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
by gabriel_sales | Feb 27, 2012
We get asked all the time “Is cold calling dead?” for B2B demand generation and lead generation. The answer is a definitive no! However cold calling (aka telemarketing lead generation) is not as cost effective as it once was. Telemarketing lead generation in isolation is a risky bet. This blog addresses how as a B2B Demand Generation company and sales process consulting firm we have had to shift our approach to outbound cold calling and B2B lead generation. Here is what the numbers tell us:
- On the down side…In 2011 our average call (time a rep picks up the phone) to connect (times a decision maker picks up the phone) ratio was between 7% -16% (depending on the Industry). In 2008 it was between 12% – 21% (once again depending on the Industry). Calls to connect are 30% to 50% less effective getting someone on the phone. This is driven in part by better screening technology but it is primarily driven that with downsizing there are less decision makers, doing more work so they have less time to pick up the phone.
- In 2011 our average call to meaning full conversation is unchanged and prospects willing to accept information has slightly increased 0.5%. In 2011 our calls to conversions into a Sales Accepted Lead is only down 2%-4%. Sales Accepted Lead to Sales Qualified Lead is virtually unchanged although they take about a month to a quarter longer to move. What this tells us is that cold calling is still effective when your call is picked up. And once you connect you patiently stay on top of the lead systematically.
To our mind there is no better way to target your ideal customer if you are convinced your product or solution will meet their needs because you get to decide specifically who to target.
What to Do:
It all comes down to maximizing the efficiency of your more senior reps by being smart. Here are a handful of increasing the success of your outbound B2B demand generation efforts.
- You need to build and ideal customer profile prior to purchasing a list. Garbage in means garbage out. Support your B2B lead gen reps.
- Spend a little more money on your lists and spend time scrubbing your list.
- Craft a solid voice mail pitch with a compelling offer for your B2B lead gen reps to push.
- Put a junior resource on new lists to verify phone number and direct lines. Leverage content as a surrogate for domain expertise and your senior sales reps.
- Automate your sales follow up with a drip marketing campaign. You are paying good money so nurture what you have. B2B demand generation requires nurturing to maximize your investment
What to Avoid:
- Forget to follow up with your existing warm pipe
- Not measuring the production or non-production of every cold call your B2B lead generation rep makes
- Holding your B2B lead generation reps accountable for daily, weekly and monthly lead gen call volume targets
- Rewarding your outbound lead gen team for anything but Sales Qualified Leads.
- Not following up with additional educational content
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 demand generation program whether you are mid cycle or building a new effort feel free to CONTACT US.
For a quick look at what a B2B demand generation engine looks like to get a sense if you could benefit from some quick sales and marketing automation process consulting we invite to CLICK HERE you to check out our short 4 minute video.
by Glen Springer | 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.
by gabriel_sales | Jan 19, 2012
In the technology industry, having a great new product is no longer enough. You need to know how to get the information about it into the right hands to close deals. In order to make this happen, you need a clearly defined sales strategy that sets you apart from the competition.
Once you have your new product ready to launch, it’s time to start selling. Your sales team needs to fully understand both the product and the current conditions of your target market. They need to understand the benefits and strengths of your product, and be prepared with answers to possible sales objections they may be faced with.
If you’re not sure how to make this all happen, outsourcing your sales and marketing may be a viable option. A sales and marketing outsourcing company like Gabriel Sales can help you improve productivity, increase revenue and grow your business.
A Sales and Marketing Outsourcing company allow you to:
- Have access to a team of experienced sales professionals working directly for you
- Understand your target market and build a custom ideal customer profile
- Spread media content about your product efficiently and effectively
- Have access to sales professionals already experienced in the markets you wish to sell to
- Stay ahead of the competition by constantly pushing relevant sales content through your pipe
Outsourcing sales and marketing may still sound like a foreign concept to some. But, many companies, especially in the high-tech industry, are finding that outsourcing sales has increased revenue and growth both during and after new product launches.
Sales and marketing outsourcing companies help put a sales strategy in place that understands your specific needs as a company, and sets up a process that will quickly and efficiently close deals. If you are interested in learning more about how this process works, feel free to contact us for a free pipe velocity review.
by Glen Springer | Jan 8, 2012
As a B2B sales outsourcing company we do a great deal of cold calling to generate business sales leads. In a previous blog titled Cold Calling is like Dating, we explained how dating etiquette and sales etiquette are similar when it comes to making the first impression. This blog continues the dating metaphor to the next stages of the sales cycle.
