The Center for Sales Strategy Blog

In the past media sales organizations employed a tried and true approach to solving dips in revenue. Here’s a summary of the approach: 

When revenue is down, develop a product, service, or tactic, and sell more!

Unfortunately, these days this approach is more tired and untrue than tried and true.

Selling more is not the solution to the current challenges faced by media organizations because it’s a new day, and it is not filled with rainbows and unicorns. The declines faced by media sales organizations today are consistent enough to be called the new reality!

• Identify
• Select
• Discover
• Advise
• Close

… just to hear "NO!"

What Happens When a Client or Prospect says NO? What’s Next?

Selling a new target account is not an easy task. Many things have to fall in place—here’s a list of some of the obstacles:

• Selecting a quality prospect.
• Developing the trust of the prospect.
• Getting an appointment.
• Conducting a needs analysis that leads to an opportunity (and cash).
• Developing a solution robust enough to get results, yet not so large it scares away the prospect.
• Overcoming objections.
• Closing the deal! 

Getting a renewal from a new customer starts with getting results on the initial campaign, and using a campaign launch brief will set you up to increase your renewals before your clients’ campaigns even kick off.

Here are three questions for sales managers and sellers:

1. Who has time to waste with prospects that don’t have the cash to purchase the kind of solutions you sell?
2. Who has time to waste trying to get an appointment with a prospect that is impossible to gain access to?
3. Who has time to waste with prospects that have a consumer base beyond the scope of your products?

Most sellers are time-starved with no time to waste… especially when it comes to developing new customers. Investing time selecting quality, new business, target prospects makes all the sense in the world because some prospects are better than others, and qualifying them will help save time in the long run.

“Wow, this is the best campaign recap I’ve ever received!”

As a seller, have you ever heard this from a customer? The odds of getting this type of feedback are low. Don’t feel bad because most campaign recaps are mediocre at best. Most are a bunch of data that do not tell a story. Most are forgettable at best.

Culture first… all the other stuff after that! 

“Until I came to IBM, I probably would have told you that culture was just one among several important elements in any organization’s makeup and success – along with vision, strategy, marketing, financials, and the like… I came to see, in my time at IBM, that culture isn’t just one aspect of the game, it is the game. In the end, an organization is nothing more than the collective capacity of its people to create value.”                             - Louis V. Gerstner, JR – former CEO of IBM 

Most organizations dealing with performance issues miss this point. Traditional logic dictates performance improvement is tied to any or all of these factors:

• Product
• People
• Process

Don’t get me wrong, these things are important, but they are not as important as culture. 

Netflix claims over 45 million people have watched the movie Bird Box! Wow, 45 million people!

This post-apocalyptic thriller follows the story of a woman who must find a way to guide herself and her children to safety despite the potential threat from an unseen adversary. The story is partially told via flashbacks and takes place during three time periods.

Much has been written and said about the true meaning of Bird Box. Here are some theories—it’s all about:

• The negative impact of social media.
• The inability of people to see racism.
• The careless way some people deal with mental health issues.
• Demons wreaking havoc and driving people to harm themselves.

All these theories are pretty deep, but they miss the real meaning behind the movie. You see, Bird Box is all about sales! 

Talking about price with a new business prospect can be tricky. If you do it too soon, you might scare away a prospect. If you wait too long, the sticker shock might blow your proposal out of the water because it exceeds reality. 

Here’s a list of recommendations and things to consider about the topic of price along with three effective ways to prompt the conversation (including some easy to use ROI formulas).

January is history, and some sellers are already singing the blues because their year is off to a cold start. That’s the bad news… here’s the good news; it is not too late to make some changes to accelerate revenue and improve sales performance.

Here’s a list of five things to get 2019 back on track and heat up sales revenue!

They don’t know you.
They don’t trust you.
They won’t respond to your emails.
They won’t engage in a conversation with you.
They won’t meet with you!

These are some of the challenges we face from new business prospects when it is early in the sales process. Each is a hurdle we have to overcome to connect and move the sales process to the next step. When you boil it down, the problem is linked to a lack of trust and value. Simply put, you are not valued or trusted in the eyes of new business prospects.

Ouch! How can this be when you have some much going for you?