Developing & Scaling High Performance Best Practices

Specific Media

Specific Media is an innovative global technology and online media company. It enables advertisers to target audiences through advanced proprietary demographic, behavioral, contextual, and geographic data. It delivers this targeting across a premium network of name brand publishers with unprecedented scale and accuracy.

Challenge:

Although Specific Media was growing quickly, it faced a number challenges that prevented it from scaling up to meet greater sales opportunities. For example, young, inexperienced reps were thrown into territories and forced to fend for themselves with resulting poor performance.  With no effort to share the best practices of top performers with newer reps, the VP of Sales recognized the need to hire and train to a consistent sales process.  Without that consistency, the company’s success would always be tied to “one off” hiring decisions.

Solution:

Specific Media enlisted Kevin Corcoran to help it meet its scaling challenge. Using process-mapping methodology, Kevin helped the sales team identify best sales practices that would become standard operating behaviors for its fast-growing sales force.

This included establishing criteria for market and account segmentation and for qualifying accounts; establishing a pre-call checklist for more effective sales call planning; and developing consultative probing strategies to uncover the client’s marketing strategy and digital advertising options.

Kevin and his team also addressed fundamentals such as creating a strong Specific Media value proposition and performing competitive analysis to ensure that the company’s offerings and sales approach were differentiated and effective.

Additionally, they recommended process improvements to ensure that information flowed effectively in and out of the company’s existing CRM solution. And, most importantly, they identified skills and competencies to execute the sales process. This included making recommendations for hiring and screening talent and for developing a training and field coaching plan for the company’s sales managers.

Result:

Specific Media is making major strides in implementing a consistent and scalable sales process to meet the challenges of a growing sales force. To this day, Kevin provides ongoing consulting for the company’s sales executives and sales managers for problem solving and performance improvement.