Whether you’re new to selling cross-media or just want to boost your current efforts, success comes down to knowing who your sales target is, why you want to work with them, where success lies for both of you, and how you can help them achieve great results. Deploy these 10 tips into your sales approach to maximize your efforts.

1. Set a clear plan for your business

You’ve invested in your business by purchasing XMPie, but have you set a clear strategy and plan for your sales team? Setting a clear path including milestones and goals, ensures your sales force are on the same page, working together towards selling and delivering highly effective cross-media campaigns that meet your customers’ needs.

2. The right sales force to sell cross-media campaigns

I am regularly asked where a great cross-media salesperson can be found. My advice is to find a salesperson that understands solution selling. They should also have a level of resilience as the sales cycle for cross-media can take anywhere from 3 months to 12 months depending on the target customer, campaign complexity, and C level buy-in.

3. Technical understanding versus ability

An easy trap for businesses that embark on the cross-media journey is having a strong technical understanding of what XMPie can do but without the ability to execute when it counts. Not being able to deliver erodes your sales team’s confidence in your company’s abilities, which puts them in reputation protection mode. Solve this pitfall by hiring know-how into your business or train and upskill your current delivery team. Do a campaign to promote yourself first, launching your new services. This will give confidence to your total sales and delivery teams when it comes to live execution of customers work. It also becomes a strong proof statement of your abilities which can be shared and demonstrated to your target customers.

During the Journey

Most companies embark on the 1 to 1 journey with great optimism, but then hit a snag when it comes to conversations into profitable sales. Let’s cover three quick areas that can help propel sales conversions.

4. Hitting the target

Your sales team needs to ensure the customers they approach have the potential for cross-media campaigns. Not all industry sectors and not all customers have the right goods or services to bring a strong return on investment. Once they established this, your campaigns will show signs of success. Additionally, they need to ensure they gain buy-in from the right level within their target, C Level decision makers.

5. Learn to strategize

Highly successful campaigns are built on robust strategies that not only hit targets with the right message at the right time, but they also ensure individual respondents undertake desired actions. Your sales team need to build campaign strategies taking your clients desired outcomes into account, whilst leveraging these against resources to ensure success is achieved. They also need to develop strong plans, influence employees across your business and within the client’s business. After all, they can’t be the only ones responsible for strategy and inspiration.

6. It’s all in the planning

Strong project management across any cross-media campaign is paramount, as it allows you to deliver on your promise. Project management should be facilitated by your company and your sales team needs to be actively involved. Planning should cover all parties involved including your client and any other suppliers such as agencies. Document and share plans including all timelines and deliverables, as this will give every party a clear understanding of their responsibilities. It also helps alleviate time constraints put on you by other parties, mostly your clients, who commonly run late on their deliverables.

Wrapping up Delivery

On time and seamless delivery means your company is known within the cross-media market as being reliable, dependable and a partner of choice. It keeps your existing customers satisfied with your services, and leaves them wanting more. It makes you an enviable competitor within the 1 to 1 industry as well.

7. Collect assets

Ensure prior to campaign strategy, design and build that all assets are identified and are starting to be delivered to your sales team against the appropriate project timeline. Assets can be data, data dictionary, images, copyright, creative, business rules, products, services, pricing and more. Your sales team members form the basis of being a conduit for this, as it allows them to manage expectations and timelines.

8. Factor in your factors

Understanding interdependent items and their associated business rules – when items trigger, why they do and for which individuals are all critical. Your sales team needs to assist with clearly mapping which respondents will receive what image, message, offer etc., and then what they need to receive next depending on their action/reaction. This helps them build future strategy and ideas for campaign enhancements. You should never set a campaign based on sending a print piece first, then an email followed by an SMS, as this locks a campaign down, rather than it being adaptive to individual preferences and needs.

9. Measure and measure again

Ensure you measure and your sales team reports their findings to your customers during your campaigns from beginning to end. This allows proactive updates to the client, allows adjustments to campaigns on the fly and ensures their deliverables are met. This will give your customers confidence and trust with your sales team. Your sales team should be reporting on which communication method, offer, messages, images are trending with target customers and what results are being achieved.

10. Have fun!

It’s important that you ensure your sales team has fun along the way when delivering cross-media campaigns. There will be times when the campaign will be stressful and they may come under pressure from timelines, programming, planning and more. If your sales force enjoys what they do, they will be motivated, positive and have momentum to drive your 1 to 1 business forward. What’s more, this will spill into their servicing of your customers to create a more positive experience overall.

Want to know more?

You can register to receive a copy of The 1 to 1 Smart Team e-book, 9 Essential Steps to Succeed in Data Drive Persona Marketing here: https://www.omgconsulting.com.au/orlando-xug/