6 Crucial Elements for Digital Selling Success

Do your digital sellers have all the ingredients for success? If not, you could be missing out on third-party digital advertising revenue. To empower your sales team to feel confident, you’ll need these crucial elements for digital selling success.

In this post, we’ll discuss the digital opportunities and the key components to boost seller success.

Third-Party Digital Ad Revenue Will Increase in 2023

You may have some concerns about 2023 budgets. Linear spot sales could stay flat or decrease, with only an expected 1.9% CAGR (compound annual growth rate) from 2022 to 2028. Digital, however, has a projected growth rate of 12.9% in 2023. The increase is even greater for programmatic, at 15%, and CTV ad spending will rise by 26.6%. Thus, digital can help you fill this gap.

When you look at what’s ahead, your sellers will need to offer digital as a complement to linear and O&O (owned and operated) inventory.

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So, what pieces need to be in place for success?

6 Pieces of the Digital Selling Success Pie

Ensuring your sales team has the tools it needs to capture more third-party digital revenue will be critical in 2023. Here are the pieces we recommend.

Training and Upskilling

Digital ad tactics can be complex and hard to explain to customers. The fear of misspeaking may keep your sellers from proposing them to clients. You want your people to be confident in understanding how the tactic works, when to use it, how to optimize it and the value it brings.

Your sellers aren’t pushing digital in a vacuum but as part of an integrated campaign strategy to enhance reach and targeting. Providing training to sellers on these topics can make all the difference.

Here’s what your team should know:

How to define each tactic
Best practices around tactics
How to answer advertiser objections about tactics
Building a budget for tactics
Targeting and reach potential
Which tactics align with specific advertiser goals

Training should be continuous, as digital advertising is constantly changing. It also needs to be relevant to the media industry, interactive and high quality.

Ability to Offer Multiple Digital Options

Your advertisers likely have some digital advertising knowledge. They may not be using these tactics consistently, but they interact with them every day as users and consumers. This could increase their interest in new digital ad options, such as YouTube, Pinterest, Snapchat and TikTok.

Your sellers won’t be able to meet these needs if you don’t have a cross-channel advertising platform with access to these channels. The alternative would be piecemeal campaigns, which can be time-intensive and hard to measure collectively.

Insights and Reporting

Your digital sellers can’t improve recommendations without easy access to campaign insights and reporting. Only from this analysis can they discuss what worked and what didn’t with advertisers and know how to make recommendations to secure repeat business. Make sure there are no barriers to data in the system you use, so sellers can learn and evolve positioning.

Technology to Simplify the Process

The digital selling process needs technology to streamline it. Otherwise, your people will need to use multiple applications just to send a proposal. Your platform should cover every step in the sales cycle, from proposal and execution to invoicing and reporting. This software should be sales-focused and remove complexities often plaguing the workflow. Ideally, technology should accelerate processes and create efficiencies.

Opportunities to Sell Digital to Non-Traditional Categories

Several advertiser categories are not allowed on traditional DSPs (demand-side platforms). However, alternative DSPs enable compliant advertising for businesses such as cannabis, CBD, alcohol, fireworks and gambling (online and physical casinos). If you’ve only been able to offer these advertisers O&O or linear spots, your sellers will appreciate these capabilities. It can also be a competitive advantage for your salespeople.

Top-Down Support

If leadership doesn’t prioritize and emphasize selling third-party digital, your sellers may not adopt it either. How you communicate around digital selling tools and initiatives should be consistent and clear. Your staff needs to know they have your support and that they will have access to training, tactics, technology and data.

Digital Selling Success in 2023 Is Ahead

If you want to make 2023 a year for increased third-party digital sales, these elements can remove roadblocks and drive success. Get ready for 2023 now with these resources: