Jay Mitchell: Building a Successful Sales Team

    • 1373 posts
    March 30, 2022 10:40 PM PDT

    Thanks to our friend Jay Mitchell, publisher and editor of The Small Market Radio Newsletter, for giving us permission to share this article he wrote and included in the 03/24/22 edition of SMRN:

     

    In my consulting work with small market stations, I see—as does everybody else, and has since the beginning of time— an ongoing, never-ending struggle to build a strong, productive sales team. From my observation, different broadcasters approach this challenge in fundamentally three different ways:

     

    1. REFINE ENTRY-LEVEL HIRING SKILLS. Most radio stations have one or two veteran salespeople who account for most of the billing, possibly one or two middling producers, and that revolving-door position at the bottom of the barrel. Adept broadcasters are always on the lookout for promising candidates in their markets, whether they be floor salespeople in retail or restaurants, personable community leaders, or young people who just impress you. These broadcasters keep the pipeline full, so they don’t have to start from scratch when an opening inevitably occurs.

     

    2. GO AFTER TOP PRODUCERS WORKING ELSEWHERE IN THE MARKET. This can be costly and it can be perilous, in that if someone can be lured from one top job to yours, he/she can be lured away to another, more promising-looking opportunity elsewhere. But under the right circumstances, given the right relationship, with the “radio bug” very much in the picture, this can work out well. The sticking point is the amount of money you have to lay out to get that top producer to cross the street. But if you look at the real cost of bringing on the entry-level candidate (as in example #1), including the training and the amount of money that you have to lay out over time, knowing that it may or may not pay off, you are at least as well off, if not better, investing heavily in someone with much better odds of returning on the investment.

     

    3. GIVE UP on the rotating entry-level candidate (#1) and luring top producer to your shop (#2), and pull back to the known quantities already on your staff (plus yourself). These broadcasters have concluded that recruiting entry-level people is just too much trouble, especially since most of them wash out any way. And they can’t see themselves affording a rainmaker, no matter how big an asset that person might turn out to be.

     

    Enlightened broadcasters will employee #1 and #2, always being on the lookout for people who can improve the radio station’s fortunes. Typically, those broadcasters will comment to me that they are always one salesperson short, no matter how many they have on staff at any given time.

     

    Broadcasters who are more weary of the process opt for #3—and they inevitably see a decline in billing as a result.

     

    Regardless of the caliber of the individual sales people at a given station, it is almost always true that the more salespeople you have, the higher your billing is—including those revolving-door entry-level salespeople who don’t seem to make a contribution. In fact, sometimes those people can accidentally stumble onto a sale that has real significance for your radio station in the long run. For example, we hired a guy named Joe, who had a lot of gumption and zero experience. Joe lasted about two weeks, but during that time he stumbled into a car dealer who would never advertise with us other than the occasional public service package, and convinced said dealer to get on a very small weekly schedule —and I mean really small, like $25 or $50. When Joe left, the station manager took over the account, and within a year, that car dealer was our biggest advertiser. Thanks to Joe.

     

    I can’t tell you how many stations for which I have done projects where the billing from year to year goes up and up and up—and then drops precipitously. When I ask what happened, more often than not the answer is, “We decided to cut back on the number of salespeople.”

     

    Sometimes we encounter business people in our communities who have simply given up. They are riding it out, and are resistant to any suggestion that would improve their businesses—because improving their businesses would entail more work, more of an investment, and so forth. It’s the classic “We don’t want any more business because then we would have to enlarge our parking lot” situation. And the same is true of some broadcasters. They just don’t want to fight another round. But broadcasters who want to grow and improve and make more money embrace proactive hiring of both newbies and seasoned pros. It’s more work, and it’s more expensive initially, but it usually pays off handsomely.

     

    Which kind of broadcaster are you?