by Glen Springer | Nov 16, 2016
Summary of 4 Benefits of Marketing Automation for Sales Outsourcing Reps
The goal of any sales outsourcing engagement for Gabriel Sales it to put a consistent flow of real sales opportunities into the sales pipeline of the companies we work with. Our aim is to do this at a lower cost. As we help our clients build a modern and repeatable sales and marketing process an automation technology is now a requirement for 4 specific benefits that are directly related to the productivity of your sales outsourcing team:
- Email Automation
- Lead Scoring
- Lead Intelligence
- Real Time Lead Alerts
Here’s a brief explanation of how each of these features will help your sales outsourcing team:
Lead Scoring and your Sales Outsourcing Team
There are two main ways to qualify leads using an marketing automation technology: using implicit behaviors and activities and explicit data and demographics.
Automation technologies allow you to rank a leads level of interest based on the content they are consuming on your website. Different types of content are scored based on how predictive they are as it relates to where a buyer is in their sales cycle. Basic educational content is not as highly scored as video demos relating to a specific solution. You can also score by what emails buyers are engaging with and how frequently they are engaging.
We also use explicit data to score leads. This is typically demographic data. A CEO gets a higher score than IT managers. A company with 1000 employees gets a different score than a company with 50 employees. You can also change grades up and down based on industry, revenue size and other factors. This is grading prospects against an ideal customer profile that your sales and marketing team identifies.
This scoring allows your sales outsourcing team to focus on the most interested buyers and allows you to prioritize on buyers that are the best fit for your company’s solution.
Email Automation
Email automation helps increase the volume of communication for your sales outsourcing team to a new level. Your sales outsourcing team can use emails send bulk emails that appear to be “personal” emails through your marketing automation tool. This allows your sales outsourcing team to personally track opens and clicks with automatic notifications.
Your marketing team can craft a message to segment prospects, and dynamically assign the “From” and “Email” field of the lead’s assigned rep. This serves two main purposes: 1) the sales outsourcing rep will get the credit for a pleased buyer being sent valuable content (yet the rep didn’t have to do anything – marketing and software took care of the touch for them) and 2) all replies to the content will go directly back to the rep.
Buyer Intelligence for Sales Outsourcing Team
Your outsourcing sales rep will be able to see all online behaviors and that information will be available in the CRM that the sales rep works from. Information like original lead source, specific page views, how long they spent on the page, webinar attendance and video views can all be tracked. This allows your sales outsourcing team to frame conversations, voicemails and follow-up emails based on those specific prospect activities and areas of interest and need.
Real-Time Lead Alerts for Sales Outsourcing Reps
Real-time lead alerts allow your sales outsourcing team to follow up faster when buyers are actively engaged in the sales education content. In some cases they can receive instant alerts via email, text messaging, mobile apps, and desktop apps, whichever they prefer.
With these alerts and summaries Reps can:
- Prioritize their day with the most active prospects
- Call buyers when they know they are sitting at their desk
- Click on links to trigger CRM profile lookups for buyer insights
- Send custom emails to active prospects with a few quick clicks
If you would like to see the tools reps will have at their disposal we invite you to contact us for a free demo of the tools in action.
If you want to learn more about how Gabriel Sales can combine your product knowledge and thought leadership with our sales and marketing automation expertise to get you in the lead scoring game faster, request a complimentary review.
by Carol Springer | Jun 20, 2016
No matter the business, marketing is always present. Even your logo or your business card alone shares your brand to customers, colleagues, and competitors. When marketing is optimally used, it results in better relationships with customers and a reduction in wasted time and resources.
One of the biggest trends in marketing today is the use of marketing automation systems. This movement to automate sales and marketing is gaining momentum more and more every year. Whether you use Pardot, Marketo, Act-on, Hubspot, Infusionsoft or other tools; the key to success is to take advantage of the automated processes, scoring and real time notifications. These features, often passed over by sales teams, allow reps to know when to take action and results in moving leads through the sales funnel.
