Why Are My Sales Flat?

by | 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

 

B to B Demand Generation’s New Rules of Engagement

by | Feb 1, 2012

The rules of sales engagement have changed and so has b to b demand generation for three reasons:

1.      Over the past 18 months a wave of technology has hit the market that allows an in house marketing team or outsourced demand generation and marketing operations team take deals deeper and further through your sales funnel than ever before. Your buyers digest, on average, 10.7 pieces of collateral prior to buying.

2.      Marketing Automation Platforms allow you to nurture your customers not yet ready to buy with increased volume and increased efficiency.  The ability to track the consumption of that content saves your top producers and senior talent tons of time working with your customers to transact.

3.      A sales driven marketing team can create content that helps engage the customer, close business and generate leads simultaneously.

Your sales content is now an extension of your sales team.  The right approach to integrating inbound efforts and your sales teams outbound efforts anchored in a smart sales content strategy can meet your customer in their buying cycle with the right team, delivering the right message at the right time.  This allow you to:

  • close those “ready to buy” faster and cheaper
  • not lose customer “not ready to buy” or without budget and close them when they are ready

One of the tricks in making this all work is the right b to b sales content strategy.  It needs to be great and it needs to be driven by your sales team and supported by marketers.

Great b to b sales content is focused on moving deals forward to close.  Sales content requires that you:  listen to your customers, listen to your sales reps, listen to your product specialists, create content for specific stages in the customer buying cycle and then re-purpose and  repackage around a specific segments’ needs.  Your sales content needs to be:

  • Designed to move Marketing Qualified Leads to Sales Qualified Leads and Sales Qualified Leads to Closed Business
  • Designed to be used by Inside Sales Reps and Senior Sales Reps in the Close
  • Designed to be “Authentic” dialogue…no CLIOs here
  • Not designed for Mass Market
  • Leveraged by Inside Reps to decrease the time Executives and Product Specialists spend in educational meetings to move deals forward
  • Able to train and support a sales “champion” to internally sell complex solutions or technologies within their organization.
  • Once created, re-purposed across multiple platforms.

This content can also be leveraged aggressively for long tail Pay per Click campaigns and long tail Search Engine Marketing.  Once proven, creative agencies can polish and take to mass market.

You need to never forget that the customer needs to remain front and center. Each piece needs to be designed for a specific stage in the customer’s buying cycle.  Below is our framework for creating sales content that gets the customer and the sales team what they need to transact.

 

For a full overview of why we feel it makes strategic and executional sense  to have your sales team involved in your sales content marketing strategy and a road map for fluid communication we invite you to read the following blogs:

Top B2B Demand Generation Requires Sales Content Marketing

Top B to B Demand Generation Requires Sales and Marketing Alignment

5 Steps to Launch or Turn Around a B to B Demand Gen Team

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 b to b demand generation program whether you are  mid cycle or building a new effort feel free to CONTACT US.