by Glen Springer | May 21, 2017
The digital buyer’s new best friend is the outsourced sales company
If you are like most companies, you have probably noticed that the days of simply cold calling buyers to generate leads is no longer as effective as it once was. In fact, most buyers now prefer to learn about new products by searching on the web or, in the case of 70% of buyers, to get an educational email that is then followed up by thoughtful reps with additional content. An outsourced sales company could help you navigate these tasks, saving you time and energy that could be spent on other projects.
Here are several challenges the new digital buyer presents followed by ways an sales outsourcing company may be able to help you address them.
Challenge #1 – Your buyers want and expect to be educated first. Buyers want to understand what you do without always relying on a sales reps to explain it. This means you may need to develop some new tactics and commit to content marketing. Marketing needs to support sales with content that shares your thought leadership digitally. If your marketers can leverage your thought leaders, they can optimize support of your sales team and keep them focused on selling while your content explains what you do. Marketing can take care of early stage sales engagement with the right content.
An outsourced sales campaign from Gabriel Sales will include creating content that can be leveraged by the sales rep and by your lead generation team to make it easier for the buyer to buy.
Challenge #2 – Sales and marketing need to work together with one goal of creating qualified sales opportunities through buyer education. The days of hard selling and simply marketing the features and benefits of your solution are over. For many businesses, this is the biggest hurdle because it’s cultural. Sales and marketing both need to work together toward the goal of educating the customer. To do this you are going to need to align sales and marketing with the tools, content, and processes you need to support your inside sales reps with the content you need to demonstrate your thought leadership and differentiators. There needs to be mutual respect between sales and marketing because the buyer no longer cares who educates them they just care about being educated. And in most cases as the graphic above demonstrates they expect it to be both sales and marketing with a consistent story.
An outsourced sales and marketing campaign can help you run an integrated sales and marketing campaigns that has both callers and content marketing tactics keeping you in front of and top of mind with your customer.
Challenge #3 – Using automation technology correctly. With the advent of marketing automation platforms, Google Analytics, and CRMs, you can now define and implement a repeatable sales process that uses technology to manage and score the effort. The right technology stack provides complete transparency and accountability throughout your entire sales and marketing process. It also helps sales and marketing keep score together.
This isn’t astrodynamics. Just head out to any Little League or Soccer Field on a Saturday during a game and compare it to what happens during practice. During practice, the energy level and focus waxes and wanes. Put them on the field when they are accountable for a score and measured on the results and everything changes.
An outsourced sales and marketing company will have the experience and expertise to help you set the right benchmarks in your automation platforms and CRM immediately.
Summary – The line between sales and marketing is getting blurred
- Your buyer now wants to be educated digitally and by reps
- They want access to your thought leadership on their time and not yours
- Your buyer does not want to engage with sales until they are educated and ready to buy
- You need to demonstrate you understand their situation and pain before your prospect will engage with sales
Sales and marketing now need to work together for sale success. Modern sales and marketing operations means your entire team needs to educate buyers.
If you want to learn more about what gaps in your sales and marketing operations, we invite you to visit this page that address what gaps outsourced sales can help you cover in your sales and marketing operations
by Glen Springer | May 18, 2017
How Does Sales Outsourcing Use Marketing Automation to Generate Qualified Leads?
Marketing automation is at almost full adoption in most B2B technology companies. Larger companies will see as many as 20 new technologies in the marketing department. But many other small businesses are just getting started or do not yet understand how automated tools can make their sales and marketing operations modern and more efficient. Sales outsourcing and marketing automation combined is one way to quickly create modern and more effective sales and marketing operations.
In this blog post, we will touch on how a sales outsourcing company will use marketing technology to produce better results. We will touch on the following areas:
- Capturing Sales Leads
- Lead Scoring
- Email Automation
- Lead Intelligence
- Sales Lead Prioritization and Notification
Lead Capture
One feature of a marketing automation platform is an integrated form builder that allows you to capture leads. You can embed these forms and customize them anywhere on your website. This includes landing pages on your main website and even within HTML code in your emails.
Lead Scoring
There are two main ways to qualify leads:
- Using implicit behaviors and activities
- Explicit data and demographics
Using implicit information allows you to rank and score activities like opening emails, click through and also seeing what content the buyer is reading. It is very valuable especially if they are visiting pages that predict purchase intent. You can also use explicit data like company size, title and business vertical.
