Promotions are an important piece of your digital business, so you need to make sure your team is primed and ready to sell them
“Without continual growth and progress, such words as improvement, achievement, and success have no meaning.”
According to recent data from Borrell Associates shared at the Second Street Promotions Summit, 42% of local media sales managers rate their sales reps’ ability to sell digital products as poor, and a full 92% believe that more digital sales training is needed for their reps.
In the constantly changing world of digital advertising, training is a key strategic asset. While new sales reps certainly need training, so do core product sales reps and sales managers. Training is an investment in your team that will empower them with new knowledge and encourage them to stay and grow with your company.
Training not only helps your company stand out from the competition by showing advertisers that you are on the cutting edge of digital advertising and promotions, but also helps you come up with new ideas to bring to the table.
This potential for innovation is especially important as promotions become an increasingly large piece of the digital revenue pie. In fact, online promotions are projected to grow to be an $80 billion industry by 2017.
As the online promotions space continues to grow, it opens up opportunities for media companies to work with new advertisers in new and exciting ways, not to mention expand existing relationships. Promotions sales training will ensure that you are prepared to make the most of these opportunities.
What IS Promotions Sales Training?
When you sell online promotions to advertisers, you will still be prospecting, pitching, and overcoming objections. However, the criteria and language you use is slightly different.
Since promotions can help advertisers achieve specific goals – like lead generation, database growth, foot traffic, customer data collection, or social media engagement – you need to have a firm understanding of what those goals are and how to talk to advertisers about the ways in which promotions can help achieve them.
Furthermore, unlike traditional media advertising, online promotions collect a large amount of data. In order to sell most effectively, you need to be in a position to understand how valuable this data is, and to communicate that value to advertisers. You also need to be able to design promotions that will collect it most effectively. An additional skill is the ability to filter out the information that is not relevant and focus only on what will make the biggest impact for the advertiser.
Finally, the follow-up meeting after a promotion is more important than ever before, due in large part to the volume of data you are able to collect and the specific results you are able to achieve. You can take advantage of the meetings to not only gauge the advertiser’s reaction to the promotion, but also to present data illustrating how you helped them achieve goals and to set yourself up for additional sales opportunities in the future.
With Promotions Training, YOU Can be the Expert
With the most up-to-date training, you can be an experienced guide who will help advertisers understand the opportunity around promotions and how they can be used to achieve their goals.
Your experience makes you good, but training can make you great.
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Julie is the Senior Customer Success Manager at Second Street and a former client in local media. Her best advice for driving the most success with your revenue and audience engagement strategy is to include promotions in every business initiative.