SalesNewz.com

ESPN recently decided to stop selling remnant ad inventory via automated ad networks / exchanges.

“We’re heading down a path where it no longer suits our business needs to work with ad networks,” said Eric Johnson, executive vp, multimedia sales, ESPN Customer Marketing and Sales.

Sources say that ESPN would like to rally support from other publishers behind this move and ultimately tamp down ad networks’ growth. Turner’s digital ad sales wing is rumored to be considering a similar move, though officials said no decisions are imminent. (more…)

A reader asked me to explain why fewer leads are better and why “cost-per-lead” budgets fail. These are two great questions that have the same fundamental answer: quality first then quantity.

The truth is that sales people care very little about the cost of the leads we generate. What they really care about is how many of those leads will actually become viable sales opportunities.

For this reason, I think cost-per-lead measurements are irrelevant unless we can answer another fundamental question first, “What is our rate of lead acceptance (a.k.a. sales pursuit) into the sales pipeline” and then “What is the cost per opportunity?”

Sadly, I find that a lot of marketers tend focus on cost-per-lead because they really don’t know what happens to their leads after they hand them off to their sales team. This is why closed loop feedback and lead management are so important.
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