The Leadership Letter

Real correspondence from the people running real companies — and what it reveals about leadership.

When Your Sales Team Can't Explain a Gap, You Have a Strategy Problem

If your frontline can't answer the obvious question, the problem isn't training — it's that you haven't decided what you actually believe.

I hope all is well! In speaking with Shane yesterday, we both agree that our sales team is still having some difficulty addressing the following question from publishers: 'the only reason we are considering header bidding is because DFP / AdX does not allow other SSP demand sources to bid in real time — why don't you allow this / have you any plans on allowing it so we can better maximize yield?' The training last week was FANTASTIC and provided a ton of value to the team. However, this question was not addressed and tends to be the 'elephant in the room'. I have seen the teams lose credibility when they cannot answer this question well and I worry we are not giving consistent and accurate info to our partners.

The sales team needs to better understand our stance (and have a company approved message) on why we do not currently offer dynamic integration with other SSPs (i.e. Rubicon). I polled a few senior vertical leads, revenue account managers and SPLs and no one had a great answer to the question — 'we are only doing header-bidding to max yield across multiple demand partners, we would not do this if DFP had this capability — why don't you?' I believe we should arm the sales team with a 4-part response: (1) Empathy — explain that we understand the quickly changing market dynamics; (2) Capabilities — what we have built to protect publisher data and drive max revenue; (3) Why no dynamic calls today — tech, policy, or product prioritization issues; (4) Things to consider when choosing to adopt header bidding — latency, data leakage, complexity. I fear we are not being as effective as possible when having these conversations today and I worry about losing trust with our partners.

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Court Exhibit
United States v. Google LLC (Ad Tech)
1:23-cv-00108 (VAED), Doc. 1247-10, filed 2024-08-24
November 11, 2015
Public domain
View the primary source →