Getting Local Phoenix Customers Is Hard Work – Phoenix, AZ
“For the past couple of months I’ve been testing a new targeted local online advertising product as part of my fellowship project at the Donald W. Reynolds Journalism Institute. The test has essentially been to sell the product to regional businesses within a given market.
The pilot market was Orlando, Fla., and we used an outside sales team to sell to businesses that we knew were already spending money on marketing (for example, running TV, radio, newspaper, online, or billboard campaigns). Because the average order size was going to be about $2,000 a month, we didn’t want to sell over the phone. We did the math to understand how many meetings a sales rep would need to set a week and what his or her close ratio would have to be to make the venture profitable, using formulas from other organizations we’ve been a part of that have sold locally.
So we hit the streets, and it turned out that our close ratio was great: When we could get a meeting, we could close the deal. The problem was we just couldn’t get enough meetings. I had two different sales executives with backgrounds in selling local online campaigns for large media companies review our sales process and make changes. It helped, but not enough. And at the end of our two-month trial, after calling on more than 150 businesses multiple times, I came to a conclusion: Selling local sucks.
Now this doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t sell local or that this product won’t work. But I do think that if you are going to try to sell local, you will need to have one or more of the following:
A Phoenix Locally Recognizable Brand I’ve always said the most valuable thing newspapers have are their brands. (Local TV stations already understand this.) This concept was reinforced when I was cold-calling SMBs without a recognizable brand behind me. It was easy to identify the decision maker, but getting past the gatekeepers or being able to arrange a meeting proved next to impossible. One small business owner told me I was the fourth person to call her that day and it wasn’t worth her time. Even if you are an independent hyperlocal news site, it only matters if the person you are calling has heard of your site before. Bottom line: No one cared what I was able to do for him — only that he didn’t know who I was.
A Low Entry Point For Phoenix With an Inside Sales Team When I did get ahold of the decision makers, I had quite a few who flat out said (although some just alluded to it) that if what I was offering cost $250 a month, they’d try it. With an entry point that low, you can’t really justify an outside salesperson, but having an inside salesperson makes sense. This is what DataSphere does for local TV stations (oh, and by partnering with the TV station, it meets my first criteria as well).
A High Entry Point For Phoenix With a Long-Term Contract or a Physical Device If your product has a high entry point, having an inside sales team try to sell it probably won’t work. We knew that $2,000 a month would be a lot of money…read more“