(By Loyd Ford) If you are really lucky in sales, you are passionate about the daily mission of hunting for people with problems and matching them with solutions. To you, bringing them more customers and encouraging their existing customers to return to them more often are the purest of joys.
You know this. Everyone is not lucky.
Sometimes life wears you down and sometimes that happens at work.
When you are responsible for doing the same things over and over and over and over, one of the key problems that can develop is a numbing of the experience. Things become chores. Grinding out revenue bores you. That’s when your heartache begins.
Suddenly you have begun to see your clients and potential clients like prison food. “Just eat it and go on,” you tell yourself. You can even chip out a revenue life this way, but it isn’t the way to bet.
People want to be seen and they want to be heard. This is your actual “in” with more new clients.
How do you change your attitude and create a rebirth in your passions for clients and sales? Let’s start with these basics.
- See clients for who they are. Advertisers have problems. That’s who they are. If they didn’t, they wouldn’t be looking for new customers. While they may not see you immediately as the solution they are looking for, this is our first real task as sellers. Even those clients who think they know what they are doing in marketing their business and think they know it all….don’t. So, don’t allow people with problems to intimidate you.
- Be prepared to meet your clients and potential clients where they are. Potential clients don’t know you until you build a relationship with them. Without that relationship built, your job is going to be much tougher. To successfully build a proper relationship, you must first find out everything about them and their business that is available to you (and today people are essentially an open book with social media; bet busy before you go see them).
- Don’t assume they know anything about radio (even if they think they do). Business owners are experts at their business. Not yours. The challenge with potential clients who think they know everything about your business is shifting their psychology to see you as an expert in your lane. We also see this with digital sellers, where they also often accept that the potential client knows more about digital because they say they do. Many times this is simply false. Bring something unpredictable with you that shows your client something they don’t know about radio or digital (or whatever products you are offering as a solution to their problems).
- Bring creativity with you to stand out and ideas to sweep potential clients into your worldview. No one you know generally applies enough prep and creativity to their approach to challenging potential clients, especially the tough ones. What people generally do is give up too early. That’s a fool’s errand. Prepare to be creative in advance and the tough ones will destabilize their resistance and allow you to create important relationships out of previously uncrackable resistance.
- Become an excellent storyteller. One of the things I learned as I became fascinated with Abraham Lincoln (don’t judge) is that he learned to tell stories to illustrate points. What I am saying is that he didn’t just tell stories. He built stories to sway people and it works.
You’ll notice that each of these five (5) involves getting ahead of clients with elemental tools that give you advantages. Once you really apply each of the five, you will see that each of these advantages can make your job more fun and productive. When you feel more productive and feel you can impact difficult potential clients positively, you’re eating at a five-star restaurant.
Join us for ideas and creativity at our free Q4 exclusive radio sales event on The Encouragers™ The Radio Rally™ podcast (Apple, Audible, Spotify) on the evening of October 10 or on-demand after. “Navigating The End Of Year Lull, The Holiday Hangover & The Q1 Delay Tactics” will feature Don Bedell, Market Manager, Bennie Media, Midcoast Maine, and Brett Sharp, VP/GM Mel Wheeler, Inc, Roanoke, Virginia along with actual ideas to help you or your sales team create more revenue in Q4.
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.
