It's a "What if" Friday in Radio Sales
Good morning sales, it’s Friday
So here we are on Friday, January 15th in the world of radio sales. Does today look painfully similar to every other day within the last year. Your sales people stroll in for their obligatory morning sales meeting. Training may on be on tap for this morning or more likely it’s time to review the week; you listen closely as your sales people list their earlier-in-the-week targeted sales list, broken up into targeted cold calls, new business meetings and converted sales. Dam if the converted sales is never where it needs to be. You listen intently about all of the reasons why certain things didn’t happen the way the sales rep anticipated. You’ve heard it all before and before long the words blend together into a Charlie Brown non descript verbal wah, wah.
Does anyone at corporate know Albert Einstein?
What was it that Albert Einstein said, the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over expecting different results. Do you every get the feeling that this is what occurs daily in your sales staff. What is it that you need to make these Ground hog days, that repeat over and over again, breakthrough to the long await Springtime of sales. It’s Friday and I am sure your calculating how your sales revenue is tracking against the goal that you’ve been given from corporate. How you doing, half the month merry month of January is over? Do you believe in miracles,–me either? Your truth is that you have sales goals that no one believes are attainable and its driving you insane. There’s that word again.
Falling behind
If you’re lucky, you have resources to help support your efforts to reach, get close to your sales goals. But there’s no money. So you have to use your wiles and intellect to come up with better ways to do everything, but unfortunately you are doing twice as much today as you did this time last year; so no matter how good you are, no matter how smart you are, no matter how organized you are, you’re falling behind.
New ways to reach advertisers
Take a closer look at your sales team. You know there good. You just need more time and resources to support them. In our new digital world there seems to be so many more opportunities-ways to do things better and more effectively. There are, and the realities are, that most Fortune 500 companies use new methods to attract and cultivate new prospects and sales. These methods use a combination of the internet-online and traditional forms-offline tactics to reach prospects. Many of your prospective advertisers use the internet to research their advertising options before your reps have even identified them as a prospect advertiser. What happens if they decide radio is the right solution to promote their business? Do they find your station? Do they call your station? Maybe.
Reach prospective advertisers before they choose another station or media
We both know that sales is a numbers game? Imagine if you took all of the sales people that represent and sell every other advertising solution in your market and made them your station reps. Depending on the market size, the total number of reps for all advertising could range from 100 in the smallest markets to thousands in the largest markets. What is there was a way to increase the number of reps that sell your station’s advertising other than hiring 100 more reps. What if, when a business searches online for marketing direction, you knew who they were and could sway their decision to use radio over another form of advertising. What if the resources to pay for the “what if” were locked in the solution itself.
