by Glen Springer | Apr 27, 2012
Question: Why Does Sales Content and Marketing Automation Matter for B2B Sales and Sales for Small Business
Answer: If you don’t have it and your competitor does you will lose business!
The rules of B2B Sales have changed. Small Businesses can now compete against bigger budgets. With the new wave of B2B marketing tools available, you can:
- Watch how your prospects are educating themselves
- Understand their needs
- Forecast their interest
All with limited interaction directly with your best reps until the prospects is ready to buy!
No one ever wakes up thinking, “I can’t wait to get a sales call today!” Nobody really wants to be sold. Especially by a salesperson. Really, when was the last time you even answered an unidentified call at work, much less listened for more than 30 seconds when a sales rep made his elevator pitch unless they hit a hot button in the first 15 seconds. Would you take a second call if they did not offer you something of value first and some additional content at the end of that first call? The same is true for your prospects. That’s why they avoid your salespeople until the last possible minute.
While your customers don’t like being sold they still like buying. So instead they are educating themselves by accessing your publicly available information and connecting with peers online until they’ve narrowed down their options. In fact, SiriusDecisions estimates that the buyer’s journey is generally 70% complete by the time a sales person is contacted. Think about it. When was the last time you made a purchase without spending time researching on your own first. Poking around on Google and Bing. Checking out the companies website while you were on the phone with the cold caller if you were interested. If how the buyer buys has changed… have you looked at how you sell to see if its meeting the buyers mark? Is your sales team running to stand still.
The winning closer is no longer the rep that hunts but the one who consults with prospects to simplify their decision-making process based on a keen understanding of buyer interest and behavior. When a prospect finally reaches out, your sales rep had better understand everything there is to know about the buyer and be prepared to deliver value. Immediately. That’s why marketing automation and sales content is critical. If you don’t have B2B marketing tools and processes in place your competition will win the business.
Marketing Automation Leads Means Sales Readiness – its about giving your salesperson the ability to deliver the right content and the right message to the right person at the right time. And its about:
Giving your highest paid talent a prioritized list of who to contact next based on
- Behavioral data that summarizes prospect interests and intent
- Tools that alert your top talent when their hottest prospects are online and at their desks
- A library of content aligned to specific stages of the buying process that helps your rep build trust and rapport with the buyer
Your success as a marketer, business unit manager or small business owner depends on your ability to help the sales team sell. Ask yourself these questions:
- What if your competitors demand generation engine could tell your sales reps what each prospect is interested before and during the entire sales process?
- What if your competitor gave their sales reps tools so they could send the right content and track that content as the buyer was buying?
- What if your competitors delivery team blogged once a week with their thought leadership and points of view to help your their sales reps address objections?
Who is going to win that deal?
If any of the thought we are sharing hit a chord or to see if Sales and Marketing Outsourcing or some Sales and Marketing Process Consulting may be able to help you accelerate your B2B Demand Generation Engine please feel free to contact us for a free benchmark and 30 minute needs analysis.
Related Blog Posts:
Top 10 Strategies for B to B Demand Generation
How to Align Your Sales and Marketing Process
by gabriel_sales | Apr 26, 2012
Working Every Lead Critical in Business to Business Sales – Tip from Marketing Outsourced Company
As a business to business sales outsourced sales and marketing company we work at accelerating B2B sales for the Fortune 1000 and small businesses. The fundamental difference between the two types of companies is the volume of leads they can generate for their sales reps. As a small business we guarantee that you cannot compete against the big boys if you do not adopt the principal that you need to Work Every Lead. Adopting the philosophy that you need to “Work Every Lead” will guarantee that you maximize the sales pipeline from your leads and we can almost guarantee that the Fortune 1000 has a team that’s sole function is to qualify leads for their sales reps. This function is one major advantage a sales and marketing outsourced company can provide.
We also recommend that this team reports directly to the sales head or the small business owner. Often referred to as the demand generation team this group needs to be held responsible for sales qualified leads they put in the pipe. This group should leverage a marketing automation platform to keep both them and the sales reps accountable, to meet your companies hard revenue goals, and that all progress is communicated in a structured way.
Working every lead will ensure that your company is:
- Responsive: There are numerous studies that show that a quick response leads to higher conversion rates.
- Professional: A company that engages with a lead that does not turn into an opportunity can still gain from a prospect’s positive experience. These can lead to referrals, which are very powerful in today’s socially connected world.
- Learning: The sales demand generation team is now a great source of feedback to the demand generation teams on the effectiveness of programs.
- Efficient: This structure will ensure that your company gets the best ROI on your program dollars, when measured in pipe to spend, or a close to spend type metrics.
It’s up to the sales leader to be the champion of this process and to create the proper environment for this success. Ready to get started…feel free to contact us for a free benchmark and 30 minute needs analysis.
