(By Loyd Ford) Salespeople burn out. You can’t be surprised. There is so much pressure to reach the goal, exceed the goal, set new goals, overcome challenges, and follow all the rules and red tape that come with the modern radio business.
Management wants more. Always more.
Challenging people to perform at a new and higher standard constantly isn’t the same as encouraging them.
If you manage salespeople or are a market manager or local radio owner, your job is certainly to use your knowledge, resources, and (hopefully) management style to make salespeople’s jobs…
…easier.
But it’s more than that. If you want to become the clear VIP in your position, you will be the chief encourager for individual sellers.
To do that well, consider:
- Focusing on the experience of being one of your sellers. Do you really know what they love – individually – about working for you and what they dislike about sales in your company?
- Do sales managers and market managers spend time rotating in on sales calls with individual sellers in a helpful way? This isn’t criticism. It’s encouragement; that means focusing on being helpful and teaching positively.
- Managers who go out of their way to catch sellers doing something right and praise them in front of others create higher-purpose and passion-based sellers who generate more revenue because they feel heard, seen, and valued. Do this regularly and everyone will notice. When others notice, you create an unreasonable desire with sellers on your team to do more for you.
- While many think encouragement as just positivity, done correctly it has a twin: Accountability. Winners want to be held accountable. The great managers hire slowly and fire as soon as they know someone is on the wrong bus. Doing this creates a sense of urgency in sales as well as a sense of belonging for those in the right place.
- Create a “ripcord” to release pressure on individual sellers from time to time with a variety of tactics, including getaways, sales staff celebrations without including forward-leaning fresh goals or new pressures and positive surprises for sellers at random times to show you care about them and understand the pressure they are constantly under.
- Consider taking one seller and their spouse or significant other to lunch each quarter. At this lunch, consider praising what the employee/seller is doing to positively contribute to your company and give them a dinner for two from the company as your thanks. This reinforces that you care about and value your individual sellers and fires up their home base of support for the work they are doing. Not to mention it makes them proud that the boss is willing to go out of their way to talk with the spouse or significant other and praise the work being done.
- Create a weekly sales gathering where you rotate sellers “pitching” a new client (something they are actually going to do “this week”). If this is done in front of the team without criticism and the entire team can help sellers with ideas and thoughts on sharpening the “pitch,” sellers can learn to see this as a pep rally to help sharpen sales presentations to increase success. Each team member can learn, teach, and grow together.
Any of these ideas may be helpful to you in reducing burnout and energizing your sales team, but thinking about them may lead to even better ideas of your own.
We Invite You To Join Us For More Encouragement
On the evening of July 11, we launch our quarterly radio sales event on The Encouragers™ The Radio Rally™ podcast (Apple, Audible, Spotify). Every quarter we focus on helping local radio salespeople ANYWHERE boost THEIR revenue in the current quarter. Coming on July 11th, we’re calling this one “What Else? Doing All The Things That Turn Local Radio Into Growth NOW!” Chris Fleming with CD Media Consulting and I will invite Melissa Boswell Townsend, General Manager, Boswell Media, Kosciusko, Mississippi, and another guest to soon be named to join us. Actual ideas, strategies, and uncovering what else you can be looking at to generate more revenue in Q3.
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.
