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Small-Town Paper, Big-Time Operation
CRM is especially critical to successful sales Located about an hour-and-a-half from Seattle in Ellensburg, Washington, the Daily Record serves a blend of constituents. From the agricultural to the affluent, from cowboys to college students, this close-knit, eclectic community relies on the Daily Record to be the source for local news and a marketplace for businesses. And while this community might be small (about 30,000 residents), it makes it all the more critical for Daily Record's advertising sales teams to operate with absolute efficiency. "Our reps are constantly multitasking," says Suzanne Williams, Advertising Director for the Daily Record. "There's a lot of exchanging of information and of different types of selling, so no one can afford to be territorial." Maximizing Resources The Daily Record's team consists of four outside reps that are regionally focused and two inside reps who help cross sell. The work is highly organic in nature. The inside reps make 20 to 30 calls a day, while the outside reps focus on everything from retail to recruitment. As a result, they turned to Relationals to streamline this information sharing, while also helping management preserve information about customers that accounting systems and emails simply cannot capture. Why Relationals When Williams joined the Daily Record, the majority of the sales process was driven from very manual methods. They did have an accounting system (PBS), but everything else was being tracked by hand if it was tracked at all. Relationals was chosen in September 2006 for its deep feature set and associated business benefits. "Relationals is user friendly, while also providing email marketing, pipeline and opportunity reports, InfoUSA and PBS integration," states Williams. "We're able to identify neglected accounts, automate lead assignments, and delegate work across our team. Rather than being awkward, it works with us naturally." Williams was convinced of the power of Relationals during sales engagements with the company. "The Relationals' sales rep was very persistent, always had our information on hand, and consistently followed up on previous activities," says Williams. "That's the kind of relationship management we needed with our own customers." Within a month, they were up and running.
Working with Relationals Means Working Together Williams stresses that Relationals helps the entire sales operation from the executive level to the individual rep centralize on a single strategy. "They all see the benefits of Relationals: the automated follow-ups, improved efficiency around sales engagements," she says. "But managers needed to embrace it as well as sales team, and be committed 100-percent. You can't do it half-way." For example, she routinely takes the neglected account list and disperses to different reps. "We've virtually eliminated the embarrassment of cross-selling. Our inside sales team can call on current accounts, pull data up in Relationals, and know not to touch accounts with active opportunities." A good deal of the Daily Record's success is due to the fact that Williams takes a hard line when it comes to requiring reps to use Relationals. "I don't give them a choice," states Williams. "It is too important and valuable a tool for us to not use it, so we need full participation. If one person, isn't logging their calls, that's 25% of our team and that's unacceptable."
Successful Adoption Williams offers several use cases that simply would not be possible without Relationals, but are critical for success at a small paper. "Turnover, vacations, and sick leave have a greater impact on us. When a rep leaves the building, the knowledge they take with them could debilitate us. That's our revenue and information. We need to protect that. With Relationals it's not an issue. We can easily transfer knowledge of customers and activities and keep the ball rolling." Her team also uses Relationals to ensure that territories are fully mined, and they are going after all potentials. "The pipeline is not New York City. It's Ellensburg," explains Williams. "Relationals lets us know if we are cultivating every possibility in every territory. Especially for special sections, we often sell 4 or 5 additional packaged print ads that we wouldn't have found on our own." And what does advertising sales have to do with election politics? "We get really organized during the political season," she adds. "We put every candidate's campaign information into a spreadsheet, import them as leads into Relationals, and track and focus on them separately. We campaign the campaigners." Personalize Support "The Relationals support team check in all the time with us," beams Williams. "They're very pro-active. It's refreshing to be on a first name basis with both our sales rep there and our support rep." Final Thoughts "We learn more every week. The more we learn, the more we like it. I can see us using more features because it better orients us for success. And from the management standpoint, we've become believers in the mantra: ‘If it's not in Relationals, it didn't happen.'
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