by Glen Springer | Jan 3, 2017
How outsourcing sales can accelerate revenue for your business
With 2017 just getting started, most companies will be considering how to accelerate revenue production. If you and your sales and marketing team killed it in 2016 congrats…now is a perfect time to consider how you can leverage that momentum and build on it.
If you didn’t hit targets, we encourage you to ask yourself what you can do differently in 2017 to get sales back on track and Accelerate Revenue production.
Here are a just a few tactics that you can implement quickly in Q1 to help get off to a flying start. And if you are a little pressed for resources we briefly explain how outsourcing sales may be able to help with specific functions to help you build more modern and productive sales and marketing operations.
Top of funnel lead gen campaign
As an outsourcing sales company we find that many of our clients have a great solution that fills a need in the market. But many companies fall prey to the misguided notion that increasing sales means hiring more sales people. Instead we encourage you to consider if your closers are getting enough leads into the top of their sales funnel. If not, you may want to consider running a top of funnel lead generation campaign with email marketing and PPC tactics to arm your team with more early stage opportunities.
Sales Function Specialization
Beyond a quality product, your closers are your most valuable asset. Outsourcing sales can allow your closers to specialize on closing and you can leverage an outsourcing sales team to focus on qualifying your top of funnel leads.
Revisit your targeting
When was the last time that you examined if you were targeting the right market or if there are new markets to explore? Have you taken the time to create a buyer persona to understand who your best customers were in 2016 and have you examined why they purchased your solution? As an outsourcing sales company we can run a quick buyer persona workshop and provide quick market segmentation to see if there are markets you could expand to in 2017. We can then help to target those markets will laser focus. To learn more about how to build an ideal customer profile you can check out our blog article here.
Create content that delivers value
If you have not committed to content marketing yet, now may be the time to start. What you consider to be common sense often has tremendous value for potential buyers. Content marketing takes time and effort but in this age when 70% of buyers shortlist vendors with one or fewer conversations with a sales rep, making it easy for your buyers to buy with digital education is now a must have. Once you’ve created your buyer personas and documented their buying process you can create targeted content for each stage of the buyer journey. Make sure you have one or two pieces for each stage of the decision-making process. As an outsourcing sales company, Gabriel Sales can help you get this off the ground with a quick 2 day content production workshop.
Start nurturing and scoring leads
Over the course of 2016 statistics have shown that the majority of leads generated are from prospects not ready to buy right away. The trick to closing those leads is not throwing more budget at phone calls to buyers that aren’t ready to buy. Instead, you can stay top of mind by simply sharing educational content that helps buyers learn more about the challenges they face, how others are overcoming those challenges and how your solution may be able to help to accelerate revenue.
And to send these emails you will need a marketing automation platform that scores those leads so when a buyer is ready to buy you’ll know.
As an outsourcing sales company, Gabriel Sales specializes in helping small business implement and then manage their sales automation processes to accelerate revenue production. We have expertise in managing entry level and more complex software solutions so we can also help you decide on the right solution for your sales targets and budget. To decide if lead scoring is right for your business feel free to download our eBook here.
Be educational, not aggressive
More and more products are first bought through digital education and then sold when the buyer is ready to be closed. Generating great leads is an awesome start but if you don’t convert them into real sales opportunities all those invested resources go to waste. If your close rate is lower than you would like, ask yourself am I being too aggressive with the close?
In this age of digital education, buyers are now in control and hard closing before a buyer is ready to buy no longer works. By focusing instead on being helpful you can stand apart from your competition. An outsourcing sales company can help with your nurturing and we can also staff buyer education reps to monitor the scored leads for timely follow up that keeps the conversation helpful to help give you extra capacity for the middle of your sales funnel. To learn more about how modern business development reps engage buyers you can check out this quick overview here
How We Can Help
Gabriel Sales builds sales automation engines for B2B companies and helps support marketing efforts by also supplying insides sales outsourcing teams that combine both marketers and reps following up with highly scored leads. If you would like to learn about our approach visit our About Us Page or feel free to Contact Us to learn more about how we can help with your insides sales outsourcing and outsourced marketing needs.
by Glen Springer | Jan 2, 2017
As an outsource sales and marketing company we speak to many small business owners that are struggling to increase the efficiency of their sale and marketing processes. It’s understandable that some small businesses that have been selling for years can be a little anxious with keeping up with modern sales and marketing operations and the advances in online business models and digital marketing. And according to a recent survey of 1200 buyers 85% of most organizations now prefer to make all are part of their purchase decision through digital channels. But it’s important to note that 75% of those buyers will not make a purchase decision without engaging with a sales rep at the end of the buying process.
