*Sales and Marketing Managers Archives – Page 2 of 9

How live chat accelerated a new inbound sales lead

Overview – Why do you need to have Live Chat?

The importance of Digital customer service led sales and marketing channels offering LIVE CHAT on your business website is NOT OPTIONAL anymore with B2B and B2C engagement. With the progression of customer service automation to ChatBots, AI and Live Chat engines, you don’t know where and when your next inbound prospective sales opportunity might come from – so BE PREPARED to have the capability to be responsive 24 x 7 or be available to engage without delay or you will miss out on new business enquiry for your pipeline!

The Initial Customer Journey “Live Chat” User Case – National IT Services Business

A leading national IT services business needed some assistance to develop their Inside Sales Team process and growth. The General Manager made an enquiry as a new lead through our website using live chat options as the communication channel of preference.

The customer buying process identified is summarised below and as a result of investment in building a content and contextual driven strategy once the target customer profile was development and understood:

1) There was a need for assistance to see who could help in the local marketplace.

2) Google keyword search performed

How to build Inside Sales teams
How to develop Inside Sales processes

3) One of Alchemise Consulting’s blog came up in the results organically SEO ranked on the first page.

https://alchemiseconsulting.com/how-inside-sales-drives-lead-generation/

4) The initial enquiry was made from our Hubspot Conversations website chat room

5) Our Alchemise Inside Sales Consultant was notified of this in real time and was able to respond from his mobile application within one minute to respond to the request and then switch channels to convert the lead to a phone based outbound call within five minutes.

6) After an initial marketing qualified lead (MQL) discovery discussion opportunity was identified, this was converted to a sales qualified lead (SQL) with a meeting set that same week with the key stakeholders/decision makers.

7) Following the initial prospective client meeting a proposal was delivered within the same week with a solution.

As you can see from the example the acceleration from top of funnel to bottom of funnel within a one week timeline was due to a two minute response time from being found on Google Search from organic SEO for an evergreen content piece, the live chat lead was developed from initial customer service to sales engagement and new well qualified opportunity for the sales pipeline.

Our solution

We have been running Salesforce CRM and HubSpot marketing automation with a Live Chat (Hubspot Conversations feature) on our homepage to allow us to capture and qualify any real leads quickly. It has a round robin team feature for any defined “customer agent” to pick up live and be notified automatically that a new web enquiry has come in within message inbox.

From a customer experience and journey mapping exercise, we choose to offer our prospective customers the options for phone, email, contact us or live chat. This was not enabled as just a pre-scripted AI programmed chat bot which allows us to deepen each live chat engagement initially.

Outcomes

As part of the shift to a 360 degree flywheel approach by HubSpot, this was not just a two-dimensional traditional marketing to sales funnel, our distinct customer centric approach allowed us to:

Add value to this new prospect
Respond quickly to their timelines
Position our value proposition in person with a meeting with the two key stakeholders/project sponsors
Lead with a proposal ahead of the two other competitors within a week

Subject to the budgeting cycle and project priorities we have quickly used inbound digital channels from content marketing to a sales qualified engagement to accelerate our sales process with this leading national IT services prospect.

Key takeaways & learnings

What I wanted to highlight is a textbook example of how the investment in sales enablement, CRM/marketing automation platform, customer experience and live chat channels can help sales team accelerate their sales process to reduce the ‘friction’ for customers to engage with us.

The lead response time enabled us to convert the warm lead within one minute response time instead of a 24 to 48 hour telephone call back response time from sales allowed us to shorten the sales funnel cycle from MQL to SQL.

Using a marketing automation tool like HubSpot allowed us to monitor, log and respond to our potential customer quickly and at the right time.

The role of the Inside Sales Representative or Sales Development Representative today needs to also be multi-skilled with digital omni-channel customer service support skills and experience to handle inbound and outbound customer interaction dynamically.

The role of the traditional telemarketer based on cold calling is at risk and needs to diversify skillsets into social and digital sales whilst having the ability to be customer centric. Most importantly it’s understanding how to really build trust and off value to your prospective clients during outbound and inbound multichannel interactions ( up to the prospect’s choice of communication channel).

We talk about bridging the gap between sales and marketing and this experience shared shows how easily the digital channel of experience can provide immediate ROI.

A traditional example in contrast which DOESN’T WORK for customer engagement today

How this unified communications/contact centre services company just missed out on a new genuine lead enquiries and needs to digitally transform their sales & marketing approach.

It is most ironic that this well established Australian service provider sells contact centre and unified communication solutions but do they really practice what they preach?

In just having two communication channels on their website – contact us for the Melbourne office with a 1300 or local direct dial number.

Upon calling their office three times over a two hour period, and pressing every option on their IVR systems:

1 – for Customer Support
2 – for Sales
3 – for Accounts
4 – for Reception

The common response was SILENCE; each channel option rang out or was put onto a dial forward to the next department but no voicemail or diversion to a real person.

As more and more companies choose to reduce cost with reception or a front office what will happen with this silence which makes it challenge for genuine enquiries to get through on the phone or someone to assist. It seems like the reachability in this digital age is becoming less focused on customer service with a reduction of communication channel choices to cater for broad demographic access.

Look out for our upcoming blog around “The impact of silence”

For a new customer lead enquiry this wasn’t a promising start, especially when I was trying to reach the Sales Director. When I eventually reached him, I asked if he was aware of this inbound challenge to get through to someone either in Sydney or Melbourne office and how many more new sales leads he might have missed! What a shame it would be if it was the next $1M deal that another competitor won from their lack of availability to be contacted from an inbound call.

