Today, SMBs ready to expand sales and marketing efforts beyond their current capacity often consider hiring an outsourced sales and marketing team to assist in scaling the business. These days, organizations can hire an experienced team of marketers and sales people for a fraction of the cost of recruiting, hiring, training, and managing its own internal team. But, keeping your sales and marketing process flowing daily is more critical than ever to deliver a sustained flow of leads and opportunities. Therefore, it’s more important than ever to have the right members of your modern sales and marketing team to ensure all the bases are covered.
Many companies are now realizing how effective (and expensive) forming a modern sales and marketing team can be to increase sales. The right team makes all the difference and can have a significant impact on the growth of a company’s bottom line. But assembling the right team of heavy-hitters can come at a cost.
Many SMBs that are just getting started don’t quite grasp how modern sales and marketing operates, therefore, they don’t understand the pieces needed to effectively build and run a modern sales and marketing team themselves. As a result, some look to outsource sales and marketing efforts to learn modern sales and marketing best practices and exactly what tools and efforts it takes to run successful campaigns that keep the funnel flowing.
First, building a team – or hiring an outsourced team – must have the same focus and goals, including:
- Shifting sales and marketing efforts to making it easy to build trust and drive value for your buyers digitally before you “sell.”
- Building trust through shifting your organizations messaging from what your product/service does and how awesome it is, to helping the buyer understand how it fits within the market and what problems it solves.
A modern sales and marketing team rigorously communicates about these goals and the status of the messaging, lead development, and failures and successes in the particular areas of interest. Marketers and sales people collaborate and discuss data points and information each is hearing from the industry, which can be used to educate users, while establishing thought-leadership and trust. Developing trust with your buyer early in the buying and selling process is one of the top reasons for forming (or hiring) a modern sales and marketing team.
Here’s the team we’ve found success with and what that team looks like.
Account Coordinator
A sales and marketing account coordinator (AC) is responsible for all the project management and reporting for accounts, including all modern sales and marketing team efforts. Deploying and managing drip campaigns and coordinating one-offs, follow-up emails and micro-campaigns dominates the ACs time. Most importantly, the account coordinator is in charge of transitioning all qualified leads to the sales reps or internal closers, and share what they have learned from the buyer – digital content engaged with and what they have learned about the buyer’s needs. Communication is key, as it saves time and ensures the collaboration of data and the accuracy of reporting.
Main Duties:
- Project Management
- Deploy Email Campaigns
- Manage Drip Campaigns
- Oversee Nurture Campaigns
- Report Conversions
- Manage Weekly Meeting
Content Producer
Content is king for modern sales and marketing, so a content production specialist (in-house or contract) is an essential part of a modern sales and marketing team. The content producer creates and manages content designed for various campaigns and different stages of the buyers’ journey. Producing thought leadership content and explaining how an organization approaches industry trends and issues is necessary to fuel the automation engine and move consumers through the stages coherently. The content producer will be able to integrate frameworks to help you create thought leadership content in the form of webcasts, videos, blog posts and checklists and present it logically on landing pages and microsites. This digital content can act as a surrogate for your senior reps early in the sales process, while scoring the content users engage with most and measuring their interest. Your “digital thought leader” will demonstrate and share educational content and expertise early in the sales conversation to display solutions and build trust.
Main Duties:
- Produce Educational Assets
- Write blogs, emails, white papers, case studies, etc.
- Produce Screencasts and Webcasts Videos
- Build Microsites and Landing Pages
Database Analyst
Successful modern sales and marketing requires campaign performance analysis to measure best practice KPIs such as click-through rates, click-to-open rates, etc. Look for high performance click through rates (CTR), click-through percentages and unsubscribe rates and adjust your campaigns accordingly. If a particular piece of content is triggering an above-average unsubscribe rate, remove it from the campaign and monitor the updated flow of buyers through the journey. If there is an email that has a high CTR, optimize the corresponding landing page and consider using it as part of an inbound campaign. There are many ways to interpret the provided data and make the appropriate changes to campaigns, the key is having a marketing database expert to ensure the system is set up correctly to capture the coveted data sets.
Main Duties:
- List Acquisition
- List Management
- List Suppression
- List Appending
- List Delivery
Automation Expert
A modern sales and marketing team needs an automation expert to manage the execution of your drip and nurture campaigns, and to ensure your database is moving through the appropriate buyer’s journey. A marketing automation expert will implement best practices and provide expertise to help build trust with buyers not ready to buy digitally. A marketing automation expert will set up the automation system to allow you to track a buyer’s digital footprint, so when they are ready to buy, your closers will be notified, never missing an opportunity.
Main Duties:
- Implement Systems
- Integrate Systems
- Manage Systems
Business Development Reps
Depending on your needs, your modern sales and marketing team may include callers, acting as business development reps, to generate interest and manage the early stage education of buyers. Effective callers will execute light discovery to qualify lead interest (from no interest to sales accepted interest) and set appointments with reps or closers responsible for managing the completion of the sale. How your team is staffed will depend on the size of the market you’re targeting and the volume of revenue you need to generate. This will also determine if you should hire a fully dedicated modern sales and marketing team internally for your organization or if it’s more cost-effective to hire a blended team of outsourced of resources.
Main Duty:
Follow up with inbound lead immediately – Senior sales resources and executives are busy, in meetings, running operations, managing accounts and leading the company. Your business development rep will ensure you’re focused on potential needs when the buyer expresses them with an inbound request. Your rep will help you get to the buyer faster – if he/she follows up in a timely manner. And as multiple studies continue to explain, the first person back to the buyer has a 50% advantage closing that deal over competitors.
Executive Oversight
Finally, you will gain access to a senior executive and strategist. This resource will be a peer that can help you to steward your sales strategy and your marketing strategy and will ultimately be accountable for your overall success.
An outsourced sales and marketing company can work with you to understand your Ideal Customer Profile. They can then help you acquire the databases, phone numbers and email addresses of these buyers and load your CRM with buyers to target that have the need for your product or solution so you are focused on selling to the right buyer.
About Us
Gabriel Sales specializes in helping SMBs and Startups grow business with modern sales and marketing operations. Our team can augment gaps in your existing sales and marketing operations or we can be leveraged for full service campaigns that include:
- Integrated Sales and Marketing Strategies
- Database Research and Targeting
- Automation and CRM Systems Best Practices
- Systems Implementation
- Inbound Lead Generation
- Outbound Lead Generation and Lead Scoring
- Sales Qualification
- Closing
To learn more about how we can help you grow your business (or decide if we are the right fit for you), we invite you to visit our page that details our integrated approach to sales and marketing outsourcing. Or feel free to contact us for free initial consultation and discovery session to see if our approach is the right fit to help you hit your revenue targets.
