by Carol Springer | Sep 14, 2016
Starting with the down turn, and in combination with Tim Ferris’ (now almost classic) 4-Hour Work week, many small business are at least open to outsourcing most functions. However Tim Ferris’ painted a slightly rosy picture of how easy this could be. This is especially true when outsourcing sales. As any executive who has attempted sales outsourcing will tell you, outsourcing sales is not always a quick path to profitability or as straight forward as advertised. This is especially true when dealing with companies that have hung their shingles over the past 3-4 years.
Here are several perspectives to consider as you consider sales outsourcing for your company:
The One Eyed Man is Not Necessarily King in the Land of the Blind
As an outsourced sales company we are experts in sales processes, and all the tools required for successes. However if you do not have a sales process already in place it will take us at least one or two sales cycles (taking buyers through their buying process and your sales process) to refine our collective approach. Sales outcomes will not change overnight because buyers don’t change the way they buy overnight. We typically let our clients know that the more they can stay engaged through the initial 3 to 6 months the smoother and faster outcomes we will be able to collectively produce (more on this below). Most companies are successful for a reason and that typically starts with the sales knowledge that is out our clients’ executive’s brains.
If you do not understand why your buyer buys we can help you nail this down with some consulting workshops and then real time feedback from buyers. But it will take time before the path to growth becomes clear and concrete.
Can you stay engaged especially during the initial 90 days of launch?
Numerous entrepreneurs see outsourcing as a one time deal – you sign an agreement with an outsourced sales company, and afterward sit back while your new outsourced sales reps start closing deals. Obviously, as we all know, closing business is never that easy.
We have found that executives that stay engaged during the initial 90 days lead to our greatest success stories. You don’t need to stay hands on daily but we do recommend that you attend the weekly meetings and digest the data. There will be insights you will have and failures and rabbit holes you will be able to help your sales outsourcing partner to avoid.
We love the feedback, because they allow us to fix issues quickly to get the best results.
Embrace the Pareto Principle when Creating Content to Support Sales Outsourcing
As an outsourced sales and marketing company we are trying to build a repeatable communication process. What we find across 100% of our engagement is that 80% of your deals are going to care about the same 20% of the information. It could be the same objections that need to be overcome. It could be the same business pains you solve. You should expect your sales outsourcing partner to have a process to help document what 20% of information needs to be shared to drive that 80% of your engagement. You should then expect to create content that will give the buyers the ability to educate themselves digitally in these areas.
Embrace the Pareto Principle when Following Up with Leads
As a sales outsourcing company we have embraced automation technologies for one reason. Once an outbound lead has been generated (agreed to accept additional information either through an eMail campaign or cold call campaign) we use this technology to help us score a leads propensity to buy. Because what we typically see is – of the leads that do agree to engage only about 20% have an immediate need (next quarter or two) and the remaining 80% are interested but nowhere close to being ready to buy. Success in the age of digital buyer education requires that you use an automation technology to score leads. You should expect your sales outsourcing partner to be adept in the use of these tools.
by Glen Springer | Dec 30, 2015
The world of professional services sales is changing rapidly. Changing with it are the challenges faced by the members of your team. This blog will talk about several challenges and the opportunity they present in selling professional services to clients in today’s environment.
Whether you are considering outsourcing sales or further developing your own internal sales team, the challenges that all of us face in selling professional services and solutions are the same. Gone are the days of discretionary or experimental budgets. If they still exist, they are typically dramatically reduced. You have to sell to both a technical buyer and a business buyer in every organization. Companies are running leaner at top levels, and as a result the decision makers that you need to sell to are picking up the phone 30% less. Once you do connect and start to engage the prospect in your sales cycle and with your content, their schedules are so tight that it takes much longer to move them through your sales funnel.
Here’s the bottom line: lead generation, lead qualifying and sales engagement can take twice the time and energy they did in the past. Markets are flooded with buyers and sellers of all types, and it’s your job to weed through it all. For the professional service firms that we provide sales outsourcing and lead generation services to, it’s more important now than ever that we sell smarter and do our best to maximize top producer’s sales efficiency and effectiveness. We also have to help make the process easier for the buyers we are selling to. They have less time and demand a more efficient way to buy.
When a professional service firm comes to us (as opposed to product sales companies) to have a discussion about outsourcing sales, they often voice additional unique complexities that they are now facing in the professional service market:
- The roles of seller and deliverer are often merging. More time spent selling means less time dedicated to delivery and/or available for sales pipe development efforts.
- The professional service sale is growing increasingly complex, and requires an investment in education and solution selling.
