The Binary Future of Digital Ad Sales
At Monday’s iMedia Brand Summit in Coronado I had the opportunity to speak with a group of 150 sales leaders on a topic of pretty serious urgency: the sales talent crisis….with a twist. The position I shared with the group was that we don’t have a sales talent crisis: We have two of them.
Harkening back five years, the profile of the successful digital seller was pretty clear: The job was squarely focused on selling the placement of ads on sites (or groups of sites) to digital media planning groups through the successful management of the RFP process. If you sold for a site, you might stress sponsorship or specific placement; a network rep might heavy up her offering based on reach or optimization. But everyone was pretty much casting their lines in the same RFP pool.
To say things have changed would be a significant understatement. In the intervening years, two major forces have disrupted the picture.
The Movement of Audience Buying: The agency holding companies have decided that automated audience buying is the key to digital profitability. You all know the rest of the story: Exchanges begat DSPs, which begat Trading Desks and so on. Anyone engaged with the audience sale pulls ever farther away from the past….new skills, new buyers, new picture. (And meanwhile, the planning groups continue to lose mojo and headcount.)
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The Facebook Effect: Part of the reason marketer’s have helped Facebook Bank $4 billion in ad sales is that they want to be part of the consumer’s life; they want an embedded presence within something the consumer is doing….something important to them. Now that they’ve breathed this rarified air, will they ever be happy with dated ideas around ‘sponsorship’ again? No, they’ll demand that the seller who’s representing a site help them really become part of the experience. Take me deep or take me home.
The net effect of all this? Two distinct digital sales models emerge, and look less and less like each other with each passing month:
The Audience Seller: Armed with reasonably strong quant skills and a deep understanding and comfort with a technical sale, the Audience Seller will have to be able to lead a team into long term, complex, enterprise sales environments. Once the automated future is built, we aren’t going to let just anyone run things.
The Experience Seller: Equipped with both deep marketing background and a mastery of consumer behavior and user interface, the experience seller must also be able to navigate multiple levels of the client/agency hierarchy. She must be as comfortable talking with creatives as she is with brand managers or researchers.
As these two skill profiles pull farther and farther apart (and away from the current people-driven RFP process) they present the digital sales leader with a very stark set of decisions. How do I find, train and retain these new levels of talent? What will my organization rely on? If I’m to offer both audience and experiential sales, how do they coexist within my sales team? And what am I going to do now with all these 2006 sellers I just paid for?
Cathy Halligan, the previous CMO of Walmart.com, just wrote that one of the biggest blunders that CMO’s make when they use Facebook is AN OVERRELIANCE ON AD AGENCIES. She writes; “Unfortunately, the entire Facebook strategy is often left to the agency, and brands are left scratching their heads when a flashy app doesn’t result in an uptick in sales.”
Although Cathy is talking about Facebook, all digital media companies should find this relevant and heed Doug’s excellent advice. Get the training – get it from Doug, but don’t apply it by continuing to spend 95% of your sales calls with digital buyers.
These buyers are just as stuck in 2006 as the sellers are.
Doug, my view is that the very best sales people will pull the two skill profiles together. It’s a lot to ask but here at Resonate, it’s exactly what we are aspiring toward. I’m looking forward to the Seller’s Forum next month. George.
Agree w/George and Mark. I do want to add the 2006 “A” seller doesn’t have a vastly different skill set than the “experience seller”, who you describe today. These sellers do exist, and come from the more established digital DNA companies who took the time to train, develop, and grow their sales teams. Problem is…it’s a 1 in 10 issue so agree we need to grow the new leaders — utilizing the consultative ways that grew digital spends to 1% to 10% over these last ten years. See you at the Seller’s Forum…
[…] create two distinct types of digital sellers… the Audience Seller and The Experience Seller… Read what he means. An interesting take on how selling in digital has become complex enough to merit new roles – yet […]
Doug – great food for thought – and I agree with George – ahead of the curve sellers need to understand the audience and the consumer experience – i call it selling the art & science of all that the digital medium has to offer marketers. leaders in the space have to do both and the best sellers understand that and can navigate both sides of the conversation. great insightful thinking sorry i missed you in CA – maybe see you in Vegas? Cate Carley
Doug, great post here and I couldn’t agree more. It is getting very difficult to find “experienced” sellers well versed in marketing strategy and consumer behavior knowledge. For the experienced seller, experience in traditional media as opposed to just digital media is very important. This is getting to be extremely difficult to find since digital is so siloed at the agency and publisher level.
Since quite often, sales prospects cut their teeth within the agencies, I feel as if our problem today is much larger than just a “2006 seller” issue. It goes back farther than this. What happened to the training and development at the agencies? The holding companies cut this sometime in the 90’s and it has never come back. As a result, we now have a generation of young people with little experience in how to think about building strategic plans. The average planner spends little time with basic things like BDI/CDI, Claritas, Reach and Frequency, etc. Many don’t understand the dynamic power of a media mix.
Until the agency world can recognize that this training is important to the knowledge of what they put out, the eventual experienced seller pool will be light on talent. Until then, and even after, it is up to our sales organizations to invest in training and developing the good prospects into great experienced sellers.
Doug,
You shine an important light on a real issue, as always.
Brand success will come from creating real engagement vs simply standing in traffic.
There is a talent shortage in those who know how to build that opportunity, how to price it and sell it.
No doubt, the agency world has cut back on training investment. Few choices.
Where do young folk with digital savvy and instinctive selling talent go for the best training?
They too need a different kind of experience.
Rick