Should You Outsource Lead Generation Or Do It Internally?

Before making the decision to completely outsource your lead generation or to hire an inside sales representative internally, consider a mixed approach - something we like to call co-sourcing.

Co-sourcing is a partner approach to lead generation that provides the cost savings and flexibility that come from outsourcing while integrating with your in-house staff to guarantee every prospect is supported according to your brand and values.

There are absolutely high-impact responsibilities that should only be handled by your most trusted experts internally: 

• Price-quoting 

• Contract-writing 

• New customer on-boarding 

But there are also low-risk responsibilities that you should consider sending out to a trusted partner: 

• List building 

• Prospecting phone calls 

• Inbound lead qualification 

• Appointment setting 

• Social media 

Trying to hire an inside sales representative comes with a lot of hard and soft costs. Finding a trusted co-sourced partner is the 21st-century way to keep your heavy-hitters in play and maximize their efficiency without incurring a ton of additional overhead.

Manufacturing Sales & Marketing Summit

We're headed to Milwaukee this week for the Manufacturing Sales & Marketing Summit! The Precision Metalforming Association (PMA) is hosting a conference dedicated to sales and marketing for manufacturers in order to help their organizations grow.  This popular event attracts more than 100 sales and marketing leaders each year. 

The PMA is promising that attendees will:

• Gain insight on how to increase sales and grow your business.
• Learn from top-notch speakers on hot topics related to sales and marketing.
• Discuss solutions that will help you to overcome your toughest sales and marketing obstacles.
• Stay up-to-date with the latest developments in your field.
• Network with your industry peers to share best practices.
• Feel inspired.

Will you be attending this event? We'd love to get together and chat about your growth goals for 2018! You can find us on the conference floor at the Incept booth.

How Much Does It Cost To Hire An Inside Sales Representative?

Time to hire again? Last inside sales guy didn't work out? Before you tell HR to go find you another inside sales rep, let's take a look at the costs you'll actually incur. 

Assuming that you're looking for an inside sales rep who will follow-up on all inbound leads, and place outbound phone calls every day in order to generate leads for your business, let's say the sales rep you hire will make $40,000/year + commission.

Hiring Costs 

• Posting the job = $50-$500 

• Reviewing and screening applications - 10 hours of labor = $200  

• Phone interviews + scheduling interviews - 10 hours of labor = $200 

• Conducting interviews - 10 hours of labor = $200 

• Job offer, paperwork, orientation - 6 hours of labor (3 for HR, 3 for new hire) = $120 

Training Costs 

• One week of training (no production) = $800 

• One week of lost production from trainer = $800+ 

Overhead 

• Healthcare = $7,500 

• Other benefits = $3,500 

• Equipment costs = $500-$1000 

Conservative total without commission: $53,870

That's just math; don't forget about the management aspects that are harder to quantify: 

• Time invested in management/support = ??? 

• Energy spent = ??? 

• Opportunity cost = ??? 

All these time and resources get invested into a sales rep that may or may not work out. 

What if they don't work out? 

How long do you continue to invest before you sever the relationship? 6 months? A year?  

After that, what happens? You're back to the beginning, starting over with the HR costs and spending energy looking for yet another sales rep. 

What if they exceed all of your expectations? 

Hiring a phone-based inside sales rep may work out really well. If you find that diamond in the rough, they'll set you up for some good sales opportunities. But eventually they'll get wise and either want to get bigger at-bats with higher pay-out potential, or they'll start seeking new opportunities. So you end up promoting them to a customer-facing sales role, or you lose them to someone who will. 

Now what? You're once again back at the beginning, starting over, trying to staff that phone-based role once again. 

Before you make the decision to hire an inside sales rep, consider the benefits of co-sourcing your sales process. 

How To Drive Inbound Leads With Facebook Lead Ads For Your Manufacturing Company

Facebook and Hubspot are partnering up this week to bring users live stream video content about the changing landscape of social media and how businesses should react to it. We attended the first session which included a panel of experts talking about major trends in social media and how you can adapt your marketing strategy to take advantage of them.

Did you know that every month over 2 billion messages are exchanged between people and businesses on Facebook? It's becoming a more natural, and maybe even preferred, way of communicating with businesses for many people. This statistic led to one of the most popular talking points of the panel discussion - Facebook Lead Ads and their growing impact on businesses, especially in the B2B space.  

FACEBOOK LEAD ADS

People are spending more time on their mobile devices than ever before, so Facebook created Lead Ads to give people an easier way to connect with businesses, wherever they are.

