Too often salespersonship is equated with manipulative tactics or worse. Real sales skills are leadership skills that are simple, available to all, and that work especially well in media sales. Yes, sales is leading customers like discussed in Selling Power on leadership mindset. But it’s much more than that. After all, leadership […]
Subscriptions will be the primary driver for quality media, because relying on advertising as the primary revenue stream puts publishers in competition with companies that don’t pay anything for content.
The solution of preventing advertising fraud by creating an approved list for advertisers to limit their advertising to will only solve 1/2 of the problem. Advertising on known sites is a start. But the traffic to those known sites must be verified to be real. This is where auditing comes in.
Sales people lose sales when they are not trusted and respected, and they can’t communicate effectively with senior executives who have the final say. That is why tops ad-sales people need to bring value to the call; not about their media, but new information or new perspective about the prospects market.
Challenger Selling is simply the re-booted and re-packaged Structured Selling process that made Ziff-Davis famous. By presenting a “challenge” that the customer is facing, like losing market share or missing sales, providing important information about that challenge, the sales person can better capture the attention of any prospect to engage them in a sales conversation that leads from the challenge — read their needs — to the solution being sold.
You might think that a super-star like Heismen Trophy winner Johnny Rodgers would just go to a meeting and clients would through money at him. But as the group discussed how to break new accounts and build the relationships and trust that leads to business, Johnny pointed out that in his experience it takes 7 “touches” to build a relationship to be ready to do business.
Your opening lines, whether your prospect answers the phone or you leave a phone message, must be smartly specific to that prospect and that business. When you can cite a specific data point about that business, the prospects ears immediately perk up. It’s a data-driven version of a warm call.
In our world of ad-sales, the important stuff is how well you understand your customers and how you can help them compete better by delivering perspective and solutions that will drive their sales.
There used to be “a thing” called “over-exposure” that was thought to apply to some celebrities, particularly in relation to product endorsements. It made sense that if a particular person was seen to be endorsing too many products it would tend to put pressure on their perceived veracity, implying that their opinion could be bought, and perhaps bought cheaply.
Lately — okay for decades — digital advertising’s spread from supporting content to supporting every sort of amusement, game, software application and yes, keeping us in touch with friends, and their friends, and their friends, has so multiplied digital advertising that it, too, is over-exposed.
The question about ROI that should be applied to sales training investments is this: What percentage increase in sales productivity can be reasonably anticipated from sales training? I encourage my clients to think of a minimum of 10% increase in sales.
