USA TODAY, a subsidiary of Gannett, is the nation's number one newspaper in print circulation, with USATODAY.com reaching a combined 5.42 million readers daily. Despite this scale, USA TODAY faced a familiar challenge: driving revenue in a highly competitive, rapidly evolving media market.
The Challenge
"A little over two years ago, we decided to deploy salesforce.com within our sales organization to help us with opportunity tracking," said Janet Lewis, Director of Sales Development for USA TODAY. Early rollout met resistance: "Even though we had support at the executive level, sales managers and sales makers were not enthusiastic about the program." Low adoption followed. A referral from Salesforce.com's SVP of Media Practice connected USA TODAY with Baker Communications.
The Approach
"When USA TODAY came to us, they made it clear they wanted to leverage sales manager leadership to drive sales team behavior change throughout their sales organization," said Michael Brichford, Director of Strategic Accounts for Baker Communications. Six USA TODAY sales teams took part in a multi-week engagement built around Baker's Coaching in the Cloud process, mapping sales activity back to Salesforce CRM dashboards for real-time pipeline visibility.
The Results
"I have to admit, I was pretty skeptical at first," said Tony Hill, sales manager for one of the six participating teams. His team applied new messaging to an underused market segment: "We loaded the messaging into Salesforce CRM and sent out emails to a list of new contacts. This effort yielded a full page ad in only two weeks."
"When you can send an email and it turns into $150,000 of new business in two weeks, that will sure get your attention."