Consulting: Creating Successful Key Account Selling Strategies
The 80/20 rule is all about key accounts.
The greatest revenue and profit opportunities tend to flow from those special few customers. The challenge very often is in uncovering new business with the largest advertisers or in maintaining margin levels, when volume often translates into steep discounts.
Yet with the right kind of selling approach it is not only possible but also even inevitable that key accounts can become the best sources of new and highly profitable business.
Leading publishing sales organizations’ are masters at what we call the Strategic Client Objective (SCO). They succeed by recognizing that they are partners with their advertising clients in understanding customer preferences and behaviors and in showing how to win their hearts and minds.
Sky Road works with organizations to hatch the kind of SCO’s that really matter to client-side executives, directors and their teams. These efforts lead to highly engaged, regular sales initiatives involving all key decision makers. By definition, SCO’s will need to connect to the critical sales and marketing objectives of both the publisher and the advertiser.
We often begin by exploring your specific sales situation, challenges and opportunities. We conduct a collaborative analysis of your process for managing the key accounts—creating compelling SCO’s, strengthening client relationships, strategic planning, and using the publisher’s resources (people, knowledge, tools, etc.).
We do this exploration primarily through interviews with any or all of the following: publishing executives, sales and marketing directors, product teams, salespeople, clients, and agency representatives.
Key Account Selling Solutions Our assessment of the selling situation enables us to make recommendations that connect our two decades of sales organizational leadership with our analysis of your specific selling and market situation.
We identify workable options for significant sales performance improvement that you may implement yourself or through the help of Sky Road.