by gabriel_sales | Jan 30, 2013
How to Increase the success of your B2b sales and marketing approach
If you are a part of the sales world, you know that the sales cycle does not look anything like it did a few years ago. In our work at Gabriel Sales, a B2B outsourced sales company and B2B sales and marketing company, we have been closely following these changes in order to help our clients navigate the new sales landscape.
The first thing we have discovered is that in some instances, buyers are buying faster. Buyers now often make decisions immediately following their budget approval, shortening the decision process to less than 60 days in some cases.
However, while about 20% of buyers are now reaching out faster for smaller purchases, there are still buyers who prefer buying via more traditional buyer relationships. There are also buyers who are now spending more time in the research phase, preferring to explore all of their options thoroughly before making a decision.
What all of this comes down to is that buyers are no longer as predictable or homogenous as they once were. If your business is not able to adapt to the changing trends of the B2B sales industry, you stand to lose up to 10%-20% of your revenue to competitors who have adapted their process and techniques. In order to make sure you can sell to your customers regardless of how they prefer to buy, you need to have a strong content marketing program in place, strong inbound and strong cold calling. The rest of this blog will briefly discuss the best practices for meeting the demands of today’s B2B sales landscape.
Marketing Automation Implementation
Our experience as a B2B marketing and sales company tells us that using Marketing Automation Software is quite possibly the most effective thing a business can do to improve its sales and give them an advantage over their competitors. Marketing Automation can increase your B2B demand generation across different buying cycles.
This type of software permits marketers to generate, score and nurture leads in a new, more efficient way. For some smaller businesses, we have even been able to combine this software with some of our proprietary tools in a way that eliminates the need for marketing as a function. This allows you to give the demand generation tools to your sales reps in order to decrease cost and increase productivity.
We believe the main reason many B2B companies do not find success with this type of software is they do not allow the sales team to propel its implementation. These companies have not yet seen the value of incorporating a top salesperson’s process as a part of their overall demand generation process.
Lead Scoring
One of the biggest advantages of implementing marketing automation software is improved efficiency in terms of scoring leads. This allows your sales reps to concentrate their phone time on the most qualified leads. These marketing software tools have lead scoring and nurturing features that allow you to watch and score the way your prospects are interacting with your online content and follow-up emails. Once a lead has a score that suggests they are ready to buy, your lead generation reps can make that lead a priority. They can then contact these leads directly for final qualification steps to convert them to sales qualified leads.
Committed Demand Generation Team
We believe having a team dedicated to converting marketing qualified leads into sales qualified leads is the key to success in terms of demand generation. Many companies try to have the sales team complete this task in order to shorten the cycle, but we have found this rarely achieves long-term success. While working this way may put you at an advantage with the 20% who now prefer to buy quickly, you lose all of the buyers who like to buy differently. Demand generation programs only work when the level of commitment from the demand generation team matches the capacity of the tools they are using.
If you would like to learn more about how sales outsourcing for B2B can help you align your inbound and outbound efforts for a fatter pipe and more closed revenue please feel free to CONTACT US for a free initial strategy conversation.
by Glen Springer | Nov 13, 2012
Technology Will Accelerate Marketing’s Impact on Revenue
In Part 1, Increase B2B Sales Volume and Revenue and Part 2,What Does Your B2B Sales Approach and B2B Marketing Culture Need to Look Like?, we discussed the new situation in B2B sales and how the buying process has changed, how marketing is more important to your sales process than ever, and how you may need to alter your sales process and augment your team.
In part 3, we outlined the 11 core competencies required to build a successful b2b demand generation marketing program that puts your buyers and their buying cycle (as opposed to your sales cycle) at the center of your sales and marketing process.
Now, in part 4, we explain the five key ways that marketing automation and sales technology can quickly shift your culture and help your sales team be more effective. The five ways are:
- Lead Capture
- Lead Qualification
- Email Automation
- Lead Intelligence
- Real Time Lead Alerts
Here’s a brief explanation of how each of these features will help your sales team:
Lead Capture
For example, Pardot Marketing Automation Software allows you to identify companies that are visiting your site without the need for any information to be collected on a form. There is a database of IPs that identify the company. The major value here is identifying potential prospects without waiting for contact info to be submitted, using 3rd party data providers like Inside View, LinkedIn, One Source and SalesForceData to more quickly identify the key contacts within the companies visiting your site. These 3rd party data providers also help you pull in additional missing data points about the company and key contacts.