More Exact
Through the use of automation, the level of interest for future business is clear and simple. Concrete data will be generated and available for analysis, which saves time for your sales team. The distinction between qualified and unqualified leads is shown quickly, allowing for an instant decision for where to focus your efforts, and how to keep track of prospects. The nurtured leads become sales opportunities, which are best found through the data that is produced from the marketing automation tools. Generic marketing, like email blasts, is effective when compared to no marketing, however this is not the most effective. With a marketing automation in place, personalized information about leads are at your fingertips instantly.
More Personal
Leads that are generated from content marketing and nurturing using tools like Pardot, Silverpop or Net-Results allow for companies to know exactly who is interested, and by how much. The customer experience is an important factor in measuring success, and gaining more buyers. It’s simple: the nurtured leads have a better experience because the marketing they are receiving is what they are interested in. This allows for your staff to go in and make them feel like people. While it is a simple idea, treating your customers like people can be forgotten and the business transaction is unsuccessful.
More Success
One of the biggest reasons to automate some of your sales and embrace marketing automation is the time saved of senior sales execs. Repetitive tasks are now automated, allowing for marketers and sales teams to focus their energy on more important assignments. Marketing automation implementations are on the rise and the data exhibits how powerful the potential is when used correctly. Take a look at our implementation checklist to get started on the right path.
The future of business relies on adapting to the trends, which are constantly changing. Marketing automation allows for your business to save time, generate revenue, and create stronger relationships with customers. This can be an intimidating concept, especially to a small business owner, however the results speak volumes to the effectiveness.
For any questions on marketing automation implementation or about the overall process, please feel free to reach out to us.
by gabriel_sales | Jul 9, 2014
Many B2B companies today are searching for solutions to generate more leads and are considering marketing automation.
For some companies, this has meant venturing into the fast-paced and complex world of B2B content marketing. And while almost any content you produce can’t hurt, simply throwing content on your website and waiting for leads to come in is no longer enough. To succeed and thrive in 2014, you need digital tools that help you manage and streamline your sales and marketing process from start to finish.
One tool that many B2B companies are leveraging with great success is marketing automation. The exact features of these platforms vary somewhat from vendor to vendor, but for the most part, they all help you track and monitor your prospects engagement along various stages of the B2B sales cycle.
In terms of content specifically, here are three ways marketing technologies increases the effectiveness of B2B content marketing.
1. Allows you to track content engagement by prospect.
One of the most beneficial features of marketing automation is the ability to measure content engagement by prospect. With a normal analytics solutions, like Google Analytics or WordPress Stats, you can only see the number of people who clicked on a link or watched a video. With marketing automation, each prospect that visits your site is ‘cookied’, and their subsequent activity and engagement on your site is tracked. This means you will know that it was ‘John S. from ABC Company’ that read your blog, rather than just some anonymous visitor. This type of data allows you to see when specific prospects have shown enough interest to motivate a follow-up email or phone call to move the deal forward.
2. Enables you to keep track of and nurture not-yet-ready-to-buy prospects.
Research has shown that only 5% of B2B prospects are ready to buy at any given time. Many B2B companies today do not have a strategy to deal with the other 95%; they simply discard them as ‘not interested’. However, by nurturing your leads with ‘light’, educational content every once in a while, you can often find new interest (and deals) from leads you generated six months or a year ago. Marketing automation helps you in the nurturing process by giving you a place to track and manage your prospects and their content engagement on an ongoing basis, rather than just campaign by campaign. For example, if a prospect dropped off or ‘went dead’ just before your proposal stage but reengages six months later, you can pick up right where you left off because you have all the data you need in front of you.
3. Allows you to use analytics to refine and improve your content and sales process.
One of the most valuable things marketing automation provides is data. Using the platform’s analytical features, you can track and monitor engagement at a more detailed level in order to understand when and how to improve. For example, some platforms allow you to not only see when a video was watched, but also how long it was watched for. This way, you can see if a lot of your prospects are dropping off at the same place, and know that you need to refine that piece of your message.
