Month: May 2019

Outsourcing your sales team can be an efficient and effective method for you to increase leads and sales opportunities, therefore aiding the growth of your business, without incurring the costs and time restraint demands that arise when on-boarding a team of full-time sales reps in-house. Outsourced sales are nothing new. However, companies are often still dubious when it comes to handing over a pivotal part of their business to an external party. It seems that there’ll be an everlasting debate – to outsource or hire in-house.

So, why might you need an outsourced sales team?

• Accelerated sales growth: Whilst your business is growing, or looking to expand further if established, you may not have the capacity in-house to deal with the flow of leads coming in or the time to outbound sell to new prospects. A dedicated outsourced sales team will take this weight off of your shoulders and allow you to accelerate your sales pipeline.
• Immediate access to sales expertise: Recruiting and on-boarding local talent is costly and often a time-consuming process, even once you have formed an in-house sales team, training each individual will be a lengthy process. When outsourcing a sales team, you will already have the raw talent there, with diallers who know what quality calls look like, it is just a matter of building their knowledge of your business and moulding their talent to fit around your product or service.
• Lower risk and overheads: Outsourced sales teams are used to working on multiple campaigns and picking up the intricacies of various campaigns swiftly. By working with experienced outsourced sales teams, you will be putting your sales into reliable hands, avoiding errors and reducing the on-going costs of in-house employees.
• Efficiency: For new business or those looking to launch a new product or service perhaps to a new market or industry, your management team will be putting much of their efforts into product development and marketing. By outsourcing to an experienced team, who have the time to dedicate to sales, you can focus on growth or launching your new campaign.

Could you benefit from using an experienced outsourced sales team, with experience across multiple sectors including Fintech, Saas, Professional Services and Energy? Then get in touch, call 0345 241 3038 or email contact@air-marketing.co.uk

We may be an ambitious and hungry start-up but we are anything but inexperienced. Collectively we have over 20 years of marketing knowledge and have worked with many businesses that struggle with marketing, both large and small within numerous industries.

Our experience has revealed that when it comes to marketing there are a number of circumstances that affect businesses and prevent them from really reaping the rewards that marketing can offer. We know that marketing activity can make a big difference to your business in generating leads, nurturing a sales pipeline and, importantly, creating revenue. For Roots it’s a matter of working smarter and delivering marketing that drives results…

We have identified the top 5 reasons why businesses struggle with marketing. So if you want to break through the marketing barriers experienced by businesses today, read on…

1. Strategy

Marketing has come a long way in the last 20 years; with advancements in technology there are now hundreds of ways to market your business. From hashtags to direct mail and search engine optimisation to email nurturing, there is a lot to get your head around and it’s difficult to know what works and what doesn’t. Is it any wonder business owners struggle to figure out where to start?

It may sound obvious, but like most things in life you need to start with a strategy and a plan. Working your way through all of the elements of a robust marketing strategy will help you to navigate todays marketing landscape and this will then identify what marketing tools to use, how to use them and when.

Your marketing strategy should highlight how you aim to build and nurture prospects and customer relationships for the long term. Identifying all the marketing activity that reaches out to your prospects, and guiding them through the sales funnel until you finally convert them into an engaged customer, a process known as Demand Generation.

2. Consistency

Even with a strategy in place and a better idea of which marketing tools to use, things will not be as straight forward as you think. As a business owner you will want to see instant results for the efforts of your marketing, but the best results come in time.

All too often we see companies panic and, in a desperate bid to increase sales, implement reactive marketing campaigns. In most of these scenarios, strategy goes out the window and time frames become unrealistic, as companies desperately try a whole range of activity to create leads and close sales.

The key to marketing is persistence and consistency.

If you have taken the time and the trouble to create a brand, and all the things that come with it, then the existence of your brand and offering deserves continued and prolonged attention. This helps your prospects to identify you and what you do in the market against your competitors. If you are also consistent with your messaging and marketing activities, your market will begin to trust you and when the time comes they will come to you for what they need.

