Top Tactics for Selling Subscription Data Products

Databases (and directories) are a special challenge from a subscription standpoint. If you are selling (or considering selling) a subscription to a database or

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Databases (and directories) are a special challenge from a subscription standpoint. If you are selling (or considering selling) a subscription to a database or directory, listen and learn from Russell Perkins, noted expert on monetizing data, will outline the top tactics for selling subscription products.

 

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Kathy Greenler Sexton:           Welcome, everybody. This is a Subscription Site Insider Webinar and live event with live Q&A with Russell Perkins. Today, we are talking about selling subscription data. Hello, I’m Kathy Greenler Sexton. I’m the CEO of Subscription Site Insider. Hello, everybody.

                                    For those of you who know Subscription Site Insider, you know that we focus on helping executives and managers at subscription sites run and operate their business more effectively. Today, we’re focusing on data, and we have Russell Perkins who is an expert in monetizing data. Russell, thank you for joining us today for our webinar.

Russell Perkins:           Absolutely.

Kathy Greenler Sexton:           I want to just give everybody a quick background. Russell is the founder and managing director of Info Commerce Group, which is a Philadelphia-based researcher and consultancy serving the database information industry. In addition, Russell is an author of several books, “Directory Publishing: A Practical Guide,” which is now in its 5th edition, and “Info Commerce Internet Strategies for Database Publishers.”

                                    He’s also a director and active in a number of industry associations now bundled under the SIIA, the Software and Information Industry Association; ABM, the American Business Media Association; and SIPA, Specialized Information Publishers Association. For anybody who knows Russell, he’s very well known and an expert in all things data and monetization. Welcome, Russell. I’m going to now get out of the way and let you talk about data and selling data subscriptions.

Russell Perkins:           Great. Thanks, Kathy. We’re [00:02:00] going to focus in this sort of mini session today on the specifics of selling databases online. The interesting thing to me is that selling data isn’t really all that different from selling other forms of online content. You’ll see that there’s a tremendous number of similarities out there, but there are, of course, points of difference as well. Let’s start with similarities. Again, we’re obviously all selling information. The formats vary, but the notion is that you’re selling people typically some updated continuously delivered or accessible form of information to them on a subscription basis.

                                    The real key, of course, is that you expect these people to stay with you for a long time and to renew their subscription. We’re selling what economists call our experience goods, which means you can’t really assess the value of them properly until you’ve used them, which is a really interesting thing from a marketing perspective because you have to give it to them in some format to some degree before they can properly evaluate it and put a value on it. That makes for a lot of complexity that you don’t have with a machine in a box or something like that.

                                    I think across the board probably everyone on this call is largely delivered their content electronically at this point, and while there may be some variation between B to C and B to B marketers, the initial sale on the B to B side tends to be relatively slow. It tends to be an expensive thing to make because it is that slow and you have to [inaudible 00:03:38] to an awful lot of people to make the sale. The good news about this business and the reason everyone wants to be in it these days is that renewals are much easier than the initial sale.

                                    They tend to be faster. They also tend to be extremely profitable, and we’re going to hammer hard on that point throughout the session today. Also, it’s worth pointing out that [00:04:00] our success is largely a function of those renewal rates. You can do a lot of things on the front end to get a first-time customer, and maybe they’ll stick around for a second year, but really the business is built and sustained by the fact that you’ve got customers who are going to stick with you for an extended period of time. It could be 3 years, 5 years, 20 years for some types of products.

                                    There’s a lot of commonalities here, but while at the same time I’m saying there’s so much in common, we also have to acknowledge that’s similar does not mean identical. What I’m going to do through this quick session today is just highlight some of the things that I’ve seen out there, some of the things that we’ve experienced through client interaction and some best practices that we’ve seen in terms of what it really takes to optimize the sale of a data product in the online environment. Let’s dive right in on that basis.

                                    This one is going to sound so basic and simple you’re probably saying, “I hope he gets a little more detailed than this for the rest of the session,” and I will. This one is also so fundamental that you can’t ignore it. It’s something we see a lot, and it may be particularly noticeable with data products because in many cases, these are relatively small revenue products owned by much larger publishers. What we see in those cases, is these products tend to get buried and often may end up with a centralized marketing group.

                                    The people who are doing the selling of the product tend to get distance from the product itself, which means they also don’t fully appreciate the value proposition. It’s very easy when you don’t full understand the product to revert to the safe approach, which is the start to roll off a list of attributes about the product, you know, 10,370 detailed company profiles. Factually accurate, yes, but exactly what value does it have to the potential buyer. You’ve got to get [00:06:00] down to that level very quickly.

                                    If you’re just running off data points about your data product, you’re not going to get there. We often say too that the marketers, especially when they’re centralized in a bigger company, we’ll go to the editors of the product and say, “Can you write down some information about the product? I really want to get inside of the heads of the potential buyer and all that good stuff.” The editor will almost invariably say, “I can’t write marketing messages” and refuse to do it, so then the marketer’s left in this awkward position of having to sort of guess what the product does, guess who the customers are, and go from there.

                                    It dramatically weakens the sales messaging and the value prop that you’re presenting to the marketplace. You really have to prove to prospects that the product is made for them, and the way you do that is to show specific use cases. You want to really get specific about how this product gets used. It never ceases to amaze me how that gets glossed over and generalized in a lot of the marketing copy we look at. You really want to use the language of your prospective customer. That’s one of the ways you’re signaling to them that this is really for them.

                                    If you pull it up and make it generic or load it up with marketing buzz words or just sort of generic online cool terms that are in vogue like this is a great platform and this is something that has a scalable architecture and stuff like that, it all sounds very good, but it don’t have a lot of substance and you’re not building that connection with the user. You really want to do everything you can to build not only interest in the product but confidence in the product. That comes back to you being able to talk authoritatively about your product, what you do, and what’s in it.

                                    What’s very interesting to me, and this is a key takeaway I think is that these days if you’ve got a data product that’s for everyone, it’s probably for no one because we’re really entering I think an age of specialization with data products, and it is very few that are genuinely [00:08:00] broad-based and are meant for lots of different use cases and lots of different types of users from lots of different industries. The ones that are doing the best these days are really the ones that are highly specialized that are doing one thing extraordinarily well and in those cases absolutely have to talk to their market knowledgeably and intelligently.

                                    This is just an example, and this is actually real-life copy. I took out the names to protect the innocent, but you see variants of this all the time, this sort of bland non-committal approach to describing a data product, which we’ve got a little bit of this going on. You could really put in any product name here in any industry and walk away and do something probably at the same level of an awful lot of larger publishers. My simple message to you is you’ve got to get past this. You’ve got to take it up several notches if you want to be competitive in today’s marketplace.

Kathy Greenler Sexton:           Such a good point.

Russell Perkins:           The other thing that’s really interesting about data and that distinguishes it is that it is increasingly intertwined with software these days. It’s getting fairly rare just to sell an Excel spreadsheet that you ship off to someone and they do whatever they do with it. The people who are really winning in data, the people who are making the most money have realized that I want to wrap software around my data so that my data’s more usable; it’s more valuable; people can do more things with it and guess what? I can charge more money for it as well.

                                    Increasingly, data’s just become inseparable from the software to the point you can’t tell where one starts and one ends. That’s good from a product perspective, but it’s kind of tricky from a marketing perspective because to kicks in this sort of natural inclination to want to talk about the functionality of the software over the content. That’s because the software features are easier to describe. Software tends to be arguably more tangible [00:10:00] to most people than data, but it’s harder to stand out in the crowd because there are so many software products out there.

                                    For most databases, the software you’re producing is going to look a lot like CRM software, and there’s hundreds if not thousands of CRM packages out there. You don’t want to blur that distinction that you’re just another software provider. You’ve got something that really makes you very different, which is the data that comes with the software. You want to think about the differences between software and enhanced data versus data enhanced software.

                                    You want to strike a good promotional balance and make sure that each one is getting the attention and the promotional messaging that it deserves because there’s an awful lot that goes on there, and again, what we see as natural instinct to talk more about the software than the data. That really is training for you, putting it in a whole different competitive set at that point and one where you’re probably not going to be competing all that strongly, so the data is very important. You can’t minimize the software, but you can’t minimize the data either, so the message here really is never forget to strike that balance.

