Happy Friday, everyone!
Here is this week's poll question:
How does prospecting for new advertisers work at your station? Is it organized through your sales manager, or is it a "free-for-all"?
Looking forward to reading your answers!
Hi Rebecca
Here in the UK there seems to be two schools of thought. The most dominant by far is where prospecting begins with the field sales person, usually under the direction of the Sales Manager, who has assigned 'territories' based on a sector specific (vertical) or geographical (horizontal) methodology. It only becomes a free for all when there is a lack of management direction. You can only imagine the damage this would cause in the marketplace with prospects being called by different sales personnel from the same radio station!
The other school of thought works on the priciple that field sales people are 'customer-facing' closers and are optimised by being kept in the 'field'. Hence a radio station is better seperating appointment making and closing. They outsource cold calling & prospecting to a company that can deliver appointments. Sure, if they don't qualify prospects properly you end up sending sales execs out on fruitless calls - but that doesn't last long, if you keep an eye on it.
When I began my career in radio, my sales manager told me that I should expect about 30% of my business will evaporate (for whatever reason.) Yikes! What did I get myself into? Start every year down 30%?
The only option for me was to commit to constantly prospect for new business. I found that the radio sales funnel for some prospects could be as quick as the first presentation and as long as up to two years (got that one this year.)
Like most stations, we monitor the competition regularly and bring lists in to the sales meetings to discuss. Most recently though, I assigned our office manager the task of going through the daily papers each day and recording in Excel format the Name of the Advertiser, Size of ad and the Theme listed by date. This has turned very beneficial for me because I can quickly see who's spending and how much... with it all on one sheet. Plus we can store this for future use and be proactive and actually beat the newspaper reps to the clients. As we all know most long-term newspaper advertisers are quite predictable and run the same ads/sales/themes each month each year. Now our reps can develop creative strategies for these specific events as part of their overall presentations.
That's a great idea. I'm going to have to implement that for my staff.
it is a total free for all, of course a few A-E's are protected, otherwise it is dog-eat-dog, unfortunately
I love the "free for all" method. it keeps my sales staff hungry. I challenge them to even out prospect me. I keep a close eye on the follow up and if an account doesn't seem to develop I'll assign it to a new AE.
Prospecting starts with discussions with the salespeople as a group... targeting a.) categories, e.g., dentists, chiropractors, etc., b.) season, e.g., tires in the fall, tanning in the spring, etc., c.) calendar, e.g., National Heart Month in Feb, Breast Cancer Month in October, etc. plus holiday driven categories, d.) station promotions or events, e.g., bridal show, Halloween bags, July 4 fireworks, etc. 1-3 months in advance we discuss what areas, categories should be targeted. We review the report for the same months 1 and 2 years ago - who was on, what they went on air for. Salespeople have learned to keep notes from previous meetings and pull up those contacts who were approached for any given month and did not buy - if it's logical they should be approached they should be approached and presented again. We develop a list and each salesperson leaves the meeting with who to contact, how the contact should be made, the rationale for the presentation.
Otherwise prospecting has been geographic - our signal area covers a number of towns, many of which have events for which we hit the street, presenting a co-op-type participation to promote a festival, high school team going to the playoffs, or other local event to which they hope to attract business from outside their immediate community. Cost is low, they each get a 10-sec message to run in rotation. We normally put these in a :60 w/open, close and 3-4 :10's back to back in the middle as a donut. A few of these contacts have turned into regular advertisers.
It's pretty much a free-for-all with no particular rules in place as far as how to let other know you claimed them or to check if someone else already has the prospect accounted for.