To find out more how you to can stop a leaky funnel effect or not miss out on valuable new inbound leads with LIVE CHAT, please contact us for a confidential discussion and we can review your requirements first to assist.

If you would like another example of how inbound marketing automation helped us close a new client deal in just 10 days – please click here for our blog.

Alchemise Business Growth Newsletter #7 – Q1 – 2018/19

September 2018

Business Growth Newsletter Edition #7 – Q1 2018/19

Current Market Trends and Observations

It’s increasingly concerning that busy professionals are not making the time or effort to plan in the business. It seems many sales managers and business owners are busy chasing immediate deals and sales revenue without thinking how to scale or systemise their business beyond the next month or quarter.

At the heart of this sales behaviour consideration for customer success and experience needs to be thought about. Can you integrate the sales process and enablement into customer success and with your marketing awareness to service clients holistically to ensure that retention rates and reduction for the cost of acquisition can be achieved?

We can all relate that New Year’s Eve resolutions can only be kept if there is commitment and intention first, once it is written down commitment turns into an actionable item if you put a date by which the goal or action needs to be achieved.

If I look at the recruitment sites, we have also seen a higher turnover of sales staff between vendors and suppliers. I think an average of 12 months to 18 months in the ICT sector can be experienced for some companies.

Perhaps a glue to all this comes back to leadership teams deciding to align sales and marketing objectives first then seeking some strong management business cases presented to obtain the investment that is needed to grow a business consistently.

Business Owner Challenges

Our recently released information video outlines some key challenges faced by business owners which we consistently hear.

Well there is a way forward!

Mindset – Willing and wanting to make time
Having a good idea doesn’t mean commercial success
Have no plan isn’t a wise move if you want to scale and attract the right customers without investing in a strategy.

Business Owners – Does this sound like you?
How to address your sales & marketing challenges with growing your business… Watch the video here:

Inbound 2018

In recently coming back from Boston US with 22,000 people attending the Inbound 2018 conference with end users, marketing agencies and digital agencies attending, this is front of mind with this newsletter.

At Inbound 2018, the concept of the flywheel was explained as a shift away from the traditional marketing and sales funnel:

Source: HubSpot

Customer, Marketing and Sales flywheel to shift away the full marketing and sales funnel. The customer is at the core of everything an organisation does but you need to remove the friction to deliver a smooth customer experience including sales engagement and also connected to your marketing activities.

The emphasis is all about customer first at your core with delight, then being able to continue to engaging and attracting customers within the sales and marketing functions.

Reducing customer or buyer friction will help build growth momentum that builds up energy and if you think of it in terms of a three ingredient growth engine that is what help drive forward this growth approach.

To me this makes sense as a continuous feedback integrated approach between customer service first connected to marketing and then sales engagement with building synchronous energy and focus on the customer from a 360 degree view.

Inbound 2018 – Key Topics of Focus

Content Marketing – why this is a key to effective customer engagement:
When I look at investment in digital marketing, more emphasis needs to be made for quality and relevant content that is going to engage the prospective buyer.

The use of video content and investment in analytics is even becoming more important for effective prospect engagement.

Without personalised and relevant content, other secondary digital marketing spent isn’t effective to deliver a tangible ROI.

Account Based Marketing (ABM) for small and larger B2B business now applies:
Account Based Marketing and Personalisation is even more important as part of any inbound or outreach approach for B2B clients. It’s not just limited to Enterprise clients but a “lighter” implementation of the ABM process can be used.

Sales Enablement and development to drive more sales qualified leads:
If you don’t have a content plan or asset list of where all your content is to make available to your sales teams, then you aren’t able to engage effectively.

Having real time response with the right information to send is vital to connect these days. A generic email follow up isn’t good enough. However using a level of sales automation and process can greatly increase the effectiveness and productivity of sales reps.

The increasing challenge of sales is getting customers still getting new contacts to connect and understanding where they are at in the buying journey or cycle.

ROI in 2012 isn’t the same ROI in 2018 as Account Based Revenue is required to deepen the success of Sales Development team

Some useful tips provided about managing sales enablement with teams…

Start small – Elevate the outreach and deepen the call to action
Balance your financial measures and leadership levers.
Know the difference between an Account Centric and Account Based approach
To traditional career path of a Sales Development Rep is no to just move them into an Account Executive field sales role as the failure rate is high as many as 1 in 3 should the right nurturing and mentoring not be provided from sales leaders.

The role of the CMO: Insights from Forrester Research CMO
In hearing the CMO at Forrester Research present he raised some important points from a business perspective to consider.

As organisations as under more pressure and budget to deliver projects like digital transformation, the way return on investment is measured or needs to be justified now is more required than before. Generally a marketing budget of 10% of revenue isn’t sufficient to drive the results expected in the business.

Customer Experience and Success – why it’s more important than ever before:
Some CMO strategy areas to consider to address:

Digital Outsourcing – turning technology debt to technology leverage, RPA (Robotic Process Automation) is the current mode and can help digital transformation.
Digital Vanilla – Nearly every company will pursue digital transformation but it’s about where the core is at. How can organisations differentiate through digital and marketing?
Crisis of customer loyalty – What is a rational expectation?
The expectations and evidence varies vastly with Gen X, Y and Z behaviours and mindset for loyalty particularly with the choice of Digital Service Providers as well as new constant offerings always being introduced to the market.

