Tuesday, May 23, 2006
Salespeople and Multi-Platform Media Sales
Paul Conley asked some questions in the comments section of my recent post on media buyer Donna Campanella's keynote address at the min Sales Executive of the Year awards breakfast.
He notes:
As you know, I've already lost patience with editors that haven't embraced new media. But I haven't given much thought to sales people who can't function in the new world.
Should publishers dump them? Train them? Is there a place that offers good training in new media for sales staff? [S]ome kind of new-media sales bootcamp?
Paul, I think there's a problem that needs to be addressed before we look at sales training.
We need to start at the structural level. It's key that b2b media management begins to understand what customers are looking for. Buyers like Donna want multi-platform proposals. They don't want four different proposals from the same media company--one involving advertising, one pitching trade shows, another hawking banner ads and a final proposal offering customized media and sponsorship opportunities.
But most b2b media companies split their sales functions up by media (advertising, trade shows, online), under the (probably true) theory that salespeople do better when focused on hitting a single media budget than when trying to sell multiple products at the same time. Some of this is driven by the buyers themselves--we often sell print to a different person than we sell a trade show booth. But this is also an indication that we may be doing our active selling at too low a level--there's usually always a marketing executive at the client who has all media under his or her control. And that's the executive who should see multi-media proposals.
There's a structural way to address this, and some companies in my experience do a good job of it--they assign a team leader (usually a publisher) to handle accounts who want and need multi-platform buys. That person coordinates the activities of individual sales people from different media, and develops and shepherds a master proposal. Behind the scenes commission splits among the relevant salespeople are common.
But many b2b media companies still don't do this, and it's not rare to find companies where the trade show and advertising folks would much rather do business with anyone other than each other, because the internal competition for client dollars is so fierce. And that's going to be a growing problem in our multi-platform present.
If we as b2b media companies structure ourselves so that clients have to make a yes-no-maybe choice among our various media platforms, we simply feed the notion that new media is somehow an alternative to print, rather than a natural and important part of a complete media buy. And, to put it another way, we feed the notion that print is dying because online is thriving.
The account team management approach is one solution (as are split/shared/enhanced commission agreements among salespeople).
But ultimately, we're going to have to give our individual salespeople the ability and skills to sell all of our media simultaneously to the same client.
Comments
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He notes:
As you know, I've already lost patience with editors that haven't embraced new media. But I haven't given much thought to sales people who can't function in the new world.
Should publishers dump them? Train them? Is there a place that offers good training in new media for sales staff? [S]ome kind of new-media sales bootcamp?
Paul, I think there's a problem that needs to be addressed before we look at sales training.
We need to start at the structural level. It's key that b2b media management begins to understand what customers are looking for. Buyers like Donna want multi-platform proposals. They don't want four different proposals from the same media company--one involving advertising, one pitching trade shows, another hawking banner ads and a final proposal offering customized media and sponsorship opportunities.
But most b2b media companies split their sales functions up by media (advertising, trade shows, online), under the (probably true) theory that salespeople do better when focused on hitting a single media budget than when trying to sell multiple products at the same time. Some of this is driven by the buyers themselves--we often sell print to a different person than we sell a trade show booth. But this is also an indication that we may be doing our active selling at too low a level--there's usually always a marketing executive at the client who has all media under his or her control. And that's the executive who should see multi-media proposals.
There's a structural way to address this, and some companies in my experience do a good job of it--they assign a team leader (usually a publisher) to handle accounts who want and need multi-platform buys. That person coordinates the activities of individual sales people from different media, and develops and shepherds a master proposal. Behind the scenes commission splits among the relevant salespeople are common.
But many b2b media companies still don't do this, and it's not rare to find companies where the trade show and advertising folks would much rather do business with anyone other than each other, because the internal competition for client dollars is so fierce. And that's going to be a growing problem in our multi-platform present.
If we as b2b media companies structure ourselves so that clients have to make a yes-no-maybe choice among our various media platforms, we simply feed the notion that new media is somehow an alternative to print, rather than a natural and important part of a complete media buy. And, to put it another way, we feed the notion that print is dying because online is thriving.
The account team management approach is one solution (as are split/shared/enhanced commission agreements among salespeople).
But ultimately, we're going to have to give our individual salespeople the ability and skills to sell all of our media simultaneously to the same client.