As an outsource sales and marketing company we help companies address these challenges by helping companies build digitally integrated sales and marketing sales/buyer processes. When it comes to empowering companies with their outsource sales and marketing efforts we focus on four core digital areas:
Creating enough content to support the buyer journey and the outsource sales and marketing process
We help companies to create digital content that supports their sales process at each stage of the buying process.
We look at creating content for four different stages:
- Creating content to share educational facts and information that helps them start to frame their problem and the challenges they will need to address
- Content that helps buyers realize that we understand their problems
- Content that frames how we help them to solve the problem
- Finally content that discusses how the problem was solved and the business results you can gain from solving that problem
We provide our Outsource Sales and Marketing clients with the content management tools to make it easy for buyers to self-educate.
Once you have your content created it’s important that you make it easy for your buyers to access that content. Getting your content on the web is only the first step. In today’s digital media age you also need to make it easy for buyer to self-discover information about your solution easy and simple. So we have created a simple to manage tool called Digital Demand Center™ that makes it easy to organize all 4 stages of your content on one microsite.
Organizing your content this way allows your buyer that is hungry for self education to go through all states of their buying process to solve one specific problem easy and simple. It also gives buyers that prefer one format over another (video, blog articles or downloadable assets) to educate themselves the way they prefer.
Allow your outsource sales team to access that digital conversation
The final step in the process is leveraging a marketing automation platform to:
- Track the buyers engagement with your content
- Score buyers based on what content they are consuming (the later the buying stage the higher the score)
- Notifying your outsource sales team when the buyer reaches a Sales Ready Lead Score
Embracing a digital workflow, scoring leads and sharing that information is not a replacement for sales – it’s a way to free up more of their time to focus on revenue-generating activities.
These digital tools are a way to boost the performance of your outsource sales team.
To learn about how Gabriel Sales can work with you to outsource sales and marketing please visit our outsource sales and marketing services page.
by Glen Springer | Nov 30, 2016
This article will address five indicators that may suggest that it could be a good time to consider sales outsourcing and marketing.
Outsourcing different functions to service providers is becoming more and more accepted. Companies can now outsource a variety of tasks like HR, staffing, product development and finance. But companies are often more cautious when outsourcing sales and marketing. But when executed correctly by an experienced provider, sales outsourcing can have a meaningful impact especially in helping you to build a modern sales and marketing organization.
Here are several reasons you may want to work with a modern sales outsourcing and marketing company:
Feature selling is not working – You need to start selling against pains with solutions. A sales outsourcing and marketing company will be able to help you quickly shift your early stage messages and process to focus on the buyer instead of your product.
Your Rolodex Reps have stopped producing – A fair amount of companies are able to grow their business through their founders or the early sales hires’ set of relationships. At some point this runs out of steam. A sales outsourcing company can provide a process that generates a more consistent flow of leads.
Sales model must change – Startups and small businesses grow markets in different ways. But most companies reach a stage where they need to go after a new market quickly. A sales outsourcing and marketing company can help you quickly shift:
- Selling to the enterprise to selling to SMB
- Generating leads for larger enterprise companies
- Transitioning your sales process from an outside sale to an inside sales
- Using content marketing to do your early stage sales education
You need to build a repeatable sales process – After a company has closed their initial 6 to 12 deals there you will have enough information and experience to build a repeatable sales process. A modern sales outsourcing and marketing company will have the frameworks to quickly help you build a repeatable and integrated process that can be scaled.
