The AdTech industry is rife with fierce competition and operates at a breakneck pace, but despite this, many companies have succeeded. How have they done it? For starters, many digital media companies have legacy media history, and as such, are movers and shakers. In the evolving industry, success often means going against the grain, and refusing to view perceived or legacy limitations as a barrier.
Challenging the preconceived notions of running a company, and successfully selling solutions, however, takes calculation. From aligning sales and support to providing effective onboarding,
to help illustrate how to successfully sell AdTech solutions, consider these steps.
1. Differentiate Yourself
There are thousands of companies in the AdTech landscape that compete for a vast, yet growing amount of money. From Google to the latest, tiny startup you may never have heard of, the competition is high. To succeed, AdTech companies must find their niche, so that their services remain in demand, no matter who—or what—is in control of the market. In addition, do you plan to serve the sell side, the buy side, or both?
Often, a successful AdTech company begins with a good idea that hasn’t been capitalized on yet. Identifying opportunities means understanding the trends of the industry and customer needs and wants. Successful companies are able to locate holes in the marketplace and work backwards from the needs of these customers to develop and deliver a solution.
Effective content is a proven, often scalable and relatively inexpensive, way to promote and position your company in a potentially saturated market. From leveraging video to providing value, there are many ways for companies to position themselves.
2. Don’t Discount Long Tail Sales
No matter the stage of your AdTech company, when you’re selling, it’s tempting to focus on the big hitters. However, because so many of your competitors are also aiming for the enterprise level, you actually have less competition with a longer tail. What’s more, you’ll never be short of leads.For reference, the 28 million small businesses in America account for 54 percent of all U.S. sales. The Long Tail in digital media accounts for a significant sum, as well.
With this in mind, you should never discount long tail sales. In today’s hyper-connected culture, many long tail digital media companies are well connected through organizations such as the Local Media Association or the Local Media Consortium. Often you also may have an easier time connecting with the appropriate decision maker(s).
3. Align Sales and Support
Traditionally, sales and support are viewed as two related, yet disparate departments. To succeed in the AdTech space, however, you need to dispel this notion. Sales and support should be extensions of each other, and incentives need to be aligned if you want to build a sustainable, growth-enabled AdTech sales process. In fact, with many AdTech companies, “support” begins during the sales process, as the implementation team needs to be an early attendee in presentations, scoping, etc.
Often, sales reps are incentivized to acquire as many customers as possible and support is incentivized to close as many tickets as possible. However, as your AdTech company grows, this level of efficiency becomes unrealistic. Fixing the handoff between sales and support should be your priority, including improving and streamlining the implementation/onboarding process (more on that in a moment).
Instead, retention is the key to sustainable, long-term growth. From assessing support on a combination of replies per customer and overall volume handled, to response time and Net Promoter Score, there are numerous retention-focused incentives that ensure support is building relationships without burning out.
4. Develop an Onboarding Program with a Human Touch
All too often, AdTech companies make the mistake of inundating new customers/users with content and waiting for them to raise their hands to ask for help. Users are thrown into the mix to fend for themselves and then become frustrated when they cannot locate the information they need, or are not seeing the performance levels they’ve been lead to believe they’ll see.
Instead, onboarding must have a human touch for your company resellers to succeed.
When asked what companies can do best in today’s market to accelerate their sales success, a MarketStar study found that joint sales calls, or “back-sales support,” was the most effective technique. To be fair, that study was in the partner channel, but the net-net is the same nonetheless; the key group responsible for early customer success, and long-term retention, is the group handling implementation/onboarding.
So, with effective processes in place, it’s completely possible to set your AdTech company up for success, even in the saturated digital media space. Do you have any additional tips for selling AdTech solutions both as an AdTech company (seller) or a digital media company (customer)? Be sure to leave a comment below.
