Toby Cook, Chief Sales Officer at Opoint, has sold news for more than 25 years, from licensed feeds on trading desks to web-crawled data for compliance teams. We asked him what that history taught him about buyers, and why he wants his team to be news experts first and salespeople second.
Key takeaways
- “News” means different things to different buyers, so a good vendor starts by asking what you need it for.
- Opoint’s data answers three questions: what was written, where, and when. Deciding which story matters stays with you.
- Source count affects risk. Opoint’s index covers more than 250,000 sources, against the few thousand a legacy screening setup might use.
- To test a vendor, describe your goal first, then ask what their product is bad at.
How did you end up selling news?
After university, I sold data solutions to the insurance market, including Lloyd’s underwriters. Two years in, I knew most of the financial buyers in the City: insurers, syndicates, banks and asset managers.
Then I moved to NewsEdge, one of the first vendor-neutral companies selling real-time news software to the trading market. I loved it. You could watch the world’s news come through the feeds as it happened. Thomson bought us in 2002, and I went on to lead the strategic accounts group, then account management across EMEA, with teams in London, Copenhagen, Paris, Amsterdam, Frankfurt, Brussels and Sydney. In 2007, NewsEdge was bought again and I became managing director of the UK business.
All that time I sold news. General business news, specialist financial wires, regulatory announcements, niche pharmaceutical news. My customers ranged from government bodies to individual traders. You’d be surprised how granular the news market is!
What brought you to Opoint?
A redundancy in early 2020, a week before lockdown. It didn’t feel like a gift at the time, but it changed my career for the better. I started consulting, and I met Opoint.
I’d long thought that if you combined the best crawler with aggregated licensed news, you’d have something special. It became obvious quickly that Opoint had the best news crawler I’d seen. They knew the media monitoring market well, but not where news data could be valuable beyond it. I knew almost every other use of news except media monitoring. That made us a good fit.
I joined in 2021 to help find those markets, and there were plenty. Risk was the obvious place to start, beginning with KYC and AML companies. Selling the best solution to a market that incumbents had let down turned out to be fun. For many of them, news is a small part of a long product list. For us, it’s all we do. If you only make shoes, you get very good at shoes. If you also make trousers, hats and umbrellas, your shoes won’t be the best in the world. We make damn good shoes.
If you only make shoes, you get very good at shoes!
Toby Cook, Chief Sales Officer, Opoint
What can you spot in a customer conversation because you know the news industry?
That the word “news” means different things to different people. Most customers don’t even say news now. More often we get asked for adverse media, which just means “bad news”. Shit happens, and we can’t stop that, but we can tell them as soon as it happens. But news is not the same thing for any two organisations, so you must understand exactly what the client needs.
Do they want press releases because they’re tracking a company’s marketing and announcements? Or regulatory releases, because they follow trading entities and takeover disclosures? Are they watching competitors, or R&D, such as new products and chemicals that could matter to what they make or trade? Some customers want disinformation kept well away from their data. For others, disinformation is the business.
Even two companies doing KYC and AML won’t define adverse media in the same way.
So Opoint doesn’t ship a universal adverse media flag.
We give customers the tools to define it themselves.
If we don’t understand that, we can’t sell news. News isn’t a box you ship.
Tell us about a time that news knowledge, not sales skill, won a deal.
Honestly, it’s most of them. My colleagues will tell you I’m alarmingly honest about what Opoint can and cannot do, because integrity matters more than anything.
If a prospect has a project with ten requirements and we can’t do one of them well, I tell them that first, every time. If I don’t, I damage the trust for the whole relationship.
People have said that my willingness to say “no” or “you shouldn’t do that” sets me apart.
I see it differently. You get the negative out of the way, so the rest of the conversation can be about what we do well, with nothing hidden.
The same goes for incumbents. If a provider already does a job well for a customer, I’ll say we’re an addition, not a replacement, and that they should keep working with them. And if there’s something another provider does better than we do, I’ll tell the customer so, and who to talk to.
What do compliance and FinTech buyers most often misunderstand about news data?
There are two things.
First, some expect us to tell them the one story that matters. We can’t, and no news aggregator can.
We are best at three things:
- What was written, exactly as it was written, with no AI or summarisation.
- Where it was written.
- When it was written. Point-in-time matters enormously.
Three simple things, but with market-leading accuracy.
