Revenews
Posts
The guide to bigger deals

The guide to bigger deals

Secrets to long term partnerships

Dan Barry
October 09, 2023

Welcome to edition number 4️⃣

Because you’re selfish & crafty businesspeople, a few of you have asked how to sell bigger deals, so that’s the topic of today.

Biting the hand that feeds me aside, lets dive in! 🚀

Dos and don’t for selling long-term campaigns
Email Magic
Scale to millions, and other great reads/listens
A joke any dad would be proud of

How do I sell bigger deals ?

There are various way to increase your deal sizes, we’re focusing on the sales aspect. So that excludes growth-related things such as increasing subscribers, send frequency, open or click rates. Although they are just as important, if not more!

So, in no particular order…

🤝 Trust

Building trust with prospects is crucial, including trust in (1) the company, (2) the individual, and (3) the product/campaign. Here’s are some quick fire ways you can build trust in each:

Brand awareness, if they know you they’ll trust you more. Are they subscribed? Do you have clean reputable looking branding? Do you have a large audience?
Be confident and portray competence. You want to establish yourself in an expert in the field, the field is your niche, your audience, and creating campaigns that kill it. Get prospects on calls, or even better, meet them in person. Make sure you have a good camera, mic, and wifi connection.
Impressive case studies of recognisable/reputable brands in your niche. Include specific testimonials from happy partners if possible. Passionfroot offers a great feature to showcase testimonials on self-serve pages.

Referrals are great. Having a happy customer, or good friend recommend you/your company as a trustworthy publisher will make closing the sale much, much easier. Personally, I think referral schemes in the newsletter ad setting can look a little yuck. But I have seen happy partners/friends leveraged effectively, when it’s done well.

Focus on selling to brands that spend a lot in newsletters, they’re likely to have seen good results, and generally trust newsletters as a marketing channel. WhoSponsorsStuff, makes it a lot quicker and easier to find them

It goes without saying that when someone trusts you, they’re more likely to be willing to spend money with you.

🏢 Enterprise clients

In danger of stating the obvious, bigger companies have bigger budgets. That includes experimental marketing budgets, which is what you’ll probably be tapping into. However, decisions come under much more scrutiny, enterprise deals are MUCH harder to navigate, and generally require working via agencies. Which is a whole topic in itself.

Getting a foot in the door is much harder, yes, cold outreach can work, but it often becomes pretty ineffective. If you’re targeting large corporations, they’ll likely have security systems designed to block your emails.

In a simplified nutshell, there are a few things you can do to bag household-name brands:

Have a super large, or super niche audience. That should help catch their attention.
Go to conferences and events. Pick the ones that your target brand will be sponsoring or attending. Book meetings ahead of time.
Use your existing network, ask for introductions from IRL friends who are connected to your target company. You’ll be surprised how effective this can be!
Leverage your social following or subscriber list. Employees at target companies are 10x more likely to respond if they like your content, use this to get a foot in the door. Just make sure you’re compliant (beware GDPR 🇬🇧), and you’re doing it in an appropriate/non-invasive way.

👂Ask before you pitch

As traditional sales ethos dictates, during the pitch, you should be listening more than you’re talking. The first half of the conversation should be you asking the prospect relevant questions to unearth their ideal customer profile (ICP), focus, KPIs, and so on.

This also applies to their marketing budget, or how they like to approach marketing in news channels. Yes, most brands like to start as small as reasonably possible, but if you assume that and start talking about a ‘test package’ you might miss out.

For example, I was talking to an advertiser once, and asked, “How would you like to approach a campaign, in terms in the number of touch-points or timeline?”

They responded with, “looking at the audience & pricing, a 6-month campaign makes sense”. Had I started talking about a 1 month package, they likely would’ve rolled with it, trusting that I know best. At the same time, had I presumptively pitched a large campaign without asking , it’s possible that this could’ve rubbed them up the wrong way.

Questions first.