In the first part of this blog, we discussed how the goal of the first date should not be to close the deal; it should be to get a second date. We find that if our reps succeeded at getting the prospect to agree to further interaction after the cold call, it is now time to “play it cool”.
When dating, after meeting someone for the first time, there’s no quicker way to end a budding romance before it begins than to be over eager or show desperation. The same goes for business sales leads. You want to convince your prospect that you aren’t annoying or creepy. Too many calls or voice mails after a first date might give the impression you are needy or dependent; this is not attractive.
After a first date, a woman wants to feel like she’s being thought about, not obsessed over. This means no gushing emails about how much you love me and how you cannot wait to see me again. In the dating world, this is an immediate red flag; we just met. In the sales world, and when we are providing sales outsourcing services we find, people are just as suspicious of sudden and constant affection that seems to come out of nowhere. Building a strong and lasting relationship takes time, regardless of whether it’s romantic or business related. If you are going for more than a one-night stand, having patience is key.
Generally, the higher caliber the romantic prospect is, the more work it will take to impress them and arouse interest. This means you must be willing to expend this extra time and effort if you have your sight set on a Victoria Secret model. You have to wine and dine her before you can even think about closing the deal. For your sales process, think of Fortune 500 companies as Victoria Secret models. If you get to know them and put in the time to show you respect who they are, you’re much more likely to succeed.
Also, remember that not returning a phone call does not necessarily equate with non-interest. If she’s the type of girl that is worth keeping around, she will more than likely play a little hard to get. When it comes to sales prospects that act this way, you have to play back and be persistent, but not pushy or annoying.
Our advice as a sales outsourcing company and what we find across verticals and most decision maker types is that the right balance between persistence and non-pushiness can benefit you in more ways than one. First, you have convinced your prospect that you are respectable and are willing to work for what you want. If your prospect takes the bait at this point, you have succeeded. However, just as not all first dates lead to epic romances, not all cold calls lead to closed deals. But, if you have managed to convince your prospect that you’re cool and not creepy, she might set you up with one of her friends (a Sports Illustrated model perhaps?).
For more on how sales in like dating, check out Cold Calling is Like Dating. If you would like to learn more on how to generate new business sales leads or about Gabriel Sales services strategy and how these strategies work for clients, or to decide if B2B sales outsourcing is right for you, please feel free to contact us.
by Glen Springer | Dec 12, 2011
Why should you choose our sales outsourcing services over Rolodex?
This blog discusses the pros and cons of using a sales outsourcing organization like Gabriel Sales vs. hiring a Rolodex Rep specifically for new product or service launches.
Gabriel Sales is an organization to work with when outsourcing sales. In short, what we do is build sales engines. Those sales engines are usually for new product launches and new service launches but we also work with companies looking to turn around under performing sales teams, improve effectiveness of cold callers or anything else you can think of that has the end goal of generating sustainable revenue through a solid sales process. Because we are not a rep company, when we take on clients launching a new product, we are required to wear many hats – sales consultants, marketing consultants, lead gen rep, inside sales rep, closer, sales manager and market research (so we can accurately forecast and create an aligned sales content strategy).
One question that comes up frequently when discussing a new product or service launch is: “Should I hire a Rolodex Rep or hire Gabriel Sales?” There is no clean answer to that question because it depends on:
- Short term and long term strategic needs
- Short term and long term revenue goals
- Competitors
- Maturity of the market
- Maturity of the solution
We can make recommendations once we understand all the specifics with relation to the bullets above but here are some general thoughts (based on experience) for boards and executives to consider when evaluating Rolodex vs. Sales and Marketing Outsourcing.
Pros of hiring a Rolodex Rep
- Rolodex Sales Reps have established relationships.
- They can generally get you in front of a handful of decision makers quickly- By quickly we mean they should be able to spend 2-4 weeks reaching out to their network and another 2-4 weeks doing the first round of meetings. So within two months you should have 6-10 meetings completed and if the product or service is the right fit you can get some quick deals in the pipe depending on the sales cycle.
- If it works you are a hero. If it does not work you are no further along than when you started and you will have lost two quarters (1 quarter waiting for that rep to produce and another putting another solution in place).