What we won’t do is tell you what to think about news. We give you the raw data. Our filters might narrow it to 20 stories, but the last step, picking the one that matters to you, has to happen on your side. We have hundreds of customers, across numerous industries, who each define relevance differently. There is no “one size fits all”.
Second, some buyers think the legacy approach of screening against a few thousand sources is enough. Our index now covers more than 250,000 sources. That makes it far more likely you’ll find the story that stops your company appearing on the front page of the FT for the wrong reasons. A setup that is orders of magnitude weaker is just that: orders of magnitude weaker.
What does it mean to be news experts first and salespeople second?
It starts with integrity. I have no room for a lack of it in my team. I want everyone to understand what they sell, so they can have a proper consultative conversation. The customer should leave having learned something, whether or not they buy. If they do, they’ll come back next time they think about it, and we get another bite of the cherry.
That’s what I mean by consultative. Our people advise on the technology, such as crawling, feeds, XML and JSON. They also advise on the content itself and who to speak to, whether that’s crawled data, licensed feeds or a referral to the right publisher or rights holder.
It suits a customer-focused Scandinavian news company like ours. We aren’t set up as a team of sharks shooting from the hip. We want long-term revenue, and that only happens if our data works properly for the client: the right data, at the right time, in the right form, making their business better. If it doesn’t, we won’t be their partner for long.
If you were buying a news data feed, how would you test whether the seller understands the market?
Get them on a call and describe what you’re trying to achieve. Then let them tell you what they have and how it helps. It becomes obvious quite quickly whether they know what they’re talking about, or whether they’re trying to sell you the one thing they’ve got.
Then ask them what their solution is good at, what it’s bad at, and what you should be aware of before you buy. There’s plenty you should know before buying from us, and some of it might put you off. We’ll tell you anyway.
Also expect it to be tailored. We barely have a couple of customers on exactly the same set-up, because there are so many ways to slice up to 3.5 million articles a day. Most customers don’t need all of it, and a good vendor will help you work out which part you do.
Related reading: our guide on how to choose a news data provider.
How has the news data market changed,
and where is it going?
Beyond recognition. When I started selling news in 1999, most news sites didn’t exist. For my first 15 to 20 years, I sold licensed feeds, five or ten sources at a time. Then came aggregated licensed content: a few thousand sources in the style of a legacy news aggregator. Then many suppliers moved to licensed feeds plus web crawling. Today, most of Opoint’s content is crawled, but with a significant licensed subset.
Today, AI is the big challenge to the news market. AI has many promising capabilities but is seen as an existential threat by many news providers. Opoint is firmly on the side of news creators, and we are positioning ourselves as part of the solution, not the problem. Our promise is what, where and when. Put AI into that equation and you risk losing accuracy. So, we don’t. We push valuable users to the sites.
Opoint has a team of experts who select which sites we monitor. We don’t entrust this job to AI bots. We tell you exactly what was written, and we don’t interpret, translate, or AI-summarise anything. Ever. We push customers to the original URL, not via a redirect.
Quick-fire round
The best question a prospect has ever asked you?
“How do you handle copyright?” It’s the hardest question we get, and it’s also the best, because we have a really good answer. I like difficult questions, especially from lawyers and smart people. The harder, the better.
One thing every new rep reads in their first week?
If they’ve got time for a quiet read, I’ve done something wrong.
What do you say when you don’t know the answer?
I say I don’t know, then I find out, or I find someone who does. People often mistake me for a techie because I’ve answered the same technical questions a hundred times. I can parrot an answer well enough that someone says, “I didn’t know you were technical.” Then they ask the next question and I have to admit I’m not. But I know someone who is!
Five questions to ask before you buy news data
These come straight from Toby’s answers above.
- Can I describe my goal first and hear what you have, without a pitch for the one thing you sell?
- What is your product good at, what is it bad at, and what should I know before I buy?
- Can I define relevance (or adverse media) myself, or do you ship one fixed flag?
- How many sources sit behind the feed, and who chooses them?
- Do I get what was written exactly as written, plus where and when it was published?
Bring your hardest requirement
At a data walkthrough, Toby’s team will tell you what Opoint does well and where it doesn’t fit.
Frequently Asked Questions
Does Opoint tell customers which story matters?
No. Opoint delivers the news data, filtered to your criteria. Your organisation chooses the story that matters, because customers define relevance differently.
Does Opoint summarise or translate articles with AI?
No. Opoint delivers what was written exactly as it was written, and links to the original URL, not via a redirect.
