by Glen Springer | Feb 10, 2017
Once a small business has decided that they don’t have the time, expertise, and/or desire to recruit, build, and manage a small sales team, their path to growth will then depend on picking the right outsourced sales team.
For small businesses that have a history of closing business, this typically means that you will need to transition the knowledge and expertise from your organization to the outsourced sales team you will be working with. Asking the right questions early in your search will help you find the best sales organization for your business. It is in the best interest for your company, your end customer/potential buyers of your solution, and the outsourced sales team partner that this fit makes sense for all three parties involved. We have put together a handful of questions you can ask to help you understand how the sales talent will be deployed for your sales success.
What is the Outsourced Sales Team Staffing Model
The first question you need to ask is how your outsourced sales team will be staffed. Depending on your needs and the volume of calls you need to make, you could have multiple people staffed on your team or you could have shared resources. For example, when we are just getting started building outsourced sales team we typically staff at several levels. We will leverage buyer education reps to managed the initial awareness campaigns. We will staff a person that is adept at asking probing questions, qualifying questions, and asking for the appointment. Finally, we will staff closers.
In some cases these resources will be shared., but in some cases, it may make more sense to staff dedicated reps at all or some of the levels. Dedicated resources typically cost more and the more complex your sales, the more experienced the closer will need to be, which will include increased costs upfront. You and your outsourced sales team provider need to be clear on budget and needs to ensure you get what you need.
How will your outsourced sales team be managed?
The next question you need to ask is how will your account will be managed. One of the main advantages of an outsourced sales team is that you do not have to manage the account. Most outsourced sale companies will have an experienced account rep responsible for the day-to-day communication and success of your overall sales (and in our case marketing support). This person will be responsible for day-to-day communication and managing regular sales meetings.
How do they train your outsourced sales team?
You need to ask how your outsourced sales team will be trained and understand how involved you will need to be.
As part of our onboarding process, we do a deep discovery into the clients sales processes; what makes the company, and product or solution we are selling unique, and craft a scripted sales story and all the early stage calls. Because we also offer content marketing strategy and content production, we automate the sales process and clone our clients thought leader. Although this process makes it easy for us to train reps and requires minimum training support from the client, you should expect to attend weekly sales calls while ongoing training occurs.
For new clients, we typically begin the campaigns with experienced proven existing reps, and in that case, we typically can prep our rep on a new client in 3-4 days. They know how to come across smart and intelligent while not having all the details, and if prospects start asking buying questions, we will go for the appointment.
If we do staff closers, it is typically 60 to 90 days after the initial campaign once there is a funnel to close. At that point we will do more technical training. Initially, we require a domain or technical expert on the client side to manage the demo until we are competent.
How We Can Help?
Gabriel Sales builds moderns sales and marketing operations and staffs and outsourced sales team and a blended marketing team to help companies accelerate their lead generation, lead development and revenue production. To learn more about our approach to building modern sales and marketing operations we invite you to visit our outsourced sales and marketing approach page.
by Glen Springer | Jan 24, 2017
Here’s how Gabriel Sales Outsourced Sales Team can help
When you have outsourced sales and marketing, one of the tactics your partner may manage will be creating content or organizing content. Creating a streamlined production of content so you should expect your sales partner to be able to manage landing pages or you should be prepared to offer this support.
Understanding the difference between your home page and a landing page or the difference between a landing page and a microsite is important. Using these different type of pages is important for outsourced sales and marketing success because they all you to address the buyers needs at different stages of the buyer journey. In this age of digital buying every page needs to have a goal to help generate business for your company. Here is the content framework we use.
How does a solid home page help you outsourced sales?
Your home page is the front door to your house. A buyer will use it to quickly get to know you. If they can understand what you do and start to understand how you can help them you will have accomplished your goal. You simply want to make a solid first impression. In face Google and Microsoft Research both report that most people will look around for between 10 to 15 seconds or less and make a decision to leave or to look deeper into your website.
So, the buyer needs to quickly understand that you understand their needs and problems and how you could potentially help them. This needs to happen quickly. If your home page engages potential buyers quickly this will help your lead scoring and your outsourced sales team. successful your lead scoring
How are landing pages leveraged by your outsourced sales and marketing team?
