by Carol Springer | Sep 23, 2015
It is becoming more clear that buyers want to and in many cases are able to control the entire selling process – from introduction to education to closing. With the abundance of information that is available through digital content, a buyer no longer needs to rely on the seller to facilitate the process. DemandGen Report released a study in June of 2014 detailing that “75% of B2B buyers rely more on content to research and make B2B purchasing decisions than they did a year ago.”
The shift in roles raises a question: what role should the traditional sales rep serve in today’s B2B transaction?
This blog will address this question and outlines the first opportunity a traditional rep typically has to engage with a prospect. The inside sales rep is as important now that buyers are empowering themselves, but to stay relevant, they must adapt the way they apply their efforts. Marketing and sales cannot sit in two different silos any longer to remain effective.
Zig Ziglar, an American icon and renowned sales educationalist, found that “Every sale has five basic obstacles: no need, no money, no hurry, no desire, no trust.”
Any experienced salesman or marketer has been exposed to these five objections regularly throughout dealing with prospective clients. The content marketing boom has resulted in a sixth hurdle that plagues today’s new business development efforts: no education.
In today’s digitally dominated marketplace, new innovations present themselves regularly that provide opportunities to increase efficiency and reduce costs. Proactive buyers will have familiarized themselves with an opportunity area well-before you have the chance to reach them.
Below you will find a list of 6 questions that aim to accomplish three things during a first conversation between sales rep and prospect:
- Build a persona of the buyer
- Identify their awareness, needs, and capabilities
- Provide relevant sales content
(These questions will be staged as if they are being utilized by a firm that provides a marketing automation SaaS product)
How does your team utilize marketing automation to help assist in generating your pipe?
A question along these lines can serve several purposes. In the context of the hypothetical provided, it will allow the sales rep to immediately discern the level to which the prospect has adopted marketing automation technology. This can range drastically from total lack of awareness that the technology exists to them already operating at an SAP-type complexity.
Identifying the level of utilization the prospect has early in the conversation is crucial to pushing the appropriate level and type of content to move the buyer forward in the process. With this information in hand, it becomes simple to identify what information will be relevant and needed to move the call forward.
Would you be the best person to share information with about marketing automation and helping improve the efficiency of your pipe?
Discerning whether or not you are interacting with the appropriate decision maker allows you to expedite your sales cycle. More and more sales require multiple personnel to sign-off in order to mitigate fear and potential risk. Budgets are constrained now more than ever, and convincing decision makers to give you a piece of their cherished pie is something you and many others are trying to accomplish at the same time.
The number of gatekeepers that sales reps have to navigate has increased as well. An answer to this question will provide insight as to how close your prospecting efforts have led to you reaching a lead with decision making authority.
What are the steps your company typically takes when they are evaluating a new solution or technology?
Securing a sale requires that you know what it is that your customer wants so that you can effectively provide it for them. What’s the best way to figure this out? Ask them about their buying process.
Knowing the steps a company takes to evaluate an offer allows you to identify the key metrics they use and consequently what is most important to them. You can capitalize on this knowledge throughout the steps of their process by providing relevant content that aligns your solution with their needs.
It’s also crucial to know the urgency with which the prospect wants to acquire a new solution. Trying to expedite this process with efforts other than pushing content (i.e. “the hard sell”) is the quickest way to discourage prospects with slow buying cycles.
Have you looked into any marketing automation solutions before?
This question provides insight into how familiar the lead is with the technology or solution you offer. You can gauge their level of interest and education related to the space and whether you are competing against other available offerings in the space or a technology that’s already ingrained within their corporate culture.
Are you familiar with our company at all?
Although simple, this question helps immensely in discerning both the prospect’s familiarity with your offering and their willingness to be further educated in the matter. Just because a lead gives off the impression they don’t want to engage with you, you can still distill opportunity by providing them relevant content that will help move them along the sales cycle at their own pace.
I know schedules are tight – is there a time that would be best for me to follow-up and just answer any questions you may have?
Asking a question in this manner communicates that you respect their time and are willing to allow them to control the way they are sold to. If they demonstrate actionable interest in your offering early on, capitalize on the opportunity. However, for the vast majority, catering to their interests and avoiding the hard sell will help fill your pipe in the most effective manner.
