How to Create Leads for Your Sellers Without Leaving Your Desk

We are all aware of radio’s challenges with digital disruption and even new generations of clients who sometimes participate in DIY advertising. It’s still early in 2025. Do you still need dependable revenue growth?

One of the most powerful things that separates radio from the cold digital world is our local sales professionals. But that isn’t enough. It is my belief that sellers have to see it to do it. Training isn’t enough unless it involves hands-on experience. 

In other words, the struggle for any Sales Manager is to encourage individual seller activity, cut red tape, and help sellers focus on the fundamentals that bring them the most success. That is “time spent selling,” seeing more potential customers more often, consistently encouraging the building of highly valuable customer relationships, and widening their influence so they can continuously expose more sales and drive your revenue North. 

But how do you accelerate the use of those fundamentals?

Radio Sales Managers may feel that they are powerless to create leads and pass them out in their weekly sales meetings. But doing that and holding sellers accountable for “running those weekly leads” would absolutely impact all of these key areas that produce more consistent growth. Think about the potential positive consequences of placing a premium on giving sellers weekly leads and encouraging the sales team to consistently run those leads. 

Well, I know what you are thinking. Those leads have to come from somewhere.

Generating weekly leads for radio sellers requires a mix of creativity, strategy, and consistent effort by the sales manager and the individual sellers. A plan without action is nothing; selling without a plan is faulty, too.

Here are some approaches radio sales managers can use to grow strategy for developing leads that can result in “activity opportunity” every Monday morning:

Targeted Prospecting

Local Business Directories

Use online tools like Yelp or local chamber of commerce directories to identify new businesses in your area or existing businesses that could legitimately benefit from a timely visit from your sales department. Use these to create one (1) lead to pass out each Monday morning for each individual seller and require them to “run” this lead during the coming week and report results directly to you.

Industry-specific Lead Lists. 

You can purchase or subscribe to lead generation services for businesses within specific industries (restaurants, healthcare, etc.). Doing this allows you to provide one (1) specific lead each week for each individual seller.

Number Of New Leads For Each Individual Seller This Week: 2

Networking & Partnerships

Community Events

Encourage individual sellers to find and attend a business networking group, which can provide direct access to potential clients. Encourage sellers to develop a consistent strategy to actively target relationship development at these events and develop “benefits” to share with business owners through follow-ups with them at their businesses. This is actual generating of content (research) to help sellers develop new meaningful relationships weekly. Doing this helps sellers begin to self-generate leads for themselves directly from their own activities.

Cross-Promotions

Sales managers can partner with complementary businesses (through local events, venues, or organizations) for joint promotions that can turn into active lead generation.

Creative Lead Generation Campaigns

Email Campaigns

This is often the missing link at local radio. Develop a regular and consistent business email campaign designed to focus on growth for the business owners with consumers and also to showcase the station’s advertising value to potential leads, offering insights or success stories, but be careful to not make it only about you – make it about them. Encourage sellers to collect email address opt-ins from clients and potential clients specifically to share valuable information designed to help their business with customer growth. The content of this email newsletter should be managed by the sales manager to make sure the focus is on the end businesses. 

You’ll hear me say this over and over: Regularly sharing helpful information and including an offer to provide even more opportunities to grow their business by visiting with someone from your team is key to this strategy.

Online Content Marketing

Radio sometimes thinks about this kind of marketing for listeners, but it’s rare that effort is exposed to generate more engagement between business owners and sellers. Create business blog posts that double as social media content about radio advertising benefits, targeting specific industries with case studies or testimonials. Sharing this in your socials gives you a multiplier of use of important content and can help you sign up more business owners to your business email newsletter. Always offer opportunities for advertisers to get more free information for their specific business along with access to intel to help them grow their business by reaching out to your team.

Develop a “Birds Of A Feather” Program

Develop a referral program where current clients can refer new businesses to the station in exchange for discounts or bonuses.

Leverage Existing Data

Database of Current & Past Clients. 

Use current or past clients as a jumping-off point for new leads. Re-engage old clients or identify similar businesses in the same industry by reviewing existing client activity with you. Once you have done this, provide sellers a short list each Monday of 5 leads they must run “this week.” Even past advertisers once bought from you. That spells opportunity if you remain top-of-mind; most of radio won’t causing further loss of revenue. They have simply “let it go.” Time to “get it back.”

Cold Outreach & Calling

You know the old saying. “Everyone loves cold calling.”  HA. Dedicate time each week for individual sellers to prospect, including cold calling businesses directly. Provide a short list of specific businesses each week for each individual seller to be responsible for calling. The goal of these “cold call leads” is to get sellers to focus on engagement and ask a lot of open-ended questions to understand advertiser prospect marketing needs. Having a specific assigned “window” each week for every individual seller to cold call will make them more comfortable and confident in generating this cold activity.