Landing pages are pages that continue the sales story. They will typically contain information about 1 topic or one issue that proves to the buyer that you understand their pain. Landing pages are also used for inbound lead generation and content offers. So you need to design landing pages to be used by both your sales reps to share individual pieces of information like white papers, checklists of infographics. But it is also important that you design them to easily embed forms. So the copy should be short and succinct. The major goal for all your landing pages is to turn site visitors into leads or to turn cold call leads into sales accepted leads as they engage with content.
How outsource sales and marketing use microsites?
Microsites are designed to organize your content to make it easy for your buyer to buy. They are used when buyers are moving from problem identification to evaluating your solution. You are simply trying to make it easy for this buyer to have this conversation with you digitally. Think about organizing content on your microsite to provide access to all three stages of content on this page. When you do this, they become very powerful for lead scoring and automation technologies. If you are not familiar with lead scoring you can learn more about that in this blog post What is Lead Scoring?
Gabriel Sales provides outsource sales and marketing services to start ups and Small and Medium Sized businesses. We specialize in helping companies build modern sales and marketing operations. To learn more about the areas Gabriel Sale can help you launch an outsource sales and marketing effort we invite you to learn more about us on our outsource sales and marketing services page
by Glen Springer | Oct 12, 2016
Since email is now preferred by 70% of buyers who want to learn about new products or services, email marketing is an important feature in an Integrated Outsourced Sales and Marketing Campaigns and Sales Automation Engines.
Over the next couple of weeks, we will publish several articles to help companies just getting started with sales automation and email lead generation, to improve results. The articles will address:
- Why using a Whitelisted Service Provider Makes Sense
- How to Design and Code Your eMails
- What Offers to Make
To kick it off, we will start with the basics of subject line writing to avoid filters, or if you are marketing to small businesses or consumers, Google’s Promotion Box. If you are not familiar with what this is, we have attached a screenshot below (and avoiding this box will also be addressed in articles down the road).
What to Avoid in Subject Lines
- Don’t use spammy and some not so spammy words like “Free”, “Urgent”, “Call”, “Marketing”, “Now”, “Income”, “Sale”, “Discount”, “Month”, and “You’re”. As an outsourced sales and marketing company, we have identified “words to avoid” when running campaigns for our clients. You can download a PDF of these words to use for future reference (and we have also included an image). If you have a question about other words, you can also run it through spamassasin.com. This is a free online tool.
DON’T WRITE IN ALL CAPS AND exclude MULTIPLE EXCLAMATION POINTS!!! Not only is this obnoxious, but you’re more likely to end up being flagged by a spam filter.
Try and keep the first 40 characters of your subject lines as impactful as possible for visibility, not delivery.
- Don’t use symbols or strange characters – $$$, <>, ###, ??? and Emoji will hit the filter immediately.
- Finally don’t oversell in the subject line – The goal of your email campaign is to get the buyer to open and engage. Do not expect one open and buy. This is the first step in a process. You will get more opens and more conversions with education vs. selling.
Don’t worry about number of characters and try to keep subject lines impactful. Remember, email platform users may only see the first 40-50 characters, or even less, and your email subject lines are even more compressed on mobile devices. Despite all the information about subject line length, studies show that length doesn’t actually affect open rates. Below are two examples of how an email could look in Outlook and how much of the subject line a buyer could see on an iPhone.
Try and keep the first 40 characters of your subject lines as impactful as possible for visibility, not delivery.
- Don’t use symbols or strange characters – $$$, <>, ###, ??? and Emoji will hit the filter immediately.
- Finally don’t oversell in the subject line – The goal of your email campaign is to get the buyer to open and engage. Do not expect one open and buy. This is the first step in a process. You will get more opens and more conversions with education vs. selling.
How Gabriel Sales Can Help with Outsourced Sales
Gabriel Sales specializes in Outsourced Sales and Marketing Campaigns that helps buyers buy through integrated digital campaigns and sales automation engine implementation. We make all this easy and you can learn more about our point solutions following the links below.
by Glen Springer | Sep 12, 2016
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Make Every Lead Count! Outsourced Sales Turnkey Tradeshow Support Package
90% of tradeshow attendees are looking for new solutions and 87% of purchase a new within 6 months of the event. But 60% of companies do nothing to fill the booth, and they never follow up with 85% of their leads. We help you maximize your investment with the incremental:
- Capacity to generate booth traffic
- Capacity to follow up with leads
- All the tools to control costs and increase ROI
Watch our educational video to learn more or visit our educational resources and case studies below. Also, feel free to check out our recent blog post here.
