How your media/tech sellers can grow future demand

First, and to get on the same page, let's agree on how we interpret certain terms:

Prospects - people who have some influence over the decision to buy from you one day. They could be working agency or client-side.

Sellers - anyone from the CEO down who has a client-facing role and an interest in the revenue number.

In-market - If you emailed them today, they would have a brief and a budget for which you could be considered.

Out-of-market - If you emailed them 100 times today it would make zero difference to your bottom line because they don't have a brief or a budget.

There are two types of prospects:

? - In-market today

? - Not in-market today

Across many b2b verticals, only around 5% of prospects are in-market today. If we look at that fact in the context of the buyer's journey, it might look like this:

Let's now zoom into an example of a single media seller.

For each brand that they want to sell to, there are many people with influence over the decision to buy, and the bigger the brand, the larger that number is likely to be.

An example of the people with influence in just one brand :

To keep the maths simple, and for illustration purposes only, let's assume that there are 10 people with influence over the buying decision for each brand. So one of your media sellers might be responsible for:

? - 6 media agencies

? - Who in turn manage 120 brands of interest (20 per media agency)

? - With 1,200 prospects (10 per brand)

For the purposes of this exercise, let's say that 5% of the brands are in-market today, which means that:

? - In-market today = 6 of 120 brands (60 prospects)

? - Not in-market today = 114 of 120 brands (1,140 prospects)

Now, to keep the maths simple, let's assume that each brand has an average LTV (lifetime value) of ￡100k for your business.?

So that means that:

120 brands in total per seller.

6 brands in-market = potential LTV of ￡600,000 in revenue (bottom of the funnel)

114 not in-market = potential LTV of ￡11.4 million in revenue. (top of the funnel)

The larger revenue opportunity is at the top of the funnel and with the people not in-market today, but our sellers are mostly focussed on the bottom of the funnel, and people with a brief and a budget to spend today.

Here is the really important bit - Your sales, sales activation, lead generation, or bottom of funnel sales and marketing tactics can only convert those in-market today.

I'll say that again. Sales and sales activation DOES NOT create demand, it converts existing demand.

Very rarely does a sales rep in media create a new budget from nowhere, they convert an existing budget, and that is their job.

The type of tactic that does create long-term demand is brand building via your sellers.

That requires your sellers to be talking to people not in-market, at the top of the funnel, and with content that raises awareness and interest. The 95% don't want to have a sales call with you today because they are not in-market. They will however read or watch something that they have a professional interest in, and that is where your seller content comes in.

How many touches do your sellers manage with the 95% of people not in-market today??

As Marco Bertozzi, former VP EMEA at Spotify so eloquently put it on The Six Sells Podcast "How many splashes of green paint can you get on them?"

If you don't build your brand for the long-term, you are relying on your sellers to make contact with the right people, at the right time, and a myriad of other factors such as who's on a preferred supplier list, whom those prospects favour at that time, whom they trust most, whom they feel their client is most likely to sign off on, which rep spoke to them last ... all things that can be addressed in the awareness phase.

Think reach and frequency with brand messaging. Consistent messaging, delivered frequently.

How many prospects can you reach and how often, with consistent messaging?

Oh, and in order to enable your sellers to do this, they need interesting content that captures the attention of the 95% of people not in-market today, so that they can build awareness and interest over time, and lead more prospects into the bottom of the funnel in the future.

At Six Sells we train our clients on how to add platforms such as LinkedIn to their sales channels, and then we ghost-produce content so that sellers can connect with more people, more often.