsourcing sales team to do five things simultaneously:

Qualify the business opportunity with the technical buyer and get the technical buyer to involve the business buyer in the decision at the beginning of the sales process.
You can do this without involving your team’s sales engineer or the top professional service producers.
Quickly figure out if the technical buyer has the juice to get budget if no budget exists.
Set the precedent that access to your company’s senior talent (especially with professional services) will be limited until you are talking about transacting.
Set the expectation that until you know there is budget or the potential budget available, you won’t go into significant technical discussions.

The formula is simple:

My company /service will create an X (month, quarter, year) program that over the life of that program will produce and estimated $X dollars (go for the big deal upfront).
This will mean an estimated % increase in profitability or % decrease in cost.

This part of the formula and ROI value statement can be used early in the sales cycle. It saves both parties time. The prospect is either interested in the return or they are not. If they are interested, you can then offer to do a more detailed analysis of their specific return after you understand their specific needs. After doing that scoping, you will add the following:

Over the course of the program we will drive:

– Time period 1 $X

– Time period 2 $X

– Time period 3 $X

– Year 4 ~ $ 1,935,000

Cost of delay of 1 quarter would be $X (which would require more detailed analysis)
Cost of delay of 1 year would $X (which would require more detailed analysis)

In addition to shortening the sales cycle and getting deals that are going nowhere out of the pipe, the ROI value statement also has the following ancillary benefits downstream.

Generally, you will get a meeting with the Business Buyer early in the sales process
Demonstrates that your company’s senior talent is valuable. This builds credibility and value
Expectation that you expect full boat on the deal
Allows you to leverage digital content in parallel to do the technical qualification
If there is not already allocated budget, it gets the budget allocation process started at the start of your sales cycle to increase your sales pipeline velocity by months or quarters (depending your sales cycle).

How to Build a Winning Ideal Customer Profile

by gabriel_sales | Jul 27, 2011

This blog outlines the steps we take to build a successful outsourcing lead generation strategy and the sales consulting options we provide, as well as the steps you may be able to take on your own if you have the sales bandwidth.

In What is an Ideal Customer Profile we talked about why the sales consulting step is critical to our success as an outsourcing sales company. To recap – It allows us to find and target your potential customers based on a number of hard criteria related to both the company and the specific decision maker type.

During launch, the first step we generally advocate as part of our initial sales consulting (especially when selling Professional Services or launching lead generation for a highly complex sale) is to apply Pareto’s Principal to your existing customer list. Also know as ‘the law of the vital few”, or the 80:20 rule, it states that 80% of your revenue is going to come from 20% of your customers. These are the customers we want to go after. You can then score the customers based on the hard criteria discussed in What is an Ideal Customer Profile with a specific focus on

Title and Level of Contact
Functional Area
Annual Revenue and Number of Employees
Vertical Market

We also recommend that you look at the customers that you don’t want, which means looking at your failures. Who makes up the 80% of your customers who are driving 20% of your revenue? Here we recommend that you look at:

Functional Area
Level of Contact

If there is a trend here, as an outsourcing sales and outsourcing lead generation company, we will avoid them like the plague and label them WCP (Worst Customer Profile). You then make a decision about what you want to replicate and don’t want to replicate when you do your new lead targeting.

If you are starting from scratch with no history you need to start making intelligent guesses. We recommend that you start with determining what percentage of someones budget your solution would qualify for. You then need to target companies that will produce large enough size revenue deals to cover the costs of sales and marketing and determine who in that company will own the P&L for your product or service.

The second step is to understand the size and scope of the market to see where the biggest opportunity is. Gabriel Sales we recommend the following 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 the will to actually 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 of your existing ICP to determine the target market size based on the hard criteria and get a hard 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.

The third step (and the one often skipped) that we recommend is an honest assessment of where you are best equipped to Sell Money and provide Success Stories for these new targets. Essentially it’s about selling to the customers you are better equipped to service than anyone else. Where there is alignment is where you will win. So, ask yourself where does this customer alignment meet existing sales and marketing alignment too, so I can win and the customer can win faster. (Both of these tactics are detailed in other blogs). This step will make your outsourcing lead generation or internal lead generation more effective. It will also accelerate your ability to sales qualify and increase your pipe velocity.

Bottom line is that an Ideal Customer Profile is (in the words of Steven Covey) starting with the end in mind. It will drive sustained and exponential returns by helping you to:

Find deals faster
Close higher volume and higher deal size
Build a strong pipe to nurture for future deals
Eliminate customers that do not scale or take too much time to service
Increase your profitability
Create a focus that drives sales and marketing alignment

Other blogs we suggest checking out if all of the above makes sense:

What is an Ideal Customer Profile

Selling Money -ROI Statement Early

A Successful Sales Script Starts with Building a Winning Sales Story

What is an Ideal Customer Profile?

by gabriel_sales | Jul 8, 2011

This is part one of a two part series that explains how being strategic in planning how you target customers will produce significantly better results on the back end. Part two can be found here,How to Build a Winning Ideal Customer Profile.

