From the desk of...

Sellers --

We had a great 2012. How great? I always measure sales team performance against the marketplace. I remember a lot of years in this business when everybody was a genius and everyone was successful mostly because it was hard not to be successful. There was just so much business to be had. But in 2012, it seems like accounts found more reasons to hang on to their money than to spend it. But we gave them reasons. The Internet and its audience gave them reasons. That added up to a great year.

Now we have a very similar playing field. Just because the clock is a week and a few days different than when you last seriously considered generating business, it doesn’t mean the world has changed. It would be nice if it did. But this year will continue to challenge any sales team because budgets are too tight, brand marketers' attitudes are too cautious, and consumer spending hasn’t dramatically recovered enough to change any of those things.

Yet, we need to grow the business. This can, and will, happen. Let’s approach this from a basic “get, keep, and grow” philosophy. “Get” is our business development effort. We will get more new business this year if we present the right advantages to our clients. Start as we always do with our audience. They are engaged, considering purchases, and still finding new ways to interact online. Continue with our ever-expanding ability to target key sections of that audience. You’ll end with an economically efficient way to advertise. Marketers must advertise. They can cut back for a while, but they can’t quit. That’s the basic internet “get” strategy for this year.

Then there are the clients we have already recently attracted. Maybe some of them are considering an even tighter budget for 2010; maybe some of them are on the fence about proportioning their budgets. We need to keep them through a consistent addition of targeting depth and technology. We need to continually show them new advertising technology and execution options. Enhanced targeting? Real-time bidding? These are some of the approaches that can keep a client interested in exploring a bigger budget.

The “keep” element of “get, keep, grow” is really close to a holding pattern. I’d say under 10 percent of our clients fit there. The “grow” strategy is our most important. We need to get into our best clients and find ways to get them to use more properties, consider bigger audience segments, test more products and in short, spend more money. I have rarely seen any client spend more money on Internet marketing and come away dissatisfied. Challenge them to grow. Challenge them to look at the audience that goes unaddressed.

A lot of sales has to do with attitude. Not a false aggression, but an attitude of confidence. Anyone that intelligently sells a quality internet product should have that confidence this year. It might not be a new year in terms of economic conditions. But it is a new start for a confident approach.