Ninety-four percent of a sampled group of newspaper executives responding to a new American Press Institute survey say they are striving for a full-service "agency" approach to advertising sales, but their current portfolios are underdeveloped, and their staffs have not yet been trained to sell services such as mobile advertising and search engine marketing.
The survey, conducted by ITZBelden in partnership with API, looks at how the views of a select group of newspaper sales executives across North America shape their strategies for 2010 - in the products and services they offer and how they organize their sales staffs. Preliminary results will be released Saturday at API's
Maximizing Sales Force Effectiveness seminar in Orlando.
They paint a picture of a business model struggling to reinvent itself, with leaders who recognize the need to expand into new approaches, yet rely overwhelmingly on traditional products like display ads and sponsorships and perpetuate sales force skills that are better suited to servicing existing clients than to aggressively developing new digital business.
While respondents say they embrace a sales approach that offers a range of products and services to help clients meet broad marketing objectives, fewer than half offer those clients digital services like paid search, search engine marketing or search engine optimization. The good news is that an additional 17 percent plan to offer these services in 2010, and even more say they would offer them if they had the capability.
Building capability is on the minds of these executives, with 82 percent saying they expect to increase their investments in digital sales training this year, and 41 percent expecting to increase the size of their sales forces.
But who will they be hiring? These sales executives say experience in newspaper sales (81 percent) is still the best background. And they look for characteristics like ambition/motivation (85 percent) and a positive attitude (82 percent) as the best predictors of a new hire's future success.
"These are perfect attributes for a wonderful service organization," said ITZ Publishing CEO Greg Swanson. "We're not as good at selling as we are at servicing the contract. But these competencies may not apply to the new landscape, where other characteristics may be much more critical to our survival."
Not so high on the executives' list of desirable qualities in a new hire are some of the very characteristics needed in a competitive media world: online sales experience (51 percent), adeptness at answering objections (46 percent), effectiveness at qualifying leads and prospects (40 percent) and technical competencies (23 percent).
Among the survey's other findings:
• Respondents clearly think digital sales will grow this year; 92 percent say their local display customers will spend more for online advertising in 2010 as compared with 2009. Only 17 percent say these customers will spend more for print advertising.
• Only 3 percent organize their sales force into entirely separate print and digital staffs. The majority has either one sales force that sells everything (57 percent) or a hybrid sales force (40 percent), yet only 7 percent of these say their print staff does "very well" overall in selling digital products.
• Seventy percent of respondents say "click-throughs" are the most important metric advertisers use when evaluating the success of banner ads on their sites, this in spite of research from ComScore, Starcom.usa, and Tacoda that suggests 84 percent of Internet users rarely or never click on banner ads.
The sales force survey was launched on March 15, when invitations to participate were e-mailed to publishers and sales executives at 1,360 U.S. and Canadian daily newspapers. By April 2, 157 newspapers (11.5 percent) representing a broad cross section of market sizes and ownerships had responded to the survey; with 124 average responses per question (9.2 percent).
There is no cost to participate in the survey, and newspapers that have not yet responded may still do so. Participants will receive an executive summary of the survey results.
For additional information on participating in the survey, please contact Mary Glick, (703) 715-3313 or Greg Harmon, (415) 566-4348.
Highlights of the survey will be presented at API's Maximizing Sales Force Effectiveness seminars
April 10-11 (Orlando, FL),
May 24-25 (Reston, VA), and Sept. 15-16 (Pomona CA). For information on these sessions, contact Mark Muholland, (703) 715-3300.
An Insight Report exploring the most successful sales strategies will be available for purchase early this summer. The report will provide additional details from the survey, assess the changing media landscape, and identify actionable steps for maximizing sales force effectiveness.