- Education is required because professional services engagements are perceived as high risk investments for buyers, since they can’t hold the product in their hand. Consequently, buyers take longer to make decisions and often want to break up adoption so that there is a pilot or proof of concept stage.
- Professional services selling requires communication of intangible benefits – character, thinking style and personality of lead consultants and top producers – to effectively close deals.
- Top producing professional service executives are predisposed to “solutioning” and solving customer problems, rather than “selling” and sales management.
- Professional service sales are high risk for the Seller due to the need to acquire real return and margins that only stem from long-term engagements, beyond initial pilots
If you take all of these emerging complexities into account, they point to “time” as the single, largest issue. Time is still quite literally money, as they say – and this is especially true for the professional service business model. For us at Gabriel Sales, the challenge in outsourcing the professional service sale lies in identifying how best to customize a program to make your top producers operate at their highest levels of effectiveness and efficiency.
Gabriel Sales has been providing outsourced sales and lead generation services successfully to professional service providers across a wide variety of verticals and target markets – for over 15 years. In the last few years we’ve seen a large market shift in the approach buyers take to engage and make decisions surrounding professional service solutions. This has led to the creation of a viable opportunity for increased efficiency and effectiveness in designing a sales engine and cloning your top producers.
The Opportunity:
Sales and marketing interactions have changed drastically due to the proliferation of the internet and digital communication. Buyers have always actively leveraged content, but now it is being digested specifically through digital and social media. Buyers are streamlining their process on their own time. You now have the ability to leverage lead generation and sales reps that are skilled in communicating your solutions effectiveness and value in the digital space. These reps can manage more of your sale and replicate larger pieces of what was previously required of your top producer. Professional service firms can make it easier for buyers to buy by alleviating the buyer’s time constraints, while simultaneously opening up bandwidth for their top producers. Sales productivity skyrockets by as much as two times within a year, and as high as three times within eighteen months.
This opportunity is significant. But what is even more significant is that taking advantage of this shift does not require completely changing your existing sales process. However, it does require that you effectively align your sales and marketing teams, and get them to stop living in the silos that is typically tradition. This allows for you to be able to engage in a one-to-many dialogue as you generate leads and communicate effectively with both the technical buyer and business buyer. Your sales reps will need to be trained and managed effectively in using these new tools.
Please feel free to contact us or visit “Why Professional Services Firms Use Outsourcing Sales and Marketing” for more information.
by Glen Springer | Dec 30, 2015
The world of professional services sales is changing rapidly. Changing with it are the challenges faced by the members of your team. This blog will talk about several challenges and the opportunity they present in selling professional services to clients in today’s environment.
Whether you are considering outsourcing services sales or further developing your own internal services sales team, the challenges that all of us face in selling professional services and solutions are the same. Gone are the days of discretionary or experimental budgets. If they still exist, they are typically dramatically reduced. You have to sell to both a technical buyer and a business buyer in every organization. Companies are running leaner at top levels, and as a result the decision makers that you need to sell to are picking up the phone 30% less. Once you do connect and start to engage the prospect in your sales cycle and with your content, their schedules are so tight that it takes much longer to move them through your sales funnel.
Here’s the bottom line: lead generation, lead qualifying and sales engagement can take twice the time and energy they did in the past. Markets are flooded with buyers and sellers of all types, and it’s your job to weed through it all. For the professional service firms that we provide services sales outsourcing and lead generation services to, it’s more important now than ever that we sell smarter and do our best to maximize top producer’s sales efficiency and effectiveness. We also have to help make the process easier for the buyers we are selling to. They have less time and demand a more efficient way to buy.
When a professional service firm comes to us (as opposed to product sales companies) to have a discussion about outsourcing sales, they often voice additional unique complexities that they are now facing in the professional service market:
-
- The roles of seller and deliverer are often merging. More time spent selling means less time dedicated to delivery and/or available for sales pipe development efforts.
- The professional service sale is growing increasingly complex, and requires an investment in education and solution selling.
- Education is required because professional services engagements are perceived as high risk investments for buyers, since they can’t hold the product in their hand. Consequently, buyers take longer to make decisions and often want to break up adoption so that there is a pilot or proof of concept stage.
- Professional services selling requires communication of intangible benefits – character, thinking style and personality of lead consultants and top producers – to effectively close deals.
- Top producing professional service executives are predisposed to “solutioning” and solving customer problems, rather than “selling” and sales management.
