The Tampa (Fla.) Tribune knows what it means to work in a converged sales environment. In addition to its daily paper, the publisher runs the local NBC television affiliate, WFLA, and an online operation out of a single facility. It’s that convergence that drove the paper to leverage additional sales tools.

“A few years back when we started merging sales efforts, we became envious of the sales tools the TV station had,” said Bruce Faulmann, The Tribune’s vice president of advertising and marketing.

To that end, the daily implemented Matrix Solutions’ 3-D Insight app, to augment its sales operations anchored by Atex’ Mactive advertising software.

Monitors operations, performance

The Matrix app goes a step further than standard advertising apps to monitor strategic sales operations and performance by letting users view, analyze and track high-visibility accounts and thus identify possible advertiser attrition before it occurs, Matrix said.

The Tribune has used the app for about two years.

“We worked with Matrix to develop a connection with our database of billing and ordering information to customize it in hopes of being able to look at our total enterprise-wide spending at an account level, and to really manage collectively in a converged world,” Faulmann said.

Compared to standard advertising app tools that are often built from the finance perspective, Faulmann said Matrix understands and addresses the reasons why a sales manager would want particular information.

“Matrix seemed to have a good understanding of what sales managers need to get out of the information,” he said.

The Tribune’s staff was trained on the software in a 45-minute webinar. Data can be set up by sales teams and modifications to change report parameters can be made quickly and easily, the publisher said.

“We’ve been able to modify the reports to look for specific things that we wanted to target,” said recruitment manager Greg Aarons. “One of the things we use it for is to go after clients who for one reason or another stopped advertising with us over a certain period of time.”

The app gives users information that aids in targeting those advertisers and identifying possible trends or service issues that may have led them to stop advertising.

The Matrix app allows The Tribune’s sales staff to extract everyday data out of its Mactive software and generate reports detailing revenue to date.

The Tribune even began conducting weekly meetings based on ranking reports generated by Matrix.

“We can see how each client we’re responsible for is ranking in comparison to the same period a year prior, and then have the account manager let us know how they’re going to finish out for that period of time,” said Allane Taormina, recruitment sales manager for the paper.

The 80/20 rule

Aarons said The Tribune operates on the 80/20 rule — that 80 percent of business is likely going to come from 20 percent of your clients, and Matrix’ reports rank all of the clients based on the percentage of revenues of the total net.

“It’s very easy for us to go down the list to see the top 20 percent of our clients or the top 80 percent of our clients and focus on those clients to generate incremental revenue,” he said.

The Elko (Nev.) Daily Free Press recently purchased Matrix 3-D Insight, and the vendor said it also recently signed a deal with an undisclosed publishing group for three of its papers.