                                    Another thing about … again, this is primarily true for B to B information data products, but it’s an increasingly complex sell in part because you are wrapping data and software together so you have to sell both parts, which means you have to explain both parts. They tend to get complicated very quickly. That means that free trials just don’t work as well as they used to in the past. What we see with a lot of these free trials is you give someone a week’s access or even 2 weeks of access, it’s not a function of time. It’s that people want to dive right in. Guess what? Nobody reads the manual.

                                    They’re going to jump in and they’re going to jump to conclusions as well. They’re going to miss things. They’re not going to seek the features. They’re going to figure out how to do a search and get a result, and that may be all they ever figure out, but rather than saying, “I haven’t figured it out,” they’ll say, “This [00:12:00] isn’t much of a product.” User interfaces, despite all the effort they just put into them, can still be intimidating to people who come into them cold.

                                    The other thing is a lot of data publishers really want to lock down their data and their functionality during the trial. I don’t want him stealing all my names. If he can get a search result with 3,000 records, he’s going to take all 3,000 records and they tend to cripple their systems purposely. They lock them up; they make them very hard to use; they shut off features. They don’t let you export. They don’t let you look at too many records, and guess what? The more you lock it down, the less useful the trial is. People don’t get the full experience.

                                    I’m not saying there isn’t a need to do that, but it just complicates the whole issue of a free trial for complex business software. Another thing that’s very popular these days is freemium models where some percentage of your data is made free or some limited use application is billed and people can have pretty much free access to it and do whatever they want. Your hope is that some percentage of them will see the value of getting excited about it or want to access the additional data you make available or additional functionality and they’ll be willing to pay you for it.

                                    There’s really a lot of things to commend the freemium model, but you have to be careful too that it isn’t one that automatically works for everyone. I would tend to stay away from the freemium model if your data set is too thin, meaning you don’t have a lot of information in a given record because it makes it very hard to give much of use away and still have something left to sell. You also have to be careful if your market’s too small or specialized, and you’ll especially be careful if it’s easy to backfill the information with web searches.

                                    What I mean by that is a lot of people will go use these free services, find out the 3 companies that are involved in doing [00:14:00] I don’t know, a specific industry. You’re hoping that they’ll upgrade so they can find out more about those companies, but what they do is they take the 3 names of those companies, dump them into Google, and then go off and do the research themselves so you’re not getting paid anything even though you’ve done the hard work of identifying companies for them.

                                    We’re also seeing a move of data publishers using online videos to sell, and that can be effective if you do it well because people really want a quick way to get a sense of what the product does without having to read a tremendous amount. If you’re not giving them a free trial, this is a nice middle ground to build awareness, to get some education and do it in a painless fashion. Since increasingly we’re moving away from this free trial and these increasingly expensive B to B products really don’t lend themselves as easily to e-commerce-type selling where they’re going to buy right off the website and give you a credit card, you’re really pushed thin into a position of trying to generate leads.

                                    That to my mind at least with data products is a 3-step process. You’ve got a discovery issue; you’ve got to inform and educate and then qualify the lead; then you got to get that lead to identify themselves to you so that you can make contact and then actually make and close the sale. Discovery is the first part, and if nobody knows you exist, nobody’s going to buy your products. You’ve got to get out there, and that really means getting into search engines for visibility. The simplest, easiest, and most effective trick that I’ve seen is really to take some portion of your database and that would be the most commoditized parts like the name, address, phone number, website address and literally make those available for free.

                                    The idea is to take every since listing … let’s say you’ve got 30,000 listings in [00:16:00] your database … and make each one a static webpage. Put those out. Those get indexed by the search engine, and then you get this wonderful long-tail effect that if someone is searching for ABC Company, they will often stumble across your listing because you may be the only one who’s got any information on ABC Company. They’ll come to your 1-page thing with the free basic information, but that information is also something you can think of as a landing page. You can provide the information, but you can also say, “We’ve got 29,999 other companies like these. Click here for more information.” That’s a wonderful way to bring people in and get them exposed and interested to your larger database.

                                    Surprisingly to me, it’s still underutilized by data publishers. Everyone nods their head when they talk about it, but for whatever reason, very few of them embrace it, although it works very well for everyone that I know who’s got it. I think my only caution to you is to don’t get too slick with it because the search engines have their rules, and if you get too promotional or try to do too many tricky things, they can shut you down. At the same time, it’s a pretty well-established way to promote yourself online. I’d also mention too that this shouldn’t be a substitute for having some really needy long-form content on your site, which could be 5 or 10 pages to talk about not so much selling your product, but talking about the industry is serves or how the industry works.

