Q: How can sales teams make better use of data to improve performance?
A: Sales teams need to look at how data is relevant to the sales cycle as a whole.
Starting with prospects – the most obvious area is identifying lapsed accounts; can they be reactivated? They are low hanging fruit given they are previous customers, understand your offering and have engaged.
Qualifying new leads is another area where the tooling is growing fast, underpinned by AI and the expansion of e-government. Discovering whether the company operates in your market space is now trivial, one can match the SIC code (standard industry classification code – the vertical in which the company operates) automatically, and AI analysis can further prioritise the probability of a successful contact with a lead, ensuring you make the best possible use of your resources.
Once engaged in the sales process, a knowledge of historical price points can assist in negotiations – it sounds obvious but is often overlooked, as we all know the rate card is negotiable, but how low do we have to go? Conversely, live metrics like yield measurement and issue targets can influence the conversation.
At a managerial level, data analysis can provide insights into team performance – do individuals’ discount disciplines significantly differ; what is per sales-person conversion performance like? What are the renewal / churn signals? Is there structure to win / loss reasons?
In the broader picture, we can collate buying signals such as the number of times emails, website urls and whitepapers were opened.
Underpinning all this is shared common knowledge, with a single source of truth in terms of the clients’ communications history and a real-time point of reference that avoids colleagues stepping on each other’s toes.
Q: Where in the publishers’ sales funnel is there most room for improvement?
A: ICP fit and profiling is a key area. With additional AI tooling, your CRM can generate its own concept of your Ideal Customer Profile on a per publication or per product basis, so salespeople are targeting the best leads as a priority. Automation around proposal generation, with personalisation specific to the client, is also now routine, minimising the possibility of cut and paste type errors encountered in more traditional approaches, and ensuring the proposition is really tightly targeted.
Automated scheduling of follow ups and tracking of responses ensures that only those prospects that truly warrant a follow-up call are indeed scheduled – the days of ‘sent but forgotten’ are long past.
Capturing every interaction, every step of the way, means that pipeline performance is fully instrumented from beginning to end and can be performance tuned.
Retention on renewals – treat as ongoing relationship, not just at the end.
Q: How can publishing management better support their sales teams?
A: Here’s a non-technical, non-CRM answer that might surprise you! Stop changing the compensation plan! The classic management motivation for revising the compensation plan arises at the point, typically 2-3 months in, when the salespeople have worked out how to maximise their returns. The goalposts then move and the cycle begins again. If this sounds familiar, instead settle on a plan that is long term, rewards salespeople fairly but doesn’t empty the coffers.
The modern tools available to us allows for quick and easy assimilation of pipeline performance; that data can be used to coach (rather than batter) the sales team on a person-by-person basis.
Work with individuals to discover their strengths and weaknesses and leverage the experience of the management team to coach the best out of them based on the scientific data.
Along similar lines, there’s huge benefit from the sales director taking to the field and gathering market intelligence direct from the coalface.
Finally, invest in data first, before expanding headcount – quality leads, backed by quality automation such as automated workflows and approvals should provide a better return than doing ‘more of the same’ against your current data.
Q: How can improved efficiencies lead to increased ad revenues?
A: Use your tools to clearly differentiate between tactical and strategic accounts. Can tactical accounts be predominantly handled by automated workflows, creating more time to build long term relationships with the strategic accounts?
Workflow automation, covering everything from lead generation to prospect qualification and personalised customer communication reduces the admin whilst improving performance – meaning they’re spending their time where it matters.
We’ve seen figures suggesting that as much as 2-4% of revenue is lost to billing administration errors and goodwill credits! Automated, integrated ad sales billing, flat planning and subscriptions systems can totally eliminate this. Depending on the size of the business, the ROI for such investment can be very fast. Dynamic / real time yield management. Expectations have risen on the customer side in terms of lead response latency. A fast, meaningful response to enquiries is a pre-requisite to closing business and beating your competitors to the finish line. Delivering inbound enquiries straight to the relevant sales team or team member is quick and easy in today’s operational environment, and it ensures that the investment made in capturing those inbound enquiries isn’t money wasted.
