10 Ways Marketing Automation Outsourcing Helps Sales

by | Sep 17, 2012

As a sales outsourcing company we are now quickly becoming sales marketing automation outsourcing specialists as well.  As an outsourced sales company we have a unique perspective how marketing automation helps sales because we specialize in leveraging content marketing to engage prospects as much as we use marketing automation to generate and nurture leads.  And by engage we mean helping to convince your buyer to buy from your company. Isn’t more sales what sales and marketing automation outsourcing be about.   This blog addresses the top 10 advantages of putting sales and marketing automation tools in your sales reps hands (if you have never seen an Marketing Automation Software here is a quick link to 5 minute demo so the points below make a ton more sense).

How Does Marketing Automation Outsourcing Help Increase Sales Reps Production?

 

Lead scoring: For companies that are lucky enough to have a steady stream of leads marketing automation prioritizes where your sales reps should invest their time. Marketing automation tools uses realtime scoring to see who is most engaged.  With this point system, you are no longer need to guess “where to start”.

 

Your buyer tells your rep what they are interested in:  Marketing automation identifies what content your buyer is most interested in.   Essentially giving your rep night vision goggles into your buyers interests and concerns.

 

Help your sales champion to champion.  A sales rep can be sold by their prospect.  You, as the rep have a hot one on the line and feels it is going great, then utilizing a Marketing Automation tool, you can see if you prospect is actually opening your emails, clicking on the content you are sending and going to your site.  If the content is not engaging or not being shared, you can raise that as an issue and ask “how can we improve our performance to make it easier for you to sell”. We find that the prospects that transact, typically engage with at least 12 pieces of content.  If a prospect is not engaging, chances are they are not serious about buying.

 

Saves time and provides feedback to your reps: email templates programmed in the Marketing Automation Tool can be measured in their effectiveness (essentially you can now do in the micro what you do with your bulk email blasts)  if emails are not working you know.   Streamlining great emails that work keep follows up simple and keeps your rep on the phone.

 

Save more time by automating follow up emails:  Using drip campaigns set up by marketing “from” the rep allows the reps to stay engaged with non- active prospects.  No more worrying about wasting time and precious phone time on cool prospects.  We never know when a cool lead will now be ready to buy and drips ensure prospects will think of you when that time arrives and they are ready to engage.

 

Quick access to all past communications:   with the streamlined integration between a marketing automation software (we use Pardot) and your CRM, all the rep needs to do is use their Outlook Pardot connector and all their email history will automatically be entered into Pardot and Salesforce.  This keeps updating the CRM simple.

 

Reduced headcount –  With marketing automation, reps can now “work”  more prospects, requiring less reps and more time for reps to work on closing deals, not nurturing non-ready to buy leads.

 

Prevents lead and deal leakage:  Typically sales reps will abandon leads if not ready to buy within a given time period (depends on the sales cycle- could be a month, a quarter).  Reps need to work closest to the dollar.  To close those deals on the horizon requires nurturing,  most reps do not have the time to do this even with the best of intentions.  They  are incentivized to close this quarter.   Marketing automation lets them close this quarter and continue to build a healthy pipe for next quarter. Marketing Automation cures that sickness.

 

Model the top performers:   Automation and CRM tools allow a view into top performers secrets of success  What leads do they pursue? What scoring attributes commonly lead to a sale? How do they engage prospects? When do they engage prospects? Periodic and systematic analysis of rep performance relative to the attributes and activities that are captured by demand generation tools and CRM can provide invaluable insights for struggling reps.

 

Call at the right time:  A lead deck  is a live feed that is part of the tool that notifies your rep the minute your prospects are active on your site.  When your prospects have your company top of mind, and your buyer is sitting at their desk (or on their PDA checking you out)  your rep has it’s a great time to pick up the phone or hit them with an email.

 

To see a quick demo of a Marketing Automation Outsourcing Tool Click Here.  To see if we can accelerate your B2B demand generation with better and faster technology integration  and getting your sales team up to speed please feel free to reach out for a quick conversation and we will let you know if we can help.   We guarantee what we are sharing here is simply the tip of the iceberg.

 

Marketing Automation Implementation Best Practices B2B Sales Marketing

by | Apr 30, 2012

So now you that you have purchased a marketing automation platform you are ready to implement and it’s not as simple as you were led to believe.   As an outsourced sales and marketing company we have already helped to implement several platforms (as well as implementing our own) and helped companies with several stalled implementations. Here are some best practices in marketing and sales automation because,  as one vendor recently told us,  ‘we can sell them the car but we can’t drive it for them’.  Here are some basic tips and some best practices to help you avoid some headaches and to learn from our mistakes and success. If you have not checked out what these platforms can do here is a quick overview from Pardot  5 Minute Overview of Marketing Automation  and this post will make a whole lot more sense.