When these two are combined, it becomes very powerful in helping your sales reps to decide who they should prioritize to call first. This makes your sales process much more effective and also helps you save thousands to hundreds of thousands of dollars a year not calling buyers that are not interested.
Email Automation
You can stay top of mind by sending email to buyers on a regular basis. This ensures you remain top of mind with the buyer not ready to buy. And when they are ready to buy, their lead score will increase. This saves you time and money and also makes sure a lead does not slip through the cracks.
Lead Notifications Alerts
The automation system can be set up to send daily email digests to help buyers prioritize who they should call. Lists can be set up to score:
- Most recent activities
- Highest scores
- Best fits
With these lists and summaries a Sales Development Rep can:
- Prioritize their day with the most active prospects
- Perform quick lookups of anonymous visitors in LinkedIn or Jigsaw to identify potential new prospects
- Click on links to trigger CRM profile lookups
- Send emails to active prospects with a few quick clicks
- Filter out unwanted activity
Lead Intelligence
Once you transition the lead you will have a record of all the activities of the buyer. This digital footprint is valuable to the sales rep as they start to develop the deal and set themselves up to both be helpful to buyer and to close the sale. Activities like original lead source, specific page views, webinar attendance, etc., can all be tracked. This allows the sales rep to profile and frame the content for conversations, voicemails and follow-up emails based on those specific prospect activities.
About Gabriel Sales Sales Outsourcing
Gabriel Sales helps companies build modern sales and marketing operations. We are committed to marketing automation as one of the critical tools for sales success. We have over 50 marketing automation deployments under our belt. And we have implemented over a half dozen different email marketing and lead scoring technologies so we can help you decide on the best fit at the right price to meet your sales goals and stage of sales maturity.
by Glen Springer | May 16, 2017
Staged Process to Get the Most from an Outsource Sales Outbound Campaign
One of the challenges facing most businesses trying to scale their sales and revenue is having too few leads in there automated nurturing campaigns. This is especially true for small businesses where cold calling and Google Adwords is extremely competitive or simply too expensive. This is why we often create leads with an outsource sales email campaign to help ramp our client’s sales funnels.
In most cases, email can be the fastest way to ramp a sales funnel. But simply buying a list and then blasting that list is no longer effective. Can-SPAM laws and Google blacklisting make this a high risk tactic.
Below are six steps you can take on your own or steps an outsource sales company will take to fill your top of funnel with a successful email lead generation campaign.
1) Define your goals
An outsourced sales company will help you define your goals. How many leads do you need? How many leads can you handle? They will also work with you to understand how quickly you need these leads and set the proper expectations of what you can expect a campaign to produce:
- In the short term – immediately after the campaign
- In the mid term – with nurturing
- In the long term – once outsourced sales reps start to follow up
2) Target Your Ideal Audience
After defining your goals, an outsourced sales company will be able to approach multiple third-party vendors to develop a campaign that hits the right audience at the right price. In most cases, this will include both decision makers and influencers because the best email marketing campaigns target the widest audience possible. This is because more and more decisions are now not make by a single decision maker but by decision making units that include:
- A business buyer
- A technical buyer
- An end-user
3) Build your campaign engagement plan
After you identify your target audience, an outsource sales company will help you prepare the copy and create the landing pages for the educational content offers you will be using as part of your campaign. The most effective campaigns are typically run in a series of three messages that will resonate with all the different types of buyers and influencers in your target audience.
4) Deploy your email campaign
An outsource sales partner will then deploy the campaign through the third-party vendor. This includes managing the tests and the best times to deploy. Typically the best campaigns includes testing messages on the first two parts with A/B split tests and then using the best performing offers and messages in the final campaign.
5) Measure KPIs
Identify the most relevant KPIs for each campaign and be sure to track results and performance. This also includes prioritizing what are the best leads to follow up with first if you do not have a nurturing campaign or if you are under immediate pressure to bubble up some early stage opportunities.
6) Move them into a nurturing campaign
In most cases, an eProspecting Email campaign is only the first step in a lead generation campaign. Once you have generated the lead, you will need to move them into your marketing automation campaign. An outsource sales company can help you with this as well.