Q: How are publishers’ commercial offerings evolving?
A: We have seen a shift from product to audience: increasingly advertisers want to speak to an audience, and the method of communication is tangential. Omni channel – print, newsletter, podcast, events, social media campaigns, and webinars are all just routes to the audience. The key to engaging with customers on this basis is two-fold: the ability to create, and manage, packages that span omni-media and then maintaining a single customer view across the touchpoints such campaigns create.
In the B2B space, quality editorial storytelling on behalf of the advertiser – across the forms we’re all familiar with such as advertorials, sponsored series, and white papers – work because it leverages both production capability and audience trust in the publication.
Some of our clients tell us that events have expanded to the point that their publications have now become loss-leaders! Event management is not for the faint hearted, but with automated workflows to cover everything from delegate ticketing, to seating plans, exhibition stand layout and all the red tape such as risk assessments necessary in today’s operational environment, it can still be managed in-house, maximising the revenue opportunity.
For larger players, first party data is a growing area, and a valuable saleable asset. Garnishing rich behavioural profiles, interest areas and audience engagement by segment used to require a technical stack that was beyond the smaller publisher. Increasingly commoditised, the gap is now closing and smaller players will be able to access the marketplace. We anticipate the growth of intermediate aggregators working with those smaller players providing consolidated volumes to rival those of the larger publishers.
Bolt-on services, such as niche jobs boards, are also gradually creeping in, especially with the reduction in cost and time to market afforded by AI-assisted software development, but it can come at significant risk for publishers if it put them in competition with their own customers.
Q: How can AI improve sales performance?
A: I think I’ve mentioned AI in pretty much every other sentence in this conversation – it’s an incredible tool that’s here to stay. A couple of areas we haven’t yet touched on though: call / meeting intelligence.
Video call transcripts can be quickly and accurately summarised, and indexed as well to make it easy to find the context of any part of the conversation. Phone transcripts can be automatically added to call records; I know many salespeople find updating call records a hateful task and doing so frees up more time for actual calls, as well as improving depth and accuracy.
Churn and renewal risk prediction is another interesting area – AI tooling should be able to identify the patterns of behaviour in end users that indicate their imminent churn; surface this to salespeople in sufficient time for them to act on it. Conversely, as I’ve already mentioned, identifying buying signals also helps focus activity with potential new clients.
Q: What’s in the pipeline from The Engine Shed?
A: We are seeing demand for lead-gen tool integration like never before – bringing it together into a single space. We’re offering self-managed integration tools that provide a zapier like experience, straight to the sales rep’s pipeline. We have a beta-grade suite of AI based tools, Pulse-Studio, aimed at supporting the editorial and creative parts of the publishing process whilst avoiding the issues associated with “AI slop”. Enhancements to our flat planning tools now extend to the provision of print-ready copy layout / collation / creation, together with associated asset management. We’ve certainly been busy, and always welcome a chat with any publisher that faces specific management software challenges – we can provide honest and impartial advice, and we may even be able to help!
About us
The Engine Shed provides comprehensive CRM and business management software specifically designed to meet the needs of publishers. As the first software-as-a-service provider in this industry in the UK, we understand the challenges of delivering remote-working capable systems. We know that no two publishers are the same.
At the heart of our systems is a single customer view that covers advertisers, digital and print members, subscribers, shoppers, layout, invoicing and e-commerce. Financial transactions are streamlined through the use of online payments and automated direct debit processing.
Our reporting capabilities offer management dashboards summarising key indicators by business area. Comprehensive APIs allow for integration with pre-existing systems.
We take care of membership, subscriptions ad sales, campaign management, production workflow, flatplanning, e-commerce, invoicing, 3rd party integrations and more.
Tel: 020 7183 0200
Email: patrick@theengineshed.com
