(Vivian Vahlberg)

For the longest time, Melonie Hall couldn't figure out why her ad sales reps weren't making many multi-media ad sales.

Hall is Southeast Regional Manager for Florida Communications Company, a real leader in media convergence. With a converged sales structure, account executives specializing in different media often went together on sales calls. And with a newspaper (the Tampa Tribune), a television station (WFLA-TV), a website (TBO.com) and a targeted Hispanic publication (Centro Mi Diario) to sell, it would seem that the company's 173 print, 12 broadcast, 6 online and 2 Hispanic reps had plenty of cross-platform possibilities.

But things weren't clicking. She told the World Association of Newspapers' Digital Publishing Conference in London how she and others in her company broke the logjam.

Working with a consulting firm, the Center for Sales Strategy, they identified the eight most important talents ad sales reps need –- and then tested current and potential reps. The results were an eye-opener.

Not only were the scores of their current reps not high enough generally, they found that broadcast and print reps were cut from different molds. The broadcast reps were strongest where print reps were weakest; they were intensely enterprising. And they were weakest in the one area where print reps were strongest: in the discipline needed to follow through with the details needed for an ad sale. Broadcast reps were also much more ambitious and had much better interpersonal skills. And they scored somewhat better on command of the room, positivity and problem solving skills. The two groups were similar only in their level of work intensity.





This went a long way toward understanding why print and broadcast reps had a hard time cooperating. Because of their differences, when broadcast and print reps went into joint sales calls, the broadcast reps tended to dominate the presentations and, being intensely ambitious and competitive, wanted to take home all the marbles -- but didn't follow through well. That bred resentment and lack of trust, which was exacerbated by the commission structure that didn't provide financial rewards for cross-media sales.

So they implemented a new cross selling commission structure, which pays extra commissions for incremental cross-sell revenue generated in a sale, in addition to the normal single-media commission.

They worked to raise the level of new hires: it hasn't been easy. Hall has kept some sales positions open since January because she hasn't been able to find print reps who could compete at the level of the broadcast reps. That's a major problem, since it costs $40,000 a month every time there's a sales position open longer than a month.

And they began intensive training, teaching a common sales language and requiring all reps to get certified through a multi-media "boot camp."

Reflecting on the changes, Hall quoted the advice of management guru John Kotter about change processes. She said she first thought the problem was an incomplete strategy, the wrong structure, the culture or the systems. But she found, just as Kotter said, "The core matter is always about changing the behavior of people." She said that takes hiring the right people, training them to do the job and then developing trust between them, the managers and the company.

Have all the changes paid off? Hall said, "Magnitude-wise, almost every large contract, $50K and up, that we are writing is a converged deal... This is unusual for broadcast, which normally only gets quarterly schedules... It is definitely netting us more broadcast and Internet dollars, even if the print dollars remain flat."

(To contact Hall, call 813-259-8250, or email her at mhall@tampatrib.com.)

Fortunately, Media Management Center's sales force management team has been working on the skills and the jobs of media sales reps for over a decade. For information about what our sales force team can do, click here.

What do you think? Please share your thoughts, experiences and reactions by clicking on the comment button below or by e-mailing me at v-vahlberg@northwestern.edu.