(By Loyd Ford) Today is all about the individual seller. It is about going beyond what your sales manager plans for you. What if being successful in sales isn’t about your competition? What if it isn’t about the thing that secretively tugs at your soul and worries you on Sunday night?
What if selling really is about how many people you see, the depth of your competitiveness and hunger, how much time you put into planning your activities each week, and how many people you see and develop proposals for?
What if it isn’t about what you sell in a given week? What if it is really about the activities that you are willing to do to complete enough actual presentations to go beyond the goal set by your sales manager or company?
How about we shake things up a bit?
- What if you pack your week with activities that you are passionate about related to discovering who needs help? Passion can be felt. Riding passion to a more successful week is manifesting victory while you live your passion.
- What if you design early morning activities where you plan to attack specific categories or even businesses so that you have additional opportunities to open up whole new categories of business? Just mapping out a category or specific businesses and working your way into them can give you an energy bump that creates more momentum for your sales growth.
- On the programming side of the business, we have content clocks and roadmaps. What if you designed your week in such a way that you create “leads” for yourself to run so you may seek out certain business targets that radio is having success with in other markets? This involves a change of mindset that can become a reality for you.
- What if you placed more positive pressure on your sales manager to encourage more sales calls so you can “press the red line” and grow unordinary sales growth beyond others on your team? No sales manager finds it normal for sellers to ask for more guidance, more opportunity, and more ways to look at growing the pure number of a seller’s weekly sales calls.
- When prepping your week, create five (5) opportunities in advance to drop something helpful on five (5) different potential clients that don’t translate to immediate benefit for you. Creating those opportunities and following up will lead you to more relationships over time and that will turn into more sales.
- What if you design your sales process to include automatic opportunities to ask for help when you close business 100% of the time, especially around referrals? You’ve heard it a million times: “Birds of a feather flock together.” Everyone recognizes the positivity of wanting to be helpful to others like those you help. If you help one advertiser, there is another nearby that may need you if we can uncover them.
Most things that are impossible are made impossible in our heads. If you design your week with significant prep and purpose, design your week around passion, connection, helpfulness, active listening, and sharpening your skill for hearing closing signs, you can unbuckle the impossible and reel in fresh whales.
Loyd Ford is president and chief strategic officer at Rainmaker Pathway Consulting Works (RPC). They help local radio with ratings and revenue. Reach him anytime at 864.448.4169 or [email protected]. Read Loyd’s Radio Ink archives here.