Related Blog Posts:
Top 10 Strategies for B to B Demand Generation
How to Align Your Sales and Marketing Process
by gabriel_sales | Apr 25, 2012
As a B2B outsourced sales company and B2B sales marketing company we have watched the typical sales cycle go through some radical gyrations over the past year. In some cases your buyers are now buying more quickly as they reach out just in time to make a decision after budget is approved, as they are quickly shortlisting and making a decision in less than 60 days. About 20% of your buyers (according to Sirius Decisions and what we have seen from our Marketing Automation Platform) are reaching out and essentially placing an order for smaller transactions. There are still buyers buying via relationships and you also have buyers that are taking a much longer time to research and explore their options prior to the making a decision and this extends the sales cycle. Bottom Line you have buyers that are now buying in a much less predictable and much more fractured way. This means you need to have a strong cold calling, strong inbound and strong content marketing program in place or you will lose between 10%-20% of the revenue you used to take for granted to a competitor that is selling to that particular buyer the way that buyer wants to buy. Below is a quick overview of the shortest path to meeting the needs of this now fractured market.
Marketing Automation Implementation
From our perspective as a B2B outsourced sales and B2B Sales Company the first step in being able to address these new challenges we all face is to strongly consider a Marketing Automation Software. A marketing automation solution brings significant advantages in terms of increasing the productivity of your sales demand generation across a wide variety of buying cycles. Marketer can now generate, score and nurture leads to a level that was not possible just a few years ago and in some cases for smaller businesses we are able to help implement solutions with some of our proprietary tools that allows you to eliminate marketing as a function and put these demand generation tools into the hands of your sales reps for decreased costs and increased productivity.
In fact the number one reason we have seen companies fail to convert these breakthrough technologies into success is because they are not letting sales professionals drive the implementation of the solution. The reason that many companies fail to exploit their demand generation success is that they fail to implement the key events of a sales persons proven sales process into their demand generation process.
Lead Scoring
Probably the biggest efficiency gain you can get from a marketing automation tool is its ability to score leads so your sales reps are focusing their phone time on the buyers most likely to buy. The lead scoring and nurturing features of these tools ensure that your company can manage the top of the funnel through to marketing qualified leads (MQL) with limited interaction with the sales reps. Marketing Automation Software allows you to observe and score the content your prospects are digesting online and in email follow ups. Once a lead has indicated (through the way they have navigated your content and digested information) that they are ready to buy your lead generation reps can prioritize that lead and take them through the final qualification steps with some human contact to move them to a Sales Qualified Lead (SQL) and into the pipeline.
Dedicated Demand Gen Team
The key to achieving a process that puts more Sales Qualified Leads into your sales reps pipe is to create a dedicated team that takes the MQLs and converts them to SQLs. Many companies try to short cycle this by having the sales teams do this job. This does lead to pipeline and closed business this quarter but this has a cost to the long term value of your pipe. You will land the 20% that are buying quickly but what happens to the rest of your revenue? It goes away and the reason for this is simple; sales people will take the shortest route to solving their needs and will cherry pick the good leads and leave the others. Why spend thousands on demand generation programs, only to have your company waste the investment, due to lack of rigor?
If you would like to learn more about how a sales marketing company can help you align your inbound and outbound efforts for a fatter pipe and more closed revenue please feel free to CONTACT US for a free initial strategy conversation.
If you are having cultural issues between sales and marketing we suggest you check out B to B Demand Generation Requires Sales and Marketing Alignment. You can also checkout our Free White Paper on 10 Tips and What to Avoid to Sell Smarter and Faster.
by Glen Springer | Apr 16, 2012
As an outsourced sales and marketing company we handle inbound leads and also produce outbound leads with integrated campaigns. Often when we first engage with a company that is looking for more sales ready B2B leads we discover that there is not alignment, or in some cases, has never been a discussion, about what make a lead sales ready. This blog is just a quick overview of some of the lessons we have learned as an outsourced sales and marketing company producing B2B leads for technology, SaaS and professional services firms.
Start with a Definition of What Makes a B2B Lead Sales Ready – As an outsourced sales and marketing firm we have the opportunity and the advantage of working with multiple companies and we find that about 50% of the time your sales team, your marketing team and your management may all have different view of what they think makes a lead sales ready. No two companies will have the same criteria so we recommend that you get your team together so there is at least general consistency in when it make sense to transition leads to your sales reps (generally your most expensive resource) to that their time is as productive as possible. As and outsourced B2B lead generation company here are the questions we like to ask of ourselves internally before we transistion a lead to a customer:
- Do you have a basic understanding their Need/Pain
- What is the Potential Opportunity identified and have we been able to match it to a product or solution? product matched to pain
- What is the timeline for making a decision?
