by Glen Springer | Jan 25, 2017
As an outsource sales and marketing company we are frequently asked what is the role of blogging in developing leads.
First it’s important to understand that when you outsource sales digital content, it’s critical to helping develop leads because according to a recent survey of 1200 buyers 85% of most organizations now prefer to learn about new products and solutions through digital education before engaging with a sale rep. So when you outsource sales, its important that you make it easy for the buyer to move through their buying process with digital content. Here is the framework we use to help clients create that content:
Checklists will support outsource sales and marketing
Blogs can be used to support an outsource sales and marketing lead generation to create quick but effective content for awareness campaigns. As you create these blogs, think about the covers of magazines when you go through the checkout line when you are grocery shopping. Lists grab attention and peak interest.
How to Blogs will help your outsource sales team prove thought leadership
When we engage with companies in outsource sales and marketing to generate leads we often find that companies underestimate how much thought leadership they possess. Even something as simple as “How to Solve a Problem” will capture attention and help you generate that initial lead. Once again, think about that checkout line.
FAQ Blogs will help save time in sales process for your outsource sales team
When you outsource sales your outsource sales reps will often get the same question over and over again. We recommend that you keep a list of these frequently asked sales questions and use them to write short blogs so they can be leveraged as part of your outsource sales and marketing process.
Thought Leadership Blogs will help you introduce your specific thought leaders to the buyers
Finally, we really love to interview our outsource sales and marketing client’s executives for them to explain the business value of the solution or the technical value of the solution to their peers at the company we are selling to. We then create blogs with an embed a headshot video and then we enhance that headshot video with some additional information to turn it into a rich piece of content that details how the solution can solve a problem is a specific area. This allows your outsource sales team to build trust without needing to involve senior resources too early in the sales process.
Gabriel Sales helps companies transform their sales and marketing programs to generate more leads in this new buyer driven landscape. To learn more about our philosophy and approach to supplying an outsourcing sales team we invite you to read more about us here.
by Glen Springer | Jan 2, 2017
As an outsource sales and marketing company we speak to many small business owners that are struggling to increase the efficiency of their sale and marketing processes. It’s understandable that some small businesses that have been selling for years can be a little anxious with keeping up with modern sales and marketing operations and the advances in online business models and digital marketing. And according to a recent survey of 1200 buyers 85% of most organizations now prefer to make all are part of their purchase decision through digital channels. But it’s important to note that 75% of those buyers will not make a purchase decision without engaging with a sales rep at the end of the buying process.
As an outsource sales and marketing company we help companies address these challenges by helping companies build digitally integrated sales and marketing sales/buyer processes. When it comes to empowering companies with their outsource sales and marketing efforts we focus on four core digital areas:
Creating enough content to support the buyer journey and the outsource sales and marketing process
We help companies to create digital content that supports their sales process at each stage of the buying process.
We look at creating content for four different stages:
- Creating content to share educational facts and information that helps them start to frame their problem and the challenges they will need to address
- Content that helps buyers realize that we understand their problems
- Content that frames how we help them to solve the problem
- Finally content that discusses how the problem was solved and the business results you can gain from solving that problem
We provide our Outsource Sales and Marketing clients with the content management tools to make it easy for buyers to self-educate.
Once you have your content created it’s important that you make it easy for your buyers to access that content. Getting your content on the web is only the first step. In today’s digital media age you also need to make it easy for buyer to self-discover information about your solution easy and simple. So we have created a simple to manage tool called Digital Demand Center™ that makes it easy to organize all 4 stages of your content on one microsite.
Organizing your content this way allows your buyer that is hungry for self education to go through all states of their buying process to solve one specific problem easy and simple. It also gives buyers that prefer one format over another (video, blog articles or downloadable assets) to educate themselves the way they prefer.
Allow your outsource sales team to access that digital conversation
The final step in the process is leveraging a marketing automation platform to:
- Track the buyers engagement with your content
- Score buyers based on what content they are consuming (the later the buying stage the higher the score)
- Notifying your outsource sales team when the buyer reaches a Sales Ready Lead Score
Embracing a digital workflow, scoring leads and sharing that information is not a replacement for sales – it’s a way to free up more of their time to focus on revenue-generating activities.
These digital tools are a way to boost the performance of your outsource sales team.
To learn about how Gabriel Sales can work with you to outsource sales and marketing please visit our outsource sales and marketing services page.
by Glen Springer | Dec 30, 2016
Here are three habits you should expect from and outsourcing sales and marketing team. But first lets define a habit. A habit (or wont) is a routine of behavior that is repeated regularly and tends to occur subconsciously. … Habitual behavior often goes unnoticed in persons exhibiting it, because a person does not need to engage in self-analysis when undertaking routine tasks. Habits are sometimes compulsory.
If you are working with an outsourcing sales team you can often predict their success in lead generation, prospecting and the development of real sales opportunities based on the habits embedded in the culture of the organization. In fact having these habits embedded in the culture if they do not exist in your culture can be one of the key advantages of working with an outsourcing sales team.
