An ASTECH InterMedia Reference Article
Proposals and Execution
by Jim Hart
Editor's note: This is the third in a series of three articles covering the most important success factors when selling targeted delivery capabilities. In this article, Jim discusses the importance of focusing on what you can sell.
It's not what you can do, it's what you can sell. If the reps do not have the ability to quickly and accurately present, sell and order integrated solutions then nothing else will matter much.
One of the fears some papers have concerning targeted delivery is that current customers will take advantage of these new offerings to spend less with the paper. We offer two answers to this concern:
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By integrating all of your delivery capabilities into the presentation, you are maximizing the likelihood that you will be able to recapture any revenue lost from one delivery method by being able to complement it with another. Think about this for a second — the advertiser is spending money with you because they believe your product is helping them. They will only reduce their buy with you to the extent that it doesn't reduce their overall profitability. If the net effect of these new capabilities results in a considerable reduction in an advertiser's spending with you, then you were either very inefficiently serving them before or they are making a mistake now and should reinstate some delivery to get back to where they need to be. |
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The ability to deliver more finite geographies and/or demographic targets allows the newspaper to pursue scores of advertisers that could not previously use or afford the larger delivery areas. Pursued aggressively, this should provide an upside that more than makes up for any reductions from current customers. |
The key success factors in presenting and selling targeted delivery capabilities include; volume, accuracy, speed, efficiency, aesthetics, and integration.
Accuracy
Without accuracy, nothing else matters. Those of us who have been directly involved with preprint sales over the years know how hard it can be to get accurate and timely distribution numbers at the zip code level. If you ask marketing, circulation and production, it's not uncommon to get three different numbers.
When you extend this to newspaper or postal carrier routes or household counts for selective inserting or solo mail, the difficulty in this equation is multiplied one hundred fold. Zip code boundaries very rarely change and virtually never split in half. Most data sources also can be tied back to the zip code level very easily. Newspaper and postal carrier route boundaries change constantly, often splitting in half to create a new route. The challenges of accurately determining which carrier routes are selected for an order is not only tedious; the results have a shelf life equal to an open jar of mayonnaise. Selecting carrier routes based on the density of desired demographic variables further compounds all of these challenges.
Making accurate counts for all levels of delivery readily available and current will be critical to your success.
Volume, efficiency and speed
These go hand-in-hand. The only way you can do something slowly, and still do high volume, is to have a whole bunch of people involved. This puts considerable additional expenses in the mix.
Recently, we surveyed several papers that currently offer some level of sub-zip delivery. We asked how long it took for a rep to get a distribution count for an account based on a targeted geography and maybe one or two demographic variables. The average answer was four business days. When carrier routes were involved, the number was even higher. An analyst that earns a salary close to what you probably pay an average sales rep typically determines these counts. It doesn't actually take the analyst four-plus business days to do this — it's a byproduct of the backlog of work. Keep in mind that, due to the ever-changing carrier route boundaries and subscriber status, this distribution count and list of carrier routes must be revised virtually every time the account runs. If the rep wants to place an identical order a month from now, they have to request the count again.
Two things happen when it takes over a week to produce a meaningful presentation; only the largest accounts are offered a full-fledged presentation and/or the reps will not be eager to do this level of presentation very often. Because of this, the opportunity to use the new delivery capabilities to penetrate the advertiser market more deeply is unlikely to be realized.
If this process is automated, and it takes a rep a matter of minutes to prepare a powerful presentation, there is no limit to the number of advertisers that can be presented the full scope of these new delivery and targeting capabilities. If the automation extends to the ability to electronically place the order, without having to output the details and re-input them into the order entry system, you will not only save time, errors will be reduced tremendously. And you won't need to continue to add more bodies in order to grow revenues.
Aesthetics
A long time ago, someone said, "The one with the best maps wins." While a map will never be any better than the data used to create it, the importance of a powerful visual impact should never be underestimated. The ability to visually represent the selected carrier routes and/or homes will greatly enhance the selling process.
Color-coding or shading zip codes is relatively easy and readily available. Mapping carrier routes, both newspaper and postal, as well as plotting household level points for selective insertion and solo mail is another matter. I hate to sound like a broken record, but the constantly changing nature of carrier routes makes the standard method of having a cartographer draw a mapping layer of carrier routes totally impractical. By the time the map is completed, it will be out of date. Plotting household level selects requires that the map is created using a household level database, as opposed to a table containing summary counts at the zip code level.
The bottom line is that simple counts are not going to visually display the geography covered by the selected carrier routes.
Integration
The ability to integrate all of your delivery capabilities in a presentation is central to solution or customer-centric selling. Integrating the available delivery methods creates a unique product that can only be produced by the newspaper itself; a perfectly designed mix of the cost efficiency of ROP or in-paper inserts, complemented by shared mail and/or solo mail.
It's likely that you already have some kind of tools to help produce zip code level presentations. If the ability to present the new capabilities is developed on a separate path, it will be very difficult, if not impossible, to combine the results or output from the different systems to create an integrated proposal. When it is done, it will be a highly manual process, with a long turnaround time and heavy personnel involvement. None of which is conducive to the two main revenue opportunities associated with targeted delivery — serving more of an existing advertisers needs while also serving the needs of more advertisers.
This article was written exclusively for ASTECH InterMedia's web site. Jim Hart is vice president of ASTECH InterMedia. For help in setting compensation and sales goals, he can be reached at 623.875.3000.
© 2005 ASTECH InterMedia, Inc.