- Do we know who all the stakeholders are?
- Do they have budget or do we know how they will champion a path to funding and/or getting budget? Initial Budget defined or path to budget
- Is their a specific challenge or compelling event that make them interested in purchasing the solution? (Nice to haves are now tougher to close)
- Are all the decision makers identified and how will the decision made? Is it one person, a committee? Who are the gate keepers?
Outbound B2B Lead Generation Needs to Be Smart to Ensure ROI so Start with an Ideal Customer Profile – In a blog post several months back we discussed the ROI of cold calling. In that blog we discussed when as an outsourced B2B lead generation company we felt outbound calling made sense so we won’t go through those number again here. We just want to reiterate here that when you are going to execute an integrated email and cold calling campaign you need to start with an Ideal Customer Profile to maximize your investment. We wrote several blogs on this topic which we invite you to visit for more details and as a quick recap here are some of the crtierea we recommend your team explores before launching an outbound campaign:
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.
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
Finally with the increased maturity of different database companies and even our own internal databases if you are a technology company and your solution works better with some technologies than others it is now possible to segment lists based on your targets existing technical infrastructure. If this is a possible you should jump on this competitive advantage.
Inbound Inquires are not necessarily Sales Ready Leads – Gabriel Sales has been doing some really interesting work over the past 6 months integrating Content Marketing, Marketing Automation and Telesales Account Profiling and Inside Sales. As part of this integration we have benchmarked several types of sales and over the course of the first quarter of 2012 we have generally found across verticals and solution types that between 15-20% of leads generated from SEO and Pay-Per Click are sales ready and that the number is hold steady with leads generated by email campaigns as well. That means that about 1 in 5 leads are actually ready for your Sales Reps to work. What does this means for your business? You can’t afford to pass these leads to sales reps and you also can’t afford to send them to sales because they will either be abandoned or you will be wasting too much time educating customers not ready to buy. We have three recommendations here:
Follow Up with Every Lead within 24 hours – If someone is ready to engage you will be first in line. But follow up with an inside reps whose job it is to profile that account. Pass the Sales Ready leads up the food chain and…
Be Ready to Offer those Not Ready to Buy More Educational Content – Have at least a couple of blog posts, a white paper or a webcast ready to offer your customer if there not ready to engage right now.
Consider a Marketing Automation Software – Depending on the size and volume of your database and the amount of sales content you have already produced it may make sense to invest the 15K to 30K it would take to automate your lead nurturing process. For more detailed ROI metrics feel free to pick up a copy of our White Paper – Sell Smarter, Sell Faster. If you are not familiar with Marketing Automation check out this quick 5 minute demo from one of our partners Pardot for a quick overview.
If you have any questions or feel like a conversation makes sense to learn how Gabriel Sales can help you pull together a more effective demand generation program whether you are mid cycle or building a new effort feel free to CONTACT US.
For a quick look at what a B2B demand generation engine looks like to get a sense if you could benefit from some quick sales and marketing automation process consulting we invite to CLICK HERE you to check out our short 4 minute video.
by Glen Springer | Apr 11, 2012
Why Are My Sales Flat?
In Part 1 of this little snapshot of facts and figures we discussed the pillars of sales and marketing alignment and shared some facts and figures discussing the challenges of implementing a marketing automation platform. In Part 2 we discussed, from our vantage point of providing you with outsourced sales and marketing insights, why we feel like your leadership buy in is important to getting a sales process off the ground that sells to the buyer the way the buyer wants to buy.
As an outsourced sales and marketing company it’s our job to stay on top of the latest research data so you can stay focused on your business. What follows are some facts an figures about the current state of sales and marketing alignment:
According to Marketing Sherpas 2011 State of B2B Demand Generation report:
- 80% of leads that are turned over to sales people are raw leads.
- Of these leads 77% are long term leads (future opportunities) often ignored by sales people (which makes sense because its their job to transact this quarter).
- 80% of marketing leads consequentially wind up lost, ignored or discarded
- 73% of companies have no process for re-engaging or nurturing leads after sales. (e.g. no nurturing process).
What all this means is that about 80% of the leads marketing turns over to sales reps are not qualified. The buyers is not ready to buy yet. So this means that as much as 60% t0 70% of your companies potential revenue is being squandered.
What Can Your Company do to Turn this Around Immediately
With the right resources you don’t necessarily need an outsourced sales and marketing solution long term. In our White Paper Sell Faster and Sell Smarter 12 Tips you can implement immediately to turn around your B2B Demand Generation Team today we get into some detailed tactics. What follows below are some high level approaches we advocate exploring to start to shift your culture now.
Aligning Sales and Marketing – Best in Class companies know that both Sales and Marketing must get on the same page.
