(By Loyd Ford) When you ask what is missing today in the radio business, it almost always comes down to time. “I don’t have the time to XYZ.”
How much time and energy do you place on recruiting new sellers? Do you look for sellers in untraditional places in addition to the usual suspects? As my friend Rishad Tobaccawala says, “The future does not fit in the containers of the past.” The best sellers may not come from the places where you found them in the past either.
So, recruiting never ends and it may not look like the past, but what about training new sellers for success? Read our tips below to get you started.
- “This is a football.” Train new salespeople intensely and regularly about your product. New sellers won’t know everything right out of the box, but consistently training them about the power of radio, the connection to local advertisers, social media and that power of radio can really make a difference in sale after sale after sale going forward. And make certain your sellers have the data they need to tell their story.
- “A good example has twice the value of good advice.” Provide your team members with examples of great salespeople they can model. Modeling behavior of winners helps develop more winners. They don’t have to be on your own team. Encourage sellers to have mentors, other sellers they connect with that can help them grow their behaviors to sell more advertising.
- “Isn’t it funny how day by day nothing changes, but when you look back, everything is different.” Helping local sellers understand that goal setting is about achieving across time is worth its weight in gold. Once sellers learn that setting short and long-term goals are both important, they can watch their success literally develop across time.
- “The key is not the will to win. Everybody has that. It is the will to prepare to win that is important.” Preach preparing for every sales call, every client interaction. A well-armed and totally prepared seller is significantly likely to come back with wins. Most battles are won before the first shot is fired. This is also true in sales.
- “Tell me and I forget. Teach me and I remember. Involve me and I learn.” Have your new sellers shadow your most experienced sellers. Create dummy sales calls and then go on real sales calls with your sellers so they can learn from interaction with you. Give consistent constructive feedback after sales calls.
- “Training sessions are vital to the learning process, but they are only one step in the learning process, and this should never be forgotten.” Teach process. Not early perfection. Great coaches teach position, they teach responsibility for hitting specific targets (behaviors) and they focus on process over results. Do this right and the results naturally occur.
- “An individual step in character training is to put responsibility on the individual.” Create daily check-ins to see what you can do to lend support and to get feedback on how things are going. Ask questions, cover the ground your new seller is covering and simply make sure you are providing a boost to the new seller’s confidence that they can do this.
- “People don’t believe the truth – they believe what they see.” Share those success stories from individual sellers to the full team in person, via email, in sales meetings and texts throughout the day and week.
As a manager, you are responsible for your budgets, your goals for yourself and your sellers, but you are also responsible for making your sellers believe they can achieve higher goals, giving them direction, positive reinforcing feedback and inspiring success. You need tools to do that, and we suggest you start with the 8 things in this article to create a balanced training plan that will elevate your local new seller success in 2022.
Reach Loyd at 864.448.4169 or [email protected].