LinkedIn

Encourage weekly use of LinkedIn by individual sellers to connect with a specific number of business owners and/or marketing managers directly, fostering relationships and following up in person with specific “helpful” information about tactics or opportunities that are working for businesses like theirs to generate customer growth across the country. 

Social Media Engagement

Follow and engage with businesses on platforms like Facebook, Instagram, or LinkedIn and approach them with personalized outreach. Again, make it about reacting to their posts, commenting on things important to them, cultivating that relationship, and ultimately in-person meetings to help them guide their business to more growth. Assign individual sellers at least one (1) individual business/business person for engagement per week.

Webinars/Workshops

Host Educational Sessions. 

Offer free webinars or workshops on the benefits of radio advertising for businesses or webinars on overall marketing opportunities for local business owners. Make sure to present actionable insights that will entice businesses to work with you. Assign follow-ups for each participating business owner directly with your individual sellers for the purpose of them asking questions, offering additional benefits, and taking steps toward a proposal for advertising. This may happen on a quarterly basis or you may rotate specific types of business categories and content so you can do monthly webinars, but this activity will contribute to fresh leads for your sellers over time.

Industry-Specific Topics. 

Tailor these sessions to industries you want to target, showing how radio advertising can benefit their specific goals. Even though you want to engage them for potential advertising, make sure you pack your interactions with benefits they can use so they learn the value of your team.

Use Sales Scripts and Templates

Develop scripts

Developing scripts helps sellers approach businesses, addressing their pain points and how radio advertising can solve specific challenges. It allows you as a sales manager more control over the presentational introductory process. 

No planning or prep only equals fewer results. If that is true, what does developing a killer script do for your cold calls and other phone calls? You know. This involves control, creativity, and training individual sellers with experiences for those sellers that will ultimately improve selling in your cluster.

The Trojan Horse

AKA The Business Person Of The Week Strategy

Chances are good that all the stations in your cluster are not sold out. That’s a shame. What are you doing about it? May I suggest The Business Person Of The Week Strategy? This is where you assign an individual seller each week to engage a business person they don’t have on the air in a business big enough to buy advertising on your stations to participate in a Zoom interview about their business with one of the morning shows or other key personalities in your building. As far as that business owner knows, the interview will air on the XYZ morning show (say, at 8:30 a.m. on a Wednesday). That’s all you tell them. This feature should happen on a specific station in your cluster once a week on the same morning at the same time. The talent will ask questions like: Why do customers love this business? What makes your business unique? What do customers buy through your business? How did you get into this business? What does this business mean to the community? What is your address? Phone number? Website? Why do you love this business?

Your seller can grab a photo of the business owner from their social media and frame it up for YOUR social media. A photo of “The (station name) Business Person Of The Week” can be shared on your website and across your social media platforms tagging the business owner.

After the interview is done, provide a copy to the business owner (your seller drops it off and thanks them for participating). Meanwhile, someone in your production department edits a 30-second or 60-second commercial from the interview and you schedule it FREE OF CHARGE for three weeks at a high rotation in unsold inventory on SEVERAL of your stations. That’s it.

At the end of the three weeks, the seller then returns to the business owner to follow up, but they carry with them a low entry point advertising opportunity with one or more of your stations.

What does The (station name) Business Person Of The Week do for you? It stirs the market because other category-specific companies hear their competitors on your air. It also allows you to encourage your sellers to go see people they may not ordinarily see and carry benefits for them to engage radio (which they may not have done without this). 

This trojan horse strategy also allows your seller to build relationships with new prospects systematically. It also allows you to AMP UP the number of presentations that your individual sellers are making because the end result of this strategy is a proposal for advertising for that business owner. Perhaps you’ve heard this next thing: Some will, some won’t, so what? 

In other words, you will sell some of these and that’s adding revenue.

Activity causes sales. Not theory. 

The value of doing the above lead generation strategy benefits you because you are committing to a long-term strategy to grow weekly individual seller activities to grow relationships and advertiser opportunities for your team. 

Your consistent leadership pushing the team to elevate individual visits per week, create more CNAs on those visits, and turn those weekly new prospects into more proposals is the most powerful key to opening more sales doors for your individual sellers and growing YOUR company revenue.

We are in the growth business. Not our business; the advertiser growth business. What is the value of positioning our individual sellers as the significant local connective path to growth for advertisers?

By mixing a proactive and consistent approach, radio sales managers can build a pipeline of leads that will consistently generate higher levels of opportunities for individual sellers every week. Tracking and refining efforts based on what works will help optimize radio sales lead generation over time.

Come on, boss. Let’s get busy.