Supporting and Motivating 

a Successful Sales Team

PART 2

Ryan Delahanty

Executive Vice President / Sales

Gardner Business Media

In our last Perspectives newsletter, we reviewed some of the insights and experiences that Ryan shared in a MediaGrowth Excellorator interview related to helping the Gardner sales team become thought leaders for their customers with audience research and data.  In this newsletter, we’ll cover some of what he said about supporting and motivating his team.

Supporting the Team 

Once in front of busy advertisers and marketers, sales reps must lead with solutions based on knowledge of their challenges -- gained before the calls.  

To make this possible, Gardner has built its own proprietary aggregation and analytics tool (named Grow) that puts its entire tech stack (and survey results) into a reportable platform where salespeople can find all of the digital information, web stats and audience data that make sales calls successful and salespeople idea generators. 

Regular discussions on how members of the sales team are using the Grow platform and Gardner’s CRM tool encourage salespeople to experiment and share ways to use them successfully.  Successful uses are scaled across the department.  Allowance is made for individual preferences as some very successful sales reps still use long-held CRM methods, but the team is encouraged to benefit from the tools available to them.  

Ryan believes that his salespeople should be the “tip of the spear”, and own the relationship between Gardner and its customers, so, salespeople do not have assistants to help with activities such as slide deck creation. But sales territories are structured so that the team’s great relationship builders can concentrate on the company’s biggest opportunities and best relationships while the “hand-to-hand combat” of prospecting is managed by others.  

An Event Management team handles trade shows and conferences and refers event customers to the media sales team when opportunities arise. And subject matter experts are in place to assist reps when needed.  This structure has served Gardner well.

On the ChatGPT front, Ryan says you have to be experimenting with it to be considered “in the know”.  He says that the Gardner content generation and marketing teams are having some fun with it, and that it might be useful to help certain salespeople learn to write more compelling emails. He is watching as tools develop.

During the pandemic, sales reps went from about four in-person meetings per year to about five really tight virtual meetings and one large in-person meeting at the beginning or end of each media plan.  Recently, some customers seem to be opening up to short, very well-planned face-to-face meetings and some are even open to a quick lunch here and there.  Gardner reps never stop trying to meet with customers and prospects in person.

Competitions and contests are great for motivating sales folks and are used rather than tiered commission structures.  Most salespeople are money-motivated, competitive and like recognition.  Spiffs and weekly Closing competitions give salespeople visibility that they may not regularly experience.

But in addition to contests, Ryan thinks about how to help team members feel that they are connected to something bigger than themselves, and how to communicate that what they do really matters to the organization.  

When adding to the sales team, according to Ryan, personality and behavior traits count as much as sales experience.  “We look at people’s ability to overcome adversity, to pick themselves up after a bad day, and to be part of a hard-working team that is developing and growing together.”  

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