• A Mutual Definition of a “Lead” – agreed upon by Marketing and Sales
• Service Level Agreement (SLA) – Sales commits to timely follow up and closes the loop on every Marketing Generated Lead, agrees to reject unqualified leads back to marketing for nurturing
• Measure – Ongoing communication between both parties to evaluate progress toward goals and gaps in the process
Prompt Follow Up – Forrester says 46% of marketers at firms with mature lead management processes have sales teams that follow up on more than 75% of marketing-generated leads. As a sales outsourcing organization we staff sales account profilers and B2B lead profilers to support our own internal sales reps and your sales reps
Higher Conversion Rates –Gartner says when greater integration is accomplished between marketing and sales, conversion rates for leads (defined as earning the designation as qualified and/or committed to the sales pipeline) can increase by as much as 50%. We have our B2B lead profilers follow up with all leads to determine their readiness in a friendly and customer service oriented way.
Why is all this critical. Because bottom line you end up with More closed deals – CSO Insights says – Companies with mature, defined lead generation and management practices have 7% higher sales win rate.
Implement a Marketing Automation Platform and take some of the pressure off your sales team. You can nurture your not ready to buy customers and ensure that when they do you are the first in line. If you have not checked out what these platforms can do here is a quick overview from Pardot 5 Minute Overview of Marketing Automation. You can also start to leverage your content consumption to determine if the buyer is ready to buy by scoring that consumption, which a marketing automation platform allows you to do. Here is a quick sample.
To see if an outsourced sales and marketing solution or sales and marketing sales process consulting engagement may be able to help you accelerate your ability to take advantage of the current competitive advantages that technology and a quick cultural shift can provide please feel free to contact us for a quick consultative call.
We also invite you to visit our knowledge centers for more detailed tips:
Tactics to Lift or Launch B to B Demand Gen
New Product Launch Sales and Marketing Tactics
Digital Content Strategies to Give Marketing a “Sales Quota”
Sales Strategies for Tech, Software and SaaS Sales
Sales Strategies for the Professional Service Sale
by Glen Springer | Apr 8, 2012
You may have implemented Marketing Automation But Is Your Culture Ready for a Sales and Marketing “Process” Driven Culture?
In Part 1 of this series we discussed why as a B2B outsourced company we felt that implementing a sales and technology stack focused on marketing automation is only the start of transforming your organization. In that blog we share what an ideal database technology stack looks like for marketing and sales. In that blog we also posited the following four pillars:
- Sales Content and Marketing Content that sells to the buyer the way they want to buy.
- Training your sales in this new approach
- Giving Sales a Shared Sales Quota
- Implementing the sales and marketing technology stack
All four pillars are ultimately process driven where the results need to anchored in data requiring the need for a marketing automation platform.
If you examine these pillars they point to the following game changers for sales and marketing organizations:
- You can no longer function in silos when you create content. Sales needs to talk to marketing and marketing needs to talk to sales.
- You can no longer measure your success or failure in silos so your data needs to be integrated.
- We all give lip service to being customer centric but you can no longer be successful unles you focus all your attention respecting where your customer is in their buying cycle or you will lose business to your competitors.
Unless you are launching your sales and marketing organization from scratch all the points above may require a cultural shift:
- You can’t expect bag carrying sales reps and executives understand the new paradigm because they are focused on growing revenue and closing deals this quarter.
- You can’t expect a marketing organization to embrace having their B2B demand generation efforts be measured on closed business
- With the buyers calling the shots now your marketing team may need to listen to the “Voice of the Sales Force” More than they are comfortable with.
- Your executive team may need to be convinced that these endeavors are both a marathon and a sprint.
So ultimately if you look at the challenges your organization faces in aligning sales and marketing — the challenge you may face is no different from the challenges most organizations face – you need to start with commitment to a “process” driven culture.
To make this shift ultimately starts with a shift in culture. And the cultural shift needs to start from the top down. You either believe that the buyer now controls the sales process or you don’t. If you do believe the buyer controls the process you need to decide if your organization willing to:
- Evaluate both teams and bring in talent that understand both the technology and processes so you can shift your culture?
- Genuinely create an approach that puts the customer at the center of your process which starts with listening to the Voice of the Salesforce since they are closest to the customer?
- Is your company convinced that long term success that you need to committ to nuturing and educating customers not ready to buy?
The final blog in this series will give you some current trends that you can explore internally to see if your company is throwing B2B Marketing and Lead Gen Budget down the drain. Are you losing because you will not commit.
If any of the facts and figures we are sharing hit a chord or to see if Outsourcing or some Sales and Marketing Process Consulting may be able to help you accelerate your B2B Demand Generation Engine please feel free to contact us for a free benchmark and 30 minute needs analysis.
Related Blog Posts:
Top 10 Strategies for B to B Demand Generation
How to Align Your Sales and Marketing Process
