Tag Archives: Advertising and Marketing

April 30, 2015 · 12:58 pm

Selling Without Supervison

Sometimes I wonder the hell managers are thinking.  Did I say that out loud?  Well, it’s true, and when I read survey results such as those I’m going to share with you, my wonderment moves towards serious concern.  Today’s bit of business insanity is about salespeople.  I love salespeople, particularly since I spent many years being one.  One thing in which we prided ourselves was knowing the product.  It wasn’t just knowing the ratings history (we sold TV) or the nuances of the talent and event coverage.  We also knew the competitive landscape and could discuss it in detail.  Most importantly, we were grilled on it by managers and went over it in sales meetings.  At times there were even external sales training sessions to reinforce our listening and presentation skills and to help us better understand our individual selling styles. I still have some of those materials since that’s the sort of stuff that doesn’t get supplanted by new technology!

That’s a roundabout way of preparing you for the survey results.  I’ll let the press release speak for itself:

Corporate Visions, Inc… today announced the results of a sales messaging survey that polled more than 500 business-to-business (B2B) marketers and salespeople from around the globe. The results revealed 85 percent of companies agree their sales teams’ ability to articulate value messages is one of the most critical factors in closing deals, yet only about 41 percent of companies ask their salespeople to perform stand-and-deliver or role-play practice of their messages. In fact, an alarming 34 percent of respondents indicate no one is responsible for coaching and certifying that salespeople are proficient in delivering their company’s value messages at all.

I wonder if as media is moving more towards a programmatic future, an emphasis on sales competency has gone out the window.  That’s ridiculous.  Maybe the nature of sales will change and what’s being sold isn’t the medium but the platform. I can’t believe, however, that the educated, informed salesperson won’t continue to have an edge over the person who stands before a potential customer just flapping their lips and saying nothing.

Can you imagine a manufacturing company where no one is responsible for product quality?  Why should a third of sales organizations be permitted to shrug their shoulders about that issue and let salespeople say whatever they choose without supervision?  Putting aside the potential legal risks, we only get so many chances with buyers.  Superior selling organizations make sure their people understand the product, know the research (not just the talking points) and deliver it clearly every time.

Do you share my wonderment at companies that do otherwise?

1 Comment

Filed under Consulting, Huh?

Tagged as , , , ,

April 15, 2015 · 9:22 am

What Goes Up

One thing on which those of us in media could always count was the constant gradual increase of prices.  Oh sure, unit rates might drop as audiences came and went, but the underlying metric – the cost per thousand views (CPM) of a target audience – would almost always increase except in times of exceptional economic downturn.   When pricing the CPM of an in-demand target such as young adults, the increases could be pretty substantial. 

That truism may no longer hold.  Witness the start of this piece from the Media Daily News:

In what could be the first material sign that even network prime-time TV is not immune from the physical laws of a rapidly expanding media universe, the average cost of broadcast prime-time inventory has eroded for the first time since the recession. While the rollback is small — the average prime-time cost-per-thousand (CPM) of buying adults 18-49 on the broadcast networks fell 2.4% to $43.06 in 2014 — the fact that it declined at all during a non-recessionary period may signal that even the most premium advertising inventory has hit the wall on Madison Avenue.

It’s all the stuff you read about in economics class coming to pass, I guess.  Inventory is no longer a scarce commodity although one could argue that if we’re still approaching every impression as equal we haven’t learned much.  Cross-platform content may be triggering cross-platform buying, and the lower CPM’s from those newer platforms might just be a drag on the older ones.  The reality is that we’re moving from buying demographics to buying behaviors and so many of the old measures just aren’t applicable.  Men 25-54 can’t really be aligned with “people who visited a car dealer website in the last week” even though both can be purchased.  That said, the trend lines for all the CPM’s are headed downward which can’t be a good thing from any ad-supported business model.

I guess if you’re a buyer you don’t mind so much.  The problem is that over time much of the high quality bait (read that as content) for the audiences you seek may wither away, lacking adequate financial support from the inventory it generates.  The audiences will go elsewhere, of course, but maybe not to something that’s ad-friendly (or ad-supported).  Penny-wise and pound-foolish?

Leave a comment

Filed under Thinking Aloud

Tagged as , , ,

April 9, 2015 · 11:29 am

Signal To Noise

One term you might have seen when you’re looking at stereo systems is Signal To Noise Ratio. It’s exactly what you’d think – the relationship between the desired signal and whatever background noise is present. I like what Wikipedia has to say about a variation on the theme: 

Signal-to-noise ratio is sometimes used informally to refer to the ratio of useful information to false or irrelevant data in a conversation or exchange. For example, in online discussion forums and other online communities, off-topic posts and spam are regarded as “noise” that interferes with the “signal” of appropriate discussion.

Part of what we do as marketers and business people generally is to gather information. We listen (at least I hope you do) to all of the sources of data, especially social media. In theory this allows us to gain insight into the concerns of our customers, the opinions of our brand, and the actions of our competition. However, as it turns out, these social signals have a huge signal to noise ratio, at least when it comes to brands.

The folks at Networked Insights did a study for Fast Company.  You can read the results here but the fact that blew me away is that in some cases as much as 95% of the social buzz on Twitter about a brand was spam.  They defined spam as tweets from fake accounts, social bots, coupon offers, the brands themselves or celebrity endorsers – basically anything that isn’t a true consumer writing.  The categories most weighed down by spam are those in which consumers make a lot of purchases, such as shopping, finance and tech. Significantly less spam occurs in categories such as religion, sports and science.

Most importantly, the nature of the conversation changes dramatically when the signal to noise ratio improves as the spam is removed.  More granular and nuanced topics emerge from the background noise (spam) and you get a better sense of what really is important to consumers along with how they’re feeling.

It’s critical to listen.  It’s just as critical to do whatever you can to improve the signal to noise ratio so that you’re gaining valuable insights and not just more data.  That’s true whether it’s social, analytics (is your data filtering out bots, your own employees, etc.?) or any measure you use to make important business decisions.  Got it?

Leave a comment

Filed under Consulting, digital media, Helpful Hints

Tagged as , , , , ,