- Professional service sales are high risk for the Seller due to the need to acquire real return and margins that only stem from long-term engagements, beyond initial pilots
If you take all of these emerging complexities into account, they point to “time” as the single, largest issue. Time is still quite literally money, as they say – and this is especially true for the professional service business model. For us at Gabriel Sales, the challenge in outsourcing the professional service sale lies in identifying how best to customize a program to make your top producers operate at their highest levels of effectiveness and efficiency.
Gabriel Sales has been providing outsourced sales and lead generation services successfully to professional service providers across a wide variety of verticals and target markets – for over 15 years. In the last few years we’ve seen a large market shift in the approach buyers take to engage and make decisions surrounding professional service solutions. This has led to the creation of a viable opportunity for increased efficiency and effectiveness in designing a sales engine and cloning your top producers.
The Opportunity:
Sales and marketing interactions have changed drastically due to the proliferation of the internet and digital communication. Buyers have always actively leveraged content, but now it is being digested specifically through digital and social media. Buyers are streamlining their process on their own time. You now have the ability to leverage lead generation and sales reps that are skilled in communicating your solutions effectiveness and value in the digital space. These reps can manage more of your sale and replicate larger pieces of what was previously required of your top producer. Professional service firms can make it easier for buyers to buy by alleviating the buyer’s time constraints, while simultaneously opening up bandwidth for their top producers. Sales productivity skyrockets by as much as two times within a year, and as high as three times within eighteen months.
This opportunity is significant. But what is even more significant is that taking advantage of this shift does not require completely changing your existing sales process. However, it does require that you effectively align your sales and marketing teams, and get them to stop living in the silos that is typically tradition. This allows for you to be able to engage in a one-to-many dialogue as you generate leads and communicate effectively with both the technical buyer and business buyer. Your sales reps will need to be trained and managed effectively in using these new tools.
Please feel free to contact us or visit “Why Professional Services Firms Use Outsourcing Sales and Marketing” for more information.
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 Glen Springer | Dec 16, 2015
Outsourcing sales and marketing is not “one size fits all” engagement. Because of the dynamic and involved nature of sales and marketing execution, it is important that you identify what gaps you are looking to fill within your current processes before looking to an outside partner for help. Alternatively, many times this potential outside partner can help you identify these gaps on the front-end as well.
The purpose of this blog will be to outline 5 final considerations you should make when considering using an outside partner, as well as what information you should be sharing with your potential B2B sales outsourcing and marketing partner:
Is reducing my time to market critical?
Outsourcing sales and marketing is more than just soliciting a business to make cold calls. You are plugging into a fully functional sales engine. Innovative technologies are in place to help you execute and processes are built to ensure success. Now you have access to a sales and marketing team that already know how to work together and are ready to start closing business on day one. Recruiting, building, and training a team can take months, quarters, even years to finally end up with a solid core group that “plays well together.” Do you have the time to bring that team together? If not, an outsourced partner is an ideal solution.
Am I looking for operational expertise?
It takes time to develop operational expertise because it is driven by measurement and verification against feedback loops. You can’t rush a good thing. To truly drive operational expertise you have to effectively benchmark performance against historical data. How can you tell whether your premature sales force is performing at the highest level possible when you are working with a brand new solution? One of the major benefits of plugging into an outsourced partner is that they already have an existing sales machine in place – you just have to jump in the driver’s seat. Feedback loops and historical data are in place to define actionable KPI’s, and you can start smarter and learn faster.
Do I want to build operational expertise and then bring it in house?
This isn’t a question you need to have an answer to up-front, but it’s important to keep it top of mind throughout this process. Once the code is cracked and the machine is running, you can heavily reduce costs if you bring the sales engine in-house. If you think you may consider doing this down the road, it’s important to share that with your partner early on. We have found that when done effectively, we often times can transition all or parts of the process at strategic times so that everyone wins more business.
Is Scalability important to me?
One benefit of being an established outsourcer of marketing and sales is that we have the ability to increase and decrease the scale of our operations fluidly. All of the necessary infrastructure and processes from the technology platforms, phone systems, and recruiting/training systems are already in place. Headaches associated with adding and decreasing headcount are no more. You have to ask yourself, can I benefit from getting rid of these headaches?
Do I really need to add full time executives (and the long term fixed costs) to my management team?
The kiss of death for any company in today’s market is employing too many strategists and not enough soldiers. Outsourced providers can bring long-term strategic expertise to the table at the right time to astronomically reduce costs. Getting the initial sales efforts running takes strategic insight and leadership from senior executive talent on both the sales and marketing fronts. Appropriately aligning the technological strategy takes advanced expertise as well. All of this requires a heavy investment. This is where the beauty of an outsourced partner comes into play. Once you invest in the engine, the fixed costs you would have had to carry otherwise with staffing internally fall away. The senior team moves to the background and the machine and sales reps continue to generate revenue.
