Rethinking Go-To-Market Sales Strategies for Broadcast TV

The WSJ article that dropped just before this week’s upfronts has been getting a lot of chatter in my social feeds.  It’s undeniable that advertising is harder than ever for agencies, marketers, and publishers alike – but I think the article misses the core challenge facing broadcasters – Demand Generation.  

Magid’s most recent survey of advertisers showed that 74% had increased their marketing budgets, and 62% had changed their advertising strategy over the last 12 months.  In short, our clients are spending more money on Advertising – we’re just not seeing most of it.

If TV advertising isn’t the first choice for the biggest brands and agencies looking to solve problems, launch products, or drive ROI, TV sales teams need to get in the business of generating that demand. I know that seems obvious, but my experience working with virtually every major media group today is that most sales organizations are still set up to maximize existing revenue at all costs. In practice, that means sales leaders are focused on share, rate, and inventory management, and sellers are focused on RFPs, pricing, and posts.  Many groups focus on new business, but it’s seen as an additional task to the core function of maximizing share and rate from the existing stream of advertising dollars flowing into the market. 

It’s easy to blame the sellers or front-line sales leadership – but my experience is that systems and structures determine outcomes, and we need to rethink our GTM strategies. 

Three things broadcasters should do to tackle this challenge:   

1. Refocus Sales Efforts: Job one is to reorient the sales teams towards finding clients who should be spending on video advertising and crafting compelling business case presentations about their problems, not our products.  That requires new training and new sales metrics to ensure the enterprise shifts focus from away from share and towards solutions.  Magid works with leadership teams to identify and deploy new KPI’s and a new reporting and coaching cadence to measure progress against non-revenue metrics.
2. Drive Demand: Develop and deploy new tools to help identify, engage, and support clients not currently buying television advertising. The explosion of generative AI and low-cost research methodologies means AEs can access, synthesize, and distribute high-quality custom insights to suspects, prospects, and clients at scale.  Moving from a responsive sales stance to a proactive approach will help reframe the sales cycle and drive new opportunities through the funnel.  Early adopters of tools like Magid’s AD.VANTAGE AI report a +40% increase in appointments set with targeted accounts. 
3. Sell Solutions: The biggest complaint we hear from sellers is about the proliferation of channels, products, and initiatives they are responsible for selling.  AE’s feel overwhelmed trying to sort out the differences between OTT, DSPs, FAST, AVOD, and SVOD and how to explain and present an ever-expanding bundle of products to an increasingly limited pool of advertisers.  Solution selling is the key to breaking product paralysis.  Sales teams focused on finding marketers’ pain points and then showing how connecting to your audiences solves those challenges will win every time.  Our team works alongside more than 30 sales teams to present findings and shape pitches just like this in markets from coast to coast – generating over $200 million in incremental revenue since 2020 alone.

Best-in-class Sales teams are driving initiatives across all three of these strategies in tandem to shift the sales culture and drive the demand the current system lacks.

The end result is more meetings, more proposals, and more closes through your existing Sales channels.