The End of Sales

I’m not sure anyone really sells anything anymore. In some ways, I’ve been doing sales for 15 years, in some ways, it’s never been sales.

In media today, the “sale” is so long, complex, and consultative, it truly is a partnership. It’s an exploration of client needs, followed by a custom solution, followed by a real time tracking of performance, followed by a readout of performance. This a circle that keeps looping. It’s not a line.

For readers of this post who don't work in online advertising, Nick Carlson's new book on Yahoo (which I just finished today) provides ongoing examples and stories of the evolving and increasing complexity and competition in digital advertising over the past decade.

Palantir has no sales team; instead they have Forward Deployed Engineers that work closely with prospects and clients.

This appeals to me and has since I first heard about it.

This week, I removed the word “Sales” everywhere it appears in our U.S. DailyMail.com titles and replaced it with “Brand Partnerships.”

For example, two of my colleagues, who have been instrumental in working with me to transform our sales organization into a partnership organization over the past 6 months, were promoted and now have titles with this syntax: Matt Kaplan, SVP Brand Partnerships; and Linda Villani, VP Brand Partnerships, West.

This is not window dressing. Yes we want want to generate revenue. But I think we are generating revenue by partnering with brands to bring our site, editorial and creative skills, and technology to bear on their needs. We are also leveraging their assets, strengths, people, and ideas. We are partnering to generate revenue for them and for us. We are not “selling” them a widget and walking away.

That’s about being decent, but it's also good business. In media, breaking a new account is incredibly hard and a long process. Delivering results almost always ensures a client will work with you forever. Renewals are the lifeblood of any media business.

David Ogilvy in Confessions of An Advertising Man has long expressed my attitude about existing versus prospective clients:

Handling accounts once you have got them is deadly serious business. You are spending other people’s money, and the fate of their company often rests in your hands. But I regard the hunt for new clients as a sport. If you play it grimly, you will die of ulcers. If you play it with lighthearted gusto, you will survive your failures without losing sleep. Play to win, but enjoy the fun.

And thus “Partnerships” not “Selling” is the right ethos, and not even slightly window dressing.

I'm obsessed by this new book (Creativity Inc.) about the founding, struggles, and success of Pixar by its founder Ed Catmull. Catmull writes, "When faced with a challenge, get smarter" and he goes on to explain that so much of getting smarter is hiring the sharpest minds. He goes on to say: "Ideas come from people. Therefore, people are more important than ideas....If you give a good idea to a mediocre team, they will screw it up. If you give a mediocre idea to a brilliant team, they will either fix it or throw it away and come up with something better."

There are only a few things that I think make the business side of a media company successful: the team, organization structure, internal culture and culture of client service, the media itself, and innovation and performance in ad products. Team is the most important because everything else flows from that. And if you get that right the score will take care of itself.