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Integrated Sales
Selling marketing solutions instead of media products can increase your revenue, deepen your relationship with exhibitors, and help your customers reach their marketing and sales goals.
By Cathy Chatfield-Taylor
Media companies that sell across the boundaries of print, online and face-to-face do more business. Take note:
• CMP Media’s Software Development Media Group is dialoging with 20–30 percent more companies.
• Red 7 Media is generating three times more revenue from a major account.
• Diversified Business Communications is selling 75 percent more auxiliary items for one show.
• Cygnus Expositions is wielding more clout in a fast-growing market.
• Advanstar Communications is reporting double-digit earnings growth.
By offering discounted product packages to help customers meet their marketing goals, media companies cultivate relationships that yield higher sales volumes and more net revenue in the long term. Whether you work for a media company or an association, all it takes is a trusted brand, a loyal audience, a customer base and multiple channels to connect sellers to buyers throughout the purchasing cycle.
“We’ve found benefits from servicing customers better by fully representing the buying process in the market,” says Will Wise, Associate Publisher of Dr. Dobb’s Journal and C/C++ Users Journal, part of CMP’s Software Development Media Group ( www.cmp.com ), which produces two events, SD WEST and SD BEST PRACTICES. “We don’t lead with the media type. Instead, we lead with the audience opportunity and the goals of the client, then match them with a plan.”
Integration defined
To an event producer, integrated selling may mean selling pre-show, on-site and post-show opportunities. To a publisher, it may mean selling across geographic territories or product categories. Media companies define it as selling across media to deliver marketing solutions.
“Doing integrated selling provides your clients with marketing synergy,” says sales guru Helen Berman, President of Helen Berman Corp. ( www.helenberman.com ), Pacific Palisades, CA, and author of the forthcoming book, Beyond the Page, Beyond the Banner: Selling Integrated Media. “When you create programs with elements that have intrinsic value and also affect the other tools you’re using, the sum of the parts is greater than the whole.”
This kind of selling is client-centric, not product-centric.
“They may begin with the Web site, magazine, show or special event, but once I get them to see they can do something with us that works, then I can make proposals that are programs, not just one-shots,” Berman says. “I’m acting as a full marketing partner now.”
Excerpt from "Integrated Sales," EXPO, November/December 2005. Copyright 2005 EXPO Magazine, Overland Park, Kan. |
