Yang Liu: So how can media companies develop effective coverage strategies to ultimately improve revenue growth and profitability? We’re going to dig into that topic today. Specifically, the topic today is going to be coverage, and we’re going to dig into that question and try to understand how can we apply effective coverage strategies that ultimately lead to increased revenue growth. My name is Yang Liu. I’m a director with our firm’s media practice. And I’m joined by my colleague Mark O’Donnell. Mark, do you want to introduce yourself?
Mark O’Donnell: Thanks, Yang. Happy to be here discussing this topic with you today. I’m also a director at the Alexander Group. I work often in go-to-market transformation-type projects, primarily with media clients.
Yang Liu: Oh, great. Can you describe some of the media clients that you’ve worked with in the past, Mark?
Mark O’Donnell: Yeah, I work across the whole spectrum, to be honest. So pure play digital streamers integrated linear, print, ad tech, basically, you name it, all shapes and sizes of media clients I work with.
Yang Liu: All right. So just as a primer in terms of the landscape of coverage, if you’re new to the topic, sales coverage is really determining the right kinds of roles and resources needed to support your customers. But before you determine that kind of strategy, as we think about the sort of context around coverage, segmentation is a really important first step, right? And it’s specifically we want to look at – what are different customer types, how best we might reach them, what are the different strategies we want to deploy against those customer types and segments specifically. So really to help kind of unpack this topic even further, Mark, what kinds of patterns are you seeing in segmentation in the media space? What priorities do you see in that particular topic?
Mark O’Donnell: So with our clients, we often go through an array of questions to kind of unpack your question that you just asked, which is how should we best group our customers so that we can service them properly? So trends or questions that we ask to answer that question are, starting out of the gate: do we consider customers brand, or advertisers, or agencies, or maybe a combination of both? So that’s kind of a first step in determining how we should segment our customers. And then from there are many questions that we go through, and so we might actually treat holding company agencies much differently than independent because maybe it’s a different sales process. There’s different gatekeepers to go through the process, different lengths of time, different interests and products. Then what’s pretty common is size of customer, or opportunity is used in segmentation. The list can go on and on. What I would say is, it really depends on what you as a firm are actually selling and what your customer set is to determine your segments. And in my clients, I’ve seen as few as two segments, as many as ten, actually more than ten in some cases. So at the end of the day, your number of segments really just needs to reflect the number of unique customer groups that require distinct strategies to be effective in selling into them.
Yang Liu: So, Mark, it seems like you’ve described a pretty diverse set of segmentation characteristics or criteria that could really help determine the best kind of coverage model to apply in those different segments. So maybe walk us through some of your observations of what effective coverage strategies are in the media sector.
Mark O’Donnell: Yeah, I’d like to start maybe with talking about jobs first. And when we do look at the jobs that are used in the media space for coverage, we see a lot of variations or flavors; well over 100. But what they all kind of boil down to is one of three categories. And those categories of jobs are typically account executives, which are the roles that are primarily responsible for generating deals, interest in your product or service and closing them. Account managers, which again, there’s a spectrum of types of jobs within that category, and they’re typically pretty tactical in nature. For example, if you’re a publisher account manager, you might be collecting assets for a campaign, activating the campaign, monitoring, reading back to the client to let them know how well it’s performing. And then you have overlay specialist and what this category of job is. It’s pretty broad in itself. It’s a category of job that is a collection of domain experts, whether that’s a product expert, an industry expert, maybe some part of the sales process they are an expert in. And they get brought in to assist either your account executive or your account manager in that specific topic that they need additional help in. And so I would say common roles we’re seeing, there are jobs that we’re seeing pop up with an overlay specialist or agency partnerships, which is pretty new, but we’re seeing pop up more and more. Multicultural is pretty common job programmatic, and there are many more. But again, summarizing this back up, there’s basically three categories of jobs that we see that are used across those segments that we talked about.
Yang Liu: You mentioned programmatic, Mark. Programmatic, definitely, from a concept and from a term perspective, is definitely not new in the media space. We know that. But the idea of automated sales and the desire to press more for models like self-service, we kind of hear that constantly from our media clients that that’s a new space to explore. It’s possibly a space where things like AI might be used as well. Can you walk us through some of your observations around how folks are thinking about the topics of segmentation coverage, maybe more specifically to automated sales, things like self-service and programmatic?
Mark O’Donnell: Our clients are always looking for more ways to expand which types of customers or the number of customers that can go into self-service because ultimately there’s a desire to lower cost of sales, wherever is possible. And so self-service oftentimes is a place folks look to drive a lower cost of sales. And so what we’re seeing with our customers more recently, especially with AI having an expansion of capabilities, is an increased number of or types of customers that could be fitting into the self-service category. So we’re seeing it, first off, as an expansion of the types of customers that go into that segment. And then in terms of coverage, there’s actually still an array of ways folks are covering that segment. And it’s again, it’s an interesting topic because there’s a lot of interest in it today in the media space.
Yang Liu: Got it. Very intriguing. And it sounds like self-service is one of those areas where, it’s a very diverse set of customers that can, and want to, buy self-service. It’s not necessarily just the engine for low-cost transactions or transactional sales in general. It seems like there’s opportunity to drive a lot of revenue growth from some of your largest customers from the self-service segment as well.
Mark O’Donnell: Yeah, and that’s that’s the desire, right? It’s more and more figuring out if there’s a right fit for customers to be self-service. And it doesn’t necessarily mean small customers should be self-service, especially again as technology expands and capabilities expand, companies are looking to really see the profile changing of who can be a self-service customer. And the answer is yeah, it is great.
Yang Liu: Yeah, and it seems like the self-service model also doesn’t mean necessarily that we’re not going to have sales roles involved. You talked about how there might be folks involved from a specialization standpoint or offering standpoint where their main focus might be to evangelize the usage of the platform, or to give guidance around optimization points. So, it seems like self-service is this kind of ever-evolving space right now, at least until folks really start figuring out what works best for their particular platforms.
Mark O’Donnell: Absolutely. And I’ll actually say there’s some risk if you completely go hands-off, or you don’t implement your self-service strategy appropriately, there is actual revenue risk as you shift more and more people over, or more and more clients over, to self-service, there’s churn risk if a customer doesn’t know how to use the platform. So talking about roles that maybe might onboard or make sure customers know how to use the platform is really important to make sure that they continue to use, and that there isn’t churn. There’s missed opportunity in terms of expanding into other products if the customer doesn’t know other offerings that exist because they’re not actively being managed. That’s also a risk. Or spending more on the same offerings if their campaigns are running well. Obviously, self-service platforms should inform the client that their campaigns are running well, but it’s a little bit more risky if you don’t have someone, like an AE, that’s actively informing the customer of how well they’re doing, and exposing opportunities to expand their campaigns, maybe into new markets, new audiences, or just more impressions. So again, there’s some risk of going self-service if you don’t put some safety or some guardrails in place for the program to make sure that you aren’t churning customers and that you are actually still capturing upside potential.
Yang Liu: So, Mark, I want to thank you for taking the time to share your insights, your observations and experiences in the space. As always, please reach out to myself, Mark, anyone over here at the Alexander Group Media and Technology Practice. We would love to set up some time with you and talk more about how companies can effectively set up strategies in coverage and segmentation, really ultimately to grow revenue profitably.