About Gabriel Sales Outsource Sales Services
Gabriel Sales help companies generate a sustained flow of leads using multiple tactics as part of modern sales and marketing operations. To learn more about our approach we invite you to check out our page that discusses our integrated sales philosophy and our 20 years of history of helping companies scale sales with outsource sales services.
by Glen Springer | May 1, 2017
The top goal of modern sales and marketing operations for small business needs to be: build a repeatable sales process that can generate a steady stream of sales opportunities.
One of the critical tenants of modern sales and marketing operations needs to be specialization. For most small businesses, this means that closing and developing opportunities now need to be different functions. Outsourcing sales help your senior sales specialize on closing business by keeping their sales funnel full.
First lets discuss why your senior sales reps should not be focused on prospecting. Then we will discuss how sales outsourcing and marketing can help them to become more productive.
Why Senior Sales Reps Should Not Prospect
They are not effective – Experience sales reps hate to prospect. They love to close. They are also your most expensive resource. Does it make sense for them to cold call?
Sporadic focus – Prospecting is like the grind of training for any sport. There are tasks you need to do on a regular basis like running, stretching and strength training. If you don’t do them on a regular basis results will suffer. If a closer is working on getting a deal done the first thing to get tossed aside is prospecting. They end up with a great quarter and then have no new deals to work on. Closers need to focus on closing not training.
Unclear metrics – Sales reps are compensated by closing business. Not hitting top of funnel metrics. It is difficult to get sustained performance for something as minimal as daily new lead flow from a seasoned sales rep.
Closing is an Art – Closing is expensive because it’s an art. And like any art it takes creativity, attention to detail and complete focus. It takes a great deal of energy. It does both the rep and your business a disservice to deplete this energy.
Outsourcing Sales to Build a Steady Flow of Leads
Conversely here is why you should consider outsourcing sales to build a steady stream of sales qualified opportunities.
Not just calling anymore – The days of throwing bodies on the phone to call are over. Prospecting still requires calling but it also requires creating content and sharing that content with prospective buyers via email. Outsourcing sales will help you gain immediate access to the skills you need for effective prospecting.
Regular tasks on a regular basis – To be repeatable means you have to repeat tasks like emailing, cold calling, follow up calling and creating content on a regular basis. A sales outsourcing company will take over the daily grind required for success.
Tools and team for success – A sales outsourcing company will have the technologies’ and team required for success. This includes marketers, callers and sales automation technology experts.
Prospecting is a Science – Effective sales prospecting requires building a repeatable process. More importantly it requires constant measure and analysis to improve campaigns and results.
About Gabriel Sales Sales Outsourcing
Gabriel Sales helps companies build modern sales and marketing operations to help closers specialize in closing while we fill the top of the funnel utilizing a team of experts in driving leads with integrated sales and marketing campaigns. To learn more about how our team can help you, visit our page on modern sales and marketing operations and sales outsourcing.
by Glen Springer | Apr 28, 2017
According to Radicati, business users are expected to receive 140 messages in their inbox per day by 2018. And while according to Marketing Sherpa 70% of buyers prefer to first learn about a new solution via an educational email, the days of one-size- fits-all blasting prospects asking for a meeting or simply pitching your solution are over.
Across hundreds of campaigns over the past several years, including our own, we have developed the following best practices for email marketing to generate solid leads for our outsourced sales team to qualify for our customers. Here are the types of email you can expect from an outsourced sales effort. The emails are simply a way to share content and communicate with your buyer at multiple stages in their buying cycle as the framework below outlines.
Email Blasts to Start to Fill Your Sale Funnel
Email is a great way to generate new leads. But for the best results we highly recommend that you target a rented opt in list with a series of three emails. And every email needs to have educational value. At the end of 2016 and in the first quarter of 2017 we have all seen the trend of email asking for an appointment out of the gate. In many cases this is pure spam and we do not recommend this approach.
We recommend that in these initial campaigns you start with a content offer that uses your blogs, whitepaper and webcasts that explain the problem in the market and potential approaches to that problem.
We call these eProspecting eMails.
Nurturing Emails
Once you have leads in your funnel you will need to implement a marketing automation system. A marketing automation system has 2 core functions. The first function is to send email on a regular basis to early stage buyers. The second function is to score the buyers activities so they you can prioritize who to call first. A nurturing campaign, when run correctly, can track email opens and track the content buyers engage with. It can save a substantial amount of budget when compared to having callers call leads with no predictive score.
