
Hiring excellent salespeople is the lifeblood of your future revenue, but let’s face it – there is a lot of fear around recruiting today. We’ve all heard plenty of excuses for why radio can’t effectively recruit and keep excellent sellers. But is that really true or are we making missteps with sales recruiting and training costing radio millions?
To strike at the core of these issues, let’s just ask you questions. You are knowledgeable enough to supply the answers to yourself for your cluster, your company, and your goals for 2025.
- When do you recruit sellers? Do you only recruit when you have a sales opening or do you have a year-round strategy for recruiting that allows you to have a strong pulse on a variety of effective sellers in your market today?
- Does your leadership have an outreach to sellers and a networking reach into sales organizations in your market or are you only focused on day-to-day sales business? Waiting for sellers to come to you is a weak strategy in today’s business world.
- Do you effectively use your on-air product to attract the market’s most compelling sellers directly to you? People who are excellent sellers are attracted to seeing how they stack up. Even sellers who are happy in their current jobs are likely to develop curiosity if you offer them a way to test their abilities, judgment, and opportunities with a survey. We already have powerful radio stations with which to reach them. What is your messaging to them or do you have any today?
- Do you have an active strategy designed to effectively train sellers to become more knowledgeable, confident, and successful in helping others find growth through your products and services? Confident sellers are more prepared for sales calls. Knowledgeable sellers have a stronger, faster ability to pivot to lead advertisers to the right solutions quicker.
- Do you have a strategy that exposes the purpose and personality of your individual sellers on your cluster of stations? It’s amazing that we work in a business where solid relationships are known to protect and grow revenue, but we don’t see a significant investment – even a free investment – in helping local markets connect with seller stories, personalities, and purpose. Maybe this is an area to mine in 2025.
- Do you train your sellers to make advertiser experiences exceptional? Many broadcasters are focused on hand-to-mouth revenue and miss opportunities to separate their team from all other marketing sellers in local markets today.
I encourage you to think about your strategies around sales, including how, where, and how often you recruit sellers. How institutional are you in your views about how you pay, encourage, and attach purpose to your sellers? I also encourage you to think about your sales strategy for facing advertisers in your market, leveraging radio’s real images with consumers that advertisers must attract, and how you work relationships in your market even before sellers meet advertisers face to face.
People out there want help. The business world is more confusing than it has ever been. Are your sellers trained well enough to go toe-to-toe with the dangers advertisers face from digital solutions they sometimes don’t understand and can be misled on? Are your sellers knowledgeable enough about what advertisers think they know about radio and the consumers they are actually missing by not fundamentally understanding our medium’s advantages?
Where there is confusion, change, and misunderstanding, there is great opportunity.
We are in an advertising revenue business. Are you truly positioned to take advantage of the current opportunities for local radio and help advertisers grow with your radio brands, products, and services that your company sells today? Are you supporting and encouraging sellers with knowledge, confidence, and exposure that shows the purpose of your sellers in helping advertisers reach their goals this year?