Toni Short on the Benefits of Geopath Training
InSite Street Media’s Toni Short provides a breakdown of how she delivers ongoing Geopath training to all employees.

When I was a beta tester of the Geopath Insights Suite, I was able to go through the entire platform and training program now available through the Geopath Learning Lab. With the information being so new at the time, I wanted to introduce everyone in my company to this essential platform that would help us grow tremendously as a business.

From the beginning, our company goal was to train everyone in Geopath, and we visited everyone and conducted on-site training. Having accomplished this, I now train all our new employees with a Geopath 101 – prior to their taking Geopath’s Learning Lab. Our new local salespeople can then hit the ground running with complete understanding about audiences so that they are able to navigate the platform and create proposals.

The process 

I start my training by providing 1:1 sessions that I developed from Geopath’s Learning Lab. During these sessions, I present the fundamentals of measurement in 6 sections:

1. Defining basic terminology
2. Impressions
3. GRPs and TRPs
4. Reach and Frequency
5. Composition
6. Indexing and Composition Analysis

At the end of each section there is a knowledge checkpoint where we discuss the most important things to remember.

Next, I jump into the Geopath Insights Suite to show our employees the interface and how to use it. Then I require each employee to sign up for the official Geopath Learning Lab training sessions – they have two months to complete the training. We confirm the last certificate with Geopath staff, and I congratulate the employee.

Market research and prospecting strategies

Another aspect of my training includes going to each of our markets and reinforcing the “Insights” using actual prospects in each market. I receive up to 3 local/regional prospects from the market. From there, I focus on the market and what the target brand/company is to put together a sample strategy for prospecting with insights from Geopath. Helping individual account executives (AEs) with the process of researching a prospect allows them to take that information and apply it to audience/demographics in Geopath and create an effective proposal to present to the client.

Connecting the dots

Another way we use Geopath, and that I make sure our local salespeople are aware of, is looking at an audience in an area that might be harder to sell vs. looking at locations or the area itself. I call this the “Lally Effect” because one of my AEs Michael Lally, was the one who asked about it.  This allows the AE to prospect for businesses that would work well for the audience in the area.

Geopath provides coverage.  We must take that information and upload into the platform we use – Apparatix – to create proposals to check availability.  We have also created training one-sheets to help navigate between Geopath Insights and Apparatix. One is steps for how to check availability from Geopath in Apparatix and the other is how to export Places POIs from Geopath into a proposal in Apparatix.

Lastly, I interact with our company through an internal group I titled “Selling Audience & Movement with Geopath Insights.” Each week, I post a new sales category and then provide the Geopath audience providing ways to apply it to local prospecting. This week it was Virtual Doctors/Telehealth. There is a variety of audiences to select from in the Insights to use in prospecting that industry.

I am also a big advocate for keeping our company informed on Geopath news – whether that be reminders to attend Training Talks or platform updates.

Ultimately, utilizing Geopath Insights to the fullest extent across our entire organization (through direct training and the development of strategic selling presentations) is helping us meet our business goals and equipping our sales staff with the tools they need to for consultant sales.