Building an award-winning media sales team

Technology, data and societal shifts have all changed the rules of the game, writes Primesight’s Andy Goldsmith.

With the pace at which we are all working in media, you often don’t realise what you have achieved until you stop to reflect.

For all of us, the challenge to deliver is becoming ever more difficult. Revenue growth is a constant demand and we all set expectations to beat the market – but it is also important to set objectives that are not just revenue based.

Looking around our industry, there’s a constant desire from both media owners and agencies to evolve not just their product but their positioning and perception.

It might seem that media and creative agencies are leading the way here, especially when you see how well they perform in the Best Companies Survey, which acknowledges excellence by assessing workplace engagement across eight key areas. The likes of the7stars, PHD, Talon, BBH, MEC and Maxus all feature at the top of their respective categories.

2015 saw Primesight being accredited a 3 Star rating (the highest rating) in the Best Companies Survey for the first time, as well as winning a number of industry awards and delivering our strongest ever staff survey results.

It’s hard to understand why other media owners don’t feature as highly in the Best Companies survey – maybe it’s difficult for some to pull together a number of different disciplines such as editorial, design, content producers and sales together under one purpose? Or maybe media owners simply don’t enter?

Despite this, many media sales teams were rightly lauded in other ways last year, such as Channel 4, Metro, Facebook and Global Radio, for delivering not only excellent financial results but also genuine innovation, creative thinking and collaboration.

Whilst delivering revenue targets is always an important focus, we also found that there must be an emphasis on workplace culture to drive these results. Media owners are realising that its employees are its brand and critical to sales success, especially those that do not have a consumer brand to fall back on. But how do you build and incentivise a successful, modern sales team in this increasingly culture-focused business?
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First of all, businesses should create a strong foundation and structure around what it means to work with, and for you, both inside and outside of the business, which can take a number of years to introduce layer by layer.

At Primesight, we have focused the last four years on creating a culture and way of working that is robust.

From devising our ‘Results Are Our Culture’ positioning, driven by three core values of Responsiveness, Accountability and Exceeding Expectations, through to our ‘five mind-sets’ that are designed to help us achieve our ambitions of having a clear and focused direction, initiatives like this help ensure the entire business is focused on delivering the best service and results for clients.

Positioning and cultural work is usually the remit of senior management (with a little external input), but businesses should also look to create an open, inclusive environment and encourage non-managers to share their input.

For Primesight, this meant forming a group of more junior sales team execs who devised and launched a set of core behaviours that the rest of the company would then fall behind: Be Responsible, Be Brave, Be Empowered, Be Curious and Be Passionate. This allowed less experienced team members to be empowered to take on and run projects that impact the entire business.

However, challenges should also be set continually across the team to ensure every individual is striving to be the best they can be. Primesight’s answer to this was to introduce a six-weekly awards competition (the somewhat creatively-named Dogs Bollocks Awards) where the entire sales team gets together to replay the best pitches recently delivered. It’s a forum that allows the team to test, refine, surprise and stretch boundaries.

Many of the ideas developed within these sessions never even leave the office – but they’re an important part of empowering behaviours and delivering more and more ambitious presentations to peers. Employees have written and performed songs, curated and delivered mock news reports with live link-ups, and even rapped. PowerPoint is a rarity in these sessions.

For sales teams to be really motivated, employees’ overall well-being is paramount. This means what happens inside the company should also be reflected outside. Part of the reason Primesight only received a 2 Star status in the 2014 Best Companies Survey is that, as a company, we were very supportive and clear when at work, but didn’t seem to recognise people’s life outside of work.

Companies should look to pro-actively celebrate personal well-being and develop initiatives that support that mantra. Whether that’s through book clubs, subsidising employees learning new skills or attending part-time courses, or encouraging people to make pledges around personal improvement.

Our well-being initiative required every team member to make six pledges of varying degrees of difficulty to deliver over a four-month period. Some were easy, like taking the stairs. Others were more challenging, like marathon-running, the Three Peaks Challenge and giving up smoking. Some were just downright bizarre – fire-eating, anyone?

What really stood out were those who took the wellbeing initiative to new heights with some learning instruments and languages, training to work in charities and learning to be carers for sick or elderly relatives. We found that what the business gained in happy, motivated staff, individuals gained in becoming better colleagues, friends, family or just people.

What we all need to learn is that success today needs to be two-fold.

Not only should media owners look to deliver on revenue targets, but the happiness and well-being of staff needs to be front and centre. Awards and accolades are just the (very welcome!) by-product of the right messages and initiatives being put in place for the right reasons.

We should all look to create a workplace where people are recognised for being the lifeblood of the business and who can all have a say in setting the agenda and focus going forward.

Andy Goldsmith is sales director at Primesight.