For more on how marketing technologies can benefit the B2B sales process, you can read 3 Tips for Success from an Outsourced Marketing Automation Provider. Feel free to contact us with any questions.
by gabriel_sales | Jun 9, 2014
In recent years, web technologies and digital sales tools have dramatically impacted the way people buy and sell. While many of these technology-related solutions have allowed companies to increase efficiency and improve targeting, they can also seem a bit dehumanizing for your prospects who can tell that machines are interacting with them—not people.
In order to retain the efficiency improvements these digital marketing technologies like marketing automation offer while not seeming like a robot to your prospects, here are three ways to make your marketing automation seem more human:
1. Program follow-up emails to go out at the right time.
Consumers today are now getting used to auto-responder emails, which can sometimes come across impersonal and uncaring. While the argument over the ‘best’ time to send a follow up email will probably never end, you can at least set up your emails to make it seem like a human is sending them. By setting up a follow up email to go out 15 minutes after a link was clicked or request for information was made (instead of 1 second after), you can least seem like you took the time to write out a personal email.
2. Schedule social posts for appropriate times of day for your business.
A lot of B2B companies are using marketing automation platforms or other digital marketing tools to schedule and automate posts on various social media platforms. This is a great practice, as you are able to schedule posts in large chunks rather than having to remember to do it throughout the day/week. However, B2B companies should be careful to watch when they are scheduling posts; it doesn’t make sense for a company selling project management software to be tweeting at two in the morning. B2C companies and global brands can get away with this; but for B2B companies to seem more human, they should generally keep their posts within normal business hours.
3. Respond to followers, friends, fans and other commenters.
While scheduling your social media posts is a great practice, not responding to those who engage with your posts will definitely make you seem like a robot (or just plain rude). Even though you have set up your social posts to run on their own, you should check your social platforms every so often to see who has engaged with you, and respond accordingly.
For more on B2B marketing automation, read 3 Things B2B Marketers Should Always Automate. Feel free to contact us with any questions.
by gabriel_sales | Feb 28, 2014
Marketing Automation may prove to be the way to save companies leads and money
Everybody wants more leads.
In a recent marketing survey from BuyerZone, it was found that 56% of B2B companies strongly disagree with the statement that they’re getting enough leads. The same survey found that 45% of B2B companies have been increasing their lead generation budget year after year.
There are several reasons why this is happening. The first is that cold calling is about half as effective as it used to be, with call-to-connect ratios dropping by 50% or more in recent years. Cold calling still works for lead gen, but it costs twice as much to achieve the same results. Another reason many B2B companies think they need more leads is that they don’t have a system in place to effectively work and manage the leads that they already have.
The BuyerZone survey found some interesting relationships between B2B companies’ use of technology and their perception of lead volume and quality:
“B2B marketers who agree with the statement that the leads they receive are of reasonable quality are:
- More likely to be using a CRM (89%)
- Use marketing automation (53%)
- Have an understanding that they’re getting enough leads (53%)
Compare that to those who disagree that the leads they receive are of high quality and you see that only:
- 78% use a CRM system
- 29% use marketing automation
- More than 90% are adamant that they are not getting enough leads”
Looking at the data, it seems many that companies that use a CRM in conjunction with a marketing automation system receive higher quality leads and therefore feel that they need less of them to be successful. Conversely, companies that feel they do not have the lead volume or lead quality they need are much less likely to use both a CRM and marketing automation platform in their lead generation efforts.
To us, this makes a lot of sense. If a company does not have a CRM and/or marketing automation system, they likely are not tracking their leads or nurturing them in any way. With no visibility into their leads’ web activity and engagement with their marketing content, how would these companies know whether or not they have enough leads or what quality they are?
The lesson to be learned? BuyerZone explains:
“In a nutshell, while the cost of CRM and/or Marketing Automation isn’t insignificant, it might end up saving companies money in the end.”
By leveraging the right technologies, you can eliminate the constant lead quantity problem by replacing it with a solution that improves lead quality. This way, you can stop spending more and more on lead generation and can instead focus resources on nurturing leads you actually know are interested.
To learn more about sales pipeline management and lead nurturing with the use of marketing technologies, read “An Alternative to Getting More Leads in 2014”. Feel free to contact us with any questions.
