Here Comes Tomorrow – Are You Ready?

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(By Bob McCurdy) I came across an article written by Shelly Palmer, a well-respected marketing and technology maven. It got me thinking. Hoping it will do the same to you. Palmer’s article started with:

Tomorrow will be nothing like today. It may look and feel a lot like today — you’ll get up, have breakfast, exercise, go off to work, etc. But tomorrow will be nothing like today. Tomorrow there will be 600,000 new smartphone activations, 540,000 new computers sold, hundreds of thousands of new cloud computing credentials issued, hundreds more petabytes of data traveling through the Internet, thousands more miles driven by autonomous vehicles, millions of new words interpreted by Natural Language Understanding (NLU) systems, billions of new patterns learned by machines, and billions of new lines of code created. Tomorrow will be nothing like today.

The entire article can be read here.

Since “tomorrow” will not even be anything like “today,” what about next week, next month, or next year? And what does this mean for us professionally? What actions do we need to take to ensure our competitiveness and employability tomorrow? Our answers to the following questions will reflect our personal view of the future as well as the skills and actions that will need to be “acquired” and “required” to meet the challenges of “what’s next.”

Beliefs influence attitudes, attitudes influence decisions, decisions influence actions, and actions influence destiny. What do you believe?

Will the pace of change increase or decrease?

Will the competition for local ad dollars increase or decrease?

Is local “spot” radio revenue likely to increase or decrease?

Will “digital” become more or less important to local advertisers?

Will “digital” expertise become more or less important to a local radio salesperson?

Will the competition for the “audio” ad dollar increase or decrease?

Will it become more or less important to deepen relationships with key advertisers?

Will it become more of less important to immerse yourself in your clients business?

Will it become more or less important to protect/nurture existing business?

Will it become more or less important to develop new revenue streams?

Will cross-platform marketing solutions become more or less important locally?

Will transactional avail skills become more or less important?

Will 2017’s sales skill-set be worth more or less in 2018, 2019, or 2020?

Will a learning mindset become more or less important?

Make no mistake about it, these or similarly worded questions apply to any industry or business and anyone employed in 2017, not just to radio and radio salespeople. Our challenges are not unique but to thrive we have got to be superior to these challenges and that requires a “learning,” open, curious, disciplined, and proactive mindset.

My own answers to these questions tell me I had better continue to accelerate my sales and marketing expertise, enhance my digital acumen, and embrace sales fundamentals more firmly than ever before.

It has never been clearer that the skills, attitudes, behaviors, and beliefs that got us to where we are today will not be enough to keep us there tomorrow. So what is your favorite professional future and are you in the process of making it a reality?

Be sure to make it a terrific place, it’s where you’re going to spend the rest of your professional life.

Bob McCurdy is the Vice President of Sales for the Beasley Media Group and can be reached at [email protected]

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