StackAdapt: What Matters in Adtech Sales

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Giuseppe La Rocca, VP, Enterprise, at StackAdapt, shares his insights this week. Three highlights:

1. The biggest change in adtech sales over the past decade is the amount of subject matter expertise salespeople now require to communicate effectively with prospects.

2. The voice of the customer is the foundation of sales and marketing. It informs the sales approach, sales training, and the marketing content that both initiates conversations and helps move them along.

3. New sales leaders should focus on three things: prioritization, processes, and people.

JZ: How have you seen adtech sales evolve in the 10 or so years that you've been doing it?

GLR: What's changed is the level of sophistication in the conversation and the pain points that our customers are dealing with today versus even two years ago. Our clean room strategy comes up in every other conversation that we have. Identity POV is paramount to anything that we do. You need to be able to go a level or two deeper.

JZ: For a DSP, what does that look like? You mentioned clean rooms. What are the types of questions you're getting?

GLR: The most important thing is to really understand customer challenges. In some cases, they're asking for us to have a clean room integration, for example, but when you get to the root, you realize it might not be a clean room that they desire.

The way it manifests at a company is in two ways. One is alignment from a cross-functional stakeholder perspective. Product strategy teams need to be bought into what the evolving customer challenges are. Then, from a hiring or talent perspective, we need to make sure we're bringing on the right individuals, and, from a sales enablement perspective, setting them up for success and evolving the training roadmap to make sure that they're able to speak to the challenges in the market.

JZ: That was going to be my next question. If you have this higher level of domain expertise that's required to do sales in adtech, how does that affect your training and hiring processes?

GLR: It’s mostly about understanding the voice of the customer. Make sure that the individual tasked with sales onboarding has those consideration sets in mind and understands their evolution. Again, it's not just about one person keeping up with the evolutionary changes of the industry, it's about the company as a whole and every organization within the company keeping up.

JZ: How does content play into efforts to show prospects that you guys know what you're talking about and you understand their concerns?

GLR: It's critically important. I would say more than anything, establishing a brand voice is key. A brand voice doesn't necessarily mean the ability to have all of these different types of conversations, but it's your approach to them. It’s about the ability to go deep.

JZ: What does that look like? Are you sending case studies? White papers? How does content precisely fit in?

GLR: I’m in build mode right now. My customer conversations are all about making sure that we're building the solutions that customers want us to fulfill or solving the challenges that customers are having. In the past, sure, you're sending case studies and things like that. Right now, for me, the focus is discovery.

As we start to build solutions from a product and strategy perspective that will meet the needs of these customers, we will in turn focus on speaking the right way to customers.

JZ: What you said also touches on the importance of the feedback loop among product, marketing, and sales. Especially if you're moving into a new segment, you're going to be learning things in real time from the customers that then you'll want to transmit to product and marketing. These parts of the business all feed each other.

GLR: Yeah, that's the identity that I've taken to all the teams I’ve led. I want us to be able to sell our solutions 360. By 360, I mean how can we come to the table with creative? How can we come to the table with marketing? How can we come to the table with product strategy? How do we use all of our assets to our benefit? But in doing so, it all starts with the right customer feedback loop.

After a certain amount of time, sometimes product doesn't get in the room with customers as often as they would like. So, providing that exposure becomes so important, not just in building the solutions for the customer but also establishing that value internally.

JZ: I like the voice of the customer as a foundation that you should always return to. Another thing I tend to find with adtech companies is that they're very excited about something in the product that their customers are not that excited about. Often that can be because they're excited about some form of technology or innovation that for the customer is a means to an end.

Let's say you have incredible creative technology. Cool. But all the customer cares about is are you delivering the results they want? The creative is just a means.

GLR: Spot on.

JZ: You've seen a lot of adtech salespeople. What would you say defines the great ones?

GLR: Yeah, three things for me really stand out. Number one, a deep understanding of the ecosystem and the workings of programmatic beyond the surface level. That could mean keeping up with the trades or digging deeper into the product. But you're able to see that in sales leaders pretty easily. Another is customer centricity — not trying to sell what's off of the truck but rather solving for customer challenges. If you have those two things and you're able to connect the dots, you're going to be an unbelievable seller in programmatic.

Thirdly, can you take a step back and see the big picture? Can you provide a vision for your accounts and for the partnership that goes beyond just the next two quarters? Together, those capabilities make for a compelling programmatic seller who could eventually become a programmatic leader.

JZ: Yeah, I hear that a lot from my clients’ customers — that what they really value is flexibility. This comes up both in terms of the product itself and the service. They get really frustrated when they feel like they're encountering tech sellers who just want to sell the version off the shelf. So, you just joined StackAdapt a couple of months ago. What are the first things you do as a sales leader to get oriented?

GLR: Yeah. I break it down into three categories. First is prioritization, the second is process, and the third is people.

Prioritization: understanding the voice of the customer, putting together our story, and working with cross-functional stakeholders in order to go to market.

The next is process: what do we need to build in order to realize the vision? And what do we need to refine if a process already exists? The first 30 days was doing just that. What processes are broken? What processes need to be created? How can we better enable sellers to go out there and be successful?

As for people, we're building an org from scratch. When you're not building an org from scratch, it's how do I ensure that I'm driving the right behaviors for our people in terms of selling itself or culture? How do I make sure that they are up to date on training or enablement? But in our case, what's most important is who are the people that we need to be able to get there, and what are the attributes and the characteristics of those individuals?

Those are the three ways I look at it: prioritization, process, and people.

JZ: I guess that goes for a sales leader, but of course, it goes for any business leader. A good framework to end on.