The purpose of this blog is to help our outsourced sales and outsourced marketing clients understand how we recommend they think about their B to B demand generation and sales content strategy and what we do as part of our consulting engagements to shape Sales Collateral.
What defines a “better” piece of b to b sales collateral? Well, in our opinion better b to b sales collateral moves a prospect further into their decision making process and does it at a faster rate. The goal: close more business, faster.
The first thing to remember is that to create better sales collateral it’s never going to be about you. It’s about your prospect’s specific sales information need and the type of information they need will depend on where they are in their decision making process.
As a sales and marketing outsourcing company, when we launch a new client we take them through our proprietary discovery process to establish the initial messaging and targeting strategy. Once this is complete we get on the phone and simultaneously accomplish the following functions:
- We execute immediately to start generating leads to fill the sale pipe
- We start collecting hard data and metrics
- We continue to consult creating a content and sales process strategy that aligns sales and marketing
This ongoing consulting based on hard data allows us to frame a repeatable sales process. Creating this process requires that we listen to and then meet the sales needs of the prospect. Without the correct sales process and the right content nobody wins. This includes our clients, their prospects and us. What most sales outsourcing organizations won’t tell you is that no ones content is perfect out of the gate. The idea here is to talk to the prospects, test, refine and become more efficient to fill the content gaps as quickly as possible. This is what helps us become more effective and more efficient closers. This is where we gain our advantage.
We realize that content creation can seem daunting. It does not have to be. It should be fun. What we generally find is that our initial immediate needs can be met quickly and created quickly as we are putting the first wave of deals in the pipe. In most cases we find that existing content just needs to be tweaked, reframed, repurposed and/or reformatted.
The chart you see at the top of this post is the simple framework we use as we create your long term content strategy during the consulting portion of our initial client launches. What drives the efficiency in this approach vs. a typical marketing firms approach is that we are not guessing. As we are filling the pipe we are measuring what is successful and what is not successful. We are learning when we lose and improving what works. We are making decisions based on real customer data and real customer feedback that creates a content strategy that fuels a sales process has a real impact. We are simply listening to your customers and giving them what they need to transact. This is not rocket science but it does require following a specific process, road map and framework, and then supporting the effort with proper tools. This approach creates a scalable sales machine.
Depending on your stage of sales and marketing maturity, there are multiple sales and marketing strategies and tactics Gabriel Sales can leverage to drive sales growth. A strategy or tactic is most effective when anchored in real numbers tied to realistic targets and measureable goals. The best sales and marketing operations outsourcing company will help you to create a unique plan to create this strategy and set real metrics if you are just getting started. If you have an existing sales history Gabriel Sales can fix what is not working and build on what is. Contact us for a free consultation to see what we can do to improve your sales performance and pipeline velocity in 2012.