Other Alchemise Consulting News

We have just kicked off a strategic campaign with an account based demand generation campaign for a global data centre provider within the APAC region.

A leading Australian logistics company has benefited from the value of our Digital Readiness Assessment and why a strategic view is so important to consider first with your web and digital strategy:

“Great questions, really made me think about what we have existing and what we should, but don’t. Biggest conclusion I got from the whole exercise is to prepare a proper business proposal to the Directors about online and website strategy across the global business rather than an ad hoc approach.”

Our recent blogs…

Throughout the quarter we took an in depth look at Sales Enablement and Inside Sales, as well as two different user experience perspectives of marketing automation:

We also published a blog on exit strategies and wealth protection – How do you ensure your exit strategy from your business partnership has your personal finances protected?

Exit strategy and wealth protection checklist for business owners

Philip Karlsson, our Alchemise Consulting intern from earlier in the year has also shared a white paper reflecting on global business inspired by his experiences:

Reflections on global business: Diversity, leadership and experience

3D guy leaning on a calendar - isolated over a white background-1
As we approach the end of 2018, now is a great time to set aside some planning time to strategise and assess your pipeline and situation for this next quarter and looking ahead to 2019. For a complimentary, holistic Business Growth Assessment to independently review your business, sales and marketing performance and operations, please register below.

We’ll assess where your business is at, by collecting meaningful and relevant data and reviewing your goals and strategies.

Reflections on global business: Diversity, leadership and experience

Following his six week internship with Alchemise Consulting in Melbourne earlier this year, Philip Karlsson shared his thoughts on the global business world including the influence of diversity, global leadership and international experience:

White paper published September 2018

To get a global view of your business, register below for a complimentary Business Growth Assessment.

A digital marketer’s user experience review of HubSpot Marketing Hub

A recent conversation sparked me to think about my own use of our marketing automation tool, HubSpot, specifically about the time it saves me, or the time and hassle I would have to revert back to without it! Our content strategy is a big part of my role, and this has been simplified by using the inbound marketing principles and marketing automation over the last 12-18 months. Publishing blog articles and series is my most common use, so I’ll start there…

Blog Management and Publishing

Publishing a blog article is not as simple as a copy/paste/publish straight from a word document. That’s the first step, but factor in keyword and search engine optimization (SEO), including images or videos, creating an effective title, URL and meta description, and this quickly becomes a much more in-depth process.

HubSpot’s inbuilt tools quickly and continually scan your document for how and where you’ve used your chosen keywords or phrases, and provide you with guidance around the frequency of their use, how it interacts with other content pieces you have published, and essentially gives you the green light to publish only once you’ve satisfied the set criteria.

This might sound demanding, if you will, but it saves you having a 12 item checklist to manually work through to ensure your content is optimised to be found and read by your target audience once it’s published and available online. There is very little point publishing fabulous content, only for it to be next to impossible to find on a Google search! I’d estimate this feature saves me at least an hour per piece – that adds up quickly when you publish several pieces of content per week.

Another handy feature that could be easily overlooked is the free access to thousands of stock images for use throughout blogs and emails (basically wherever you’d like to place it!). This saves having an external resource to sift through and file and store your images. The searching, storing and integration of these images saves many fiddly steps and minutes at a time.

Keywords and Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)

Newer tools and updates have changed the way keywords are checked, lodged and used for optimisation in HubSpot. Rather than the previous iteration of single string keywords/phrases, it now allows you to build out content families and series, with multiple pieces centred around a primary focus topic.

This allows you greater control over which content pieces you want to highlight and direct traffic towards, and is proactive in suggesting how to physically connect and link other pieces in the series so your audience can arrive at one page and seamlessly navigate through to others – maximising the time they spend on your website, and depending on where they are in the buyer’s journey, their level of engagement and action.

While I still check Google searches myself for search volume and to check out which pages are ranking well, the keywords features have saved a lot of time with their guidance around search volumes, the difficulty you might face in ranking for term ‘x’, and relevant cost-per-click (CPC) prices for those who take that path!

Social Media and Monitoring

Social media’s reach and influence continues to grow and be a leading component in business’ content strategies. The ability to schedule and publish posts from one location for multiple social channels is a great time saver, and allows you to easily create and see the consistency or points of difference in your posts.

Monitoring tools are also included for an overview of views and engagements, and further complement the tracking and monitoring of other features (such as calls to action you might include in a blog post) to create an overall picture of the success of your content publishing.

Email Marketing

The other side of publishing and reaching contacts that I use HubSpot for on a regular basis is newsletter mailouts, and event invitations where required. The newsletters can be created, filled with images and highlighting relevant CTAs, direct readers to landing pages or forms, all within the one tool.

Sending the newsletter is as simple as adding the various contacts, either individually or as tagged/designated groups, and scheduling the best time to send it. I can quickly see who has received the email, who has opened it, who has clicked on any of the internal links, even how long people spend reading or scanning the newsletter.

This HubSpot feature was particularly useful earlier in the year when we organised a half-day workshop. I could email invitations to our relevant contacts, see when and how the emails were opened, and then share this information with my colleague who was making personal phone calls to contacts at a certain stage to encourage registration. Likewise, when he found another contact to invite, it was a quick process to add them to the list and have these engagement metrics instantly available to view and action on.