With Facebook ad targeting, businesses can reach the people most likely to be interested in their business right within the Facebook platform. Leads can then fill out a pop-up form without having to leave Facebook, increasing conversion rates substantially for many businesses.

IMPACT FOR MANUFACTURERS

Huddle Contacts, a contact lenses manufacturer and retailer, used lead ads to gauge market interest and retarget people with ads optimized for conversions. The campaign led to more than 3,000 new leads with an average cost per lead of $2.30.

By using lead ads, Hubble Contact was able to build an email list of people who had already shown interest in the product and then retarget its ad to this list, eventually converting people through purchases. 

If your purchasers could easily find out about your products on Facebook, do you think they would fill out a form to learn more? We think it's certainly worth the try.

VIDEO REPLAY

Interested in watching the entire 'How Social Has Changed & What Marketers Can Do' session? Take a look at the video below or click here.

NEXT SESSION

Any fans of Gary Vaynerchuk or Brian Halligan out there? They're teaming up on September 13th at 2pm EST to talk about Growing a Business in the New Age of Social. You can attend by just filling out a short form on Facebook or you can check back here tomorrow for a short recap.

Are you using Facebook Lead Ads for your manufacturing business? If so, we want to hear about it! Let us know your experience in the comments section.

Best Practices in B2B Customer Segmentation

Learning how and why your customers make buying decisions can teach you a lot about the industry your serve. If this information is recorded, analyzed, and leveraged appropriately, it can lead to a sizable lift in revenue and set you up for sustainable growth going forward. Here's a breakdown of things to keep in mind when conducting your initial customer segmentation campaign. 

What do you need? 

• Purchase History Data 
• Anecdotal Information 
• Customer Demographics 

Generally, customer segmentation happens by analyzing purchase history data alongside anecdotal information. It's usually pretty easy to acquire the purchase history data for your entire customer base by pulling a report from your ERP.  

The demographic info is also relatively easy to acquire using something like ReferenceUSA or a simple web search. Look for employee count, annual revenue, industry, and geography. 

The anecdotal data probably needs to come in the form of a voice-of-the-customer survey.  

Crafting a survey 

• Smart, open-ended questions 
• Carried out by a third-party 

What we're referring to here is a third party conducts a survey on your behalf. This survey should consist of verifying demographic information plus 3-5 open-ended questions. Here are some examples: 

• What led to your decision to use Company A? 
• What factors contribute to how frequently you place an order from Company A? 
• What can we do to continue to serve you better? 
• What else would you like to see Company A do for you? 

Aggregating the data 

There are plenty of quality data analytics partners out there who would be happy to help you aggregate, organize, and analyze the data you pull together.  

However, as a first step, it could be as simple as putting together a basic spreadsheet with each customer's purchase history, demographic, and anecdotal data compiled into one report. From there, some trends might jump out. 

Analyzing the data 

Don't panic - this is a basic, initial implementation, remember? The word 'analyze' doesn't need to be scary. There are big firms out there that will conduct analytics and throw around words like 'big data.' That's not necessarily what we're talking about here. We're talking about your data from your current customer base all put together in a format that we can look for trends.  

Do you see any columns that all seem to have the same answer? That's a trend. This could be something as simple as, the State column having most 'OH' in it. Or, if you look at the column for the question, "What led to your decision to use Company A?" and every answer is, their prices were lowest, that's a trend and is worth noting. 

Note all of those trends, and then go through the list and start placing them in buckets. As an example, one company I worked with ended up segmenting their customer base down by employee count, and then each had sub-segments. The largest customer segment was the 50-100 employees who used internal processes as opposed to outsourcing their particular application. The next largest segment was 50-100 employees who outsourced this same application.  

You may find that the buckets look entirely different than that - maybe your segments are based around geographic trends (for example, OH-based companies, sub-segmented by employee count; TX-based companies, sub-segmented by employee count). 

Next steps 

• Strategies for growing current customers 
• Strategies for approaching lapsed customers 
• Strategies for acquiring new customers 

Once you have the segments finalized, you can begin creating strategies for how to grow you current customer base. What segments of your current customers need to either buy another product you sell or to buy the same product again, more frequently?  

After you've upsold/cross-sold your current customers, it's time to look back through the archives to lapsed customers. Wherever that data lives, dig it out and use the same segments to group up your lapsed customers. Then create strategies to approach and reactivate those customers. 

Lastly, using the same segmentation guidelines, you can acquire a list of prospective companies to begin targeting in attempt to bring them on as new customers.  What strategies apply to these segments of prospective customers?