Do You Know When You Are Blog Feature
Molly D Protosow

By: Molly D Protosow on November 6th, 2013

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Do You Know When You Are "Selling Wrong?"

Digital Media Landscape | selling right | advertiser goals

A key sales consideration to think about when a deal is pending is to assess: what is needed to land the deal, satisfy the customer, and then get the renewal? Or, should we pass given all the works that’s needed to make this deal a success? Just because you have the signed agreement doesn’t really mean that you’ve “sold it right.” In fact, “selling wrong” is the penalty for winning a campaign you can’t properly service.Selling_Wrong

There are 3 questions that we need to ask at the beginning of every sale in order to drive the “right” kind of digital sale:

  • Who are you trying to reach?
  • What are you trying to accomplish?
  • How will you measure success?

What happens when we ask these questions? We have the ability to guide the conversation down the right path in order to uncover the information we really need and want to know. However, we must be prepared to address any questions or concerns as well as explain how we are different from the competition.

Who are you trying to reach?

Think about:

  • Does our audience match the advertiser’s target?
  • Are we prepared to describe our audience in the right way that will work for the buyers?
  • Can we paint a picture using 1st and 3rd party data to show how our audience, or a targeted version of our audience, can meet the advertiser’s needs? 
  • Apart from scale (visitors, uniques, and reach by country) how do we compare to the competition (both peer and non-peer)? Are we bigger or smaller? 
  • Do we have an unduplicated reach?
  • If we sell a 360° campaign do we have unduplicated reach across our own platforms? 
  • Does our audience over-index for desired buying traits?

Whether you are working with the advertiser directly or with the agency – they will have their own requirements and preferences. The trick to “selling right” is getting to the bottom of the answers to all of these questions.

What are you trying to accomplish?

Now, if we’ve “sold wrong” one way to truly find out what the advertiser is trying to accomplish is to wait until the campaign launches and the customer is calling to “pause” the campaign because it is not working. When you ask “what’s not working” then you will get the details you wish you had from the beginning. Let’s look at it this way: The advertiser has a metric cost-per-acquisition (CPA) goal, for example, “we want 100 ‘likes’ on Facebook at $10 each.” If their benchmark is a very aggressive performance goal then we would have wanted to know that upfront. If we would have known, we could have asked how realistic this goal is and ask if they’ve ever reached this goal before. If they haven’t reached it, then we would want to ask them “why this goal” and “is it a deal killer if we don’t reach it?”

If we went even further and gave the matter a little bit more thought, we might have asked: “why are you only willing to pay $10 per like?” If the advertiser can convert likes into a community that can be remarketed to, arguably the value is greater than $10. What is the lifetime value of being able to communicate with interested consumers on owned media where the next communication doesn’t cost the advertiser anything?

How will you measure success?

First, we need to find out what benchmarks they will be using. The most common, but least helpful to us, is click-through-rate (CTR). Other than paid search and cost-per-click (CPC) campaigns on a network, why are we still so pre-occupied with clicks? Does the click prove an ad worked? One variation of this answer is: “we are not only interested in clicks, we are looking post-click too.” But, post-click is still focused on clicks. Post-view makes sense. Comparing the conversion rate of clicks produced by each media partner makes sense. We must consider the client’s answer before moving ahead with the campaign because the answer to how they will measure success and their willingness to work with us to determine what the right benchmarks are for their organization will make all the difference in success vs. failure.

To avoid “selling wrong” remember to ask these 3 questions and take the time to understand each answer. Knowing and understanding the answers to these questions will help you hit a homerun with this client because you’ve “sold it right.”

What strategies do you use to make sure that you’re “selling right?”

 

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About Molly D Protosow

Molly Protosow is the COO and Training Strategist for DMTraining. She manages the day-to-day business and training operations while helping research and develop new training programs as well as refreshing signature programs to reflect the newest sales trends, technology, and best practices. Molly utilizes her wide-range of skills to create sales and marketing assets focused on delivering value to DMT’s clients. Molly has a passion for learning and leveraging new knowledge and experiences. Outside of DMTraining, Molly is a hard core Pittsburgh sports fan, enjoys staying active by running and golfing, and unwinds by reading and playing the piano.

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