In a turbulent radio advertising market that has been in structural decline year on year for almost 10 years now, the Lagardère Publicité group (Europe 1, Elle, Gulli...) has made the strategic choice to move away from selling advertising space to designing increasingly diversified global offers, tailored to their customers' needs. This highly strategic change in business model is beginning to bear fruit, but it also represents a minor revolution for the Group's sales teams, who must develop specialized skills specific to "complex sales", in order to convince key account customers whose decision-making cycles are long and involve numerous players : decision-makers, internal influencers and/or intermediaries (media, advertising or event agencies)... And to move from a product/brand orientation to a questioning approach focused on "customer issues"!

Franck GODIN, Radio Sales Director at Lagardère Publicité, heads up the team of some twenty sales representatives in charge of the group's 3 flagship stations (Europe 1, Virgin Radio and RFM), and looks back on the system implemented with KESTIO to develop the skills of its sales teams. The program was subsequently extended to more than 100 Lagardère Group sales staff.

 

1. What triggered your sales training project?

Franck Godin: At the outset, our main objective was to win new customers: after a complicated period, and in a market context that has been fairly tense for media in general over the past 10 years, we wanted to grow and win new business in our market, and to do so we didn't hesitate to review our business model.

Not an easy task, given that the radio sector - although less affected than the print and outdoor media by the difficulties associated with the massive arrival of digital on the advertising market - has been experiencing a structural decline in revenues for several years.

 

We have over 500 customers. Our customer renewal rate is around a third a year for advertising space purchases, and almost twice as high for "special operations" (which include an events component, editor's note). So the stakes are high.

 

Our strategy must also guarantee our margins in order to increase profitability : this is based, among other things, on the development of new integrated offers, drawing on the rich possibilities offered by our different media brands. We are constantly creating new solutions, in collaboration with different internal teams and in line with our customers' needs.

 

The sales profession in our field has thus evolved considerably in recent years : from sellers of advertising space, sales people have become sellers of global solutions around a media brand.

 

We called on KESTIO to support the development of our teams' skills, and the implementation of this new sales operating mode : we are now involved in much more complex sales, so we had to build a different sales model.

 

2. How did the collaboration with Kestio go? What training programs were put in place?

F.G.: Initially, KESTIO was asked by Lagardère to run a sales seminar for 45 people (the 20 sales people on the radio team, plus the creative and marketing teams).

 

This was followed by a 2-day training course on the Exchequer Method for the team of 20 radio sales representatives, to "set the scene" and provide the basics of the method.

This was followed by individual coaching over a one-year period, 2 hours a month, by 4 KESTIO consultants.

This kind of sales support represents a major investment, so we started with the seminar as a first step, before moving on to training courses.

 

In the end, the project took on much greater scope : we presented the KESTIO solutions to the Human Resources department, and the training was extended to all Lagardère Publicité sales staff (press, digital and TV), i.e. a hundred employees in all.

 

 3. What objectives have you set yourself with this training program?

F.G. : The initial objective was simply to increase the sales force's ability to win new customers.

 

We then moved on to the idea of strengthening our sales teams' coverage of the "right contacts", i.e. being able to address not only the Communications Director, our traditional contact, but also other players involved in the decision or influencers (for example, the CSR manager for an environment-related event project) and of course all the intermediaries in the chain: media, creative and advertising agencies...

On some deals, we have up to 4 intermediaries or service providers involved, in addition to our customer, who each give their opinion on the final purchasing decision!

 

In addition to the number of customers, we also wanted to increase the share of "special operations" in our sales (operations that set our customers apart, but also event-based operations).

 

All this means developing in-depth knowledge of our customers, working more closely with them and gathering information on their organization and business challenges.

It's easy to say, but difficult to do, and KESTIO 's intervention helped us to progress and anchor these practices thanks to a highly individualized approach to each employee.

 

4. Are you already seeing results from these actions? What are the main benefits?

F.G.: First of all, we've noticed a real awareness on the part of our sales teams. Initially, they found the training rather confusing.

One sales rep even told me after the first training module that he felt he had to "learn to walk again". The image is strong, but there was a real destabilization phase.

 

Once this had been done, the sales team took to applying the method quite naturally. They now have a much better understanding of our customers and their needs.

We apply this method to our customers and to the intermediaries we have already mentioned, with the result that our success rate is on the rise when it comes to the famous complex devices (special operations), because we know how to adapt and react quickly to all the players in the decision-making chain.

 

 

This better understanding of our customers' challenges, combined with the diversification of our offerings, also enables us to win over new advertisers.

We are more effective in our overall sales strategy: we are fortunate to have a highly diversified range of offerings, so it's up to us to find the right solution for our customers, based on our in-depth knowledge of their challenges.

 

On a managerial level, the training has also brought about changes in our practices: individual coaching sessions based on questioning have been introduced and systematized between managers and their team members. These individual meetings are the perfect complement to team meetings.

Involving managers in the process is essential to support this transformation of sales practices. It must be integrated as far upstream as possible.

 

5. How do you see the future? What are the main challenges ahead?

F.G. : We now have a major challenge in sustaining the results of these actions: having passed a milestone in terms of special operations on the group's three stations (Europe 1, Virgin Radio, RFM), we now need to confirm these results over time.

Our main challenge is to integrate digital into our media recommendations. We have to convince our customers to use the digital levers integrated into radio programs in their operations.

 

There's still a way to go before we' re systematically using digital technology, and the prospects are real, for example with a site like Europe1.fr, which is consulted by over 5 million people a month, where we can imagine enriched and innovative content.

 

Finally, we also need to convince our customers to repeat the operation year after year, to have a real support logic. We're in a business in which customers are very much in demand, so we need to continue working on the notion of customer effort, by developing our listening skills through open-ended questions, by precisely identifying our contacts, and by being able to approach them intelligently, in short by having a more systematic approach based on the methods that KESTIO has passed on to us.

To achieve this, the sales teams will continue to pursue an increasingly "customer-centric" approach.

 

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