Why Outsourced Sales and Marketing Makes Sense for Marketing Automation Implementations
So you have decided that you want to transform your sales and marketing operations. This means you need a lead scoring system and marketing automation platform. However, you are still a little leery because of the sizeable investment in the software and team of marketers this commitment will represent. You have the following concerns:
- You want to test a marketing automation platform but you don’t have the internal resource to run it
- You want to limit your investment until you know it will work before you make that commitment to both talent and software
- You have enough content to generate leads but not to nurture leads
- You don’t understand the best practices or how to baseline that return
Essentially you want to get started and prove you can get a return on your efforts before you pull the trigger and build your own team.
Below are 5 ways outsourced sales and marketing can help with Marketing Automation as you execute this strategy.
Automation Platform Selection
Most outsourced sales and marketing companies will have deep expertise across the platforms. They will have preferred providers but you can expect them to make solid recommendations based on your needs, sales cycle and budget.
Try Before You Buy
You can always contract directly with a marketing automation software supplier if you wish. And once you have decided that marketing automation works for you that is what we typically recommend. However almost all the software providers require at least an annual commitment and in some cases an annual payment. They want you to commit because it takes marketing automation about six months to a year if you are building a team on your own. Most substantial outsourced sales and marketing companies will be able to negotiate shorter commitments or in Gabriel Sales’ case will be able to provide solutions on a month to month basis until you prove concept. This frees up budget to spend on generating leads to help you produce an ROI from your marketing automation process faster.
CRM Data Integration
Key to successful marketing automation is connecting the automation system to your CRM so you have one clean buyer record. This makes it possible for your sales reps to see the value from the automation platform without needing to learn another system. An outsourced sales and marketing company will have processes to clean your data and will be able to connect all the data required. This makes the system useful to your sales team immediately.
Campaign Deployment
An outsourced sales and marketing company will have the technical skills to deploy a campaign through your platform in a fraction of the time it would take to learn these systems on your own. This includes: customer and prospects segmentation, best practices for how to launch your campaign, how to scale, and the frequency of your email communications.
Lead Scoring Best Practices
Lead scoring requires a combination of sales and marketing alignment, a strong content matrix, and a strong definition of both implicit and explicit qualification criteria. An outsourced sales and marketing company will be able to work through these issues in a fraction of the time ensuring that your engine identifies buyers most likely to buy.
Sales Team Adoption
Your automation platform only has value if your sales reps follow up with leads. An outsourced sales and marketing company will be able to train your sales reps how to leverage the system and also provide appointment setting support if your team lacks the time to follow up with your new volume of leads.
Reporting
Many of the marketing automation platforms give you the ability to run hundreds of reports. Most executives only want to see dashboards and a handful of reports that demonstrate how many contacts you’re marketing to, how they’re segmented and what scores are leading toward pipe velocity and sales conversions. An outsourced sales and marketing company will be able to cut through the noise and provide these reports to you for ROI measurement out of the gate.
Gabriel Sales helps companies transform their sales and marketing operations by providing the team and tools you need to generate score and qualify leads faster at a lower cost. To learn more about our outsourced sales and marketing approach and philosophy visit our About Us page.