Once you have a solid flow of consistent day to day marketing activities, it is important to keep trying new things, testing and measuring, learning and developing to improve the impact of your marketing and your results.

If you focus on using a mixture of proven marketing tactics to reach your target audience and produce marketing qualified leads for your sales team, you can start to prove the difference that great marketing can make on revenue.

3. Dedicated marketing resource

Marketing is one of the main areas of any business and as such should be treated accordingly. So many people don’t get started with marketing because they don’t have a dedicated marketing person to do the job, or it becomes part of someone else’s role.

There is so much to be done by a marketing team, and therefore marketing needs to be owned – implemented by someone who is going to get the work done. In order to be a success, it needs someone who can dedicate the time and resource to it, building knowledge about what works and what doesn’t.

Your dedicated marketing resource can facilitate implementing strategic Demand Generation techniques, to bridge the gap between the sales and marketing functions of your business, delivering leads that your sales team crave whilst also building your brand within the market. A Demand Generation strategy focuses on drawing in marketing qualified leads (MQLs) to your business who are already engaged with your brand. This helps align marketing to sales, who will be under pressure to seek out new opportunities, developing their own pipeline and convert sales qualified leads (SQLs) into new customers.

4. Time

Many businesses and business owners confess that they don’t have the time, or they don’t dedicate enough time to marketing. Business owners want to increase revenue and profitability in the most efficient manner but are quite often a central resource for many different individuals within the business. Detrimentally, in many businesses marketing lies at the bottom of the priority list and consequently is the last thing to get done, if at all.

Just like accounts or sales, marketing is an important business function and deserves dedicated time. You can have the best product or service in the world, but if you don’t spend time telling anyone about it by marketing it effectively, you’re not going to get the results that you’re looking for.

Demand Generation is a measurable strategy to invest in which will have an impact on both your marketing and sales departments. With the aim to drive leads into the business and to make an impact on your revenue. Delivering warm, MQLs directly to the sales team, allows the team to spend more time working on converting warm leads, rather than just prospecting cold leads which overall can save the business time.

5. Money

Many business owners think they need a lot of money to implement marketing activities, but surprisingly it doesn’t have to break the bank.

If you want to see ROI from your marketing efforts; you must trust and work from your strategy. By investing in a dedicated resource, you can ensure momentum and consistency are maintained.

Born from a sales environment Team Roots understand the importance that marketing has on all teams within a business, especially those responsible for generating revenue. We understand that seeing ROI is important to you and how marketing can slot into your business to save you time. If you’re looking to partner with a company that delivers intelligent marketing with a sales attitude– give us a call on: 01392 796702 or email: contact@roots2market.co.uk. Visit our services page for more information on the services that we offer.

On a daily basis, prospects are bombarded with generic sales and marketing activity from businesses claiming to solve all of their problems and offer services that are tailor-made to suit their individual needs – but are businesses communicating their value to prospects, or are their voices drowning in a sea of sales noise?

Prospects can now find all of the information that they need to make a purchase online, be it through web searches or social media, so it is vital that all marketing activity has a clear message that stands out. With more tools than ever at their disposal, businesses should drive prospects through the sales pipeline with targeted marketing that engages, hooks and helps sales teams to convert them. The easiest way to do this? Simply tell your prospects how your product or service can be of value to them, as an individual.

At the end of the day, buyers are only interested in the value of a product or service – does it help them to achieve a goal or solve an issue? Whether you’re sending your prospects an email, speaking to them via telemarketing or directing them towards content that you have written, tell them exactly what you offer and how it solves their problems. Your offering may be ground breaking and exciting, but if you don’t communicate its value and how it can help them, they simply won’t be interested.

An inability to communicate their Value Proposition is one of the biggest inhibitors to businesses when looking to attract new customers and reach sales targets, with only 24% of organisations agreeing on the definition of their target audience. So how can you avoid that and make your value known?

