Five Ways to Increase Sales Performance with Media Monitoring

5 Ways to Increase Sales Performance with Media Monitoring How Sales Professionals Can Use Media Monitoring To Gain A Competitive Advantage & Deliver More Sales March 2007 by Steven Bracy Abstract Timely information about customers, prospects, and competitors is a powerful competitive advantage for sales professionals. Integrating media monitoring with the sales cycle improves productivity and efficiency by making it easier to find new prospects, strengthening relationships with existing prospects and customers, and allowing them to respond proactively to the actions of their competitors. Contents 1. Discover New Sales Opportunities 2. Know Your Customers and their Industry 3. Know Your Competition 4. Know What’s Being Said about You 5. Spend Time Selling, Not Searching www.CustomScoop.com This report is provided to you courtesy of CustomScoop, a leader in customizable media monitoring technology and services. For more information about how CustomScoop can help your company with media monitoring, please call us at (800) 538-6420 or visit our Web site: www.CustomScoop.com. 5 Ways to Increase Sales Performance with Media Monitoring |2 Sales Professionals Have Access to More Information than Ever Before Media monitoring technologies and services have conventionally been utilized by public relations and marketing professionals to track media coverage of their own organization. These services began as clipping services that literally clipped news coverage out of print publications and delivered large, untimely clip books to their clients. More recently, many media outlets have begun publishing their content online; monitoring services have also evolved to monitor the Internet. Along with large publications, “citizen journalists” or individuals have begun publishing information online at an rapid rate. One of the most popular mediums for individuals to publish content online is through a weblog or blog. Technorati, a blog search engine and recognized authority in the blogosphere, estimates that bloggers add new content to their blogs, or “post,” 1.6 million times per day – that’s 18 updates per second. For public relations and marketing professionals, this presents an overwhelming problem of how to monitor and maintain their organization’s brand image. For sales professionals, however, this means that there is more information available than ever before to increase sales performance. And a media monitoring tool is the solution that distills that vast supply of information into actionable intelligence, allowing sales professionals to find new prospects, strengthen relationships with existing prospects and customers, and respond proactively to the actions of their competitors. #1: Discover New Sales Opportunities For many sales professionals, one of the one of the biggest challenges remains filling the funnel with new sales opportunities. In many cases, the sales professional left to gather cold leads - through such sources as surfing the Internet or picking up the phone book - will most likely find themselves spending more time nurturing the leads they already have. This seems far more productive than trying to reach out to prospects that likely have no desire to hear from them. However, this strategy inevitably leads to peaks and valleys in sales performance, with the salesperson working the prospects they have until they are all closed – lost or won. To avoid this defeating scenario, sales professionals can leverage the power of technology and the Internet by using media monitoring to search for prospects that are looking for a service or product just like the one they are selling. The results are not displayed like a purchased list – with contact information right at your fingertips - but if used correctly, the clips delivered to the media monitoring account can translate into real sales opportunities. Sound too good to be true? Let me provide some examples. Copyright 2007, All Rights Reserved 5 Ways to Increase Sales Performance with Media Monitoring Imagine you are a developer or architect whose sales prospects include municipalities or private organizations who are planning new development or construction projects. By monitoring the news for articles about overcrowded schools you could find prospects who may be interested in your services. When you find an article, it is a great opportunity to reach out to the town or organization and let them know that financing and building a new school is more affordable than they may have originally thought. You can offer to come in and discuss the opportunity and help them build an RFP. In other words, as a sales professional, you can spend your time reaching out to people who likely have a need for what you do, rather than churning through a list of uninterested prospects. Each business is unique, and therefore the events that trigger the sale of your product or service are also distinct. However, many organizations experience sales growth when the community grows. Therefore, media monitoring can also be used to find articles about new businesses that have come to town, expansions or new hires. Likewise, a mention of company or professional receiving an award is a great opportunity to reach out to a new prospect and congratulate them. By starting the conversation with relevant and