Radio Sales Café

Happy Friday, everyone!

 

This week's poll question was inspired by a comment from Alta Mayhugh in response to Geoff Bate's blog entry, Top Ten Ways Clients Waste Money on Radio Advertising. 

 

In this article, Geoff discusses the many ways in which "clients can cause even a powerful medium like radio to fail" and Alta asked, "What's the best way to tell the client 'you're screwing it up' without offending him/her?

 

So here's this week's question:

 

Have you ever had to point out to a client that their advertising strategy is faulty, and if so, how did you go about it?  What was the client's response?

 

Looking forward to reading your replies!

By being honest, and diplomatic.

 

Alan Rock

Orlando, FL

Surely the customer is always right?

I guess what I try to do is just try to help from the outset. And come up with a strategy to deal with individual clients. 

Or I would try to "seed" them with useful advise and articles.

Some clients are more sensitive than others.

I worked with an account rep years ago who had been working with a client that owned a pet store.  The owner was spending considerable dollars advertising her store with our station.  Problem was, the pet store was filthy!  It smelled terrible the moment you walked in the door.  There were crickets running all over the place.  The windows were streaked, the carpets were stained, the cages were dirty, and there were boxes piled all over the place.  My co-worker refused to advertise for her until she cleaned her shop up.  She even went down to the store over the weekend to help her clean the store.  Although our Station Manager nearly had a heart attack when she refused this client's advertising, her bold move represented a dedication to truly help her client, and not just sell her ads.  We can drive customers to your door, but it's up to you to keep them there and sell them something.  She seen the problem, and corrected it with a frank discussion with the business owner.  I don't think I could have been so brutally honest, but it worked.  The pet store was clean, the ads started running again, and the two of them became great friends!

This is one of my hardest things to deal with.  I have a lot of customers that think they know what is right when advertising, and it doesn't produce the results they're looking for.  But even worse is when I can see the problems in their business that are keeping customers away.  How do you bring that up??  It is insulting to them when you say "this is wrong. I wouldn't want to come here either."

In the long run, your better off being honest with the client. Be that fresh pair of eyes and ears that can let them know what may be impeding sales.

 

As far as the client insisting on bad copy, I like the approach of, "That may work but my experience tells me you are not going to stand out the way you want to."

 

I've also told clients I was going to put a clause in the insertion order stating that they were running this copy against my advice, and they needed to initial and date it. I've never had any business owner feel strongly enough about their own copy that they would run the copy in question.

A couple of the Wizard's principles come to mind:

1) It's hard to read the label when you're inside the bottle.  As Jack Walker pointed out earlier, a fresh pair of eyes and ears can be useful.

2) The risk of insult is the price of clarity.  Sometimes you have to risk offending the client's ego to defend his pocketbook.

It helps to have the client's best interests at heart and to have a client that knows this to be the case.  

I've learned (the hard way) that it's best not to criticize any advertiser's campaign unless you're prepared to offer a better alternative and able to articulate concisely and persuasively WHY the alternative makes more sense.  

It's also prudent to pick your battles, and not nit-pick every little thing he might be doing that you would do differently. Sometimes it's not a matter of right/wrong but good/better.  Other times the sticking point may be strictly a matter of personal preference, not a game-changer, in which case, why make waves?

One of my favorite clients is a Realtor, for whom I've developed a unique (and audacious) branding campaign, positioning him as "Pullman's Real Estate Expert" (example attached).  After his first year doing the campaign, his TOMA has soared (as we expected it would).  Call-out research and his own sales performance have confirmed the value of his radio campaign. But the interesting thing is, we first connected 15 months or so ago on social media.  I'd made a comment on his blog in which I flat-out disagreed with something he'd said, and it opened a conversation that led first to email exchanges, then face-to-face meetings over coffee, and finally a professional relationship that has been working well for over a year now.

 

You just never know...