For more information on how outsourcing sales and marketing can help accomplish your goals, please feel free to take a look at our previous blogs in this series “Should I Outsource Sales and Marketing” and “Is My Company a Good Fit to Outsource Sales and Marketing.”
If you would like more information, or would just like to chat with us about issues you may be having or how we can help, please contact us.
by Glen Springer | Oct 7, 2015
Every call is important, here are strategies and techniques to help secure those 2nd, 3rd, and 4th (and so on) phone calls with potential leads. Obviously a cold call is just the tip of the iceberg when interacting with a new prospect. A question that burns on every sales rep’s mind is: what should I do to get this lead to commit to another conversation?
In a recent blog we recently, detailed 6 Questions to Ask All New Leads that will help you drive meaningful interactions with prospects, ultimately filling your pipe with better opportunities. In this blog, we will outline 10 B2B sales techniques and strategies that can be used along with those 6 questions to help successfully move opportunities through their buying process.
Once you have gained the actionable prospect information by asking those 6 questions, you need to get them to commit to another meeting. What’s the best approach to set next steps?
We have compiled a list of ten strategies and techniques to accomplish this. There is no single way to address this problem as every lead is unique. However, through direct questioning and technique, you can employ any number of these strategies to successfully move the conversation forward.
Identify what stage of the buying cycle the prospect is at and don’t try and force them to another stage. Give them the opportunity to get there by providing appropriate content.
This is crucial, and should be done for every lead that is not immediately disqualified on a cold call. If you try and set a business proposal meeting with a lead that is barely aware of the existence of a new field of technology, you will quickly find your way to a “no.” Help them along their buying process through your selling techniques and marketing content.
Be polite and professional first and foremost.
Always remain polite in the initial interactions with new prospects, but be wary of trying to create too significant of a relationship too early in the process. Many leads want to understand that you respect that their time is short, their phones are busy, and they want to be in control. To accomplish this, it is helpful to be short, succinct, and direct in your initial conversations, so that the expectation is set early in the opportunity.
Provide all of your contact information
You would think this is a no brainer but it is the standard in sales interactions today to successfully provide information for all means of contact: phone, email, website, etc.
Ask them if there is anyone else that would benefit from communicating with you and seeing your educational information
The more people you can connect with in an organization, the better. You want to get them talking about your solutions, sharing it with others who may be involved with the business process or buying process.
Ask them for a good time for a follow-up conversation
It’s amazing how easy it is to get a second meeting on the books just by simply asking for an available time to have it. If they say they don’t have time this week, ask them about next week. Don’t be so easily dismayed to hang up the phone without having a firm second conversation scheduled.
Ask them for their preferred way to communicate during your next conversation
Some people hate answering emails, others won’t answer their phones unless they are completely unpreoccupied. Give your prospects the opportunity to tell you the way they prefer to communicate.
Make sure you’ve got the right person
Many people will allow you to send them any and all information. Whether they are trying to find distractions from their own work, or if they’re just curious about the space, it is important not to waste valuable time on leads that have no impact on technology implementation, solution service decisions, or buying power.
Give them homework
This can be simple: “Visit our website when you have a moment, our URL is _________” Or, you can provide relevant content for them to digest. Maybe you have demonstration videos that buyers who are farther in their process would benefit from seeing. Whatever tool you use, asking your prospects to review content in between connections is crucial in staying relevant within their consideration set.
Always, always, always finish a conversation with next steps
The first ten suggestions are all directed at successfully accomplishing just this. A conversation without next steps planned gives the opportunity for your prospect to fall into someone else’s pipe before you’ve even successfully engaged them in yours. Time, mode of communication, and task to be completed by both parties – all three of these aspects are crucial in a successful next steps plan.
Know when to not push for a second contact, but rather circle back in a timely fashion.
Sometimes you catch a lead in a meeting, others simply hate cold calls. It is a useful talent to be able to discern when to just let the lead go, and give them another try without requiring anything from them, including listening to your extensive pitch. This should not be used except in extreme circumstances, as we believe every valid target prospect will be willing to engage with you if you provide them content that supports the stage of the buying cycle they are in.
The more techniques and strategies you can employ in your initial contact with a new prospect, the greater your success will be in filling your pipe with quality opportunities and moving more deals to closing.