                                    It not only credentials you, but even though the quantity isn’t that large, it seems to do wonders in terms of your search engine ranking just to show again that you’ve got some authority and knowledge about a specific industry. These are just a few examples. I just happened to type in a company name as so many people do. I picked it at random, and every one of those that’s marked with a red arrow [00:18:00] is actually a result from a database product. These people have put in individual pages that are tied to a specific company. You’ll notice the one thing that doesn’t come up there in the first page of search results is the company’s own website, so these people have actually elevated themselves ahead of the company itself with their search engine ranking.

                                    It’s not so much that there’s massive tricks going on. It’s simply that it’s highly relevant content, and they’ve made the entire page dedicated to a specific company. Whereas, you can see in the second example a specific person, and you can do both. It tends to rank very highly. Again, if you don’t junk it up with too much promotional copy right on that exact page. This is a way to really get people who ordinarily may never find you to discover your website and learn about the larger database that you have for sale. Once you’ve got them, they’re on your website, you’ve got to inform and educate them. Remember as I said earlier it’s an increasingly specialized sale.

                                    You have to talk to them in their language. That has the benefit of qualifying them as well as you because not only are you telling them you’re an expert. If that copy makes any sense to them at all, then they’re a qualified prospect. As you probably know, you’ve got to catch their interest very fast, and that to me means don’t be vague, avoid jargon, and remember that getting too cute could backfire on you. You’ve got a limited window to engage with someone who hits your website, so you’ve got to make every second count. We think it’s very important to show use cases and benefits in that ever classic “What’s in it for me?” Messaging so that people understand how they can take this database and apply it.

                                    The old days of print directories are very much based around the notion of here’s a whole bunch of stuff. We know it’s valuable. You take it. You figure out how to use it. Thank you very much. [00:20:00] Those days where you can just push it back to the user and say, “Figure out where the value is” are gone. If you’re not actively aware of what the use cases are for your product specifically, and I don’t mean again in those glittering generalities. If you really know how people are using it, you’ve got to spell that out for them and show it right back to them how they can make money or work more productively or efficiently with your data.

                                    Another fascinating thing, which could be a webinar of its own, is how to use your API to market for you. what we’re hearing from a remarkable range of publishers is that if you have an API, you should make it available on a test basis for free because people who want you data to integrate it with their own data seem to have a strong increasing preference to test it first. If you let them play with it on a limited basis and do some programming around it so they can convince themselves they could bring it into their system and do what they want with it, obviously, you’re building a very, very strong prospect that way. A surprising number of people start with the API before they make contact with your sales force to get more information.

                                    They want to know that their data is really what they’re looking for. Finally, even though this is anathema to a lot of people, I believe in telling them the price or at least signaling the price. It’s a waste of everyone’s time if this great database excites someone; they sign up; your salesperson gets on the phone; you’ve got all this back and forth. They’re thinking they’ll spend $1,000 maximum, and you’re saying it’s $10,000 minimum. You need to get past that. If you’re negotiating prices heavily, which a lot of data publishers do, you don’t necessarily want to give away a specific price, but you can signal through hints and clues and references that this is not really expensive or this is super exclusive but very expensive. That also has qualifying effects with your prospects.

                                    With data products, again, B to B price points and the nature of the data itself, [00:22:00] typically, buying isn’t done on the spot. It doesn’t lend itself to e-commerce purchasing. That’s why among other things, you want to try and capture the e-mail of a prospect so that you can send them more information and do it over a period of time. That’s where the magic of marketing automation starts to come into play because you can send them an ongoing flow of useful information. More importantly, you can watch what they do with it. Do they come back to the website? What are they looking at? You can further qualify a prospect based on their subsequent activity.

                                    The other thing you may want to do is think about segmenting your visitors as quickly as possible when they get to the website so that you can give them much more targeted messages. There’s clever ways to do it with software now, and there’s also some very basic ways to do that. Finally, this one’s a small but fascinating point, is sometimes buyers really do want to buy on the spot. It’s amazing what percentage of people are buying because they’re desperate. They’ve got a project. They need an answer. They need to get something accomplished by the end of the month or the end of the quarter. They’ve got their credit cards out. They’re ready to go. It’s amazing the extent to which a lot of publishers hide.

                                    They’re going to leave that fill-in-the-blank web form, send us your information; we’ll get back to you at some undefined point in the future and we’ll work it out then. These people are in hurry. They want something done immediately; at the very minimum, you want to get a phone number and make sure you’re set up to take a sale when someone wants to give you that money. It really does happen in the data business. This is my bad artist attempt to simulate a homepage for a data provider, but the idea … and you’ll see variance on this on a fair number of websites now. If you have only a handful of specific use cases, some companies will actually now make you choose coming in who you are, identify yourself by function.

                                    Then from that point [00:24:00] on, you’re getting a very customized presentation or information that’s tailored to exactly what it is that you do. The message is tighter. It’s more compelling, and you can move people much more quickly towards a sale. This doesn’t work if you’ve got 1,000 use cases, obviously, but if you have a couple and they’re very distinctive, not necessarily a bad way to start to bring people into your site. As far as making the sale, you’ve got that prospect; he’s raised his hand and identified himself and said, “I’m interested.” What we’re seeing in terms of trends is that increasingly, selling is moving to live online demos.

                                    A salesperson will schedule a telephone appointment with someone. They’ll get on the phone, and they’ll walk them through an online demo during that conversation. What I like about it is it’s not only time efficient and economical, you’ve got the advantages of being able to (a) control the conversation. You can show people what you want them to see. This is a classic thing with data products where the first thing people tend to do is look up their own company, and it’s a rare data product that comes out looking good when people do that because they know the stuff that happened yesterday afternoon and you don’t, but you got measured against that.

                                    If you’re taking them through an online demo, you can’t stop them from asking you, but you can push them in all different directions and show the good stuff before they try and measure you with these really tricky tests that they almost invariably do. It’s the best way really to walk people quickly through all the different power and functionality of what you have, and you want a tight demonstration, obviously, but you can show them 5 or 6 things that they’re unlikely to discover if you left them on their own. Another neat trick that I see that works really well is you talk to the prospect on the phone about what they’re interested in; you show them how to set up an alert so they can be the first to know when X, Y, and Z happens.

                                    [00:26:00] You’re not only showing them how the alerts work. You leave the alert on, so for the next days and weeks after you’ve done the demo,these alerts are hitting their mailbox and it’s getting reinforcement just how valuable your data product is. That could be alerts. It could be canned searches. Anything that sort of pushes e-mail to them. They’ve asked for it. You’re showing them the power of the system in a very subtle but powerful way. Then the thing that’s particularly powerful about the online demo, you can say, “Give me something that you’d like to know,” and then the salesperson who’s knowledgeable about how the system works and where everything hides can take them through that search and show them results on the screen. It’s really a remarkably powerful thing.

                                    Then typically, these sales presentations are following up with a proposal with dollars and cents, and then it moves into a much more traditional selling environment where the salesperson will follow up and try and close the sale based on that. Demos are something we see that are becoming increasingly important to all this, and as the price points in particular of these go up, and they look to be very effective, and again, they’re a very time-efficient, economical way to sell. I mentioned renewals in the beginning. For a B to B data product, you really need an 80% plus renewal rate if you’re going to have a sustainable business.

                                    If you’re not achieving that, you’ve got some serious issues lurking somewhere. It could be on the marketing side. It could be on the content side, but something’s not working properly. Indeed, the best data publishers we know of see renewal rates routinely about 90 plus percent, and we know more than a few that are running in the 95 to 98% range. We actually know a couple who for several years running have achieved 100% renewal rates, so it possible. These numbers are going up and the reason is [00:28:00] that data products have become more valuable because they’re coupled with software. They’re becoming more specialized. They integrate into work flow, meaning that these people who have used them become dependent on them. It’s very hard to shut them off.

                                    This is really where all the magic of data products comes into play. One thing you want to do is avoid this reference mentality as I call it, which again goes back to the old print directory days where it sat on the shelf and people only used it when they needed something specific. They’d sort of roll their chair over and look it up, put it back on the shelf and go back to doing their work. That’s not work flow. That’s outside of work flow. You want something where people have got their hands in it. They’re looking stuff up. They’re using it. It’s helping them do their job. Those are the most powerful types of products out there today. The interesting thing is you can get yourself into the center of the action a whole number of different ways, and software is critical to this.