Just as important is actually capturing leads with landing pages and forms. That is nothing new, but the ability to then implement strong lead management rules helps hand over qualified prospects automatically.
Lead Qualification
There are two main ways to qualify leads: using implicit behaviors and activities and explicit data and demographics.
Using implicit information and lead scoring, you can rank and score activities (email, web and social) variably by importance and then set up actions to pass the top scoring prospects over to a sales rep automatically.
Using explicit data and lead grading, you can qualify a prospect on who that person is, e.g. a CEO versus a workaholic just trying to learn something new by requesting your content. You can also change grades up and down based on industry, company size and other factors. Essentially, it’s grading prospects against an ideal customer profile that your sales and marketing team identifies.
Along with helping your sales team avoid talking to bad prospects, using these grades and scores provides you another way to dynamically pre-qualify and assign the best prospects to your sales rep.
Email Automation
Email automation for sales reps takes their knowledge about and performance with their leads to another level. Reps can now use email integration tools for Outlook, Gmail, Apple Mail, and Thunderbird to send personal emails through their marketing automation tool, This allows them to personally track opens and clicks with automatic notifications being sent back to the rep when these actions are taken.
Another powerful email automation component is personalized email marketing campaigns, where the marketing team can craft a message to the companies entire pool of prospects, yet dynamically assign the “From” and “Email” field of the lead’s assigned rep. This serves two main purposes: 1) the rep will get the credit for a pleased lead being sent valuable content (yet the rep didn’t have to do anything – marketing and software took care of the touch for them) and 2) all replies to the content will go directly back to the rep (plus, the rep can also be notified when their lead interacts with that message).
A bonus aspect to email automation is the sales rep can pass back “not-yet-qualified” leads to be nurtured by marketing and allow for further lead qualification. The sales rep can be notified again once the lead qualification status has been improved based on the lead’s content interaction activities and scoring rules.
Lead Intelligence
Sales reps will be able to track all online behaviors (email, website and social) and that data can be put directly into the CRM that the sales rep works from, e.g. Salesforce, instead of requiring the sales rep to learn the ins and outs of the marketing automation prospect tracking system (though they probably will want to once they see how much more effective they are). Activities like original lead source, specific page views, keyword searches, 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.
Real-Time Lead Alerts
Real-time lead alerts allow sales reps faster response time when companies or leads are actively engaged in the sales education collateral. Sales reps can receive instant alerts or daily email summaries regarding these activities. They can receive instant alerts via email, text messaging, mobile apps, and desktop apps, whichever they prefer.
With these alerts and summaries Reps 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
All of these features, Lead Capture, Lead Qualification, Email Automation, Lead Intelligence and Real-Time Lead Alerts, save your reps time and make them more successful. An effective integration and use of marketing automation can synthesize marketing and sales objectives and improve the effectiveness better than ever.
If you are still a little skeptical that marketing automation and content marketing are going to be critical to your success we invite you to check out our blog Content Marketing is Now Required for Quality B2B Lead Generation that will give you a little background on the risk you are running and the cost of delay.
If you want to learn more about how Gabriel Sales can combine your product knowledge and thought leadership with our sales and marketing automation expertise to get you in the game faster, request a complimentary review. If you want to review more information, download the White Paper for Tactics you can implement now.
Additional Blogs in this Series:
Part 1 – Increasing Your B2B Sales Volume and Revenue – What’s Changed?
Part 2 – What Does Your B2B Sales and Marketing Culture Need to Look Like?
Part 3 – What Core Competencies do I Need From My Marketing and Lead Generation Team?
Part 4 – How Can Marketing Automation Improve My B2B Sales Performance?
Part 5 – Why is Content Marketing is Now Required for Quality B2B Lead Generation?
by gabriel_sales | Sep 19, 2012
A recent Deloitte survey on outsourcing pointed to a projected increase over the next several years. What is driving this across the board is a desire for companies to focus on their core competencies. What was interesting to us as an sales and marketing outsourcing company is the expected anticipated growth of sales and marketing outsourcing specifically of 22%. Why are so many diverse companies, both big and small, turning to outsourcing? Organizations chose to outsource for many reasons, and when asked which objectives were the most important to their outsourcing initiative 87% said reducing operating costs, 73% said improving customer service, and 49% said gaining a competitive advantage.
