Overcoming 'marketing myopia'

Folio: The Magazine for Magazine Management, Jan, 2001 by Hershell Sarbin

To be competitive, ad sales must merge old disciplines with the power of new technology.

Way back in 1960, Theodore Levitt, writing in the Harvard Business Review, argued that too many businesses are afflicted with marketing myopia and that we need to view the world through the eyes of the customer. That perspective has become even more important today. Immersed in the wealth of recent dot-com advertising and the general prosperity of the 1990s, many magazine publishers have come to ignore the old reliable disciplines of sales management.

Lack of training

At the same time, too many sales representatives are not taking advantage of today's technology. They are taught PowerPoint presentations simply to present their products. Yet technology has made it possible for us to travel anywhere with infallible memory of the needs and wants of our customers. We actually carry context in our laptops, and an ability to respond instantly as marketers, not salesmen. We can communicate on-the-fly with sales directors, managers, researchers or anyone from the sales team--working from the same data and with the same insights on customer needs--while separated by thousands of miles.

What's wrong?

How strange, then, that so little time is devoted to harnessing the digitized power we have been given. How peculiar it seems to hear top executives say, "No time," or "Too swamped," or "It's different now," when I ask about the need for sales and sales management training. I've even been told it's "passe."

All of this prompted me to visit a couple of marketing consultants who grew up with me at Ziff-Davis and experienced the disciplines of sales management.

"Managers have less and less time," says Al Traina, president of Traina Associates, an ad sales training company based in Chebeague Island, Maine, and a former top executive at Ziff who helped design and implement the company's marketing approach to sales. "But technology is the great enabler. Too few companies engage in a disciplined process," he says. "If I look at companies that are very successful--like Meredith and Rodale--I see really good disciplines."

Traina teaches these disciplines in small seminars where, as part of the training, he asks participants to do a precall analysis. "We ask them to bring in the problems with accounts they can't sell-- a dossier of marketing rules, objections and competition. Through the use of structured presentations, I work with them on selling specific accounts. I act as the client in a role-playing session. They then go back, fine-tune and present again."

Working together, Traina and his clients prioritize accounts according to potential. "Then we create strategies individualized for accounts and work one-on-one with salespeople to plan and get at a result. We bring together all the different elements required for the creation of a sales and marketing package that really works these days," he says. "This is a whole different thing from just selling pages. It's watching carefully and helping people to move toward larger sales in a spirit of partnership."

I also spoke with Martin Walker, of Walker Communications, who is frequently called upon for post-acquisition sales-management restructuring.

"You would be shocked to find out how little training there really is at most of the large, New York City-based publishing companies," says Walker. "It's stupid. They hire 25-year-olds who make over $100,000 a year to work on large consumer magazines. These young people suffer from the delusion that they are worth that money, and then the companies don't invest anything in training them. No one graduates from college with a degree in ad sales."

Dealing with myths

There's this myth that salespeople are born with a sales personality, says Walker. "But that's not true. Think about the greatest basketball player who ever lived--Michael Jordan. He practiced every day."

The whole concept of a structured sales presentation is missing, says Walker. "There is a sequence of presenting data, knowing how to open and close a presentation, knowing how to bridge from one concept to another, how to use numbers, the concept of features and benefits-- these are all lost on a lot of today's salespeople."

And the downside of relying too heavily on technology--of going in with only a PowerPoint presentation--is that these presentations have become so routine that a prospect's eyes glaze over, says Walker. But as more magazines compete for ad dollars, the ability to sell and the need for formalized training will become more important, he says.

"New marketing" models

My personal view is that consumer magazine publishers will not continue to live so comfortably in a charmed dot-com world. There will be more shifts of marketing expenditures to direct selling on the Web and the building of longer-term, one-to-one customer relationships. Business-to-business publishers are already experiencing the impact of the "new marketing" models. In any case, magazines that fail to embrace the merger of old disciplines and new technology will not remain competitive in the new one-to-one marketing world.