                                    The software doesn’t have to be yours. You could pump it into Salesforce.com depending on what it is you’re doing and get all the benefits and not have to develop any software. The point is you want people to be using your data in an environment, a software environment where they’re constantly got their hands on it and they’re doing things. That’s critical to the whole renewal aspects for data. As far as rules of the road, number 1 always, it’s probably true for all forms of subscription content, but if they don’t use it, they won’t renew it. In some ways that is probably more significant for data products because it’s so obvious if they don’t use it.

                                    It’s not like I may have read and article 4 months ago, people know because data is something that gets used, which makes it very visible if there’s not using it. Probably the worst thing you can do with a new customer is just e-mail them a password and forget about them until it’s time to renew. There’s still a lot of that going on, but the smart publishers, the ones who are getting those remarkable renewal rates, are the ones who are really [00:30:00] thinking very aggressively and proactively about engagement. What you’re seeing is that they’re making sure that they’re onboarding the customer very extensively.

                                    Not just a welcome message, “Here’s your password. Goodbye,” but helping, drawing them into the system and giving them helpful hints, getting them off to quick starts, thinking about how you can draw people into that system when they’re most motivated, which is the exact time they bought it and get them using it and get them to understand it as quickly as possible. The good publishers are involved in pushing training a lot more than you’d seen in the past. They want people to see and use the full power of the system because they know that builds that engagement and ultimately starts to build some dependence on the system. They regularly monitor log-ins in particular.

                                    They want to make sure that every customer is logging in regularly, and it’s important to have those good monitoring tools in place. You want to make sure that if someone hasn’t logged on in 30 days or 15 days or whatever you think the correct window is, that you are proactively reaching out and engaging with them to find out what’s wrong. I know one publisher in particular who found out because they sold group subscriptions and one person was the group administrator, they discovered that if the group administrator quit or changed jobs or whatever, often the rest of the company would just totally end up forgetting they even subscribed to that database.

                                    If they didn’t recover that situation and get someone else in the company to be the group administrator and start using the system again, [inaudible 00:31:38] and that’s very typical. You also want to think about how you can position yourself that people can add more users within the company because then you can move into that whole wonderful world of group subscriptions, and you have to make sure that support is there. That’s no something you can avoid. It’s not something where you can give them online help [00:32:00] and say, “We’re done.” People have high expectations. You can price accordingly, but you’re going to also have to deliver accordingly in terms of [inaudible 00:32:10] sum it up for you.

                                    I think it’s very important and very smart to think about leveraging your own data for discovery purposes. There are lots of cool ways you can push yourself into the search engines that will benefit you. You want to avoid the temptation that exist out there to talk about features rather than benefits. We’re selling these products with this enormous number of features. You want to talk about what it does for people, how it helps them. You need to talk to prospects in their own language, and 2 great warning signs. If the target market for a data product is everyone, I feel comfortable in saying you’ve got a problem. Similarly, if you ask about the primary use for your product and you hear back lots of different things or words to that effect, you’ve also got a problem.

                                    It means at a minimum that the marketer doesn’t understand the product. It means worst case that the product has either drifted or morphed or lost its sense of mission and purpose, and it’s trying to do a lot of things for a lot of people and more likely than not failing at it. Then finally, telephone selling with online demos is a powerful tested way to sell higher priced B to B subscription products. It’s the best way to show them everything you’ve got, and that neat trick of showing them how to set up alerts and reports and then leaving them on has actually proven very effective. Then you have to stay engaged with them if you want to have any hope of renewing them. You want to monitor usage and engage with them if the usage drops, and training and support cannot be afterthoughts in this new environment.

                                    It all sounds complicated and expensive, and to some extent it is, but the good news is people are willing to pay up for it and you can charge very, [00:34:00] very steep premiums for good quality, well-supported data products these days. That’s my very quick half-hour overview of marketing specifics for data products, and I think, Kathy, we’ve got some time for questions, right?

Kathy Greenler Sexton:           I think that we do, and we have actually several different questions. You really did mention throughout the presentation the difference between B to B and B to C. What are some of the top things that somebody who is in let’s say B to B versus B to C needs to understand that is a difference between those products?