As an outsourced sales and marketing company we find that the largest area we are able to reduce operating costs for our clients immediately is in our ability to take over your sales recruiting, sales management and marketing management overhead which can run into six figures plus annually (not including staffing the reps). With this headache off your plate you can focus on your core competencies.
The report goes further and talks about some of the areas that are critical to a successful outsourcing engagement that we believe also applies specifically to sales and marketing outsourcing. They are:
- A spirit of partnership between the vendor and the company. This is especially critical when the goal of sales and marketing outsourcing is closed deals.
- Clear service levels
- Strong and joint management of the relationship. This is especially critical in sales and marketing outsourcing which may require pivots, as feedback from the market drives modifications in how the market should be approached.
- Detailed contract terms
- Strong vendor account management team. When outsourcing sales and marketing this should include both a marketer and a sales manager.
- A strong company management team. We strongly recommend that you do not just plan on turning sales and marketing outsourcing on and walking away. Staying engaged on a monthly or weekly basis can help the relationship flourish and generate more leads and closed business for your company. Sales and marketing outsourcing companies are experts in selling but they cannot immediately replace your thought leadership in your product and market.
To discover if an outsourced sales and marketing company outsourcing is right for you please contact us for a quick review to see if our strategies can help.
by Glen Springer | Sep 9, 2012
A Successful Outsourced Sales and Marketing Company can take Tips from a Rock Star?
As a successful outsourced sales and marketing company it’s important that we keep our outsourced sales reps and marketers up beat and motivated. Success in life no matter what your pursuit all take the same basic building blocks. This quote was particularly helpful in demonstrating that with our sales team so we felt like we would share it with a wider audience.
Bono In response to the question about U2’s drive for huge worldwide success:
“Be honest. Are you really telling me that you’d never contemplated failure before?”
Responded:
“I don’t remember it. I would get angry, I would get upset that we weren’t what we could be. I don’t remember thing that we never would be successful. I always thought we would. And as soon as we did, it would be clear. Doubt, self doubt, was about the current material we could improve, but the destination was never a doubt. See, there is a chasm between envy and desire, OK? Envy is like wanting something that’s not yours, not worked for. But desire is different. Desire comes out of wanting what is yours, and still wanting it even if it’s not yet there. When desire becomes envy there is a difference. And there is a difference between the point of view of the fan. When (a fan) looks up at desire they think I can be”
Great quote but what does this have to do with sales and marketing. We think the difference between desire and envy, where you are coming from in your heart and head is often the difference between success and failure. Obviously you can’t get much more successful then U2 has. And its clear from this quote that this was not an accident.
What does this quote demonstrate to help create a successful outsourced sales and marketing company?
- Success requires passion but not anger. A drive to push yourself and your team.
- Success requires knowing what your chief aim is. Visualizing it.
- Success requires never doubting that you are capable of it.
- Success requires coming from a place (desire) where you believe in what you are doing (selling, marketing)
- Success is about never forgetting that your success requires that you genuinely care about your fan (customer).
If your sales pipe could use a boost feel free to contact us to see if one of our programs can help.
by Glen Springer | Sep 1, 2012
I am a huge fan of David Foster Wallace. In a commencement speech he tells the story of three fish:
“There are these two young fish swimming along, and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says, “Morning, boys, how’s the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes, “What the hell is water?”
The immediate point of the fish story is that the most obvious, ubiquitous, important realities are often the ones that are the hardest to see and talk about…A huge percentage of the stuff that I tend to be automatically certain of is, it turns out, totally wrong and deluded. Here’s one example of the utter wrongness of something I tend to be automatically sure of: Everything in my own immediate experience supports my deep belief that I am the absolute center of the universe, the realest, most vivid and important person in existence. We rarely talk about this sort of natural, basic self-centeredness, because it’s so socially repulsive, but it’s pretty much the same for all of us, deep down. It is our default-setting, hard-wired into our boards at birth. Think about it: There is no experience you’ve had that you were not at the absolute center of.”