timely information about the prospect, you turn what would have been a cold call into a warm call. |3 #2: Know Your Themselves Customers Better than They Know Most sales professionals have a core group of customers that are responsible for a majority of their sales revenue. This elite group of customers are the ones that require the highest level of relationship management. How do you stay on top of their business while pursuing new sales opportunities? This is where the power of technology and the Internet – with access to near real-time information – comes into play. By using media monitoring technology to track coverage of key customers in online newspapers, blogs, wire services, etc., sales professionals will get to know their customers better. In fact, since a lot of larger organizations are so fragmented in their communication, it isn’t uncommon for an informed sales professional to congratulate a customer on a news item that they didn’t even know existed. Some sales professionals take monitoring a step further and track not only their customer’s name, but also the customer’s industry. This reinforces that the salesperson cares about the customer enough to know about current events taking place in their industry. Imagine how impressed your customers would be if you could speak with them about the latest breakthrough in their industry, regardless if it’s related to what you sell. The bottom line is that in order to strengthen the relationship with a customer and, in turn, increase sales, it is important to know as much about the customer, their products and their industry as possible. With the information delivered by a media monitoring solution, the Copyright 2007, All Rights Reserved 5 Ways to Increase Sales Performance with Media Monitoring sales professional can be informed and, as a result, make a meaningful connection with their customers. |4 #3: Know Your Competition Inside and Out Staying informed as to what your competition is doing is critical in the sales environment. Being armed with information helps you better position your product and organization against that of the competition. However, this important task often takes a backseat to other important sales activities, such as staying informed about your own products or services, your customers, and your prospects. There often aren’t enough hours in the day to say on top of everything. Utilizing a media monitoring solution cuts down on the time spent searching for information. By tracking a competitor’s company or product name you will see the press release that introduces new features in their product as soon as it hits the wire. You’ll see awards that the company has just won or new accounts that they brought on board. And throughout this communication you’ll see how your competition is positioning itself against you. Having this information in near real-time allows a sales professional to be proactive about crafting a response to the activities of their competitors – rather than having to be reactive when surprised by a question from a customer. From the customer’s perspective the salesperson appears informed and knowledgeable, and best of all, more likely to close the sale. In addition to utilizing media monitoring to track the messaging your competitors are distributing on themselves, this powerful technology can also be used to track what the public is saying about your competition. Specifically, with the advent of blogs, consumers everywhere have been given a platform to speak – often to large audiences – on topics they are passionate about. By setting up your media monitoring solution to monitor blogs for mentions of your competition and their products you can find posts from your competition’s customers. Not only is this market research – you’re reading, first-hand, the impression your competition is giving their customers – but a blogger who is unhappy with the competition’s product often translates into a highly profitable lead for you. With a growing number of people going online and describing their experience with products and services, it is more important than ever to have online media monitoring in place. #4: Know What’s Being Said about You Monitoring what is being said about your company, products and services, and personnel is absolutely essential. Whether what is being written is positive or negative, it is imperative to know what is being said online so that you can speak intelligently with your customers about your organization. While you can’t change what was written about your company, knowing what was written and by whom, allows you to be prepared to respond appropriately. Copyright 2007, All Rights Reserved 5 Ways to Increase Sales Performance with Media Monitoring |5 In some cases, you may find news about your organization that you were unaware of, a company expansion or an award, for example. You may also uncover positive feedback from a customer, vendor or reseller. In any case, passing along this type of positive coverage is extremely effective when building relationships with customers and prospects. Effective media monitoring will uncover negative coverage as well. Negative coverage can take the form of a blog post from an infuriated customer, a negative review of your product or even a post by an angry employee. The key to negating these types of coverage is to respond quickly and