Russell Perkins:           Yeah, it’s sort of a traditional dividing line. There’s actually far fewer subscriptions supported for B to C out there. Consumers don’t have a great tradition of applying subscriptions to data-driven products. There’s maybe a handful of exceptions to that. Not surprisingly, the price points tend to be a lot lower, so you do then tend to see a lot more selling on sort of an e-commerce basis. Interestingly too is renewal rates tend to go down pretty dramatically, but in the case of B to C data products, you’re really running a volume business on that base. You’re losing a lot, but you’re also replacing them very quickly. They don’t stick around for the same length of time, so there’s just some different dynamics in the customer base, but a lot of the general points still hold across both of them.

Kathy Greenler Sexton:           I would think too that with a high-volume business, you’re using a lot of automation to do what if you were a lower volume business your sales team would be doing in terms of personal touch points.

Russell Perkins:           That’s a good point.

Kathy Greenler Sexton:           Do you see that?

Russell Perkins:           Hopefully, you’re using a lot more automation because it is much more of a volume-driven business.

Kathy Greenler Sexton:           I have a question here. You keep mentioning … [00:36:00] I think this point was actually at the beginning, but the question’s about specialized data. If the data is so narrow, I mean, can you really make a business out of it? Or do you really need to be thinking of a collection of products? Or is it just putting it on a software platform and it being so specialized that that’s enough to really create a business out of that slice of data?

Russell Perkins:           Good question. I mean, being specialized in and of itself doesn’t really get you where you want to be, but if you’ve got something that people really, really want and need, I mean, we do have clients who have 75 subscribers, but they’re charging $50,000 to $200,000 a year to those subscribers for the data they’ve got. What fascinates me too is those are not databases with 20 million records in them. Some of them actually have a couple thousand records in them, but its information that’s so critically important to these people that they’re willing to pay for it. I mean, the pricing is very, very substantial.

                                    If you have something people really can’t get their hands on anywhere else, there is absolutely no question that they’ll pay up for it. The tendency is … and maybe the cost of the software that if you can do a couple functions, a couple things extremely, extremely well, you’re probably better off than just being a general purpose information utility these days.

Kathy Greenler Sexton:           Got you. I have another question about the sales process. Enterprise database sales. Are the publishers that you’re working with embracing this effectively? The way that I interpret this question is a publisher, especially if you’re doing high-volume sales, is relying on a lot of automation, but when you really cut over and you’re now starting to use that content almost as content marketing and those dedicated pages as content [00:38:00] marketing, to use a marketing term, not a publisher term, how do … ? Then those leads ultimately are being fed into a sales process.

                                    A software sales company has this highly automated highly optimized to really make sure that that lead to sale to close process is highly efficient and they really understand what levers to turn. I’m just curious do you feel that publishers are keeping up with the sophistication or are publishers still kind of ramping up now that they’re on software and leveraging these enterprise sales tools?

Russell Perkins:           I think most of them are ramping up. I only know a couple that are really doing anything that I would consider impressive with it. I think they’re starting to put them up. They’re starting to see the value. Many of them are just getting to the point where they can get that so-called 360 look at their customer and say, “What else has this person bought from us and how long has he been a customer?” Just getting organized enough to have all the basics in one place is where most of the industry is at, but I mean, it is picking up speed. I’m seeing adoption of these tools, and people are getting smarter about it, so they’re moving in the right direction. They’re certainly not leading edge.

Kathy Greenler Sexton:           You heard it here first, folks. There’s a lot of low-hanging fruit in this area for your business and your team. We’re running out of time [00:40:00]. I just wanted really to highlight what I thought was a great point that you made about the alerts post-demo and keeping that on for several weeks. It’s simple but brilliant to help support the sale, and it’s a lot of these details that I think can really help scale businesses. Just wanted to emphasize that. I thought that that was a great tip.

                                    Well, Russell, thank you very much, and thank you everybody for participating today. If you have any questions, feel free to contact Russell or myself. Our information is right there. We’ll be posting this on the Subscription Site Insider Membership Portal in approximately a day or so with a complete transcript if you need that as well. With that, thank you everybody. Thank you, Russell, and I hope everybody has a wonderful day.

Russell Perkins:           Thanks, Kathy. Thanks, everyone.

 

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