Summary: a return to fundamentals

CLOSE-UPs Imagine if there were no telemarketing whatsoever? Bakersfield took that leap. Meanwhile, combining a diverse mix of sales and retention tactics is working wonders in Winston-Salem and inIdaho.

At the core of all of the suggestions in this Guide is a return to the fundamentals of sales and marketing. Newspapers must construct operations driven by marketing principles. What does that mean? It means:

• Hiring people with the right mix of sales and marketing skills. This pertains not only to employees but to vendors as well. Demonstrate due diligence before contracting with a vendor by talking with other newspapers that have used the vendors service in the past.  Past performance is no guarantee of success but it does provide insight as to how an individual may perform.

• Conducting ongoing research to understand customer expectations and to identify unmet needs. Focus groups are just one way to gather information from customers on a given program or why they behaved in a particular manner. Consider a survey to customers who recently discontinued the newspaper as part of a reselling direct mail piece, an online survey that provides recent stops a forum to air their views or a simple telemarketing call that asks why they stopped, what they liked about the newspaper and what they didn’t like. Of course, once you’ve gathered the information, you need to do something with it.

• Structuring your sales so that you get what you want – long-term growth, as opposed to shortsighted, artificial spikes in your numbers that will put you in red ink over time. Think longer term, better discount.

• Emphasizing internal communications so that everyone buys in to the same strategy. Develop your business plan/model and stick to it. Be certain to give your plan a chance by maintaining it over a specified period of time.

• Thinking of sales as a continuum that begins with a casual reader and leads to long-term, paid-in-advance subscriptions.

• Demonstrating behaviors that treat saved stops and upsell conversions as equal in importance to new sales. (It could be argued that they are MORE important.)

• Using analysis to assess what’s working, and what’s likely to work. Testing will aid in this process and ensure that the program you implement can be measured in some way. Determine the goal for each program and then determine if the goal has been met.

• Testing and measuring programs effectively so you can reinforce effective programs and walk away from weak ones.

• Looking inward to make sure that the staff members have the training and tools they need.

• Looking externally to take advantage of industry best practices.

• Selling your vision upward to publishers and CFOs to assure adequate resources.

• Supporting industry wide initiatives that add to the overall knowledge base.

As you review the list above, think about your operation. How does it measure up, line by line? What areas could be most improved?

Sales pressure vs. marketing principles

In some sense, our industry’s culture is contrary to the finest marketing principles. Consider the term “sales pressure.” What does that imply? It suggests that at least some of your sales were the result of applying pressure on a prospect. How much pressure? The more pressure you apply, the more you sell.

Marketing, however, it not just about applying pressure. Marketing means selling people something they want or need. It means identifying the attributes of your product that will provide a benefit, and communicating those attributes in a persuasive way. Marketing is about motivating people to buy, rather than pressuring them to do so just to avoid the pain of an aggressive sales pitch.

At worst, tactics like telemarketing are simply randomly-applied sales pressure. Selling to anyone who’ll pick up a phone. One pitch fits all.

But no one likes to be “sold” to. People want solutions to problems. Marketing means selling your paper using channels and methods that link the newspaper to solutions.

In today’s environment, you can’t do that with an iron fist.

Why do newspapers who should know better, abandon marketing principles?

□       The need to meet short-term circulation goals is the most obvious reason that newspapers stray from solid marketing principles. For example, who among us has not come back from a conference, energized by new strategies, only to feel the urgency of meeting this month’s numbers, no matter what the cost or long-term consequences? Come on. Admit it.

□       The unusual dynamics of the newspaper business also encourage “drift.” That’s because higher circulation, even if it is acquired at a loss, can be subsidized by advertising revenue.

□       The lack of proper metrics is probably the most significant reason that newspapers stray. Measuring the cost-per-order rather than the annualized cost-per-unit-of-circulation leads to a host of bad decisions and predictably bad outcomes.

And what damage does this cause?

□       The newspaper’s brand is eroded. That’s not just an abstract concern:

• It means future sales efforts will face an indifferent or even oppositional audience, rather than one predisposed to subscribing.

• It creates lost opportunities. For example, if, in an effort to quickly pump up the numbers, we aim low and try to sell easier short-term, pay-later orders, we have forfeited the opportunity to sell some of those same people an EZ Pay order with a longer term.

• It rewards the wrong things. Do we place our incentives where our strategic interests lie? Do we reward a rep for saving a stop on a longtime, valued subscriber as richly as we compensate a telemarketer for securing a tentative new eight-week bill-me order? Do we put our money where our mouth is?

The answer lies in a return to the marketing principles that have not changed over time, despite changes in our society, culture, economy, and technology. Marketing is still a matter of aligning your operation to deliver a relevant product through effective channels of distribution, with equally relevant promotion, at the optimum price. The marketer has many variables to mix in the mysterious alchemy of sales.

What works for one paper may not work at another – but it may be worth a try. Newspapers have to renew their commitment to testing new ideas. And testing their old assumptions as well.

Using the analytical tools found in this Guide, for example, you can compare your various sales sources on the most relevant basis – the annualized cost of maintaining or increasing a unit of circulation. This simple formula allows you to avoid the pitfall of selling based on cheap per-order costs, only to discover that you get what you pay for in terms of retention.

The newspapers that have paved the path into the new era of strategic selling have certain things in common:

• Publishers who recognize that the good old days were never that good, and that not all sales are of equal value.

• Cultures that encourage testing and trial-and-error.

• Cultures that are willing to let go of tactics that simply don’t enhance profitability over the course of the long term.

• Continuous investment in the technology and human resources needed to compete for customers in a world where change is the only constant.

• Sales operations driven by strategy and brainpower rather than mere volume and sales pressure.

The team that created this Guide hopes that it provides circulation executives and publishers with a fresh perspective on the application of fundamental marketing principles in the new era.