Contact Us
Drive More Booth Traffic with Turnkey Outsourced Sales
According to data from the CMO Council, Fortune 2000 and large companies are much more effective in how they allocate resources and approach tradeshow lead generation.
Large and enterprise companies expect a 4:1 return on their tradeshow investment and typically spend as much as 17% of their annual lead gen budget on tradeshow and event marketing. The first step in a successful tradeshow lead generation campaign is to drive traffic to your booth prior to the event and during the event. Learn how to create and manage a smarter approach with, automation systems, temporary callers, lead scoring, email marketing, and outsourced sales reps to help you achieve the same results. Read More
Generate More Sales Opportunities with Outsourced Sales Support
In this age of marketing automation, with content marketing and increasing competition, simply showing up at a tradeshow and then blasting every lead with the same, tired email message instantly upon your return from the show no longer works (and dialing every lead is simply too cost prohibitive). If you execute your tradeshow strategy correctly, you can ensure:
- You never miss a hot lead
- You don’t let warm leads slip away
- Everyone knows who you are and how you can help
- You maximize your ROI for the remainder of the year
In this article we focus on how to maximize your post-show follow-up with outsourced sales to make every lead count! Read more
Download Tradeshow Marketing Whitepaper
Enterprise companies expect a 4:1 return on their tradeshow because 92% of tradeshow attendees say they are looking for new products. But 70% of SMBs exhibiting at tradeshows don’t have any tradeshow lead gen strategy. As a result 80% of leads that are generated during a show are ignored after the show.
Download this educational white paper to learn how to:
- Drive more booth traffic
- Identify immediate sale opportunities
- Score leads to prioritize and automate follow up
Download Whitepaper Now
Tradeshow Support Package Case Studies
We invite you to visit two concrete examples of what a Tradeshow Package Produces:
Case Study #1 – SMB technology and service provider with no booth increases their sales pipeline by $760K
Case Study #2 – Mid-sized technology start up builds awareness, generates new database of over 6000 early stage leads and sets over 2 dozen demos after the show
We Are Passionate About Helping Entrepreneurs Committed to Sustained Sales Growth
We Specialize in Building Outbound Marketing Engines To Consistently Fill Your Funnel with Real Sales Opportunities
Contact our team and evaluate in detail if our solution can help drive your success and remove barriers to growth.
by Glen Springer | Feb 5, 2014
Many people consider Outsourced Sales and marketing work come to me with some preconceived notions about what they would like to do.
One thing I hear over and over again is the desire to produce outsourced sales or marketing functions using a pay-for-performance model. While the intentions of using a pay-for-performance model are usually good, in practice, there are several reasons why it doesn’t work well for outsourced sales.
The first is in regards to the cost of resources. Let’s take cold callers for example; cold callers are an extremely expensive resource (especially if they are full-time). Cold callers can also require a lot of training before they can become effective.
If everyone is in agreement that cold callers are valuable resources, why would an outsourcer agree to invest in those resources without any guarantee of return on that investment? From a business perspective, it just doesn’t make sense.
Another reason why pay-for-performance does not work well for outsourced sales is that it puts the focus on short-term goals rather than long-term success.
For example, I often get asked if we will take compensation for each appointment set. From a sales reps perspective, this incentivizes the sales rep to ‘hit his number’ by setting as many appointments as possible, regardless of the quality of those appointments. Because, if the only performance metric being looked at is the number of appointments set, the rep has no motivation to put in the extra time and effort to only set meetings with quality prospects that he thinks will eventually close. With no reason to think past hitting his numbers for this week/month, a pay-for-performance sales rep is focused on his short-term goals, not your long-term success.
If you would like to know more about the value of outsourcing B2B sales, read Scale Your Business for Sales with B2B Sales Outsourcing. To learn how we price our sales and marketing outsourcing services, you can visit our services page and click on the different boxes for pricing details.
Feel free to contact us with any questions.
