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Upcoming Public Events & Presentations:
Profitable Internet Publishing; Learn How Here:
Mequoda Summit: I highly recommend that niche and B2B publishers sign up for this conference on best practices that ARE WORKING for media companies adapting to our new world of Internet media. This conference covers content strategy, search engine strategy and tactics, leveraging social media, and of course the segment I'll teach on successful advertising sales. You'll be refreshed by the jargon-free language, step-by-step tactics and print-publisher friendly atmosphere. Learn more here. |
Sales Tip:
Change is Your Ally
No advertising agency, nor client, will ever say to you, "you worked really hard to win our business last year and we made a mistake not buying your proposal." Every media plan is presented to management as "the optimum buy." So how can you go about your renewed selling efforts to win the business this year? Focus on how things are changing.
When you can bring perspective or data to your sales contacts on how their market or their competition is changing, you will be bringing them valuable perspective. But most important, you'll be giving them psychological cover to change their own minds. They will never say "you were right last year," but they might say; "things have changed, so I'm going to recommend you this year."
Change is everywhere. You can see it among competitors in any market your advertisers target, and in the readers your media serves. Any change you can mention will help spark the conversation and give you an opportunity to initiate a discussion about what other market changes the prospect is seeing and how they are adapting to it. Are the competitors of your prospect introducing new products or altering their products or services? Are the retailers or points of distribution changing? Are customers changing the way they gather information to make purchasing decisions or are they changing what product features or benefits they care about?
In a perfect world, you would have a multi-year study on your market that would allow you to point to the year-to-year or decade-to-decade changes in what, or how, customers are buying. But we don't sell in a perfect world.
It is more likely you need to find your material the old fashioned way; reading trade publications on and off line, and being just plain observant. In the marketing world, here are two interesting sources that continually publish aggregated research that may give you a good place to start: http://www.mediapost.com/publications/?fa=Archives.showArchive&art_type=8 and http://www.marketingcharts.com/
Whether you sell local ads to restaurants, multimillion dollar multimedia packages to major national advertisers, or national ads to hobby product companies, every year you are challenged to find new clients and persuade them to change their spending. It rarely works to tell them they have been wrong...however nicely. It frequently works to show them how things have changed, and how they can make that change their opportunity. That will make change your opportunity too.
To read more sales tips, click here. Or to learn about ambro.com Strategic Sales Tactics Training and other services click here. |
 continued from:
Dear Colleague: ...a Sales Call Stimulus
The recession over the last two years has been very depressing to sales people. It is hard to maintain that happy loser attitude when the accounts and agencies you call on say they don't want to see you because they have no budget. If you have been tracking the number of genuine sales interactions per week by your sales people - in person calls and phone appointments - you would know clearly how much sales call volume has declined over the last two years. It is not surprising that clients with no money to spend don't like having meetings only to disappoint sales people. As we see the glimmers of spring in the media recession, it is time to focus on the mechanics of recovery. And job one is more sales calls. In order to demand and support more sales calls by your sales team, you need these "Three Rs" in place:
Requirements: Set them. You can't manage what you can't measure. Don't obsess about the past, but start tracking calls per week now by each sales person. Set goals that are consistent with your market and the sales person's territory. For instance, set a goal to help your sales people increase sales calls by 25%. For an outside sales person that may be only moving from an average of 8 to 10 a week! Sales results will follow.
Resources: Recognize that your customers don't agree to meet with your sales people for their entertainment. You must give your sales people something to talk with their customers about; ideally about market research that helps your customers understand how their market is changing, and how they can use marketing to gain sales and market share.
Reasons: New opportunities are the tried and true way to get sales people back out in the street. New special sections, issues, web content areas, email marketing programs, webinars; any, or all of these, can be the thing that gives the sales people a reason to call and that gets them in the door. Sales calls are the down-and-dirty part of the media business. When sales people are working for a hot new property, it's easy to get appointments. Accounts and agencies are always looking for the Next New Thing they can take to their client or boss. But most of you are marketing an established property. And the clients think they already know what they need to know. It is your job and your sales people's job to break through that resistance, to get into the room where they can begin to make a difference. Contact us directly for a customized one day seminar or multi-session webinar for your team on winning the sales call battle: 541-431-4500, or DanielMAmbrose@ambro.com
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A Stimulus for the