How many years has your company been selling advertising? Can you see with confidence why the company will make its plan, or worse, miss? Here are 5 tips that will help you sleep at night:
1) Datawarehouse:
2) CRM
3) Knowledge Management
4) Competitive sales coverage analysis
5) Short list of KPI’S that tie to compensation
These are simple, cost effective, and available from several established vendors. So why are so many CEO’s bewildered or fired because they could not articulate what is going well pot not so well? In many cases, these individual categories fall under the wrong departments or sponsors don’t want to risk internal conflict over tedious work or the commitment is pushed aside for other projects. All five strategies are not required all at once. They are not in a prioritized order, but they are all capable of creating non-linear revenue and profit growth. Not this year or next year. Every year! As an illustration, draw a sketch of the perfect sale in your company. Give some quick definition to “perfect” and make a short list. What happened?
1) Landed a “whale” defined as big advertiser who was new to your company.
2) The client purchased a long term campaign using multiple components found in the proposal.
3) The deal was big enough to include C-level decision-makers at the client.
4) after the initial presentation, the client suggested working teams from both sides to help sellers better understand client’s brand and its customers.
5) the spirit of the relationship hit such important issues to the client , other marketing projects were opened up separately as problems that needed to be solved.
Now imagine that your company becomes known for the type of experience described in the “perfect sale.” The CEO naturally wants to know how to scale “the perfect sale.”
You have a company competing for advertising buys daily, weekly all over the market, country, maybe the world. The top five tips listed at the beginning are the foundation of the most productive sales organizations, including advertising sales of both traditional and new media companies. In a series of five blogs following this one, we will dig deeper into each listed tip so you can get a closer look at the power of each component.
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