- If it does work you can show investors traction but not scale.
Cons of hiring a Rolodex Rep
- The ability of a Rolodex Rep to penetrate the market is limited. Studies have shown that the average Rolodex Rep can maintain 7-20 really strong relationships with senior buyers and another 15-30 plus friendly relationships. If you have a finite market this could be a great solution.
- In most cases you have no visibility into what a Rolodex rep is doing for you until they actually produce something.
- It has been our experience that Rolodex Reps with valuable relationships (20 strong relationships with senior buyers and 30 plus friendlies) are not cheap.
- An experienced Rolodex Rep with genuine value in their network are often reluctant to take on a product until its proven unless you are willing to give them an exclusive for a period of time.
- Rolodex reps rarely sell using a script (process in not necessarily repeatable and sometimes does little to convince investors you can scale) and do not provide and significant sales ratios for future pipe forecasting.
- If it does not work you are no further along than when you started and you will have lost two quarters (3 months waiting for that rep to produce and another 3 months implementing the next solution).
Summary of hiring a Rolodex Rep
When a Rolodex produces it’s a huge win! Hiring a Rolodex Rep is generally high risk and high reward. Gabriel Sales is often brought into an organization after this approach has been attempted unsuccessfully. We are also often brought in simultaneously to start the lead generation engine so when the Rolodex Rep’s pipe runs dry we are filling it to sustain the sales momentum.
Pros of hiring an Outsourced Sales Company (like Gabriel Sales)
- Outsourcing Sales Companies sell using a repeatable sales process. They generally get on the phone to start filling the pipe leveraging a scripted and repeatable sales process.
- Outsourced Sales Organizations staff blended teams so you get the advantage of being able to hit 1000’s of decision makers with their dedicated telemarketing staff, leverage direct marketing campaigns and still have senior inside reps and part time enterprise reps to close business.
- Unlike a Rolodex Rep, Outsourced Sales Companies are collecting critical market data for long term strategy and growth, creating a sales content strategy (and in our case producing digital sales content ).
- When Outsourcing Sales and Marketing you don’t have to deal with all the database management and acquisition work. You get the advantages of a dedicated sales team without the 100K-200K of technology and support team investments required if you were to build your own technology stack. In addition you get rid of some of the fixed costs you would incur by hiring a Senior Sales Executive and Senior Strategist to frame your own engine. The savings is usually in the 100K -150K+ range.
- With an Outsourced Sales and Outsourced Marketing Organization you get accountability, market intelligence and transparency on a weekly basis.
- You get into the market fast and you get infinitely smarter faster.
- Unlike a Rolodex Rep with a Sales and Marketing Outsourcing Company your sales momentum is just starting to build heading into months 3 and 4 which is generally when a Rolodex rep is starting to run out of steam.
Cons of Outsourcing vs. a Rolodex Rep
- The same principle applies here as with a seasoned Rolodex Rep: The better the Sales Outsourcing Organization, the more expensive they can become. (On the plus side neither comes close to the sunk cost of building and managing your own team).
- These organizations can get you into the market much faster than you could get there on your own but it will still take a little time to customize your sales machine and build a process that is both sustainable and repeatable.
Overall Summary
The best solution if you can afford it is to hire both. However in this market you are better off walking away with something if you can’t afford to risk walking away with nothing. Good Rolodex guys are not cheap and you don’t know if you are getting anything back on your investment unless guarantees are made up front. With an Outsourced Sales Organization you are guaranteed call volumes, weekly reports to help you shape future metrics, market intelligence, a sales pipe with multiple stage deals that you can at a very minimum if the product you are taking to market does not quite hit the mark.
At the end of the day everyone is looking for the fastest cheapest way to fix their problem. While you might be able to get something in the short term from a Rolodex Rep you will not get anything for the long term. Building a sales engine is like building house and you have to do it the right way, build a strong foundation and lay the groundwork for success, or you will end up dealing with repairs on a consistent basis and wishing you had invested that extra effort up front.
For more background on the type of consulting you can expect and to understand some of the additional options you have we invite you to check out our blog post on Sales Consulting vs. Sales Outsourcing. If you are looking to drive sales faster while building a sustained foundation for a high velocity sales machine we invite you to contact us for a free consultation to see what we can do to help.
