Happy Friday, everyone!
This week's poll question was prompted by our friend and sales trainer Phil Bernstein. In his latest blog post, Converting Call-Ins: Don't Miss the Lay-up, Phil notes, "When a prospect calls your office out of the blue, it may feel like you’re already 2/3 of the way to a sale.... It’s tempting to skip some of the steps. After all, they called you — do you really have to do all this work? Only if you want the money. If you haven’t followed all the steps you’d follow if you’d called them, you’re taking a huge risk." Click here to read the entire piece.
So for this week's poll question, we'd like to know:
How often does your station get calls for advertising? What's the best or most unusual call-in you've received?
Looking forward to reading your replies!
at January 18, 2018 11:13 PM PST
As the Director of Sales, I would say I get at least one call/email a week. Sometimes its non profit type events that really just want free ads but we can convert to lower cost investments. No matter what their request, my team knows to treat each call like they would a prospect they were pursuing.
I cant think of an unusual one (surprisingly lol). The best ones are the ones where they have heard from other clients how awesome radio has been for their business and want to learn more!
From Jay Smith: I've only been in radio for a year and half. I've had a handful of call ins. All were closed. They were all given my proposals earlier and just now had pulled out my card and decided to call. In some cases it was months earlier. My thoughts are always make the most of any time in front of a potential client. Always give them a card and some proposal sheet. Most, if not all still had the original sheet I gave them months ago. Just my two cents!!
at January 19, 2018 11:30 AM PST
I'm not the person who gets the calls first hand, I would guess between 1 and 5 per week. Our G.S.M. doles them out to his staff according to who he believes will best handle the lead and who has earned it due to our own initiative.
Some are people at the very beginning stages of wanting to know how radio ads could help (with no idea of cost or how any of it works.) These are fun because I get to set the stage and expectations.
At the other end of the spectrum, I will sometimes get someone that is ready to buy, has a budget approved and ads ready and then it's a different educational process. I want to know what the results are that they are looking for and how they came to the decision to use my station and a multitude of other questions and insights. Instead of just writing up an order, I want to provide guidance on how to best use what I can offer to get the best ROI and then build a potential long term relationship.
Sometimes, I will steer them away from what they think they want towards something that I believe will be a better use of their budget.
In the past couple of weeks, I've had a former advertiser that was originally a call in, come back to me 4 years later asking for my help again and with 3x the budget we worked with before. I also am now working with a call-in that I last offered a proposal to in April 2017 that is now ready to move forward.