The content for these emails can slowly move from shorter educational pieces to pieces that talk about your solution specifically. But we do not recommend them to be extremely salesy. Your initial nurturing campaign should be about 6 to 7 emails over a 90 day period. After that you simply need to send out an educational email once a month to stay top of mind with buyers not ready to buy.
- Content offers can include case studies, blog posts, demo videos and headshot videos
- The email copy and design should be short and simple. In most cases text only outperforms a great deal of graphics.
- You can also use these emails to engage buyers in your social media platforms
- Remember to score in your automation system so your Sales Development Reps know who to target.
Sales Prospecting Emails for Outsourced Sales
After you have your marketing automation system set up and your nurturing program in place and running you can also run mini-campaigns directly from sales reps. You can use the automation platform to send personalized emails to the reps targets in small campaigns.
- Sent from a personal email of the sales rep
- Needs to be part of the calling and nurturing cadence
- Keep it short and direct asking if the buyer would like a meeting
About Gabriel Sales
Gabriel Sales helps companies build modern sales and marketing operations. To learn more about email marketing and other tactics we can help you leverage to generate and sustain a steady flow of sales qualified leas feel free to check out How Outsourced Sales Can Help Build Modern Sales and Marketing Operations.
by Glen Springer | Apr 26, 2017
Outsource Sales – Start with Sale Prospecting First?
When owners of companies with complex sales or solutions sales are ready to scale they often consider two options:
- Hiring an outside sales rep or outsourcing closing
- Outsource sales to prospect and fill the funnel
As an outsource sales and marketing company, we have a strong belief that in many cases the second path can make more sense. Or, in some cases it makes sense to hire an outside sales rep and outsource sales at the same time.
This quick blog article will quickly explore the pros and cons of both approaches and recommend an alternative path.
Lead with Outside Sales Reps First
Remember Outside Sales Reps Are Closers Not Lead Gen Experts
For the past 20 years the standard way for small businesses to scale sales is to hire an enterprise-level sales rep. This is because organizations believe that senior sales reps can leverage their extensive contacts to generate narrow leads and close deals. But every sales rep’s list of contacts is finite. When the rep gets through that initial push, leads dry up quickly.
And outside reps by the time they get to this point in their career, cold calling and content marketing to generate leads is not something they are doing on a regular basis. It is not something you should expect them to do.
In most cases if you invest in a closer first you are putting the cart before the horse. You are focusing on the bottom of the funnel and are in a high risk situation because you are counting on the outside reps ability to close deals. But you are also relying on them to generate leads as well. And the reality is a closer cannot do both effectively at the same time. So even in the best of circumstances you will generate a handful of initial deals and then the closer will not have a top of new set of leads in the top of the funnel to work. You are investing in the bottom of the funnel and not the top of the funnel, which leads to point two.
Outside Sales Reps Are Expensive
Simply throwing sales reps at your revenue growth problem without focusing on lead generation first is expensive. Domain experts with solid experience command a large base salary and substantial compensation package. Inside reps and a marketing team that can generate leads can often come in at the same or even reduced cost.
If you have a founder or internal resources that can close deals it often makes sense to ramp the lead generation first to:
- Ensure you have a sustained flow of leads
- Give your closer something to close as soon as they walk through the door
Outsource Sales to Fill the Sale Funnel First
Throwing bodies at a sales problem no long works reliably. Instead of hiring expensive outside sales reps it now often makes sense to invest in modern sales an marketing operations first to fill your sales funnel with a consistent and repeatable flow of leads. An outsource sales organizations can now:
- Fill your funnel with leads with PPC campaigns, email marketing campaigns and cold calling
- They can then use content marketing and marketing automation systems to score leads
- They can staff business development reps to qualify leads for your closer
- You can then continue to close deals with your existing team and when you have a funnel that is bursting you can hire that expensive outside sales rep and get them productive immediately
About Gabriel Sales
Gabriel Sales specializes in filling your sales funnel with warm sales qualified leads. We build modern sales and marketing operations that are crucial for sustained revenue growth – using a combination of marketers, business development reps and tools to maximize your investment. Visit our about us page to learn more about our approach and services for outsource sales.
