Sales Council Network Means Better Business

The Sales Council is a network for sales managers within Bonnier. The council has some 10 members who meet four to five times a year to exchange ideas and experiences and discuss issues that they face.

For TV4's sales director Michael Grimborg, who has been the chair of the council for the past three years, the most important aspect is the networking.

"Meeting and keeping in touch is the most important thing," says Grimborg. "If something happens it's so much easier to pick up the phone and talk to one another. There are more similarities than differences among the different sales organizations, even if they're run in different ways. And we face more or less the same challenges."

As chair, Grimborg has responsibility for the content of the meetings and keeping up with what's interesting for the group to talk about. He often invites guest presenters, from media agencies for example. But it also means a lot of sharing experiences and best practices with one another.

"We always start by going through the different businesses' development, to look for similarities and differences," says Henrik Stangel, sales director at Dagens Nyheter and one of the members of the council. "Then we usually have different themes, such as methods of measuring media, business discussions with differnet partners, business development projects, etc. We have even had meetings where we highlighted various organizational issues and methodologies for building expertise in sales and sales culture."

Stangel thinks that the network provides tangible benefits in members' daily work.

"We also get the opportunity to compare ways of working, methods and organizations with the purpose of being more effective and powerful," says Stangel. "The organizational questions we have within the companies tend to be very similar. We're now in somewhat different development phases, but that's only good since we can share and benefit from each others' experiences. The differences are more in the businesses' volume of trade. The purely commercial issues are more different depending on whether we're talking about a main media or complementary media."

A challenge ahead for the council is to combine the different possibilities that each company and media channel has.

"We have a sales side that still buys advertising very traditionally, and the future is very complex when it comes to putting together different opportunities for exposure," says Grimborg. "Somehow we need to find a way to sell it all. It's a lot about creating and selling concepts instead of single ads and TV spots, this is where we can make a difference in the way of getting the best results for the customer."