1. Understand your offering: Make sure that you and your sales team have a clear understanding of exactly what value your offering can bring to your prospects. If you and the people selling your product or service don’t understand the true value of a product, how will your prospects?
2. Be customer-centric: Before even attempting to market your product or service and begin the sales process, it is vital that you know your target prospect inside and out – what are their pain points, industry, business size, etc. When you truly understand your target audience, your sales approach will appear more personal leading prospects to trust you and take the value of your offering seriously. This allows you to engage in proper conversations and address problems a potential customer may not be aware they were struggling against. By making every effort to show you understand them, you may just go that one step further than a competitor that they are also talking to.
3. Hire well: If you want to demonstrate the value that your product brings, then you need to ensure that the right people are delivering this message. You need to attract, train and retain exceptional sales people. Ask yourself, would you trust your sales team if they were selling to you, do they engage you?
4. Use the human voice: Encourage your team to use their voice well. By this we don’t mean having endless conversations but having quality, credible conversations. Are they assertive, demonstrating their knowledge with a confident voice? Or do they lack confidence and allow upwards inflection to creep into their voice and make it sound like they are questioning what they know? If the sales person sounds doubtful in the value of your product or service, the prospect simply isn’t going to buy into what you’re selling.

If you’re looking for a confident, driven sales team to communicate the value of your offering to prospects, get in touch today. Email: contact@air-marketing.co.uk or call: 0345 241 3038

61% of marketers say generating traffic and leads is their top challenge, with 37% of salespeople admitting that they struggle most with prospecting. The growth of a business is reliant on the consistent momentum of sourcing and following up leads, but not every business has the resources to do this in house. For many businesses, outsourcing a Lead Generation campaign is the next logical step.

When enquiring about a Lead Generation campaign with us, a business’ top question is often, “when will I see a return on my investment?” The most important thing to remember with any campaign is that no two are the same. On average, the time frame in which a business will see a return is 6-12 months, however, some of our clients see returns as quickly as 1-month in. Ultimately, campaign outcomes and ROI will be totally unique to you and your business.

Making your Lead Generation campaign a success can be impacted by different criteria including, but not exclusive to:

• The journey of your customer – How long does it take to engage, nurture and close your prospects? If your sales cycle only tends to last a couple of weeks, you will see ROI more quickly, however, if your sales cycle takes months or years, this will inevitably delay the time in which you begin to see ROI.
• The average cost per order – Once closed, how much is the sale worth? If, for example, your product has an upfront value of £10s of thousands, you may see ROI quicker than a company selling products of a lower value per sale, or a subscription-based SaaS solution relying on residual income. That is however not to say that ROI won’t develop, it is more about being realistic on the scale and worth of your sales – look at your sales value, customer lifetime value and time to convert.
• Your ability to service your clients – When beginning a Lead Generation campaign, it is important that you have three things in place to support us and your prospects.

1. Define what a lead means to you. Is it a phone call, face to face appointment or setting up a demo, for example?
2. What are your qualifying criteria – industry, company size, location, decision maker position or contract end date window?
3. Have a process in place to handle and close the lead once they are qualified by us. We will focus on the qualification and passing the quality, but how will you close them?
4. Be the expert and have good product/market knowledge. It sounds obvious, but you need to know your market and products inside out, whilst our experienced team are able to offer prospects introductory information, it is your experience and knowledge that will ultimately seal the deal.

• Your data – If the data provided to us is cleaned and ready to go, we will be able to get the ball rolling quicker than if it needs to be sourced and cleansed. Moreover, if your data includes prospects that are already in the process of being warmed or nurtured, ROI will come quicker as they will be further along your sales pipeline. If you don’t have any data to provide/are looking for additional records, we can source this for you and ensure that it is CTPS compliant.

The key takeaway is that Lead Generation, like any other sales and marketing campaign, should be seen and measured as an investment and a business support. It is not a magic fix and there is no magic formula to calculate guaranteed return. Whilst we can forecast what can happen and make predictions based on your business and our experience, it will ultimately be dependent on what you want to achieve and the insight you can provide us with to get you there – from there we can take your goals and run with them.

Are you ready to take your Lead Generation and sales goals to the next level? Talk to Air, the award-winning agency who are disrupting the market. Call 0345 241 3038 or email contact@air-marketing.co.uk