HubSpot Marketing Hub – One of the team…

Using HubSpot as our marketing automation tool easily saves me several hours each week across just one aspect of my role, and honestly I would struggle going back to completing each part manually to achieve the same level of detail and comprehensive overview of our content strategy. It allows sharing of knowledge and resources between team members in a way that no manual approach could cover as successfully for the same effort or time. HubSpot is really another hard-working and valued member of our team!

Find out more about how you could be further optimising and aligning your marketing and sales strategies using digital tools with a complimentary Digital Readiness Assessment.

Click here to read
An inside sales user experience of HubSpot marketing analytics

An inside sales user experience of HubSpot marketing analytics

By Andrew McFayden
Marketing and Sales Insight Consultant

Inside Sales experience before HubSpot Access

Working for other companies in various levels of maturity, I have found that the incumbent customer relationship management tool has ranged from either online shared Gmail tools, Microsoft suite or the old style note book and pen. Suffice to say they have their purpose and are thankfully superseded. These tools and the outbound process of cold calling and having no visibility into whether my communications have been received or even looked at are behind me at this point in time.

My initial impression of HubSpot as a CRM was that it was an unknown – I have not used this tool before, I hope that it does not slow me down. Should I revert to digital note pad to create canned responses to my contacts? Should I create multiple signatures as canned responses in Outlook? Also yes, great – so where is my cold calling list to bang blindly away at!

Inside Sales transformation with HubSpot access

I found that the user interface was easy to work out and it also helped that HubSpot has easy to follow training videos that helps your people with getting a running start to the tool. The important point here is that it is a tool. But this particular tool has smarts about it. Uploading structured and relevant content documents (PowerPoint, Excel, Word, videos/audio etc) to the file system allows you to place hyperlinks into your emails that allows this system to provide analytics to the sender of the email.

Where as before I was blind and ignorant as to whether a contact has opened my email clicked on the attachment and even if they have looked at the content pieces I have sent. Now I am able to see each time stamp when the email has been viewed. Hang on a second, I know you want more. This reporting goes further and also informs you as to when the contact has clicked on a link to your document(s), as well as which pages have been viewed and approximately how long each page was the focus. This is provided that you send them a link that allows them to view the link to the document(s) online. An important note here is to structure your content attachments so that you have one topic/service listed per page, with a table of contents at the front.

With previous tools that I have used this level of data was not available and it resulted in repeated calls to the contacts to see if they had viewed the email or the document(s). More importantly it has allowed me to identify who may have needed a reminder and who has not opened a particular email, content attachment or link.

Inside Sales with HubSpot access: A real example

For example: I was in recent contact with an ICT software development company. Part of my research included looking for triggers. Triggers are events that have been documented online that may be a pain point for your contact that may be a need that can be filled by your company. I found that they were advertising for a position, also additional research uncovered that there was a review on Glassdoor that reflected on the current culture within the organisation.

Reaching out to the CEO of the company, I had a discussion around the position that was advertised. We discussed the particulars of the role and also details of the culture of the company as well. The result of the call was that I was to send an email with additional information to be reviewed. I included the link to the Glassdoor review as one of the links. Out of all the information that I had sent through to the CEO, the link that was clicked first was not surprisingly the Glassdoor review that was submitted by a former employee. The details of the Glassdoor review are not important to this overall picture. What is important, is that it provided me with some insights into the priorities that the CEO has for his business.

When I review this contact in the HubSpot CRM now, I am able to see which other links he has clicked and which documents he has viewed. As a result, I avoid sending information that he has not reviewed, again, and instead look into content that I can send him that he has shown an interest in. It is important to note that at this point that you should not just rely on the marketing analytics and data report to supply you with all the information. Follow up with a call for validation from your contact.

You can use this data to determine when the best time to call may be. As people tend to form habits calling at around the same time as the contact has been setting aside to read emails you have sent should result in being able to reach the contact more readily. The same can be said if the contact has not opened your emails as well. Calling to verify if they have been received your email will help you avoid the spam filter black hole.

This level of marketing analytics and insights have not been available to me previously. It has allowed me to be able to determine the logical and informed next step, the next piece of content to follow with my clients.

It is important to note that HubSpot also have a certified course on email marketing as well that I can recommend that will help with structuring your emails and the content that you send. The courses are free which is an added bonus and I have found that they have allowed me to further improve the quality of my engagement with inbound methodology to my customers.

Find out more about how you could be further optimising and aligning your marketing and sales strategies using digital tools with a complimentary
Digital Readiness Assessment.

Click here to read
A digital marketing user experience with HubSpot marketing automation

How inside sales drives lead generation

Part 2 of this series continuing on from
The importance of sales enablement for inside sales teams

How inside sales drives lead generation and could provide more value than business development for SMEs

The inside sales function can help bridge the gap between MQLs and SQLs with the right onboarding process and agreement between both marketing and sales. We see this as a combined function with, ideally, common budget allocated between the two departments. Our recommendation is to engage inside sales specialists who understand your market and are able to scale based on demand.

For many SMEs and growing businesses the process of hiring strong and experienced BDMs to generate new business isn’t always possible within initial budget considerations. Depending on the sales and marketing go-to-market strategy, the role inside sales plays will have significant impact on marketing activities. You can drive top of funnel leads through multiple channels, however often there is little resource allocated to follow up leads and nurture them. To increase sales pipeline generation and the ability to accelerate sales revenue targets requires increasing sales productivity and marketing aligned discussions.