🤿 Deep Dives

I’ve noticed a recent trend that a few advertisers are mainly (or only) interested in deep dives. From their point of view:

It offers much higher engagement
Often can be evergreen content
Generally speaking they’ll result in higher quality leads & customers
Once created, they’re an asset which they can re-use and repurpose

Deep Dives are a great way to add value to your partners, and also generate higher deal size. You can charge at least twice as much for a deep dive vs a standard sponsorship. There are a few variables to consider:

Will it be a dedicated email? If so make sure it’s done appropriately, otherwise readers may get annoyed!
Will it be gated, or open?
Who writes the content? You should at least edit the content to your tone of voice.
Will it be part of a larger campaign/package?
What brands will be interesting to your readers, and not betray their trust.

⚓️ Beware of Anchoring

Anchoring is a psychological concept, it is a cognitive bias that causes us to rely heavily on the first piece of information we are given about a topic. This is used a lot in sales/marketing, especially around pricing.

The obvious way to use anchoring is to aim high with your pricing, which you may be doing already, in your pitches or media kit.

A less obvious aspect is the package size, or number of touch-points. If you are communicating your pricing as “1x sponsorship costs $1,000, which decreases with scale.” You are immediately putting the idea of (a) $1,000, and (b) only running 1 placement, in the prospects mind.

However, if you were to phrase it this way, the outcome is likely to be quite different: “A package of 4 placements is $3,600 and 8 is $6,400. We recommend trying at least 4 touch-points to iterate the copy and fully introduce the brand. If you’d like to do a standalone send we can do it at $1,000.”

Anchoring is an inescapable fact in any sale, or exchange of information. So you may as well use it to your advantage!

💰Increase your pricing?

Figuring out how much to charge can be a bit of educated guess work. Raising pricing per sponsorship is an obvious way to increase deal size. I would be hesitant to increase pricing until you’re almost sold out, and closing is not uphill battle for you.

I’ll probably do a full edition on pricing, but here’s a quick overview:

Always aim for flat fee
Base that flat fee on a CPM of unique opens
Newsletter CPMs can vary from $10-$200+, depending on your scale, niche, or audience value. On the cheap end, broad & low quality audiences, vs niche/powerful engaged audiences at the high end. Figure out where you think you are.
When you’re small and under $1,000 per sponsorship, the media buy comes under a lot less scrutiny, meaning you can ‘get away with’ higher CPMs.
Let me know if you’d like a full newsletter on pricing!

Here’s a good article by Paved. And one by Swapstack.

🥊 Avoiding 1-hit-wanders

Don’t be like this guy.

Campaigns with only one touchpoint are not ideal, for both sides. The advertiser is less likely to see the results they’re looking for, and you’re obviously seeing less initial revenue.

A lot of advertisers will prefer to test a single sponsorship, understandably so! It’s their job to manage risk, especially on untested channels. It’s not always possible to convince someone to go above 1 send, but you can try:

Discounts? Of course, you can offer a juicy discount on doing 2/3/4, making it economical for them. It’s not ideal, but can be very effective. Make sure you mention that it’s a discount ‘to get this off the ground’, and they shouldn’t expect it to happen all the time.
By being honest, building trust, and being the competent sales person that you are, you can instil the confidence in them to go above their testing budget policy.
Focus on the WHY. That is, why you recommend multiple sends e.g. copy angles, trust building, complicated products, performance, using previous case studies, and so on.
You can mitigate their risk by stating that you’ll offer make goods. This can be effective, but be careful, you don’t want to put yourself in a never-ending black hole of promised clicks. Only offer make-goods for top funnel metrics you’re 99% sure will be hit.

Marketers know that it typically takes numerous touch points to drive conversions, especially for B2B leads (good article on this). Although newsletters do convert higher than ‘traditional’ digital media channels, which is what makes them great!

Bonus: Build trust in your pitch. Mention something which is obviously against your own sales interests, but won’t fundamentally jeopardise the sale. For example, you could say:

“Not every subscriber is going to be a potential customer, but the ones that are, are approximately X%. We can craft an awesome campaign that will resonate with these readers. It’s up to you to crunch the numbers and see if the economics work for you.”

Honesty is always the best policy!

🙃 Inbox Banter

How do lumberjacks check their email?

They log in.

Cheers!

Dan,