Radio Sales Café

Happy Friday, everyone!

 

This week's poll question was prompted by an email from Jim Seemiller of Flagstaff, AZ, who wrote, "Would love to hear your thoughts on this, the radio business is trying to re-invent itself with a whole set of sales items to increase revenue, the website, streaming, text message campaigns, facebook and twitter, and yet with all these new selling features, we are not seeing any real growth of revenue. So, why are these new marketing tools not yielding the revenue that station operators thought they would?"

So here is this week's poll question, in three parts:

1) Are you using a website, streaming, text message campaigns, Facebook, and/or Twitter, to increase your station's revenue?

2) If you are, are these selling features yielding the revenue you expected?

3) If they are not yielding the revenue you expected, what do you think is the cause?

 

Looking forward to reading your replies!

 

Radio revenue was up 6% last year with the digital component up 24%. I believe that the new focus on local digital dollars (Groupon etc) is helping radio grow both its digital sales and traditional sales because digital is growing the local pie. I think you will find that well-trained reps can sell anything so if stations are not meeting goals, they should look at how reps are trained to sell digital.

It doesn't matter what you have to sell; radio, TV , Print , Digital, if you don'n have enough well trained sales people.

 

If you want to double your revenue , double the number of well trained sales people and teach them to sell the product you desire.

Adding new products with out adding the people to sell them will result in existing sales people just diverting their attention from what they have been selling and they will start selling the new product, thus keeping revenue flat.

Most radio stations need twice the sales people they currently have on staff, especially if they are adding new digital products.

Al, this is a major key, training rather than here it is go sell it approach....totally agree

Same response, more and better trained, I actually created a separate sales staff for the Digital Platform and had much better results

Jim: A simple answer from me. Yes we do. No it doesn't. Because we don't work it enough!

Roger, thanks for the absolute honest answer, would love to take a secret poll and see actually how many folks have the exact same answer that you gave...we are running an ad on radiosalescafe home page for a webinar to do some training in this area, it is free, might be worth looking into

Jim, greetings. Yes we are using the social utilites as well as all available digital assets. Yes, they have added revenue to the bottom line. But the threat of cannibalizing on-air revenue is always a threat as the others in this chat string have stated. The difference is not as simple however as trained sales people. Years ago I managed a sales force at a station which also had a newspaper. There were a few reps who had decent print revenues, but those same reps were tanking on-air. The reason for this was not lack of traning, but an inability to sell intangibles. If a station's total billing does not change once it starts offering digital advertising it is likely a problem with certain people on the sales team with a preference to sell that which buyers can see, that is, graphic display, rich media, eBlasts, mobile, etc. When a sales rep sells both tangible, and intangible, (online, and on-air), believing in the superiority of an integrated advertising approach, increased revenues will follow. In the end, sales reps must be willing/capable to present larger ad-spend proposals out of a conviction the integrated campaign is better for the advertiser. If our efforts to monetize our website does not result from this belief, or if our reps are one-dimensional, it will be very difficult to grow overall revenues, and the presence of a new rate card, and larger list of things to sell will be reduced to flat growth- robbing Peter to pay Paul.

Roger, loved your comments, cannibalization is a critical point and one that we must address, we had hoped by developing another sales group that we would overcome that problem and we did in fact have better success that way. I am not suggesting that a magic wand of training is the answer, it is a start. The better we can train obviously the better the results but it is not the cure all. Training may help one dimensional sellers but the old dog new tricks mentality is tough. I have found that the leader of the effort will determine the revenue increase, if they sell their sellers, train their sellers, success ratio goes up. I posed the original question because I believe our expectations are too high from some management types who don't see some of the problems you identified, thanks for your input.

Using our website to help drive additional revenue. No streaming, since we don't want to pay the royalties twice. We have Facebook and Twitter. We haven't gotten real serious about that yet but there are revenue opportunities. No text yet. It may be a good idea to find a social media company to help drive these efforts. Revenues are not what we want yet for two reasons: 1) We have so many other things to sell focus is easily diverted 2) Many of our own radio brothers and sisters are giving the web away as added value (same with remotes), while we're trying to charge for these things. 

You hit on important element, the focus of your sales staff. i have found that the sales folks have a lot on their plate to sell, the standard things, new promotions, 1/2 price deals and other things the station has taken on. We developed a separate sales group, started with one that sold only the digital products. We had huge webinar last week for radio folks on all the new stuff and how to sell...let me know your contact info and I will forward invite to you

Super! [email protected]