By Maria Arnone, Vice President Media Development

You think you’ve got it made: a captured, devoted person to sell your exhibits, sponsorships or advertising for your annual meeting or other publications. You can train and mold this person to success, right?

We often hear from clients that even though they have a captured team within their organization, the team is not meeting its goals. Reasons for this could be:

• Lack of marketing tools or outreach in addition to the actual sales efforts: Without a drumbeat of awareness in the background or a good sales toolkit for making presentations, the sales outcome can fall flat.

• Lack of assertive enough sales approach: We’re all averse to boorish salespeople, but sales efforts for top-flight meetings that don’t visit their top prospects or aren’t looking at a large enough universe don’t get the job done.

• Inferior knowledge of market and prospects: Your folks may be contacting the obvious players, but if they don’t have a sense of the market as a whole and a consistently updated competitive analysis, they will not be contacting the prospects that are next in line for your business.

• Prioritization problems: Your team may be tasked with selling too many things, or two things that are super-important and then a host of more minor campaigns. Focus and prioritization can be a stumbling block to reaching sales goals.

Times have changed. Many of our clients, who for years could expect booth reservations or publication insertion orders to come over the fax machine, now know they can’t handle their business the same way. These same teams are getting out on the road, demonstrating the value of their products in deeper and more competitive ways and calling on a wider universe.

One of the advantages clients have in working with us, or other agencies that sell for them, is that we see what works across a wide spectrum of meetings and publications. We can compare and contrast sales campaigns and results, and position new opportunities effectively. In the case of our medical meeting spectrum, many of the same product managers make decisions for a number of the meetings we represent. That means we’re talking to them all year long, versus once a year. They get to know our offerings, we get to know their objectives — and it usually means we’re considered more of a resource for information and current media strategies.

Another effect of our unique sales approach for the meeting communications is the thoroughness of the effort. You would think all sales efforts would encompass communicating with the entire exhibit list — and communicating appropriate opportunities to that list. But we have not found that to be the case. Many times, internal teams simply don’t have the time to contact everyone. Or it’s not in their DNA. For example, in the medical arena, coming from the years of pharmaceutical companies representing 90 percent of the revenue in some meetings, we have had to adjust offerings to include smaller entry points for small exhibitors. In many cases these opportunities don’t replace what has been lost through dwindling pipelines or regulations, but we are assured that each and every exhibitor gets educated on opportunities and has an invitation to participate.

In many cases, we can add a layer of sales power on top of what you already have by deploying our efforts against a selection of prospects or products that you simply don’t have time to work. And when we take over sales from other groups, rare are the instances we don’t over-deliver on either what was sold before, or the current sales goal.

What are some of your strategies to motivate your internal sales resource to success?

By Darren Sextro, Vice President, Sales

Right now, who can blame a business owner for looking at economic indicators and reacting by padlocking the marketing budget? The rollercoaster of irregularity that is the stock market. The stubbornly static national unemployment rate. The dramatic price increase of capital expenditures and non-negotiable costs of doing business. What’s a person in charge of the finances to do but retreat into a dark and quiet place, shut the door, stay as quiet as possible and hope things get better by the time she needs to venture out to eat?

While recent months have been a particular struggle for everyone in the business of connecting products and services to audiences that buy, these slash-the-marketing-budget trends make no strategic sense even though they seem to make logical sense. The role of advertising in a recession has been discussed as if it were a new concept every time the economy heads south. Twenty-five years ago, McGraw-Hill published a study showing that companies that maintained or increased their advertising during the 1981–1982 recession averaged higher sales growth in the immediate years following the recession.

Strategy: Advertising during a down economy can tip market share in your favor.

Less than a decade later, another study, conducted by Coopers & Lybrand and Business Science International, followed another recession (one that plagued 1989–’91) and reported results that also seemed counter-intuitive for someone with very real and daily worries about the idea of spending when top-line revenues are struggling. If you’re significantly slowed by the economy, marketing actions are most effective in coping with recessionary effects, the study reported. Does this make sense? Times are tough so … spend?

Strategy: Advertising when others are not can make a company appear more stable than competitors.

A look backward often can give guidance for the future. Another research firm of old, Meldrum & Fewsmith (I’m not making that name up), conducted six studies analyzing the role of marketing during post-World War II recessions. (For those who think that we’re dealing with something that is oh-so-2007-to-now, there were also major economic woes in 1949, 1954, 1958, 1961, 1970 and 1974–75. What is unique about our current economy is that the pain has dragged on for so long.) “Advertising aggressively during recessions not only increases sales, but also increases profits,” reports Meldrum & Fewsmith.

