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How To Sell Salesforce To Marketing, Advertising And PR Agencies

Posted on November 9, 2016

Selling Salesforce to creative service companies — like advertising, public relations, and marketing agencies — is a unique challenge, much different than the struggles of selling to high-tech customers.

A high-tech prospect knows why they need a CRM, but they may be skeptical that you’re the right fit. Prospects in the creative services industry may not understand how Salesforce can help their business, or have written it off as being overly technical or robust.

So, how do you go about selling Salesforce to marketing, PR and advertising agencies? Here are three essential tips.

Know How the Industry Works

If you’re not familiar with how creative agencies operate, you need to learn before you pick up the phone.

First, understand that as a sales professional, you and your creative prospect already have something in common: creative agencies need to win work and to do so, they usually need to pitch.

Once the agency has successfully signed the client, they agree to create a certain amount of product (advertisements, PR campaigns, digital content), for a specific price, within a certain timeframe. In some cases, the client might hire the company as the “agency of record,” retaining their services for a longer timeframe, for a suite of projects.

Understanding the unique operational model of creative service agencies will help you make a stronger case for how Salesforce can help.

Make Salesforce Relatable

Knowing how an agency works will help you prove the relevancy of Salesforce. To show a creative prospect how a CRM can improve their business, draw connections between their business processes and the features of Salesforce most relevant to their industry. For example:

  • A creative agency is typically working with several clients at a time, on projects that are at different stages. Salesforce can organize all that client data in one, searchable platform. It can also track project progress, and trigger actions; for example, a project marked completed in Salesforce could trigger the generation of an invoice.
  • Warm leads for new clients often happen casually, through personal connections and socializing. But does that information ever get recorded? Salesforce can store details about potential new clients, including who made the connection, and it can be used to record all the work undertaken to win their business (like the date and time of phone calls, emails, etcetera). If the agency signs the prospect, they can move into the agency’s database of clients at the click of the button. And if the deal is lost, an explanation of why can be added to their record.
  • All creative agencies need to modify strategies and try new tactics to win business. Those tactics should be informed by data. Salesforce can help an agency analyze its history of won clients, lost clients, how quickly or slowly a client relationship progressed, why a project was lost, what client feedback was like, and etcetera.

Simplify the Process

The implementation of Salesforce and the on-boarding of employees is often what intimidates creative industry prospects and causes them to hesitate about signing on the dotted line. You can expect that your prospect will have one or several of the following concerns:

  • Setting Salesforce up will be painful, time-consuming and confusing
  • Employees will complain about having to learn another system
  • Some employees will forgo using it entirely
  • There’s not enough in-house tech support to help with any questions or issues that may arise

Explaining the services of Salesforce implementation partners can help assuage these fears and get your prospect to the next step. An implementation partner will create a plan and set up Salesforce according to the unique needs and processes of the prospect’s company. Many Salesforce implementation partners will provide training for staff, and phone and web support afterwards.

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