👋 Today, we’re following up on the previous email about follows up with more about follow-ups.

Multi-word sentence puns aside, let’s dive in! 🚀

We’re wading recklessly into Q4, which means you should have your eyes on Q1.

Today, our guest is Brian D’Erario, Director of Client Partnerships at Payload. Who is killing it.

Without further ado.

Over to you Brian…

It's the Most Wonderful Time of the Year (Q4)

Greetings Revenews readers! I’m Brian D’Erario, Director of Client Partnerships at Payload, a media company covering the business and policy of critical industries around the world (space, nuclear, defense). I previously worked at Morning Brew covering B2B SaaS clients and Dow Jones covering finance clients. 

It’s safe to say I’ve experienced all different types of products, clients, and situations. As I get more experience, I’m finding there are a ton of commonalities across every industry, especially in the B2B space.

I’m here to discuss the (hopefully) greatest time of the year for advertising sellers, Q4. This is the opportunity to grow your relationships with current clients and begin new ones. While it can certainly be stressful if you haven’t hit your year goal yet (don’t worry, I’m with you), it’s also time to start building your pipeline for 2025. 

I’m a person who likes to get straight to the point, so I won’t ramble too much. I’ll share three things to think about from now until the end of the year to set you up for hopefully a mega 2025 💪

Don’t Be Afraid to Ask

We’ve all been there. You’re on a call with a client, whether they be new or existing, and you ask the question, “What’s your budget for this campaign?”. The client gives you a number, likely not one that is going to excite you or company leadership, and you just thank them and start working on your plan. Maybe you try and upsell them in the proposal by 10-20%, nothing moving the needle but you’re naturally going to scrape every dollar you can.

During this proposal season, I’m suggesting you take a different approach. When you hear that number, let’s call it $50,000, position your response differently. Ask the client what a $150,000 campaign looks like. What products, audiences, events, and/or experiences would you need to have at your disposal to 3x or 5x that budget? 

The first time I did this, I was shocked to learn my client would double their spend right off the bat if we had an event at SXSW. My response? “Funny you should say that client, we were discussing internally about doing one. If you can commit to the spend, we’ll get started on planning next week.” We had no such plans but of course, but we did execute it and now have a staple event we’re expanding on this year.

The question will help you both dig up opportunities from the client they may not have thought of initially as it wasn’t in their planning for you or hadn’t thought your company was capable of. If they give a theoretical answer like “Well we were considering investing more into the podcast space, we’d be willing to give your future podcast a try”, it’s a way to provide feedback to your team on products clients would be willing to sponsor in the future.

Outreach, Outreach, Outreach

I have a saying I live by in media sales, ABO (always be outreachin’), but now is especially the time to email all potential prospects you may or may not have spoken to. 

Unfortunately, a lot of marketers in the B2B space plan their budgets around now for the entire year and seemingly set an automatic reply “Sorry we don’t have any budget for the rest of the year, love your product (do you really???) and hopefully we can work together in the future”. Well, Q4 is your opportunity to make that future a reality. 

Responses from now until Thanksgiving will likely look more like “Perfect timing as I’m planning budgets for next year, what does your calendar look like?”. Get your sequences in order and make sure everyone on the team is sending as many outreach emails as you possibly can and get on your client’s calendars (or diaries for you folks across the pond).

Bonus points: If you meet with a new client, don’t be afraid to ask if they have any budget left for this year, especially if you have unfilled inventory and can offer a significant discount. Give them as much bang for their buck as possible to have a successful test and be able to get a full budget for 2025 as opposed to a test budget.

Innovate

As I mentioned above, this is the opportunity where clients may ask for products you don’t necessarily have already. You can’t do the impossible, but I’m lucky to work at a company that isn’t afraid to try new things when a revenue opportunity arises. We’ve created products like on-demand webinars and custom events like breakfasts, happy hours, and a multi-day conference-like event strictly from client conversations. 

Don’t be afraid to share your ideas as well. We created two custom products, custom podcasts and business breakdowns, from me simply throwing it out there before we built it and seeing if clients were interested. Clients will appreciate you thinking about their business strategically and your team will be a lot more open to introducing new products if someone is willing to buy it already.

That’s it from me, hopefully you all have a great Q4.

Send me an email [email protected] if any of the above ideas work for you 🤙