Wallace’s insight is truly brilliant and something sales and marketing professionals in the world of online B2B marketing can never forget. Stated another way:
Your Customer IS the Center of Your Universe
In the new rules of sales and marketing engagement we need to always remember this universal truth and fight our hard wired biological drive to be the narcissistic self-centered creatures we were designed to be.
Here is a quick and easy test to see if your team is getting it right
Read your sales content and see how many times you use the words “We”, “Us”, “Our”, or your brand or product names and then compare it to how many times you use the words “You”, “Your” and your targets Title or Job Function. Below are two real world examples of a first emails that have gone out from our team.
How this slip occurred in our process is the topic of a second blog (and cautionary tale) entitled Best Practices Integrating Your Outbound Sales Team into Your Marketing Automation Program to be published in a couple of days.
Email 1
- Narcissistic and Self Centered Being The Creatures we Hard Wired to Be: -11
- Customer is the Center of the Universe Score +2
- Success Score – 9
From:
Date: Wed, Aug 29, 2012 at 10:06 AM
Subject: Your Inquiry to Gabriel Sales
To:
Hi XXXXXXX,
Thank you for your inquiry regarding outsourced sales. Gabriel Sales has been helping companies bring their products to market via lead generation, lead nurturing, closing deals as well as managing the entire sales team for over 10 years. We have worked with many offshore companies, U.S. start-ups as well as the Fortune 100. We have deep domain experience selling Marketing Services and Technology. Our most recent success has been bringing an Indian data analytics firm from $500K-$12M in revenue in 3 years. They then sold for $65M.
We are very process oriented. We will develop the best way to sell your product, (messaging, packaging and pricing if necessary), begin selling, track all the ratios related to the sale, and create a repeatable forecast-able sales system and Marketing plan for you to then to run yourself or continue to outsource with us. We will cold call, buy lists, or manage a marketing campaign to get leads; or work leads provided by you.
In regards to selling similar products, we have sold many marketing solutions to VPs of Marketing in the SMB and Fortune 1000 markets.
Our model is based on a retainer and consulting fees. We believe in automating the sales process as much as possible to reduce the human resource requirements. We do this through creating landing pages and content that can “sell” as much as possible as well as utilizing Marketing Automation software.
We look forward to your response.
Email 2
- Narcissistic and and Self Centered Being The Creatures we Hard Wired to Be: 0
- Customer is the Center of the Universe Score +9
- Success Score +9
From:
Sent: Wednesday, August 29, 2012 10:03 AM
To:
Subject: A Couple Other Recent Best Practices from Gabriel Sales
Hi XXXXXXXXX
Hope you find some tips your team can leverage from the “Sell Smarter, Sell Faster” White Paper.
Here is a quick blog post on some Best Practices you can leverage to keep your Email Marketing aligned with your buyers’ goals and your sales team’s efforts Keep it Conversational – Best Practices for B2B E-Mail Marketing that the team put together after receiving some questions from sales and marketing professionals that liked the White Paper.
Also in case you missed it here is 4 minute video How to Accelerate Your B2B Demand Generation Engine that describes how your team can start to align your sales and content marketing to lift your results for both.
Look forward to connecting to see how else we can help. If you have any questions about any of the educational resources we are sending across don’t hesitate to reach out.
Regards,
With this one simple approach to your outbound communication, from both your sales reps and your marketers, you will see a sales lift across the board.
As a little additional backstory we got this wrong at Gabriel Sales this week because we did not correctly train one of our sales reps when they were promoted. That’s another story for a blog that will soon follow. The incident was also a strong reminder that sales and marketing alignment is not always seamless. Hopefully this post makes it a little more seamless for your team.
For additional Best Practices regarding online B2B marketing, feel free to check out our White Paper – Selling Smarter and Selling Faster.
Also wanted to give a plug to David Foster Wallace and would highly recommend that if you are into literature and great story telling that you read Infinite Jest. Written in the 90s its an incredibly predictive future version of North America, and touches on competitiveness, aspiring to excellence, addictive and compulsive behavior, advertising, media, film theory and popular entertainment. Here is a link to his Wikipedia site. Have fun.
by Glen Springer | 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
