Matt Chaney, our Director of Partner Deals Success, shares his tips for managing your deals calendar. Matt was formerly the Product Manager for The San Diego Union-Tribune’s very successful deals program.
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With kids out of school and vacations on the mind, summer can be a hard time to get and maintain the focus of your deal prospects and merchants. However, the “deal must go on” and maintaining a close eye on your sales pipeline will ensure your continued success in bringing in those great deals.
Keep Your Eye on the Prize
Having a healthy pipeline is as much about maintaining revenue as it is about giving yourself breathing room to maximize your deal potential. The last thing you want to do is to be scrambling to fill an open spot a day or two before it runs. Why? You are less likely to pick a deal that has a high level of deal appeal and instead run something that may or may not excite your users. Here are eight questions to always ask when vetting a deal:
1. Is the business a well-known or established brand?
2. Is the business located in a convenient location? How many locations?
3. Will it excite our audience? Is it the right deal for them?
4. Is this deal available anywhere else?
5. Is the deal more than 50% off?
6. How many restrictions? Are there too many?
7. Can you buy more than one?
8. Would you buy this deal or recommend it to a friend or family member?
Hit List
Create a prospect list in order to focus your efforts. If you haven’t already, create a list based on top deal categories like restaurants, activities/events, travel, and health and beauty. This will help you view your list from a different perspective with deal category in mind. If your sales staff are already category-based, list out the top advertisers for each rep’s category. If they haven’t run a deal with you recently, those are the ones to go after – especially if they’re completely new advertisers! That is one of the beauties of daily deals for media companies. They give you a new segment of the market to go after – those that have traditionally said no to print or online display ads.
Past Deals
Reviewing past deals – good and bad – can give you great insight into what has worked best for your site and, most importantly, what resonated with your audience. Target merchants who could offer a similar deal and pursue them heavily. Review past deals to understand where your successes came from and try to replicate the best deals with new prospects. The same is true of your competition. Deals that were successful on other sites with offers that are about to expire are prime targets.
Seasonality
As a general rule, running deals that are seasonally appropriate is a best practice, but in certain cases, flipping that approach around can help you uncover new opportunities. Consider a ski resort. During the winter they can barely keep up with demand, but during the summer months they are likely to be wishing they had more hikers, campers, and outdoor fans around.
Incentives for Merchants
If your top prospects and clients are being unresponsive, it may be time to re-think your approach and consider offering limited time incentives. This can take a number of forms, but essentially offering up extra incentives can sweeten the deal for your merchant and help get them off the fence on whether to run a deal with you. Offers like bonus exposure in your media, a better split on the deal, or credits towards future ad buys can go a long way to converting those reluctant prospects into clients.
With these tactics, you can keep your pipeline full and maintain a high level of deal quality. Be the driving force that shapes and identifies the best deals in your market and bring them to your users, who will show their appreciate for the extra effort by sharing and buying deals.
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