The sales team at SQUIRE knows barbershop owners buy products based on two things: trust and advancement.
“We ask ourselves, ‘Do our shop owners trust us enough with their businesses? Can they see their success propelled by our offering?’” said Frank E. Garcia, director of global sales.
In order to build this sense of trust and progress, the company partners closely with each of its customers, gathering feedback in an effort to continuously improve. Garcia added that his team even attends barbershop industry events and conferences to gain greater insight into common challenges and trends.
“We’ve found that this approach allows us to remain agile, attuned and organically responsive,” he said.
Staying up to date on market shifts isn’t only applicable to the barbershop industry. According to Clelia Zattoni, director of sales operations and marketing at Madhive, her team helps businesses succeed in TV advertising by monitoring seasonal trends with the potential to impact ad inventory and campaign delivery.
Zattoni said her team has also invests in creating thought leadership content outlining connected TV best practices for local advertisers, which is an often overlooked yet promising segment of the industry. Upon uncovering the significant value of the local ad marketplace, her team partnered with a local advisory service to develop a white paper educating customers on the growth opportunities available in the CTV landscape.
For both Zattoni and Garcia, adapting sales strategies requires both strong partnerships and careful research. Built In NYC caught up with these sales leaders to learn how they tailor their approaches in order to help reps succeed.
Madhive provides infrastructure to power end-to-end streaming TV advertising, enabling advertisers to plan, target, activate and measure campaigns.
What are some ways your team stays on top of trends or market conditions that may impact your customers?
As viewership on streaming platforms rose in recent years, we realized broadcasters needed an adtech solution to help them reach these new audiences. As a result, we found success in helping local broadcasters transition from linear TV to streaming.
One key to our success has been creating thought leadership on connected TV best practices for local advertisers. While there’s a lot of advertising content dedicated to national advertising, we’ve found that local advertising is often overlooked. We recently partnered with a local advisory service to develop a white paper educating our clients on the growth opportunities in the CTV landscape. Our research showed that the local advertising marketplace would be valued at $167.4 billion in 2022. While TV and cable earn a share of local video ad spending, the momentum is shifting to digital video ad formats.
How has Madhive adapted its sales strategies recently in light of market shifts?
Since our platform is customizable, we take a consultative approach to understand how our clients currently go to market and where our technology can add to their existing offering. We recently worked with a local broadcast company that was competing against cable and radio companies for local ad dollars. We looked at their tech stack to understand how we could easily and quickly add CTV to their existing platform. We were able to integrate with their order management system and data providers, helping them grow their revenue by 600 percent year over year.
We also know it’s important to stay ahead of seasonal trends, especially those that will impact ad inventory and campaign delivery. For example, during the 2022 election season, we created a task force to monitor the implications of political ad spend on our clients’ campaigns. Our content series helped our clients navigate the impact that the forecasted $8.8 billion spend would have on local media.
We also know it’s important to stay ahead of seasonal trends, especially those that will impact ad inventory and campaign delivery.”
What impact are these new strategies having on the success of your reps?
While we scaled quickly within the local broadcast media space, we’ve recently started to see traction with direct brands and agencies. This success is a result of our educational approach to sales relationships and how we’re able to show our clients the additional revenue they can unlock using our technology.
We’re now seeing a market fit with companies that are rich in first-party data, but have limited experience in streaming TV advertising. For example, we’re working with a leading travel and tourism platform, which has seen the limitations of traditional TV — waste and lack of transparency — and is excited to push into CTV with a granular digital-media approach.
We also recently worked with a well-known software company that wanted to measure brand lift and acquired customers. The company approached us to leverage CTV advertising, and we created custom reporting and assessed the impact of advertisements on perception, purchase intent and overall brand awareness. We achieved an 8.6 percent overall increase in brand awareness and a 2.1 percent increase in purchase intent, driving upper and lower-funnel impact with CTV.
SQUIRE’s platform supports barbershop owners by connecting them with customers, offering insights into their revenue and enabling them to manage every aspect of their business.
What are some ways your team stays on top of trends or market conditions that may impact your customers?
We consider ourselves partners in the success journey of our customers. We take their feedback to heart, particularly what features they find most intriguing and other features we could finesse. This helps our team identify opportunities to improve our offering and better meet the needs of our barbershop owners.
Attending industry events and conferences provides valuable insights into the barbershop industry’s latest trends and emerging technologies. Our team stays connected and up to date on the latest developments by immersing ourselves in the barbershop industry. We’ve found that this approach aligns us with the cultural center of the barbershop world and allows us to remain agile, attuned and organically responsive.
From a pre- and post-sale perspective, we continually seek to understand their needs, pain points and efficiency gaps. This helps us identify any barriers in our processes at any point in the sales cycle, which we address swiftly.
How has SQUIRE adapted its sales strategies recently in light of market shifts?
As barbershops try to operate efficiently and maximize profits, our team emphasizes how our software can help automate their repetitive tasks, reduce administrative burden and improve overall operational efficiency. For example, we’ve helped a barbershop remove the need to spend 40 hours each week calculating commissions. Our system calculates commissions across all locations and enables swift and accurate payouts, so now, they’ve been given time back in their week and can refocus their efforts.
Exceptional customer support needs to be consistent amidst any market shifts. Timely responses to inquiries, personalized assistance for troubleshooting and technical issues, and a world-class onboarding and customer success team allow us to be a reliable partner in our client’s success journey.
Exceptional customer support will need to be consistent amidst any market shifts.”
Even during the pandemic, when safety measures became more important than ever, we pivoted with new standards and ensured our platform prioritized safety, touchless check-ins, virtual waiting rooms and health waiver forms. This helped our shops operate and abide by county and state regulations as the necessity arose.
What impact are these new strategies having on the success of your reps?
Our strategies are driving customer loyalty, generating positive reviews, increasing sales and creating a competitive advantage. We’ve had a number of barbershop owners join us with one or two locations, and now they have 20 or more. Due to the tireless efforts of our account management and customer success teams, we’ve had brands with more than 150 locations remain and thrive on our system.
It’s exciting for us to watch our clients grow and see how seamlessly they can open additional locations utilizing our tools and features. With our startup mentality, we’re committed to remaining vigilant and agile. Should internal or external changes require new strategies, we’ll respond appropriately and timely. We’re committed to being the future of barbershops.
