Creating successful sales campaigns

FIPP Training Promoted Post: Audience behaviour and client decision-making have undergone significant change. These changes have created new challenges for media salespeople, but they also represent a huge opportunity. The strongest salespeople are adapting to this new situation by taking a very different approach.

Traditionally, media salespeople have tended to approach campaign creation by asking: “What do I want to sell?” This is the wrong question to ask because of a sales challenge that’s been around for a long time- a challenge that the current environment is accentuating.

FIPP and Flume Sales Accelerator Starts Next Week

The challenge is that clients have never been particularly interested in what we sell. Not least because, for them, everything sounds the same. In fact, according to the CEB, 86 per cent of buyers don’t see a big enough difference between what you’re selling and what your closest competitor is selling to pay a premium or to advocate for it. What they have always cared about is finding solutions to the problems that they’re facing. For media buyers, that problem is always: “What is the most effective means to take my target audience on the right journey?”

With so many products available, creating and justifying a multi-channel solution can be challenging, but helping clients understand the audience’s buying journey is still the key to sales success. Unfortunately, it’s getting harder as that journey becomes more complex and the average number of marketing touch points increases. If salespeople are to successfully articulate the value of their particular solution, they need to understand the overall audience buying journey and the role that their solution plays in it. Salespeople need an audience-centric approach to creating solutions that make it easy for the client to say “yes”.

Key to creating great campaigns is to work collaboratively with the client and work out what mix of channels and products are going to be most effective at getting the audience to where it needs to be.

‘Creating Campaigns’ is the third in FIPP’s ‘Sales Accelerator’ series of sales training workshops in association with Flume Sales Training. Click here for more information.

FIPP and Flume Sales Accelerator Starts Next Week