Welcome to a Revenews where I hand over the reins to another ad sales specialist.

😎 Today, you’re hearing from Nick Pataro, the Director of Sales for Aysling, creators of Ad Orbit.

Introductions aside, let’s dive in! 🚀

^{Optimising Revenue with Packages}

From here on out you’ll be hearing from Nick Pataro from Ad Orbit, which is a CRM for publishers who focus on ad revenue. Over to you Nick…

In Q1 of 2024, we surveyed approximately 300 publications and on average these publishers have seen a decrease of 2.97% in advertising dollars compared to Q1 of 2023.  With ad spend largely tied to the economy and the success or failures of the advertisers themselves, what’s a publisher to do?  

Having worked with thousands of salespeople, we’ve seen it all. One of the most successful ways to orient towards value-based selling and avoiding the itemized path to a heavy discount is to deploy packages.   

The research tells us that packaging is an effective way to increase average order size, decrease sales cycle length, and increase the variety of products your sales team can sell. On the flipside, customers want transparency so they can understand everything they’re paying for and how much the seller values each item. How have we seen publishers thread this needle?  

When bundling, we follow 3 key guidelines: 

1. Provide Options 

2. Be Transparent 

3. Use Comparisons 

🥇 Provide Options. But… not too many.

We like 3’s. There’s a lot of research to show that 3 reasons, 3 options, 3 guidelines (cough cough), can be a powerful way to convey a message. Curious about the “rule of 3’s”? You can learn more here.

Good, Better, Best is a great approach. We’ve seen publishers use terms like “Dominant, Competitive, Present”. We like these because it helps the advertiser get a feel for what results each package will get them.  

A great way to increase your total package price is to use the top package as an anchor. If you’re using the “Good, Better, Best” labels, your “Best” option should be out of reach. It’s OK if this package never sells. The higher price of the “Best” package will make the other packages look affordable, will convey your expertise, and will over time help your company move upmarket. Don’t go crazy here. A 500% markup looks ridiculous.  

This should go without saying, but salespeople should tailor the contents of the package to reflect the customer’s success metrics. We very rarely see a publisher selling out-of-the-box packages at scale that make sellers and customers happy.

Building a package requires the seller to ask questions and take notes.

Contrary to the above, if you are selling lower-cost transactional products/packages (think fast food drive through value meals), having a set number of canned packages will likely increase your close rate and decrease your sales cycle.  

Back to metrics… usually success for an advertiser falls into one of two buckets: Brand or Performance. Fairly self-explanatory, but a brand play would include more awareness-type ads or sponsorships, whereas a Performance play would need tangible results at the end of the campaign (e.g. 30 leads) 

🫣 Be Transparent 

One of the downsides of selling with packages is that the buyer can no longer itemize. On one hand, customers may feel like they are paying for things they don’t need or want. On the other, packages can provide a better buying experience and increased margin for the business overall.

Here are two examples to put you in your customer’s shoes:  

• You book a hotel room for $400/night. It has $10 bottled water in the room. You might think $10 is ridiculous for a bottle of water and you avoid it like the plague.  

• You book a hotel room for $410/night. Bottled water is included in the price. You don’t even think about the cost of the water. You might not even drink it, but you paid for it because it was packaged.  

If I bought the “water included” hotel room, I wouldn’t feel nickel and dimed even if I did pay more overall.  

Being transparent can be tricky. The best packages shed enough light on the details, so the customer feels like they are being provided plenty of value for the cost of the package, without getting into the nitty gritty of what each item costs.

Our favorite approach here is to use an itemized product table with a pricing summary at the bottom. 

🖇️ Use Comparisons

The tactic we’ll end with relates to how a salesperson might pitch these products. One of my favorite tactics to use when prospecting is to take a current customer and find a list of their competitors.

Open the conversation with a mention of the current customer (assuming you have permission to do so) and share some of the benefits this customer has realized by partnering with you. Don’t give away any trade secrets but share enough to get the prospect interested.  

When you get to the proposal stage, bring the customer back up and say something like: “ACME CO went with a similar package to the Competitive Package here. It’s different but similar. If you’re looking for a similar outcome, I’d recommend that one.”

The great thing about media is that once an ad is published, it’s basically all out in the open. The prospect advertiser could get this info if they did the research, so you’re not really giving anything away.  

Deploying packages isn’t a silver bullet, but when used correctly, packages might just be the solution you need to make up for some of the downturn we’ve seen. 

For those of you who are interested… Ad Orbit helps hundreds of publishers sell, deliver, and bill for advertising revenue. The contract-to-cash platform combines a Customer Relationship Management (CRM), Order Management System (OMS), ad ops workflows, and billing automation to enable revenue teams to reach maximum effectiveness.

This is not an ad.