Based on the buyer’s journey and focussing on sales enablement, more budget should be invested in marketing in ways that support sales. Part of the justification to consider is that the ‘people’ element of inside sales (in-house or contracted) can take less time to payback ROI and also shorten the sales cycle based on sales enablement productivity goals than just on technology automation alone.

Source: Miller Heiman Group Report

Choosing an outsourced telemarketing campaign that may not drive qualified pipeline opportunities or contribute to the required ROI required can be risky, as can be hiring the wrong BDM. Your brand reputation could be affected with negative perception from prospective organisations receiving cold calls that can have a future impact. While there is always risk involved in making these choices, it is important to carefully consider any and all relevant factors and plan to help to mitigate this risk, and to increase your success.

Many traditional marketing agencies offering guaranteed cost per lead can prove to be of low value, unless the metrics can be clearly measurable and aligned to sales impact. Caller agent behaviour changes depending on the reward and their skill levels. A minimum standard BANT method needs to be used but a level of consultative or trusted advisor approach with relevant subject matter and communication skills will increase the lead qualification quality. The only way this can be demonstrated is having the sales and marketing function sit in the same room first and agree on the common objectives with a sales enablement process.

Step One: To agree on alignment with the correct sales targeting and marketing activity

Step Two: Once the clear requirements and goals are highlighted through a structured workshop, the level of investment can be agreed towards joint accountable and responsible KPIs first.

The alignment process looks like this as an example:

Source: Alchemise Consulting Sales Enablement Process

Why the strong focus on inside sales function for lead generation?

An Inside Sales Role function provides:

Value for money and accelerated sales pipeline development in line with sales and marketing aligned goals.
Opportunity to nurture a good resource with sales and marketing skills development.
The domain expertise and skills can be nurtured and talented individuals can be progressed into BDE or BDM role under senior experienced managers which helps with talent retention and promotion.

There are no guarantees or security from a traditional recruitment process in hiring full time sales teams. For small companies with limited hiring experience, this cashflow outlay can prove very hit and miss, and risky at the least. Both direct and indirect costs are at risk if the wrong hiring choices are made, often with perfomance monitoring throughout a six month probation period.

The employment market is shifting to an outcome-based model and the certainty of fixed costs and measurable tangible results. Looking at the accounting and legal industries for example, some of the mid-tier firms are slowly shifting from time-based to value/outcome-based services. However the cost for quality hired resources needs a good talent acquisition plan and budget.

Considering a shared risk model in the professional services helps you shift to deliver value added services and demonstrate a willingness to differentiate in the marketplace and to your clients.

Gaining access to an experienced sales team on demand provides both a skill and budget buffer during peaks and troughs as properly marketing qualified leads can be generated through multiple channels and nurtured. The provision of consistently qualified leads and communication from marketing will also offer more confidence to the sales team.

Imagine the focus on sales teams with aggressive targets for Q4 and then there is no pipeline for Q1… Does this scenario sound familiar? An inside sales presence to complement your internal sales team can help solve this all-too-common challenge.

The value of inside sales as a service can fill the gap in building a real sales pipeline, so having access on demand can help drive up prospective client engagement and opportunities.

I would hire an inside sales resource on demand rather than paying for lower level telesales resources who do not have the required expertise in the industry. What I believe brings success is not only the right experience but also the passionate attitude and personality suited to the client and part of the wider team.

At Alchemise, we strongly focus on not only nurturing leads but also our inside sales team management focus depending on the type of campaign and expertise required.

Suggested inside sales metrics

The primary metric to consider is Contacts to Conversions that is driven by sales pipeline and revenue generation as a truer measure of success.

Common digital marketing metrics such as content impressions, web visits and content downloads at the top of funnel typically becomes an MQL. This often frustrates sales as the time and cost of these measures doesn’t have an aligned correlation with sales revenue and pipeline/ opportunities generated.

We would like to challenge the conventional model with one that aligns sales and marketing with an inside sales function.

In closing…

If you want to differentiate your organisation with a more effective aligned sales and marketing growth strategy to generate higher ROI on your marketing investment, sales enablement and inside sales is the way forward. The attention should be directing focus towards the middle and bottom of funnel conversation or engaging a marketing consultancy which appreciates both sales and marketing alignment and not just generating top of funnel leads.

Unlike a telemarketing “one size fits all” guaranteed cost per lead model commonly delivering less than 1% lead conversion, a different approach is to look at the detailed setup and preparation first. A detailed process aligned to the business strategy to increase conversion rates typically establishes a benchmark after the first 3 months using an rolling average lead indicator.

If you can appreciate the delivery process with subject matter experts from the inside sales resources and a quality over quality approach, this is also good indicator that you have found a good fit of who to work with.

Come and arrange an obligation free discussion with Alchemise Consulting and our experience with a holistic, people, process and systems approach or find out about our Inside Sales as a Service.

Inside sales teams and the importance of sales enablement

This article has been written to open up some strategic thinking and discussion for business owners, as well as sales and marketing managers in SMEs or corporate businesses, on different ways to increase lead generation success with inside sales.

At an event we were a part of last year, it was great to hear that a prominent marketing agency acknowledged that marketing supports sales, and that successful lead generation cannot be achieved with just marketing automation and digital content alone.

The challenge in lead generation and conversion efforts between marketing and sales departments are still causing inconsistent measurement of ROI and success.

It’s becoming even more important with the need for both sales and marketing functions to complement, align and integrate with each other and adopting a “full funnel” top-down view. So how can you start that process and get a business to commit to a shift in mindset?