Always keep in mind what your questioning is aiming to accomplish, and that you may need to adapt your process at any point to cater directly to the stage of buying your prospect is in.
Please contact us if you would like to learn more about our sales strategy.
by gabriel_sales | Sep 16, 2015
Contact us to learn more about Sales Marketing.
by Carol Springer | Sep 8, 2015
Content marketing is making huge strides in the sales process. Why? It is effective.
Content keeps people engaged without sales calls and content is scientifically better at impacting people. You may already know that videos have a higher retention rate than text, but did you know that stories trigger the brain more than just facts and figures. It is recommended to incorporate story telling into marketing in order to relate to your audience, appeal to emotions and engage their brain more.
The idea behind story telling is to show not tell. When using facts and figures to portray an idea or product you will only engage two parts of your reader’s brain, the Wernicke’s Area (language comprehension) and the Broca’s Area (language processing). Using stories you can trigger multiple areas of the brain by describing the surroundings, Motor Cortex (movement), Sensory Cortex & Cerebellum (touch), Olfactory Cortex (scents), Auditory Cortex (sounds) and Visual Cortex (colors and shapes). By triggering more areas of the brain you are making it more likely that your audience will remember your content.
It is easy to learn how to market a product through storytelling.
There are 5 key steps to telling a successful story:
- Get Personal – connect with your audience emotionally. Appeal to the pains they may be experiencing without your solution.
- Avoid Clichés – they have minimal impact and are more likely to drive people away than engage them.
- Avoid Complex Language – keep your story conversational to create a more enjoyable experience rather than overwhelming your audience.
- Be Relatable – add meaning for the audience.
- Be Descriptive – take advantage of describing scenes in order to activate more areas of the brain in order to be more memorable.
In order to successfully engage with the audience you also need a hero they can connect with 5 things the hero must do in order to engage your audience:
- Sets out to achieve a goal.
- Butts heads with an antagonist or a problem that needs to be solved.
- In order to conquer the hero must make a transformation.
- Finds a mentor with resources.
- The hero prevails!
In order to practice what we preach we wrote a story about ‘John’ who is struggling to maintain sales. This is just one example of how to market a product with storytelling. Continue reading in order to learn what actions John takes to alleviate his sales woes.
John sits at his desk, a nearby copy machine whirrs, and the clock chimes 8 times. It’s the start of a new work day. The same daunting task looms before him as it had for days and weeks and months.
John needs a way to sell, market and close deals efficiently and cost effectively. As he braces for the chaos that is about to begin, he glances over at the stainless steel framed photograph of his family. It has been weeks since he has made it home for dinner. He is lucky if he makes it home to tuck them in.
As owner of the company John has many functions. His days are filled with company operations, client management, proposal creation and employee management. Lately his time has been devoted to hiring and training sales reps. Due to the nature of the industry, the sales process is long, which makes the training process longer.
Last month John had to replace their last sales rep because goals were not being met. John has since picked up the sales calling while training the new sales rep. Before John picks up the phone for his first round of calls he runs his fingers through his graying hair and wishes there was an easier way to sell.
This led John down a rabbit hole of internet searches for a sales and marketing solution. What stood out as the best option for John was outsourcing.
Fast forward two months.
John is sitting in a conference room filled with people determined to cure his sales and marketing pains. They previously mined John’s company for existing content and learned the sales process. These people were now going to change the selling process and with John’s help, create fresh content.
Outsourcing and how to market a product is new to John and he is nervous it won’t work. In this monochromatic room, tan walls and brown furniture, he tries to turn his fears and doubts into confidence. If this is successful the ROI will be substantial, not to mention the time and money that will be saved by not having to hire new sales reps every six months.
The outsourcing team created content to address frequently asked questions. As John supplied information for content he quickly realized that each piece had a specific purpose within the sales process. Content was not being created solely for marketing; it was being created with sales strategy in mind.
After two days with the sales and marketing outsourcing team John was feeling confident. Two weeks following content creation, cold callers hit the phones and pushed the first wave of content. Using cold callers lowered the cost of calling for John and increased the volume of calls made.
Through cold calling and trackable content each prospect was scored. The scoring made it possible for John’s heavy hitting sales person to focus on prospects that showed interest. John was still the closer and was brought in early to guide buyers through the sales process. Although John’s initial headaches were gone he had a new one.