Here are the habits we believe you should expect from a sales outsourcing team:
Weekly Meetings to Discuss Sales Pipeline
Your sales outsourcing meeting should meet with you weekly to discuss the number of deals moving through the pipe and entering your sales pipeline:
- Highlights of the best successes of the weekly efforts
- What new leads have moved forward into the pipe
- What new leads have entered the pipe
And your team should be prepared to share the following with your outsourcing sales team:
- What deals have closed
- What deals have fallen out of the pipe
You and your sales outsourcing partner should also have a clear scorecard they are working towards on a weekly, monthly and quarterly basis that tracks all these goals.
This habit aligns both you and your outsourcing sales team around the most important goal of consistent deal flow because pipeline focus drives production for everyone.
Following Up with Inbound Leads Immediately
In this age of digital education 85% percent of buyers research multiple vendors when they have a business problem they are trying to solve. And the average amount of inbound inquiries they submit when they finally short list the companies they are interested in ranges from three to five..
You have a distinct advantage when you get back to those inbound leads immediately. Especially if you are a small business competing against larger companies (since you are already at a disadvantage with headcount) and need to demonstrate that your size will not impact the responsiveness the buyer can expect. In fact the ability of a sales outsourcing team to provide you with this responsiveness is a nice advantage a sales outsourcing team can provide.
Daily Use of the CRM by your Outsourcing Sales Team
Your sales outsourcing team should be active users of the CRM. If your sales outsourcing team is prospecting you should expect every call to be recorded even if there is no connection. If there is a connection you should expect the results of the calls to be recorded regardless if that call moves forward with a next step or not. This habit ensure that your sales outsourcing team remains accountable on a daily basis for moving deals through the pipe and ensure you have:
- The data you need to forecast and make projections accurately
- Have the visibility you need to coach your outsourcing team on:
- Where to focus their prospecting
- How to overcome objections
- And evaluate what deals they should focus to develop real opportunities
As a company you should also be committed to using the CRM on a daily basis. This is critical because it will help if you need to pass a lead back to your sales outsourcing team for further development.
Gabriel Sales takes a methodical approach to building sales outsourcing teams and marketing programs. To learn more about our philosophy and approach we invite you to check out our outsourcing sales services page.
by Glen Springer | Dec 21, 2016
Why Outsourced Sales and Marketing Makes Sense for Marketing Automation Implementations
So you have decided that you want to transform your sales and marketing operations. This means you need a lead scoring system and marketing automation platform. However, you are still a little leery because of the sizeable investment in the software and team of marketers this commitment will represent. You have the following concerns:
- You want to test a marketing automation platform but you don’t have the internal resource to run it
- You want to limit your investment until you know it will work before you make that commitment to both talent and software
- You have enough content to generate leads but not to nurture leads
- You don’t understand the best practices or how to baseline that return
Essentially you want to get started and prove you can get a return on your efforts before you pull the trigger and build your own team.
Below are 5 ways outsourced sales and marketing can help with Marketing Automation as you execute this strategy.
Automation Platform Selection
Most outsourced sales and marketing companies will have deep expertise across the platforms. They will have preferred providers but you can expect them to make solid recommendations based on your needs, sales cycle and budget.
Try Before You Buy
You can always contract directly with a marketing automation software supplier if you wish. And once you have decided that marketing automation works for you that is what we typically recommend. However almost all the software providers require at least an annual commitment and in some cases an annual payment. They want you to commit because it takes marketing automation about six months to a year if you are building a team on your own. Most substantial outsourced sales and marketing companies will be able to negotiate shorter commitments or in Gabriel Sales’ case will be able to provide solutions on a month to month basis until you prove concept. This frees up budget to spend on generating leads to help you produce an ROI from your marketing automation process faster.
CRM Data Integration
Key to successful marketing automation is connecting the automation system to your CRM so you have one clean buyer record. This makes it possible for your sales reps to see the value from the automation platform without needing to learn another system. An outsourced sales and marketing company will have processes to clean your data and will be able to connect all the data required. This makes the system useful to your sales team immediately.
Campaign Deployment
An outsourced sales and marketing company will have the technical skills to deploy a campaign through your platform in a fraction of the time it would take to learn these systems on your own. This includes: customer and prospects segmentation, best practices for how to launch your campaign, how to scale, and the frequency of your email communications.
Lead Scoring Best Practices
Lead scoring requires a combination of sales and marketing alignment, a strong content matrix, and a strong definition of both implicit and explicit qualification criteria. An outsourced sales and marketing company will be able to work through these issues in a fraction of the time ensuring that your engine identifies buyers most likely to buy.
Sales Team Adoption
Your automation platform only has value if your sales reps follow up with leads. An outsourced sales and marketing company will be able to train your sales reps how to leverage the system and also provide appointment setting support if your team lacks the time to follow up with your new volume of leads.
Reporting
Many of the marketing automation platforms give you the ability to run hundreds of reports. Most executives only want to see dashboards and a handful of reports that demonstrate how many contacts you’re marketing to, how they’re segmented and what scores are leading toward pipe velocity and sales conversions. An outsourced sales and marketing company will be able to cut through the noise and provide these reports to you for ROI measurement out of the gate.
