July 2008
Digital sales teams - the way forward?
As advertiser demands and requirements evolve, publishers are having to adapt to meet these needs. In our regular conversations with publishers there is a growing desire to focus on online-only job advertising, and to offer digital packages without the inclusion of print products.
Part of MatchWork’s input into these discussions is to reiterate the unique strength and marketing power that publishers still have in the market place, certainly over and above online-only competitors and, if they don’t offer online-only services to their customers/advertisers, then the pure players will, and are doing so.
Happily, we can report that this approach - including new initiatives - is being well received by advertisers, and publishers are reporting positive feedback to this type of proposal.
What we are terming the “online-only” strategy is leading to revenue generation from employers and recruitment agencies that are lapsed print advertisers, now looking for the best and most credible ways of reaching the online audience. Just as importantly, industry sectors that have not traditionally advertised in print are now proving lucrative to newspaper publishers, as they are a source of revenue that has not previously been tapped.
We are building up a ‘best practice’ file of the different ways innovative and creative sales techniques can improve results and engage new customers. Motivating and incentivising sales teams is one very important part of the mix as Dagens Nyheter, Göteborgs Posten and Sydsvenska Dagbladet and the online job portal, MeraJobb, in Sweden have proved.
Similar experience is being gained in the UK where one partner introducing sales force incentives for the first time has doubled sales as a result.
Another UK client partner has seen increases of over 300% in revenue and over 240% in ad count after a period of concentrated training on CV Match sales techniques followed by the establishment of targets and incentives.
There is no doubt that a major culture change is taking place in the classified market and forward-thinking publishers equipped with MatchWork technology are ideally placed to benefit.
The role that MatchWork plays in the online-only approach is more than just to provide the websites and tools to enable publishers to hunt effectively in this market, for instance in the UK market we also provide strategic knowledge and support so that publishers can develop clear and effective sales approaches.
Publishers can sell online-only access to MatchWork’s advanced CV matching technology, whereby the advertiser logs in to view anonymous matched CVs and invites jobseekers to apply for the vacancy. It is also possible for advertisers to self-serve, by creating and activating their own ads, then instantly accessing the ranked matched list of the most relevant jobseekers. Publishers are bundling this access with other premium areas of their websites to tailor digital packages suitable for each of their online-only advertisers. A typical package could include CV matching log-in, inclusion in a ‘featured recruiter’ section with ads shown as “hot jobs” on the front page.
MatchWork also provide CV statistic profiling tools to publishers, so that they can source their own statistics from the CV database to sell more intelligently to advertisers. The CV statistics help publishers to construct powerful sales arguments to persuade online-only customers to buy access to the CV database.
This in turn enables publishers to create relationships with customers which would never previously have considered them as a serious online option. The transition of newspaper publishers from ‘print only’ to multi-media companies offering a complete ‘one stop’ recruitment solution is well under way.
If you would like to learn more about online-only sales strategies, please contact your local MatchWork office.
Reference: Search and Match – What’s the difference?