CLIENT: B2B publisher, Web site and event company
CHALLENGE: Publisher covers a variety of complex finance and technology topics that are undergoing dramatic change as a result of global financial crisis, mergers and rapidly changing product offerings. Due to recent restructuring, company’s sales team generally young or new to the financial/technology marketplace and needed to be brought up to speed quickly without feeling patronized or sitting on long training sessions.
SOLUTION: By working closely with senior editorial, sales, marketing and research department heads, we developed for the sales team a series of quick- read internal white papers on the publisher’s key editorial (and conference) topic areas. The papers helped sales reps get quickly up to speed on complex endemic topics and helped them uncover hidden leads and product categories that had been previously overlooked.
RESULT: Produced nearly 10-fold increase in qualified leads; improved initial lead to RFP time by 70% and helped publisher maintain ad page count during 2008-09 recession when peers were down on average 15% to 30%.