Gabriel Sales helps companies transform their sales and marketing operations by providing the team and tools you need to generate score and qualify leads faster at a lower cost. To learn more about our outsourced sales and marketing approach and philosophy visit our About Us page.
by Glen Springer | Dec 19, 2016
As a sales outsourcing company understanding our clients Ideal Customer Profile is critical to:
- Understanding what story your sales outsourcing and marketing team should be telling
- Understanding how to tell this story
- Understanding where your sales outsourcing and marketing team should focus their efforts
When you have a clear understanding of who you are targeting and why you are targeting them you sales outsourcing team will produce significantly better results on the back end.
What is an Ideal Customer Profile?
An Ideal Customer Profile is a process for you and your sales outsourcing partner to identify the buyers you should focus on for the best return from your outsourcing sales, marketing and lead generation investment. As sales outsourcing company this is the first area focus on when we provide sales consulting during the launch of a client. This area is critical because the leads you put into the funnel will have a downstream impact across the entire sales funnel.
Ultimately, an Ideal Customer Profile enables your sales outsourcing and marketing team to target your potential buyer based on hard criteria directly correlated to the type of company and specific buyer persona, such as:
- Company revenue
- Company employee count
- Level where the decision will be made
- Level where the decision will be influenced
- Technology Adopted – ERP, CRM, Social Media Platforms, Marketing Automation Platform, etc.
Your Ideal Customer profile should also include softer criteria:
- Business Pain/Need
- Psychographics – company culture, leadership style, corporate values
- Education Level of Decision Makers – MBAs, MBAs from Ivy, Under Graduate degrees
It is also important to know who you don’t want to sell to:
- Are there decision makers or influencers who would feel threatened by the solution
The reason you want to start with this level of detail is so your company and your sales outsourcing partner will be fully aligned focused on:
- Telling a powerful sales story to buyers that are most likely to transact
- Creating the content and scripts necessary to tell this story
- Focusing all your demand generation efforts on putting as many of these type of buyers into the sales pipeline in the most efficient and cost effective way possible.
We realize that this can all sound like a difficult task but as a sales outsourcing and marketing company we have the:
- Frameworks to make this process frictionless
- Access to the database subscriptions to make the market research and segmentation cost effective
- And the experience building buyer persona’s to help stimulate insights from our clients they may not have had the time or bandwidth to uncover
To learn more about why we feel this approach to selling is the right solution for many businesses in this new buyer driven landscape we invite you to check out our sales outsourcing services page or our About Us section which details our sales outsourcing philosophy.
by Glen Springer | Dec 16, 2016
Over the past several years, buyers have decreased the effectiveness of cold calling by as much as 50%. Because of this, buyers simply no longer pick up the phone as often and prefer to learn about new products and solutions through digital education first. So, success now requires a team that understands how to build awareness with buyers, engage those buyers and then convert those buyers which requires a combination of:
- eMail Marketing Talent
- Copywriting and Content Management Expertise
- Content Distribution Capabilities
- Lead Scoring Experts
- Phone Talent
Here are 5 Reasons why Start Up Sales Executives consider an outsourcing sales team for prospecting:
Consistent Results – Achieving results with all these moving parts is high risk. If there is a breakdown or lack of consistency on a daily or weekly basis at one stage of the process it will impact the sales funnel downstream. Knowing that sales executives need to stay focused on closest to the dollar activities, An outsourcing sales team will provide you with the consistent daily activities required to keep a steady flow of sales qualified opportunities and well educated buyers entering your sales funnel.
Speed to Market
Building a team with expertise in outbound marketing and lead generation takes time, and getting that team to work together towards a common goal takes even more time. An outsourcing sales team with marketing support can be turned on and start producing results in a little as 30 days as opposed to months or quarters that may be required to build a team on your own. In addition, you will avoid the 80 to 160 plus hours of bandwidth required to recruit, hire, and train your own internal team.
Daily Management Bandwidth
There are only so many hours in week and it is often more effective to have sales reps focus on those opportunities already in the sales funnel and leave the front-end work to someone else.
An outsourcing sales team is a fast and simple way to get a pipeline-building organization up-and-running to see results. After implementing this team, you can expect to eliminate the daily management requirements, employee headaches and conflicts, HR issues or employee churn.
Flexibility
Using an outsourcing sales team gives you more flexibility when it comes to staffing for specific campaigns. Most salespeople carrying quotas don’t have time to target and penetrate new markets. An outsource sales team makes it easy for you to staff for these campaigns while you focus on closing deals already in the pipeline.
When you are testing a new market you don’t always have the time to conduct market research, test a new message, or determine what customers are saying about your products or services so that you can uncover new opportunities. An outsourcing sales team can help you do all these things at a lower cost for a specific period of time.
Gabriel Sales helps companies transform their sales and marketing programs to generate more leads in this new buyer driven landscape. To learn more about our philosophy and approach to supplying an outsourcing sales team we invite you to read more about us here.
