Feature Story
Understanding the Facts!
Naples Daily News is #1 in their internal corporate prospect challenge because of the Needs Analysis they give to current and prospective customers which includes giving targeted effective custom presentations. Resesarch Manager and Immediate Administrator, Kelsie Welch, attibutes recent success to the custom “Selling with Research” webinar that their reps recently attended . Having a presentation management tool and a solid library is not always enough. Sales reps need to know how to use their research in order to consult their clients and then ask for the sale. Welch reports that following the webinar, sales reps showed increased excitement in their system in response to this training. With this excitement came more proposals and, in turn, closed deals.
According to Kelsie, the “Selling with Research” training connected the dots for reps by teaching them how to develop concise and consultative sales presentations. Using “the big fact” method allows reps to understand that every slide can be easily presented and easily explained using the same basic method. The Webinar’s premise is that facts empower you to say more with less. “The realization that a presentation doesn’t need to be heavy in slide count to be informative is a freeing feeling.”
What impact has this really had? Well, retail sales rep, Lesley Crissman, recently secured a $27,000 up sell to Terracina Grand, a retirement/assisted living facility. She gave an Immediate presentation to the Executive and Marketing directors of the property and they were dually impressed with Crissmans’s slides because they related both audience-based reach and showed that NDN subscribers match their demographic target market.
Crissman’s successful sales presentation not only won Naples another year of advertising but an increase in spending from the previous year. She attributed this success to "arriving with a professional presentation that I was able to show "Big Facts" to the advertisers related to their needs and open up discussion as to how their needs had changed over the last 12 months."
With Welch’s lead, the Naples Daily News acknowledges the importance of ongoing training and top of mind awareness. Besides the “Selling with Research” webinar, she has initiated a weekly training series that focuses on different aspects of the Immediate system as well as basic fundamental sales skills training.
Industry Update
It Takes a big Umbrella
Today, with newspapers offering four or more distinct media technologies in a single market, the newspaper name is sometimes no longer a big enough brand umbrella to cover the options. So for the last few years, newspapers have been rebranding to embrace:
Print media, including newspapers, nonsubscriber products, ROP zones, community newspapers and array of magazines.
Advertising distribution media, including preprints, weprints, mail options and more.
Digital media including news sites, classified sites, entertainment sites, an array of special sites, and multiple digital partnerships.
Event production media, including event development, event management and event partnerships.
Broadcast media. In a number of markets, a media company with all these media technologies also has television stations, radios stations, and/or cable operations.
It takes a big brand umbrella to cover multimedia in a single market. Here are variations in multimedia branding approaches in three different markets:

Baltimore Sun Media Group brand uses the name recognition and trust earned by the Baltimore Sun to embrace a rich media family that includes the Sun, a digital family lead by Baltimoresun.com, a large family of community newspapers, and a rich array of niche magazines.

The Belleville News-Democrat and bdn.com share the crucial purpose of providing local news, entertainment and advertising for Metro East, the market across the Mississippi from Saint Louis. The news concept unites the family of media products with the Belleville News Group name.

Swift chose the name Northern Colorado Communications to embrace the Greeley Tribune and other community newspapers in nearby Northern Colorado cities, as well as a thriving regional agricultural product distributed in the Rocky Mountain area, the Western Slope and parts western Nebraska.
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