Strategy: “When times are good, you should advertise. When times are bad, you must advertise.”

That quote is frequently attributed to “one major advertiser,” so apologies to you if you coined the phrase and no one is giving you proper credit. Maybe you’re part of the Bud Light marketing team, which increased advertising during that 1989–’91 recession while other beer companies decreased spends. The reward? A 16 percent jump in Bud Light market share … And a beer toast to the oddly sensible logic of advertising in a recession.

Have you increased advertising during this recession? Why or why not? 

By Leann Sandifar, eMedia Director of Audience Development

Monitoring your open and click-through rates is fundamental to any custom email marketing program. Of equal importance is evaluating whether the layout and lineup of your email holds the attention of your readers.

You spend a lot of time and energy producing content that is relevant, useful and interesting to your recipients. You occasionally need to take a deep dive into the metrics to make sure your content is as well-received as you hope it is.

Recently, I reviewed clicks across our medical client emails. Specifically, I calculated the percentage of clicks for each content section from the top story to the bottom rectangular ad. Were readers getting through the entire eBlast or staying above the fold? In particular, I wanted to see which content sections were of the most interest for our readers.

The No. 1 story across a number of our client eBlasts wasn’t too surprising as it was the first story or near the top. But I was pleasantly surprised by what was running a close second. At the bottom of many of our eBlasts, we feature a section we affectionately refer to as the six-pack. It is a grouping of quick-click tools that take readers to a resource or location that addresses their needs.

For example, if the eBlast is previewing an event, we will provide quick links for such things as registration, hotel and travel. If the eBlast is more informational, we might provide links to membership, social networking and other resources. I found that these tools/resources outperformed the navigation that is primarily found in the header or toward the top of the email. This provides proof that our recipients are scrolling down and viewing the entire email newsletter.

So what are the takeaways from these findings? The metrics prove that readers get value from these eBlasts. From your own email habits, you know that if you receive something that isn’t valuable or of interest, you likely delete it before you even open it or simply read the top headline. Our readers not only are opening the emails, they also are scrolling through them and finding value throughout. Mission accomplished.

Not only is this great news for us in validating the content we create, it also validates the channel for advertisers. Regardless of the ad location, the advertiser can be certain that its message will be seen.

How do you keep your readers engaged with your communication messages?
 

By: Angie Barnum, Manager Media Sales

I’m about to date myself with this, but as a child, I remember laughing at these Dunkin Donuts commercials where the donut-maker would spy on his competitors by dressing in various outrageous costumes (often as a woman, which was made all the more funny as he tried unsuccessfully to cover his dark bushy mustache with his index finger). He would point and ask, “How much for this one?” Then it would pan to him the next day unenthusiastically dragging himself to the office, saying, “Time to make the doughnuts.”

As a child, the only thing important to me was how much it made me laugh. But as a sales manager, those commercials offer a valuable message about being diligent, working hard and understanding your competition. In the custom-publishing advertising world, this can sometimes be tricky to maneuver.

It’s easy to assume competitors are our peers with other custom-publishing organizations. However, we often find that when advertisers are working with limited budgets, our own advertising options such as digital, mobile and print as well as our clients’ on-site sponsorships, magazines, etc. become the biggest barrier. The question then becomes, which option(s) does the advertiser choose?

The most successful way we’ve found to overcome this obstacle is through the advertiser-education process. Consider engaging your clients early in the sales process so that all communication efforts (yours and theirs) point to the partnership and make the delineation that all the advertising opportunities offer valuable results to the advertiser. Communicate through eNewsletters, eBlasts, websites, mobile, blogs, buyers’ guide, house ads and other event- or association-related content. Also sharing the net revenue will limit the instinctive need to “land grab,” allowing both parties’ hard work to pay off equally — keeping the advertisers needs as the No. 1 priority.

Another way to drive revenue is to open up sales beyond traditional targets like membership or event exhibitor lists — and include other prospects such as industry leaders, cooperatives, lines and/or manufactured representatives — or even nonessentials such as luxury items (jewelry) or lifestyle (cars) ads. There is a lot of pressure on these individuals to drive revenue and grow market share in the current economy and, often, separating budgets are set aside for these initiatives. Co-op advertising is not a new concept, yet dollars can still be found by asking the right questions or by using one of the many “search” agencies like www.lipennysaver.com, www.targetedadcoops.com and www.acbcoop.com.

Achieving advertising sales success is all about the numbers — yes, it is a numbers game. You can’t afford to leave anything to question or chance. The more work you put into soliciting, communicating and researching — in essence, the more times you tell your story — the more you will achieve.

How do you overcome the obstacles in your way to achieve success for your clients?