Sales Enablement

The term sales enablement comes to mind and applying the real meaning of this requires the focus of the inside sales role and joint ownership between marketing and sales – agreed upfront as a common shared goal.

What is sales enablement?
Sales enablement is the process of providing the sales organisation with the information, content, and tools that help sales people sell more effectively.

Common lead generation scenario
One example and context was from a marketing agency feedback in running an ICT campaign for a successful Microsoft partner. The client challenge was to generate 2500 marketing leads for a sales target of $10M (4 sales representatives) through content driven marketing automation. That would mean over 200 leads per monthjust from organic digital content and use of marketing automation – a huge task to guarantee a cost per lead model that doesn’t quantify sales opportunity progress or success.

These metrics and expectations just didn’t add up realistically given the variables; length of follow up from sales, quality of leads, and length of the sales cycle. It seemed like the ROI and appropriate KPI would have been unrealistic to achieve in 12 months. These lead metrics are only part of the picture and can’t be relied on to generate consistent leads without first examining the sales targets. If you can reverse engineer the sales target setting process with the required amount of marketing activity and leads required, this usually highlights either a gap in sales target expectations or marketing budget allocation to support this. In an ideal situation the sales manager and marketing manager should agree on the common metrics and KPIs.

In the previous campaign run by the agency mentioned, the MQLs manifesting from the marketing automation platform were largely impressions, web visits, contacts, downloads and enquiries. This is purely a top of funnel focus.

However typical frustrations arose in lead follow-through between MQL and SQL when the sales team didn’t follow up the leads or several leads slip through the cracks.

It was refreshing to hear the marketing agency involved in this campaign quote that the missing link is (needing) “still a human to be involved”.

The other negative impact of relying on inbound automation alone as the primary channel for lead generation was that the sales representatives can became less motivated to generate their own leads as BDMs or Account Managers.

From my sales experience, the biggest challenge still lies in bridging the gap between MQLs and SQLs with a higher degree of skill over simply appointment setting to meet the metric. I believe that one of the keys to successful lead generation is for businesses to invest more in inside sales functions and achieving higher quality results.

What is Inside Sales, and how is it different?

Definition of Inside Sales, Sales Development or Sales Acceleration Lead

What is ‘Inside Sales‘?
Inside sales is the sale of products or services by sales personnel who reach customers by phone or online methods, rather than travelling to meet them face-to-face. Inside sales relies on the phone, emails and the internet to reach customers and is common in the retail industry.

How is inside sales different to outside sales?
Unlike outside sales personnel, insides salespeople do not travel. Despite this, they are still proactive about contacting potential customers and may make cold contacts. A company may also designate incoming calls from prospective customers as inside sales. In addition, a company may outsource their inside sales duties to a third party instead of conducting sales in-house to increase their speed to market. In a highly competitive, quarter-by-quarter sales environment, the time taken to engage can mean a lost sales opportunity.

This Inside Sales function is commonly known in the ICT or telecoms world as an Inside Sales Role (ISR) or Sales Acceleration Lead or Sales Development Representative.

The typical capability and profile is someone with 2 to 3 years of sales experience or telephone based sales who appreciates the technical/conceptual aspect of the product or service that is being offered. At market rates in Australia they are paid between $50K to $70K base salary plus commission of up to $100K OTE in an ICT role.

If you can successful build a team of ISRs who have senior industry expertise, the right sales aptitude and attitude, with attention to detail and appropriate training, this is a great foundation. The team can then enhance sales enablement process and help bridge the gap between sales and marketing. This investment may generate a higher ROI than employing just a field sales team and, in some cases, represent better value.

The key to successful full funnel conversion from any marketing lead generation is to execute a marketing campaign with Inside Sales Representatives. Many marketing agencies spend a lot of time developing a top of funnel focus, driving online automation campaigns and leads from multiple channels and tactics. This may be moderately successful however the role and responsibility is handed back across to the client for the middle and bottom of the funnel engagement focussed on sales conversion.

Stopping the “Leaky Funnel” effect

In my opinion, this is where the true ROI of a retainer is unlocked for sales effectiveness and still requires a level of knowledge and “human” interaction to bridge this MQL to SQL gap and “leaky funnel” syndrome – which is still being experienced as a common cause of disconnection between marketing agencies and sales teams.

Source: Hubspot

A good inside salesperson should have the ability to grasp more complex concepts and think about a more meaningful business discussion on a follow up call to increase the quality of marketing qualified leads.

The benefit of inside sales is that star performers can be identified and nurtured towards a field sales progress path which provides sales engagement continuity to the business or a transition plan for staff retention.

The human skills factor can’t be replaced by digital automation
The human factor in consideration of the specific knowledge of the company’s products, services or solutions can provide a far more contextually-relevant delivery compared to a telemarketing representative following a script. Commonly the lack of depth of understanding isn’t appropriate to the conversation with the target stakeholder and decision maker on the prospect side and can lead to lost opportunities.

The buyer’s journey today means that more customers and prospects are well informed via multiple channels through their own research before being accessible and ready in their timeframe to actively make a purchasing decision and engage their supplier of choice.

Traditional telemarketing conversion rates are still poor and the ROI is negligible without the due care of impact on sales revenue and profits. Would you rather have 10 highly qualified leads a month with a 50% ratio to convert with some strategic awareness or 20 average leads of inconsistent quality just because it was an agreed cost per lead engagement per month that was committed to deliver regardless of the chance of conversion?

