How To Find High-Performing Sellers – Part 6

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Our series continues today with Kevin Malone, Market Manager for Community Broadcasters, Destin-Fort Walton Beach, FL. Before taking over the four-station “Emerald Coast” cluster, he was GSM/RVP for Cumulus Atlanta.

Radio Ink: Is it tougher to find high-performing sales talent these days?
Malone: We need to hire more intelligently than we have in the past. We don’t have people beating our doors down anymore like we did 15 years ago. First of all, I look for experience, outside sales experience. Oftentimes we get people applying with retail experience, but that doesn’t apply. It’s a little bit harder to hire someone with media experience because of non-competes in markets. I can’t poach somebody. We are looking for similar experiences, maybe digital, maybe print, maybe direct mail, maybe cable TV. I’m looking for a personality that’s easy to like, are they warm, do they have a great attitude. Quite honestly I recruit for attitude and intelligence and probably I can train for the rest.

Radio Ink: How important is training to develop a high-performer?
Malone: It plays a huge role. We don’t drop anyone in the deep end and hope they can figure it out for themselves. Formal sales training I hope they already have, and then we will train specifically for advertising in radio. We have a plan in place here with the RAB and Nielsen. I’ll also ask some of the high-performers to spend time with them, and as a manager you want to be with them on three to five calls a week and do a little sidewalk coaching when that call is over.

Radio Ink: What role should high-performers have in training others?
Malone: I think a typical high-performer wants to take on more assignments, so I ask them to take a role in recruiting, help in the training, asking them to literally help out on the street, to spend some time, maybe a half day a week with new AEs. I think high-performers constantly want to be challenged. They get bored easily because they usually move faster than others. So asking them to get involved in recruitment and training is something that fulfills their job a little bit more.

Radio Ink: What type of benchmarks do you set for your staff?
Malone: The obvious ones are metric based. Generally, a high-performer can be a true handful to manage, but it’s only because they are literally trying to be the best they can be. They are pushing us managers for more accounts, more avails. I think any staff would be lucky if they could define 50 percent of their staff as high-performers. Not everyone can bat cleanup. A good staff has to have a good balance of really good transactional sales people and really good business development people. I’ve learned over the years that’s not the same person. Asking a fish to climb a tree generally fails. There are some people that are just better at developing new business; they are more comfortable making cold calls, more comfortable walking in on a business, they are more comfortable at starting from step one. Other people are a heck of a lot better at when an agency or client knocks on the door; they are better at getting a much higher share, better rates, maybe getting 100 percent of the business, pushing up a cost per point. That’s a skill that sometimes we minimize, sometimes we think that anybody can handle transactional business, but the difference in getting a third of the business and 80 percent of the business is what a good transactional seller can do for us.

Radio Ink: How do you use incentives?
Malone: Most high-performers that I’ve been around are a little bit starved for recognition. So I make sure that when a high-performer ends the month a nice percentage over goal, has written a significant amount of new business, if they pull off something the cluster needed or found a new vehicle for us, they get mentioned by name in a memo. High performers want feedback, they want to know where they are in relation to the rest of the staff and they want to know what they could do to make things better, I ask them to help with pricing and recruiting and training. You have to stretch high-performers so they are not sitting at budget at the first day of the month, but are sprinting through the finish line. The two incentives that are the most important are time and cash. Can you earn a day off by being 10 percent over goal or can you pick up an extra $500 dollars. Those are the most stimulating that I’ve found over the years.

Radio Ink: Do you manage your high-performers differently?
Malone: You try to manage everybody about the same about 60 percent of the time. I manage more of the activity on a lower performer and productivity on a higher performer. Low-performers might end up with more time in front of me, checking smaller boxes like phone calls, appointments, proposals written, how many spec spots have you produced this month. It’s activity that leads to productivity. In the front of the room, at a sales meeting, it appears that we are managing everybody exactly the same, but then in the one-on-ones it can be a little bit different based on where they are. Like a football coach, it’s just the finer points. Talking to a wide receiver that may need some help blocking while another needs help to run better routes.

Radio Ink: Firing someone is never easy. How do you handle it?
Malone: First off, the reasons have to be black and white, so anyone can walk in and see the person is not meeting the minimum standards for keeping the job. You can’t fire somebody for missing budget if seven or eight others are also missing budget. So it needs to be other things like activity, calls, proposals, specs producing, and missing goals. I would generally give someone 60 days. You need to be fair, you need to sit down with somebody, write a set of objectives, put them on notice. Tell them over the next 60 days we need to do this. At the 30-day mark we need to have this. Benchmarks along the way — three new pieces of business on the air, $10,000 new business, four or five face-to-face calls a week. It’s a little bit better to rehabilitate than to rehire. Sometimes you can get people to turn around with some color-by-numbers micromanagement.

You can contact Kevin at: 850.654.1000 or email: [email protected]

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