How Outsourced Sales and Marketing Works to Keep You Focused on What Matters Most
Goethe shared the maxim “Things which matter most should never be at the mercy of things that matter least.”
Vince Lombardi was a champion because he lived by the creed that “Success demands a singleness of purpose.”
And the greatest lesson Garry Keller learned when building one of the largest real estate agencies in the world in a little over a decade is this: “Multitasking is a lie…You can do two things at once, but you can’t focus effectively on two things at once.” In his book “The One” he makes a compelling and succinct argument for focus:
“Success demands singleness of purpose. You need to be doing fewer things for more effect instead of doing more things with side effects. It is those who concentrate on but one thing at a time who advance in this world.” He goes on to state, “Passion for something leads to disproportionate time practicing or working at it. That time spent eventually translates to skill, and when skill improves, results improve. Better results generally lead to more enjoyment, and more passion and more time is invested. It can be a virtuous cycle all the way to extraordinary results.”
How does all this impact sales and demand generation for your business? It appears to be a daunting challenge. Especially when we all know that no “one thing” works in isolation to generate qualified sales opportunities because:
- Cold Calling stopped working on its own because buyers simply pick up the phone less.
- Email marketing is a great and cost effective way to generate early stage leads, but the leads then need to be nurtured, then prioritized to maximize your calling budget.
- Email spam filters are making it harder to deliver messages without following best practices.
- You need systems expertise and best practices to get the most from your CRM and marketing automation platforms.
- LinkedIn is still valuable, but requires more focus because it is becoming cluttered and pushed as a marketing tool after it’s acquisition by Microsoft.
- Other social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram work until they don’t, and are slowly embracing PPC business models to compete with Google, which is driving up costs of acquisition.
- For all these marketing channels you need a consistent flow of quality and substantive video and digital content to educate buyers, improve your visibility on search engines and to generate leads.
- Finally, success requires that you don’t get distracted by what you could do. With the proliferation of social media adoption and content marketing, there are quite simply too many choices; we are all flooded with the latest “magic bullet” daily. These distractions can have us chasing our tails, thinking about what we could do vs. what we should do.
There are no new magic bullets. Generating sales opportunities still requires sharing your truth authentically with substantive content using multiple methods. You then need to have conversations with buyers that are interested in speaking with you. And these fundamental tactics work best if they are done simultaneously. Success requires hard work, done consistently for an extended period of time.
As John Wooden, former UCLA basketball coach and owner of the most consecutive championships of any coach all time, puts it: “If you keep too busy learning the tricks of the trade, you may never learn the trade…I discovered early on that the player who learned the fundamentals of basketball is going to have a much better chance of succeeding and rising through the levels of competition than the player who has talent but doesn’t focus on developing fundamentals daily and was content to do things his own way.”
The challenge that many stretched executives face when they push through growth stages is, there are an infinite amount of things they “could” do to have a positive impact on their business. And often the things they “could” do are more comfortable, sit in their core skill sets, more innovative and often more fun. As a result, the mundane (and frankly boring) fundamental tasks required on a regular basis for successful demand generation and growth start to slip through the cracks. At first, it happens occasionally. Long term some of these fundamental tasks are often neglected completely.
With all these moving parts, fundamental tasks and distractions, it’s no surprise executives and senior sales professionals trying to grow sales demand struggle. Lack of consistent focus on “should do” tasks creates inconsistent results, especially when the tasks are assigned to existing employees without the passion, experience or expertise.
Executives and employees often have the best intentions, but sales and marketing success requires a commitment a set of fundamental demand generation tasks on a daily, weekly and monthly basis. For resources that are already stretched, these “should do” tasks quickly become interruptions and are reprioritized and turned into “could do” tasks. And “could do” tasks are ignored for more primary responsibilities. Ultimately, demand generation is like athletic training – if you don’t put in the time, you don’t reap the benefits.
Because of distractions, inconsistent commitment to fundamental daily, weekly and monthly tasks, and a lack of focus, we see businesses across the country with great sales and marketing strategies, great stories to tell and great products, struggle to take sales to the next level.
When you work with an outsourced sales and marketing company, you can be confident and expect that your team will be passionately focused on one thing – putting qualified sales leads in your sales team’s funnel.
You can also expect that your outsourced sales and marketing team will focus on the following fundamental tasks on a daily, weekly and monthly basis.
Your Content Marketing Team – Will help you turn your thought leadership into substantive content in multiple formats including; Articles, Checklists, Videos and Webcasts that:
- Can be used for email marketing and lead nurturing in your automation systems
- Can be leveraged for SEO and PPC
- Can be leveraged by business development reps and sales reps to use as part of their sales processes
- Can be shared on social media
And that content will be created in the right formats and distributed consistently at the right cadence to meet your specific competitive needs.
Your Email Marketing Lead Generation Team – Will source the best lists from vetted vendors to produce targets and leads to feed the top of your sales funnel with leads that can buy or influence the purchase of your product.
Your Inbound Marketing Team – Will focus on your PPC, SEO and Social Media results.
- Your PPC resource will track your results weekly, and analyze your results monthly, to optimize campaigns incrementally when possible to ensure you maximize your budget.
- They will create quality content that Google and your buyers appreciate and consistently optimize it for specific keywords to help you climb in natural search when possible.
- They will consistently distribute your content in social media channels for additional exposure.
Your Marketing Database Admin and System Technologist – Will keep your system optimized to produce sales results and make sure your automation and CRM systems are running smoothly, ensuring your automation tools are scoring and prioritizing effectively for your callers.
Business Development Reps – Your first touch callers:
- They will call prioritized leads with call volume targets on a daily basis
- They will start to build helpful relationships with potential buyers
- They will conduct pre-qualification calls for need and potential interest
- They will ask for an appointment with a senior rep when it makes sense
Sales Reps/Managers – Will move and steward deals through the funnel on a daily basis.
- They will stay on top of the hottest leads
- They will qualify for needs, budget process and decision making process
- The will schedule appointment with sales engineers and your team’s senior resources
- They will manage deals through the sales process to closing
Account Managers – Keep the entire team aligned and “Account”able for hitting targets and milestones.
- They will ensure calling and conversion targets are intelligently set and met
- They will ensure callers are focused on prioritizing calls correctly
- The will keep the marketing team on track and on time producing the right content and filling the pipe with new leads at the right cadence
- They will manage the feedback loops with your executive team so the right insights are shared and the right pivots are recommended
As John Wooden put it:
“The star of the team is the team and it takes ten hands to score a basket. Time lost is time lost. It’s gone forever. Some people tell themselves that they will work twice as hard tomorrow to make up for what they did not do today. If they work twice as hard tomorrow, then they should have also worked twice as hard today. That would have been their best.”
An outsourced sales and marketing team will allow your team to focus on what they do best. Because an outsourced sales and marketing team will consistently focus on the fundamental daily, weekly and monthly tasks required for your demand generations success.
About Gabriel Sales
Gabriel Sales specializes in helping SMBs and Start Ups launch modern sales and marketing operations and build successful and custom best practice strategies to consistently generate sales qualified leads. To learn more about our outsourced sales and marketing services, we invite you to visit our outsource sales and marketing services page.