Cold calling, content nurturing and focusing on interested leads meant John was working to close more deals than ever before. Most of his calls involved explaining their solution and he was feeling like a broken record. John was getting involved too soon. John wondered, “Is there a way to get people the right information without getting tied up on the phone?”
He called his sales and marketing outsourcing team and explained his challenge. They proposed to automate the sales process with content. Together they created headshot, demo and whiteboard videos in order to clone John and get the information in an easily shareable form.
Now, sales reps could send prospects pertinent information through a marketing automation platform. The data was tracked and if the content was viewed the prospect could move to the next step in the sales process.
John’s time was further leveraged by bridging the information gap with content. He was spending less time involved in the sales process and the company was working more deals than ever. John was working less hours and spending more time with his family.
Today John sits at his desk, sipping coffee while he views marketing automation reports. His reports show that two clients viewed videos on how to calculate ROI. Today is the day to get them to buy. Before picking up the phone, John smiles to himself and thinks, “Two sales a day and only two calls. Not too bad.”
To learn more about how to market a product with content, check out these blogs:
Get Prospects to Take Action: Content Variety
How to Guide B2B Prospects through the Sales Cycle with Content
by Glen Springer | Aug 19, 2015
This blog is the second on our series and 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 someone’s 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
Visit our resources page for more helpful tips, tactics and strategies.
by gabriel_sales | Aug 13, 2015
This is our first blog in a two part series about how to build an ideal customer profile, and how being strategic in prospect targeting will produce significantly better and measurable results.
Building an Ideal Customer Profile is a process designed to provide an identity for customers you should be targeting in order to get the best ROI on your sales efforts. As an outsourcing sales organization this is one of our main focuses when providing initial sales consulting. We believe this facet of the sales process deserves careful attention – what goes into the sales pipe has a huge impact on what comes out of the funnel. It is also critical to build an aligned sales and marketing effort, so you can create an effective and efficient sales machine.
Ultimately, an Ideal Customer Profile allows you to find, identify, target, and engage your potential customers based on a variety of 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 etc. they are employing is huge
- Their clients – who are they, and who are they doing business with?
In addition, there are softer qualitative criteria that should be identified as well:
- 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 equally important to know who you don’t want to sell to:
- Decision makers whose job may be threatened
- Internal support functions – fear that your service may replace their position
- Low-level, “shopping” employees
- If they don’t have the budget, and aren’t willing to secure, they can’t spend it
The purpose of the combined hard and soft segmentation is to establish clear, actionable criteria that can be leveraged across your sales and marketing engine, in order 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 acknowledge that this task is daunting for many organizations, but as an outsourced sales organization with 10 years of data we can guarantee that if you complete your due diligence on the front end, you will see significant ROI and pipe quality increase. Exponential returns will follow after your first wave of nurtured leads start to fall out of your pipe as closed deals.
For additional information on how to build an Ideal Customer Profile, look for our next blog in this series – available August 19th, 2015.
by gabriel_sales | Aug 26, 2014
This is part 2 of a blog series on ways to be more effective with B2B social media marketing. Click here for part one.
2. Pay attention to your metadata
When most people think of content metadata, they are thinking about SEO. However, metadata can also be a big part of what drives engagement on social media. Many companies today post blog content without specifying an ‘exerpt’ or ‘meta description’ to be displayed on social media sharing sites. These small details, like the title of the article and the quick blurb that describes what its about, can really make a huge difference when it comes to engagement.
To learn more about sharing best practices and how to optimize your content to generate sharing, check out these tips from Facebook.
3. Use visual information like infographics and video
If your in B2B marketing currently, you’ve likely been a witness to the amazing rise on popularity of visual content over the last few years. The huge amount of visual marketing content like infographics, videos, webcasts, Slideshare presentations, etc. out there today shows that companies are finding success with this approach. A recent blog from Atomic Research suggests that one reason for this may be that “Your brain processes images faster than text and attaching a graphic to your content can create a mental foothold for your audience, which will result in reads, clicks and leads.”
This means that anything you can do to make your content more visual will likely make it more engaging for your audience on social media. For more tips on creating visual content, you can check out Atomic Research’s article here. For more on video in B2B, you can read last week’s blog that discusses recent barriers to success.
For more tips on B2B social media marketing, you can read 3 Ways to Use Twitter More Effectively for B2B Marketing.