An Ideal Customer Profile is a process for identifying what customers you should be targeting to get the best return from your sales lead generation efforts. As an outsourcing sales organization this is one of the key areas we focus on when providing our initial sales consulting during the launch of a client. We believe this aspect of the sales process deserves careful attention because what goes into the sales funnel is going to have a huge impact on what comes out of the funnel. It is also the critical first step in building an aligned sales and marketing effort, so you can create a sales machine.

Ultimately, an Ideal Customer Profile should allow you to find and target your potential customers based on a number of hard criteria related to both the company and the specific decision maker:

Annual revenue of the company
Number of employees
Level of Contact – C-level, senior Manager, middle manager
Functional Area – business Area, technical Area
Title
Revenue Responsibility – budget maker or budget spender
Geography – global, national, local
Technology Adopted – in some cases knowing what ERP, CRM, and if they have virtualized may be critical
Their Clients – e.g. are they doing business with a Procter and Gamble, Federal government, education (local gov.) Walmart, Intel, EMC etc.

In addition, there well could be some softer qualitative criteria:

Business Pain/Need
Vertical Industry Trend – established or in transition, growth or decline
Competitive – large competitors or a volume of competitors
Psychographics – company culture, leadership style, corporate values

It is also important to know who you don’t want to sell to:

Decision makers whose jobs could be threatened
Internal Support Functions – for example, if you are selling data analytics you may want to avoid MR groups, or if you are selling operational efficiency services you may want to stay away from operations managers and start with supply chain directors

The purpose of this type of hard and soft segmentation is to establish clear, hard criteria that can be leveraged across your sales and marketing machine to:

Purchase direct dial contacts for cold calling
Purchase direct mail and Electronic direct mail contact information
Filter leads from publishers
Leverage for a “Cost Per Click Campaign” like Google Adwords
Decide where to place your online advertising budget
Instruct your social media outreach program

We realize this can look like a daunting task. But, as an outsourcing sales organization with 10 years of data we can guarantee that if you give this the attention it deserves upfront, you will see significant returns within 6 -12 months. You will see exponential returns in months 12-18 when your first wave of nurturing deals start to fall out of your pipe as closed deals.

For additional information on how to build and Ideal Customer Profile, we recommend you check out our companion piece entitled, interestingly enough, How to Create an Ideal Customer Profile.

Sales and Marketing Alignment

by gabriel_sales | May 24, 2011

As an outsourcing sales company, outsourcing lead generation company, a sales strategy consulting and a digital sales marketing execution company, we have a great deal of conversations with existing and potential clients about what sales and marketing alignment mean. For Gabriel Sales it means that you have a sales machine where your team is focused on closing business. That means:

Marketing is focused on putting leads in the pipe that will close
Marketing drives deals forward with the right sales collateral at the right time.
Sales provides marketing with the insights they need
Marketing provides “Sales Collateral”, that moves deals through specific stages of the pipe
Sales will actually use the collateral
Sales trusts marketing to do its job to nurture deals that are not yet ready to buy

The first step in building Sales and Marketing alignment is to agree on your Ideal Customer Profile.

The second step is to agree on definitions for early stage leads. You need to do this so you can build a lead generation machine that matches the buyers readiness to buy with the expectations of your sales team. This way they will understand how much time, effort and money should be invested. To do this you need to clearly define your lead generations and lead qualification stages.

The following are quick definitions that Gabriel Sales uses:

Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL) – A lead that has accepted information and is open to understanding what you have to offer. They have registered for an event, or engaged in conversation with a telemarketer and indicated an openness to be contacted again.

MQL Hot – They are actively digesting your content. They have registered for and attended a webcast. They are opening multiple pieces of digital content. They are asking your telemarketer buying questions.

Sales Accepted Leads (SAL) – There is a fit between the customer’s pains or needs and your product or solution. It makes sense to invest sales resource time to do some initial discovery. A telemarketer can identify this fit by asking some pain questions and then setting an appointment. A marketer can do this by noticing a shift in the content they are absorbing. Are they moving from digesting digital sales content that is educational to digesting digital content that is verifying content? Are they moving from opening emails onto white papers, case studies, testimonials or your blog? (This is why an investment in marketing automation software like Marketo or Pardot becomes critical).

Sales Qualified Lead (SQL) – Your inside rep has established the decision making process, budget and/or path to budget and confirmed the need, which includes some combination of the following:

Company Profiled as to:

Vertical
Public or Private
Annual Revenues
Spend in Solution Area
Strategic Initiatives
Contact(s) title and role(s) known
Basic understanding of need/pain
Spoken to lead several times
Potential opportunity identified- product matched to pain
Timeline identified 3-12 months (depending on sales cycle
Stakeholders identified)
Initial compelling event identified that drives the timeline
Decision makers identified
Agreed to meeting with “Senior Sales” or “Executives” and a next step beyond that meeting (even if that next step is a yes or no on moving forward)

Nurture – Not yet ready to buy. Have expressed interest, but have not shown an interest in moving beyond Sales Accepted Lead. In some studies and across several of our clients we are seeing as many as 77% of our deals coming from the pipe a year after we have made first contact. This requires we stay in touch with digital content and an occasional voice mail on a sustained and consistent basis.

Once you have agreed on the definitions it is much easier to give your marketing team a sales quota by evaluating their tactics and giving each tactic both a primary and secondary function in building sales momentum.