Customised lead generation is highly recommended rather than a ‘one size fits all’ approach to have a better chance of success. Inside sales is increasingly becoming the avenue to help achieve this.

Look out for Part 2 of this series, Why to use inside sales for lead generation: Sales strategy and ROI, where we will talk about the value of Inside Sales versus Business Development, the importance of strategy, and also the use of marketing automation to increase qualified leads and overall ROI.

If any of the challenges mentioned above resonate for you, register for an independent Business Growth Assessment to find out how and where we can help you resolve some of your concerns across your marketing and sales strategy.

Alchemise Consulting – Inside Sales as a Service Overview

Sales and marketing strategy: Case study – Australian HR advisory firm

HR Client Overview

A leading Melbourne based boutique HR advisory firm has a small team of six staff and growing with offering HR assessment and full range of HR advisory and resourcing services to corporate and SME businesses. They pride themselves on personalised service and long term retained clients. They have growth aspirations and also much of their business was from referrals with a very high conversion rate as well as forming alliance partners in their business network.

Vision & Goals

Here were our HR client initial vision and goals for the next 12 months.

To explore an effective marketing communications and sales pathway for business growth;

To uncovers insights for the value proposition, audience personas and competitive landscape;

To identify internal alignment opportunities to strategically position the HR Advisory for success;

Recommends an actionable 12 month plan to reach desired 25% growth projections;

Identify key sales processes and budget requirements; and

Position the HR Advisory with the capacity to grow with velocity and plan for succession.

Client Needs

To date a conversion rate of 82% from a complimentary HR Health Check has been good and effective however more inbound leads were needed.

The HR advisory wanted to develop core business service sales around selected retainer services and to explore growth of recruitment services and retainer based business which can scale and provide steady cash-flow from both existing clients and new business.

Current resourcing has about 10% capacity to grow in workload.

An additional priority to review sales and marketing process and systems (CRM and marketing automation tools) and consideration for investment to support clients, operational processes and internal requirements for future scalability and growth.

In forward planning for the financial year 17/18 they needed some sales and marketing strategy assistance to help with business growth.

They recognized the current depth of their sales and marketing strategy plans weren’t sufficient to help them scale and reach their financial year growth targets.

They wanted a combined integrated approach to address and plan out their alignment of sales and marketing in order to scale.

From there they needed some coaching and guidance on how to best invest a limited budget to take their business forward whilst hiring a new HR consultant and evolving their brand marketing.

A strategy of new leads from their HR Growth Assessment was their main form of new leads, followed by referrals with a high close rate.

The logos and colours used on throughout their digital online presence appeared dated.

After combining the sales and marketing strategy as an integrated approach, the deliverables were a comprehensive plan and roadmap with staged investment estimates to budget for.

How we were engaged

Business Growth Assessment

The HR Advisory found us using an inbound marketing approach and registered opportunity for downloading and completing a Business Growth Assessment as well as downloading our 7 Profit Multipliers E-book resource.

The initial engagement followed an inbound process.

Strategy Planning Workshop
Following this we engaged in partnership with our marketing strategist for a 2 hour paid workshop for an integrated sales and marketing strategy engagement using our proven methodology.

The client came well prepared with their data and financials as well as marketing materials to help strategise and develop recommendations.

Outcomes and value achieved
A detailed business growth assessment overview to independently help set the direction and achieve their goals. This assessment also included a digital website customer experience review for online engagement which improves lead generation projects. A blend of creative marketing design and commercial sales consideration elements were provided in formal feedback and recommendations of next steps and also an appropriate budget to consider a staged approach.

After the workshop and a series of consultations, we formulated the integrated sales and marketing strategy plan to help provide a roadmap for their objectives using a strategy, people, process and systems approach broken down into stages.

Given it was a small business, budget was a challenge in hiring a resource first, servicing their current client base and then a focus on system tools.

Key Recommendations

Our staged recommendations and roadmap of an integrated sales and marketing strategy given the short term budget constraint and plan to hire a senior consultant were:

Stage 1– Strategy Plan and Roadmap/Recommendations with Marketing Benchmark.

Stage 2– Implementing HubSpot to replace Salesforce and a transition plan based on ease of use and requirements from the design and CRM marketing data capture process.

Stage 3 – Enhancing marketing strategy to deliver a website and social media plan for CTA with their HR assessment offer and capture more customer and prospect data for FY17/18.

Stage 4 – Generate more leads and shift from a product focus to a higher margin and upsell/cross sell offering to help the account management process.

With some assistance and consideration, the HR advisory have now updated their website and digital presence with more HR assessment offers, social media engagement and customer centric content.

They have also implemented a basic HubSpot Marketing Hub and Sales Hub platform to track and collect digital and social engagement analytics with reporting for better visibility.

Moving forward they now have a defined strategic plan to implement the roadmap, as budget allows, in a practical and controlled way which allows them to be innovative and provide growth using a strategic people, process and systems approach.

Strategy Development Outcomes

As a result of our integrated sales and marketing strategy consulting assistance, the HR advisory gained better clarity and a plan of action across people, process and systems with:

Help in defining business goals, objectives and marketing benchmarking measures.
Aligned Sales and Marketing strategy plan and processes from the workshop.
A plan to provide growth capacity and tools foundation for a 5 year growth plan.
Providing an informed sales management and commercial decision making process with a detailed implementation planning and investment budget needed for the next stages of the project over the next 12 months.

