by gabriel_sales | Apr 4, 2014
Cold callers on their own are no magic bullet for marketing success
This is part two of a blog series. Read part one here.
At its most basic, we believe this approach has been successful because today, buyers don’t like to be sold products; they like to buy solutions that solve their problems. Our integrated approach simply makes this easier.
Sales reps supported with strong and authentic content enable buyers to educate themselves and buy on their own terms and on their own time line. The sales professional now adds value to the buyer’s day as opposed to being another disruptive interruption (such as cold callers). Because once a prospect feels educated on a product or service, the sales pitch is no longer intimidating or overwhelming. It is providing value and helping them to reach a decision.
For example, you may want to buy a guitar amplifier but know little about electronics. A salesman going on and on about transistors and capacitors and signal conversion is not going to get you any closer to making an informed decision. However, reading a brochure titled, “5 Things to Look For When Choosing a Guitar Amplifier,” may help you (the buyer) understand what capacitors and signal conversion acutally are. You then feel more educated and can evaluate the pros and cons of the capacitors and their impact on the type of music you want to offer as your service to the world. Then, you and the salesman can have an intelligent dialogue around guitar amplifiers and you can leave feeling truly satisfied with your purchase decision.
Knowledge is no longer a tool for the salesperson. Knowledge is a tool to create wins for both the buyer and the company.
By offering valuable, educational content to early stage prospects that does not try to sell anything, prospects are able to engage with your company in a nonthreatening way. This digital engagement helps to slowly build trust, so when your prospect has a real need and real budget, they are willing to take a call from a sales rep, and no one feels that the call is ‘cold’.
Getting to this point in your sales and marketing process takes some time and requires a fair amount of patience. But after a year to 18-month commitment to the approach, your whole sales process changes for the better. Your cost of sales percentage decreases, your margins increase, and your deal flow accelerates exponentially.
Rather than searching through thousands of people at a multitude of different companies to try to find those in need of help, you can look at a dashboard, see who is interested and have specific topics to talk to them about.
If you would like to learn more about how sales and marketing have changed or our integrated sales and marketing process, read, “The Shift to Bought then Sold”. If you would like to learn more about our integrated sales and marketing outsourcing services, you can visit our services page.
Feel free to contact us with any questions.
by gabriel_sales | Apr 2, 2014
Why cold callers cannot- and should not-have to handle all of marketing on their own
At Gabriel Sales, we have not needed to staff a fully dedicated cold caller in over 12 months.
While there are many factors at play, we see this as an indication of the success you can experience when you make it easy for your buyers to self educate with an integrated sales and marketing strategy.
Long before we began offering integrated sales and marketing outsourcing services to our clients, we made a commitment to implementing the approach ourselves. On the technology side, we were early adopters of marketing automation and CRM systems. On the marketing side, we have been publishing relevant content and executing eProspecting campaigns and nurturing programs for over three years.
We didn’t get there over night. After committing to this integrated approach for about eighteen months, our dependency on cold callers was dramatically diminished.
This is because the integration of content and technology has allowed us to take our early stage sales messages and turn them into digital content—blogs, white papers, webcasts, etc.—that can be shared one-to-many. Because our marketing automation platform tracks content engagement by prospect, we can start interacting with our prospects early in their buying cycle digitally with our calling resources simply stewarding them through their educational process.
The result is a win-win situation: Our prospects are now able to take themselves through their own discovery and education, on their time frame based on their own business drivers. Our calling resources can then watch this engagement, and they are able to see when it makes sense to reach out.
Now, instead of placing endless follow up calls to companies that may or may not be ready to buy, we are able to use marketing automation and digital sales tools to see what prospects are interacting with what content. We then have a better idea of not only what people are interested but also what they are specifically interested in. Additionally, our calling team is able to be helpful as opposed to disruptive to the buyers’ day-to-day business activities.
When we do see sufficient interest to indicate that it makes sense to follow up with prospects, enough trust has been established digitally that the experience on both sides is about deepening the relationship and moving towards a common goal.
On our end, we know who the prospect is and what title he/she holds (e.g. admin vs. executive). We also know what webpages he/she has visited, what videos were watched, what social media posts were clicked on, etc. This makes us much more effective in helping them to buy or not buy the right solution.
On the prospect side, he/she knows who we are and what we do and also has a general feel of the company culture (e.g. brand attributes). The prospect has also been given the chance to educate himself/herself enough to speak intelligently about our solution. Typically, they have a much greater grasp of what their needs and priorities are.
So now, when we call a prospect for the first time, instead of hearing:
“Who are you? What is this about? Sales and marketing? Oh, I’m not the right person to talk to about this.”
We hear,
“Oh yeah, that white paper on marketing automation was really helpful. I was looking on your site and see that you guys offer marketing automation consulting, could you tell me more about that?”
By allowing our content marketing campaigns to do the work before we get on the phone, both the tone and content of the initial calls are radically different from the typical disruptive calling experience. Whereas the best response you can expect to get from a cold call is, “Sure, send me some information,” calling someone who has already been through a fair amount of your content is generally a ten-minute qualifying conversation right out of the gate.
Rather than pitching ourselves, the call is spent understanding the needs of the buyers.
Continue reading.