You have gaps in your internal team – A sales outsourcing and marketing company will be able to help by supplying:
- The right marketing talent and a sales talent to execute parts of your sales process
- The right automation and CRM systems experts
- Access to a database to market to and the talent to help you manage that database
- Content marketing and content production specialists
The right strategist and consulting experts for marketing, lead generation, lead qualifying and closing assistance are also typically part of any sales outsourcing and marketing engagement. These strategists will be able to provide a fresh perspective to help you remove barriers to your sales.
Conclusion
Sales outsourcing and marketing provides a number of benefits, like controlling costs, providing access to highly skilled sales talent, sales and marketing strategists, technologists and marketing professionals. You also avoid the costs and delays of building on your own. You get a team up and running faster that will be aligned around enabling growth.
Gabriel Sales specializes in helping Start Ups and Small and Mid- Sized Business build modern sales and marketing operations. To learn more about our approach we invite you to check out our About Us page or you can also check out our Sales Outsourcing and Marketing Case Studies to evaluate if we may be able to help
by Glen Springer | Nov 28, 2016
In 2015 Live Webinars were one of the top 3 content formats leveraged by buyers to help them learn more about a company’s solution. But according to DemandGen’s 2016 Content Survey webinars slipped slightly from this position in 2016 for the following reasons:
- Lack of time to view a full webinar: 88% of buyers surveyed said they prefer shorter content formats
- Too much content available in general: 83% of respondents said they are overwhelmed by the amount of available content
- The need to watch webinars live: 73% of respondents said they prefer to access audio/video content on-demand.
But on the positive side…if you create compelling webinars buyers that do invest the time are more likely to convert into Sales Qualified Opportunities. So as an outsourced sales and marketing we still love webinars because they are a killer piece of content to make it easier for your buyer to buy and a great predictive tool in your lead scoring strategy.
So as an outsourced sales and marketing company here are 5 tips we give our clients to ensure they get the most out of their Webinars to maximize their content marketing investment.
Turn one webinar into multiple pieces of content Outsourced Sales and Marketing Team can leverage
We can get a dozen pieces of content because that one webinar can typically be repurposed into:
- 4 to 5 Short Weblette Videos
- 4-7 Blog Posts
- A White Paper and/or an Ebook.
These also are shorter pieces of content which buyers now prefer.
You don’t need to always have live webinars.
Having live events are a great way to generate leads but you don’t need to always go into the extra work of making these live events. If you do have live events you should expect as many as 50% to 60% not to show. But this does not need to be a huge cause of concern. You can still follow up with these with additional content marketing. Remember to send them a notification when the live webinar is recorded. And we have also found that if senior buyers sign up its worth as many as seven follow up calls to these senior decision makers because they signed up for the event because they had a problem they needed to solve. It’s worth as many as 7 calls.
Simply Start with an On-Demand Webcast
Building on two of the points above, doing webcasts live puts more pressure on the presenter and the moderator. Now that buyers prefer on demand webcasts you can start there.. Simply simulate a live webcast. With video editing software it is now easy to clean up any mistakes if you don’t like how you presented a section. So in one session with some basic editing you can create an impactful piece of content that can be used for an extended period of time faster and with less pressure.
On-demand webinars are essentially DVRed TV shows, Demand Gen Report’s 2016 Content Preferences Survey showed that 73% of respondents prefer to access audio/video content on demand.
Send Email Promotions Strategically: Blasting multiple emails with the same message and content is not the right strategy. Send the first mail about two weeks prior to the event, the second two days before the event and the last mail the day of the event. And articulate what they will learn from the event with slightly different subject lines and content.
Conclusion
Webinars should be a staple of any marketing, education and lead scoring program. But they are just one important part of an integrated outsourced sales and marketing program. Marketers should stop thinking about them as events and start thinking and using them as part of an overall strategy to tell their sales story to the market in a substantive way.
To learn more about how Gabriel Sales can help you get more out of your webcasting and overall content marketing and sales efforts and how we can help you build more modern sales and marketing operations we invite you to check out our outsourced sales and marketing outsourced sales and marketing or the About Us section of our website.
by Glen Springer | Nov 23, 2016
Solutions are first Bought and then Sold All culminating in the ability to score leads so your callers are focused on buyers most likely to transact Ten years ago the number one way to generate new leads was through the proven method of targeting the right market,...