in an intelligent and informed fashion. If you are not responsible for this timely response, it’s still important that you monitor how the issue is resolved so that if a customer or prospect questions you about the issue you are prepared with a response that illustrates how your organization worked to rectify the situation. Whether it is good news or bad news, the reality is that once your organization has built a significant level of awareness within the market you compete, your company, products and services, and personnel are likely to receive media attention. The challenge is to be informed in a timely fashion so you can then take action, when necessary. When internal resources don’t allow for comprehensive manual monitoring, a media monitoring solution is a great way to stay constantly informed. #5: Spend Time Selling, Not Searching In a field of work where what you get out of it is often a direct result of what you put into it, most sales professionals feel there are never enough hours in the day to do everything they’d like to accomplish. This desire to accomplish more in less time is illustrated by the rapid adoption of sales force automation programs and CRM applications. As these applications are becoming the norm across competing organizations, sales professionals are seeking additional tools to improve efficiency. Many sales professionals clearly see the value of having market information at their fingertips, but struggle to find the time to manually track down the information on a regular basis. As a result of these two driving forces, sales professionals are utilizing an online media monitoring solution to do the searching for them in an automated fashion. Not only does this save valuable time in gathering the information, but most media monitoring solutions also save results in an organized fashion, allowing the salesperson to quickly and easily retrieve the information when they need it. In addition, utilizing a service that includes folders where informative news clips can be sorted for easy retrieval is a big time saver. Having the ability to save the clips to a spreadsheet for additional organization and analysis is also a plus. The spreadsheet can be uploaded to popular CRM / SFA programs like Salesforce.com or NetSuite so that a history of the news for a specific customer can be stored with their contact information. Copyright 2007, All Rights Reserved 5 Ways to Increase Sales Performance with Media Monitoring While most sales professionals would agree that additional information about their customers and prospects is extremely useful, most can’t spare the time searching for that information. Manual searching on engines such as Google or Yahoo! just isn’t a realistic option. The solution: find a media monitoring service that searches 24/7, organizes the information, and delivers it to the salesperson when they need it. |6 Utilize Media Monitoring to Close More Sales Information has proliferated our world with the advent of the internet and social media. The challenge is putting this vast amount of data to use with the hyper-competitive world of sales. By efficiently gathering and organizing this information, sales professionals can discover new sales opportunities, deepen relationships with existing customers, understand the weaknesses of competitors and proactively utilize your organization’s coverage to your advantage – whether it’s positive or negative. Without the time to collect and organize the data themselves, media monitoring is the best solution for sales professionals. Consider it a virtual research assistant who is working 24 hours a day, 7 days a week to find the information that you can use to close more sales. # # # About the Author Steve Bracy is Executive Vice President of CustomScoop, responsible for the sales, marketing and business development initiatives. Prior to CustomScoop, Steve was Vice President at Vertical Market Ventures, an early-stage investment company. Before VMV, Steve held numerous sales positions for Autodesk, Inc (NASDAQ: ADSK) and Softdesk, Inc. (NASDAQ: SDSK) including Asia Pacific Sales Manager and USA VAR Sales Manager. Steve earned his MBA at Southern New Hampshire University and his B.S. in Business Administration from the University of New Hampshire. He lives in Concord, NH with his wife and two sons. About CustomScoop CustomScoop, a leader in customizable media monitoring technology and services, delivers relevant market intelligence to its customers in public relations, marketing, sales, investor relations, and competitive intelligence. CustomScoop’s solution utilizes proprietary software and an extensive database of sources to deliver in the areas where traditional news clipping services fall short: speed, accuracy, and detailed reporting. CustomScoop is headquartered in Concord, NH. For More Information or to Try CustomScoop for Free CustomScoop offers a 2 week free trial of ClipIQ, its robust online news clipping service. Sign up to receive customized news briefings, daily. Stay informed without needing to stay glued to your desk. Take advantage of our reliable, cost-effective system that reviews online news sites around the country. We gather the latest relevant information 24 hours a day, 7 days a week and deliver it right to your desktop. http://www.customscoop.com/freetrial Copyright 2007, All Rights Reserved