Think about your Content in a Different Way – The whole point of a marketing automation platform is to drive more business in a more effective way.  This starts with how you are speaking with your buyer.  If your content is still all about your product – tech sheets, features and benefits etc. its -time to think about being customer centric rather than product centric.”  Your drip campaigns will drive more business if you talk to your customers about their problems and their needs.  You may need to look at the “voice” of your messages and refine your language a bit.  As a starting point look at how may time you talk about “Our’ product, “our” team vs.   “your” needs, “your” business and “your” customers.  Stop being product centric and start being customer centric.  Here is a series of blogs on how to shift your content approach and get sales and marketing on the same page.

 

Organize your Content Ahead of Time.  For a marketing automation platform to run effectively it helps to do two things with your content.  First you should isolate all your webcasts,  white papers, blogs, videos on individual website pages.  This allows you to easily understand what your customer specifics needs are which in turn allows you to score your leads more effectively as you track their digital interest.  Secondly, it really helps to also create landing pages that offers your customer content for all three stages of their buying cycle so you can track when your buyers are moving from educating themselves (kicking the tires) to being ready to buy (e.g looking at pricing or testimonials).  Gabriel Sales has created an easy to use sales content management technology – Gabriel Sales Digital Base Camp™ that can help you do this in a matter of weeks. Below is an example of one of those lead scoring features.

Involve Sales and Invest the Time Integrating with your CRM – What we have found is that even a basic integration can take an IT professional too much time.  Most of the marketing automation platforms we have seen have huge volume of really cool features and bells and whistles so you can tend to over design before you know how you want to use them. Ultimately this is about empowering your sales team and recognizing your IT teams expertise is not sales.  Probably one of the biggest bottle necks we have seen is that IT folks get proprietary and a project that they thought would take weeks can take a developer three months or more . The challenges are not with the system’s API or stability; they were with our client’s requirements, process definitions and prioritization. Like most development work that starts “easy” it quickly gets complex when they don’t understand the underlying business processes. Unfortunately as the time line  expands it ends up being sales and marketing that are on the hook for results and not the developers. Salesforce.com has been the easiest integration for all the platforms we have seen.

 

Keep your Initial Drip Campaigns Simple.  This is probably one of the biggest lessons we learned.  When we first started we came up with a very complex IF/ then workflow so if they opened this piece of content on a topic area we would send them another piece of content on topic area B and then if they didn’t open that we would send them content Z.  It was too much and just writing about it confuses me. What we found is about 80% of the value you are going to get from your initial drip campaigns is going to come from simply implementing them.  It takes time to learn a new software and the biggest value the software provided initially is simply keeping your brand and solution in front of your buyers over time so your reps don’t have to.  A simple five to seven touch campaign without any IF/then work flows was enough to get more deals flowing at less cost.  Don’t frustrate yourself.  You will quickly learn from your wins. If you are a smaller company, as a best practice, we recommend that you start by talking to your sales reps about their sales process and simply take that sales process map and create your initial drip campaigns for about three target markets.

 

Tap your vendors (and other vendors) knowledge centers –  This industry is not that old.  Eloqua, Pardot and Marketo (to name a few) all have fantastic knowledge centers that can teach you the basics of lead scoring and nurturing etc. Our vendor Pardot has been a huge help but we have also found both Marketo and Eloqua’s knowledge centers to be valuable as well.  Obviously as an outsourced sales and marketing company we also recommend that you strongly consider working with an organization like ours.  We have the advantage of having worked in the space across multiple enterprises so we have made a great deal of the mistakes already so you don’t need to.

We hope this blog has been helpful.  Marketing Automation is a relatively new concept for most marketing teams and we have found that once you start to gain some momentum you will quickly realize that it’s clearly how business will be done for the next decade. We are just at the beginning of a new paradigm starting with marketing automation and then,  as we are quickly discovering, if your marketing automation implementation is done correctly this will  drift towards sales automation.  Ultimately this will begin to drive more deals fast at less cost.  We are experiencing some fantastic initial success reducing cost of sales percentages for both ourselves and our clients. The learning curve is exponential. So have fun.

If you have not checked out what these platforms can do here is a quick overview from Pardot  5 Minute Overview of Marketing Automation. If you have a stalled with your marketing automation implementation or if you would like to know more about best practices in marketing and sales automation, feel free to contact us for a quick consultative call.