Meet Today’s Radio Wayne Finalist

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Kris Hackett Lucas is the Director of Sales for Cox Media Group in Atlanta. Kris has been in radio for 29 years, 16 years in sales management. She’s a finalist for a 2022 Radio Ink Radio Wayne award later this month in Miami during the Radio Masters Sales Summit. Our awards are sponsored this year Quu.

Radio Ink: What is the key to being a successful manager of salespeople and multiple stations/clusters?
Kris Hackett: It starts and ends with helping and supporting talented people. Lead with care, know what drives them, and what they value. Help your people identify their strengths and then place them in position to allow their strengths to lead them to personal success. This is an individual sport with team victories and consequences. As you help your people perform individually you help the team win globally. It is the same with multiple stations. Identifying each station’s strengths, creating unique opportunities, and ways to maximize each stations revenue success. I think the key to being successful is about caring about your people and leading by example. When they know you care about their success and their family, they will move mountains.

Radio Ink: How do you encourage reps to sell all assets?
Kris Hackett: There’s a lot to focus on with four stations and dozens of digital solutions and it all starts with education, training, and most importantly relationships. I encourage our media consultants to proactively educate themselves on all of our products and services and utilize all the resources so that so they can help our clients succeed. I focus our team on being first to educate our clients on new digital products and services and to focus on generating results to make every campaign successful. I have created a culture that doesn’t focus on just closing business but taking the time in each stage of the process to better identify our clients goals and growth opportunities. Next we focus on solutions based relationships instead of product based selling. By understanding our clients goals and identifying the best solutions to ensure success we have greater credibility to offer a diverse mix of solutions.

Radio Ink: Beyond revenue numbers, what other benchmarks do you look at in evaluating performance in that area?
Kris Hackett: Revenue is the most important end result but it is not the only way I evaluate the performance of my team. Success leaves clues. Especially for newer media consultants, I look at activity, building credibility with prospects, creating well thought out customized proposals, and developing internal relationships. This is a long game, and I don’t just evaluate on revenue but I look at the business cycles for each media consultant, their specific portfolio of clients, and the clues that they are leaving that show results.

Radio Ink: How do you know when you have a great sales manager in the wings?
Kris Hackett: A media consultant that is developing into a future manager is a natural floor leader. When I see other media consultants gravitate to them for help and they in turn are always willing to offer guidance while at the same time still handling their own business. Great sales managers in the making are positive, empathetic, and natural motivators and encouragers. Another indication of a sales person who will make a great sales manager is one who can advocate for our clients internally while advocating for the needs of the station/company with the client and result in win – win scenarios.

Radio Ink: What has been your biggest success story over the past year?
Kris Hackett: I am most proud of our sales team and for achieving record breaking success with new business in 2022 and continuing to beat the market. My team has written over $7.5M in new business this year and currently we have 41% share of the market. Our talented sales team is made up of fifteen media consultants with a wide range of experience. Each one of them has contributed to this achievement. New business is the lifeblood of our business and vital to the clusters growth so I have developed a robust new business development plan that we follow. I’ve created a culture of media consultants to work hand in hand with local businesses to generate real results by building integrated marketing campaigns that help their businesses grow. Focusing on direct business is in our DNA and something that is fostered in our culture. At CMG Atlanta we are elevating the industry by introducing new businesses and customers to radio every day. We keep them and grow them and that is how we remain the best and most notable sales team in the industry!

Radio out to congratulate Kris on being a 2022 Radio Wayne finalist at [email protected]

Register for the Radio Ink Radio Masters Sales Summit HERE

Previous Profiles of our finalists:
Beasley Media General Sales Manager Marta DeLisi.

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