The Drift

The Drift

Better than the Market.

Perhaps you’re freshly back from Cannes or already have a half dozen industry conferences behind you this year. In those environments you’re trying to make the market better for your sales team: Frictionless buying, data standards, uniform measurement and making sure your offerings fit in with the most recent agency/holding company data/buying mousetraps. Over time, if you’re successful, demand will improve: the market will get better, and budgets will grow.

But there remains an unanswered question: how will your team be better than the market?

In the dozens of sales team workshops and scores of manager coaching calls I’ve done this year, I consistently hear they cut the budget, they’re only buying lower funnel, and they’re not buying our category right now. I’ve heard economic trends, oil prices and even crop yield as justifications for missing numbers. Seller energy is spent on lobbying for new accounts or smaller numbers, because the market just won’t allow them to sell what’s expected.

Completely unreasonable goals and unreasonable management are, of course not OK. But questioning the premise above is quite reasonable. Selling is about the strategies, efforts and execution to be better than the rest of the market.

Some ideas:

6-6-12: Every seller should have a strong six-week agenda for competing for already-budgeted campaigns. But she should also spend time every day on her six-month agenda: how she’ll proactively drive unique demand for your products and services. And some time every week on the structural and long-range stuff that will play out over 12 months with key accounts.

Diversification: If you only ever talk to investment and media – on the agency or client side – you’ll only ever discuss price/value and features. Brand, strategy, planning, centers-of-excellence, shopper marketing, regional and local spending… these are the seedbeds for incremental demand, ideation and budgets.

Depth: Don’t go to the people noted above with the same case you bring to the investment team. Learn something about the customer’s calendar and what geography they need to support. What are they doing in local broadcast? What new products or line extensions are they launching? Who is their chief competitor? If your only expertise and knowledge are about the ad sales business, you are a sitting duck.

Diagnosis: Always have a solvable customer problem at the top of every customer conversation, every meeting, every time. In our foundational sales training program, Leading with Needs, we call this the diagnosis, and it challenges us to make it about them, not just the stuff we have to sell.

The next time a seller says They’re not buying us or The budget parameters have changed, I hope you’ll ask, So what’s your plan? Where else do you plan to look? Who else can we approach on the business? Or What else might you try?

If you’re collectively unsure where to start, I know a group that can be of help.


More Posts

Show Me the Values!

"If you act in support of the values that really matter to our business, we want you to take risks in order to delight and care for our customers." Wow. Such a simple concept really. But how many of us put such a thing into practice with our own sales and support people. We'll spend days each month focusing on yield and sell-through and effective CPM and did we charge enough? or did we charge too much? But when is the last time we had a conversation with our front line sales and service people and deputized them to embody our values with their customers?


Beware the Ad-Industrial Complex.

I've been accused in the past of speaking and writing almost entirely in metaphor, and I'm afraid I'd have to plead guilty. They're just so darned handy in making sense of things. But let me warn that…


False Choices.

This week's Drift was prompted by Andy Atherton's recent post on the Brand.net blog ("An Inconvenient Truth") in which he explores the polarity that remains between "brand campaigns" and "audience buying."…


Knock Again.

As digital and integrated media sellers break free of the suffocating transactional market they've been enabling for the past decade (a market that will be fully automated), their real sales skills will…


January 3rd Belongs to You.

As 2008 wound to a close, I posted a Drift column called "January 2nd" in which I challenged sellers to come out of the gates fast and smart in 2009. Looking back at that post, it's still an evergreen…


Your Circle of Control.

As I talk to digital sellers about their hopes and wishes for the coming year, one theme continually emerges: Control. Digital sellers worry a lot about a myriad of players, factors, decisions and technological forces over which they have absolutely no control. They fill out blind RFPs that they may or may not hear back on; they read in the trades about how trading desks and demand platforms will automate them out of their jobs; they wonder whether Google or Facebook be making a decision today that marginalizes their sales strategy tomorrow. Enough.


This Enlightened Age.

I write this post after spending two days at the iMedia Agency Summit in Phoenix and - while I could be imagining things - I can't help but feel the gathering force of a powerful new idea forming. Time…


A Pause in the Targeting Arms Race

At last May's iMedia Agency Summit in Austin, I offered up a dozen "Dead Internet Ideas," long-held beliefs and practices that - if left unquestioned and unchanged - would stifle the further intellectual…


2011 Just Called...

Here's a helpful rule: We don't get to change the strategy unless we're really clear on what it is that's causing us to change the strategy. Don't just react to the noise around you. Malcolm X said it best: "If you don't stand for something you'll fall for anything."


Thanks...

OK, so a Thanksgiving week blog post giving thanks may seem a little predictable. But at a time when so little in our business world is foreseeable, maybe that's a good thing. On with it! As 2010 winds…


ROV: Return of Value

Return of Value is the sum total of all the ways in which you reward your customers for doing business with you. It's representative of the ongoing commitment to truly making a difference in the customer's business, and a proxy for determination, hard work, service, attention to detail, generosity and value creation. There are probably dozens (if not hundreds) of ways in which sellers can return value to their clients every day.


Targeting: Finding the Guardrails

At last week's ad:tech conference in New York, I sat in on a fascinating and articulate discussion of networks, exchanges, DSPs and targeting. While this rather sensible and illuminating conversation was…