The Buffalo (N.Y.) News is in the process of installing and rolling out Media SalesExcelerator from Excelerator Technologies.

Media SalesExcelerator is a customizable customer relationship management sales and marketing automation system that works in an open-system environment. It provides an interface between the customer, the sales force, the distribution channel and the corporation.

Heading up the project, which began in November 2001, are Tom Wiley, retail advertising manager for The Buffalo News and Shawn Joslyn, the newspaper’s co-op and sales technology manager. Both men come from a Gannett background.

The Consult module helps sales representatives develop a consultative relationship with the customer through a series of “interviews” that capture information about the client, the client’s customers, competitors, goals, etc. Sales reps can use this information to compare a specific company’s advertising investment with like companies and then make recommendations on which products to use, frequency of advertising and investment.
Photo courtesy of Excelerator Technologies

“We decided from that experience that one of the keys to creating a useful system was that it be an open system,” Wiley said. “Foremost, we see it as a sales tool, and second, we see it as the ability to get quality data to make decisions about how to manage the department.”

Key from The Buffalo News’ perspective was the potential to save its marketing services group — the presentation wing of the department — a tremendous amount of time in creating sophisticated custom proposals rather than creating a proposal several times for the same group of people.

Forging a new path

The Buffalo News (daily, 218,781; Sunday, 304,434) has taken a unique approach to the project. The newspaper composed a test team of eight people from various divisions of the advertising department to get familiar with the system and to help them work out the bugs. That test team — rather than managers or technical staff from Excelerator — will train the rest of the sales representatives on the software.

“Rather than having a group of managers sit in a room and build the entire system turnkey and then roll it out, we elected to create a group of actual users that would help determine the interface and the functionality of the software,” Wiley said.

The beta team is going through the process of determining how to best use the system as well as working through the challenges involved in merging several different databases. They are also deciphering what tools are the most functional and which are simply “bells and whistles.”

“Their input is key on how we roll this out and train the rest of the sales staff,” Joslyn said. “I really like the aspect of having the beta team because these are real live folks — not sales managers or ‘techie propeller-heads’ — deciding what’s going to work for a sales rep, both from a functionality and an interface standpoint and from a training perspective.”

Wiley and Joslyn said many discussions took place between them over pizza at lunch deciding how to approach the installation.

“There were two schools of thought,” Wiley said. “One was just to do it and one was to try to build it with the staff.”

During training the beta team has been asked for their input about what they like and dislike, and what things could be improved when the system is rolled out to the rest of their colleagues.

“That input has been invaluable,” Joslyn added. “I’m glad we’re doing it this way.”

The rollout schedule

The first modules of the system to be rolled out will be the Customer module and the Manage module. The Customer module will serve as the newspaper’s link between SalesExcelerator and the legacy data system. All billing information that exists in the business office flows into the Customer module of SalesExcelerator and gives the sales reps access to ad history and all of the other performance information on an account.

“The hope is that we’re going to be able to arm them with that information out in the field, rather than them having to call back to assistants or call back to the business office to get that sort of information,” Joslyn said.

The Manage module will be used by administrative employees and includes goals and forecasting tools.

Next to be rolled out are the Present and Propose modules. The Present module houses every slide the marketing and research department has built. The Sales Library within SalesExcelerator allows marketing research staff to update and maintain those slides and to create new slides, which reps can access instantly.

“What used to take them two or three days to get out of research, they can now get in five or 10 minutes,” Joslyn said. “They can build a custom presentation tailored for a specific customer or product and do these presentations on the fly.”

The purpose of the Present module is to give sales reps access to standard form letters so various reps aren’t giving out different versions of the same letter to clients.

The Buffalo News is just beginning to delve into the last couple of modules installed, which are Consult and Compare.

“The Consult module is really very cool,” Joslyn said. “It has a lot of potential for us to develop our sales staff into much more of a consultative sales force as opposed to just order takers.”

With that module, advertising staff can perform customer needs analysis on-the-fly. It also allows sales reps to gather demographic information about the advertiser’s potential clients, such as gender, age and income. That information can then be compared with actual demographic information about who their customers are for a specific geographic region.

The Compare module shows advertisers the effects of advertising in the newspaper medium compared with other media.

“You can pull up the newspaper and compare that against television, radio or the Internet. Eventually that will become even more product-driven but right now it’s just very general,” Joslyn said.

There are approximately 40 more sales reps to be trained on the system and about 15 other staff members, including support staff and mid-level managers. The Buffalo News plans to roll the system out team by team.

“Our target to really begin rolling this out live to people beyond the beta team is this spring,” Joslyn said. “Our goal is to get everybody up and running before we hit the fourth quarter. We don’t want to be in the middle of training people on new systems during their busiest selling time.”

Joslyn said what stood out to The Buffalo News about Media SalesExcelerator was the fact that it goes beyond performance data and presentation tools to include tools that build customer relationships by creating a knowledge database about those customers.

“You can start to teach your reps how to educate customers about the strength of newspaper advertising relative to other media … having that capability and functionality built into the system just strengthens what we’re able to accomplish with our sales staff,” Joslyn said. “We don’t want to turn good sales people into accountants and clerks who are just managing performance data on a laptop. We want them to be a sales tool.”

Wiley said he does not want the advertising department to view the new system as a way for management to monitor their performance, but as a tool to make them better sales reps.

“In the end, what we’re looking to do is create much more sophisticated sales person and differentiate our salespeople from their counterparts out in the field,” he said.

The Columbus (Ohio) Dispatch last month became the latest newspaper to license Media SalesExcelerator. The newspaper will utilize the Customer, Marketing and Sales modules of the system.