For further information around our strategy services or how we helped this HR advisory client, feel free to contact us on info@alchemiseconsulting.com or call +61 3 9225 5022.

Organic rankings: How to improve your Google search rankings without paid SEO

At Alchemise, we haven’t paid for Google Adwords PPC campaigns and wanted to share how we have managed to get some SEO organic rankings for our core business services.

This purely is focussed on one strategy which might be effective for you but not for all and being mindful that Google algorithms are always dynamically changing and there is no one formula for SEO success.

Can you afford the increasing costs across many paid campaign digital channels including Google AdWords without generating a solid return on investment? We have spoken to many SMEs who have spent in excess of $3,000 per month for 12 months with little ROI and sales leads or simply the wrong clicks or web traffic. This kind of ad hoc spend can be prohibitive to helping them to grow their sales where other digital marketing and sales strategies may be more effective.

Do you have a digital marketing plan and understand your customer behaviour?

Are you tired of paying expensive search engine optimisation (SEO) costs that promise to put you on the first results page? It seems like many SEO providers work seem to make this a black box approach where it gets harder to justify and see a tangible return on investment (ROI) for this aspect of inbound marketing and many without integrating this considering a broader outcomes.

I challenge the value of SEO services as there is a factor of human psychology and customer interactions that prevent people from converting with advertised listings.

For those who remember the ‘old’ Yellow Pages advertising, people paid for first position, for example, AA or AAA plumbing services. If I think back to my selection method, I would typically pick the first non-paid ad to enquire to and call. Then I would select a second and third company in the first third of the directory for multiple quotes.

The same principal still applies when thinking about SEO, even aside from the cost. It’s purpose is to allow you to digitally list your advertisement and website as the start of a potential lead funnel where patience is still required.

Where is the sales ROI?

The purpose of SEO doesn’t directly help drive more sales qualified or quality leads to you. Often it’s just for brand awareness in the target market or segment where you wish to attract interest.

Even if you get SEO results, there are still many steps in the marketing and sales funnel process needed to progress from a marketing interest to first sales engagement. For us this has taken a carefully planned content strategy and about 6 to 9 months to unfold with patience.

We have taken the time to closely monitor our use of keywords, competitive research and rankings using Google Analytics in conjunction with our marketing automation platform, our WordPress website and SEO tools to test for what generates optimum results.

We have had many customers complain about the lack of cost benefit once they are on a higher page ranking.

If you search any term, the typical representation of Page 1 will be a series of paid ads first at the top of the page and bottom of the page with only a handful of organic ranked listings in the middle.

As a potential customer searching for information, I relate this to the old Yellow Pages directory where you will pay attention to the second or third ranking listings but not necessarily the first or the one which stands out more (if they have paid for top advertising space in BOLD).

There is no magic formula as this constantly changes in relation to Google search algorithms and what ranks, however you need to ensure you understand what you are paying for and what knowledge the SEO service provider adds in tangible value over a period of time with transparency.

There is no magic timeframe where results can be generated instantly. It does take time and organic progression or trial and error to find what works.

Our version of SEO in 2018 and how it’s worked for Alchemise Consulting

See below the attached images of our Google rankings on a global scale and search rates (in millions), we have ranked in at least 8 search terms organically.

Alchemise organic rankings SEO tips:

Here’s some tips on how we achieved organic rankings for some of our keywords and offerings, primarily through our blogs across a 6 to 9 month period:

Change of KEYWORDS to TOPICS – this reflects Google search engine algorithms for search intent and related topics.

Are you using a global or localised domain name for your content approach? Our homepage uses a .com name and ranks globally.

Create relevant content across topics NOT just keywords – present themed content that touches on different aspects of an overall topic, rather than always using a narrow focus.

Build authority for your content.

Build relevance with your content.

Optimising existing blog posts and long tail keywords titles – this takes practice and skill but can make a big difference to the reach of your content.

Develop your content strategy in relation to your Google Analytics and SEM Rush research data.

Include external and internal links within your content that is relevant.

Use a Core topic and Pillar search for your content plan.

Consider what topic(s) you want to be known for…

Answer every question about those topics and regularly.

Link them to one another fit the topic.

Rank higher for related queries.

Here are some examples of where we have achieved a #1 organic ranking:

As of July 2018, we have ranked organically #1 on google.com.au above some of the Tier 1 Consultancies and Corporates.

Sales and Marketing Consulting

seo-sales-and-marketing-consulting

Business Growth Assessment

Sales Consulting Services – not #1, but two results on the first page.

Now that you have achieved organic rankings for keywords, what do you do now?

The organic rankings do not guarantee that you will convert business or leads.

Conversion of inbound traffic and leads is important and whether you engage a paid advertising campaign or utilize inbound or outbound analytics can help determine your target market segment – remember, people will be attracted to you if your content resonates with their pain point.

More SEO Tips

#1: Ensure you have the right SSL certificate on your website, as organic SEO rankings can be impacted without one.

#2: Google has, as of June 2018, highlighted that they prioritise mobile formatted content (i.e. AMP format) over desktop based content.

If you are not sure which SEO path to take or how much should you invest in digital or social advertising campaigns, consider our valuable Digital Readiness Assessment which will guides you through a checklist.

From obtaining our holistic recommendations to suit your objectives, we can advise you what has worked for us and how we can help you shape and create your SEO strategy to work organically and save you marketing cost and drive more organic lead and sales opportunities for you!