Replacing Anxiety With Action

Sales can be overwhelming and managing different sellers by personality, motivation, work ethic, and creative problem-solving can be intimidating for any sales leader. The days of the “low-hanging fruit” are over.

As one of my friends says, “No one is waiting for you to open so they can come down to the station and give you money. We have to change the dynamics of how we are selling and become much more aggressive about covering the local market and radio’s most natural advantages.”

Let’s look at what sales management prep and the regular activities radio sales managers can create to turn anxiety into action that can support a growth culture in your sales department and generate outsized results with individual sellers in place of anxiety and uncertainty. 

Nothing replaces fear and anxiety like action.

1. Don’t accept that you cannot create a lead generation system from the GSM chair directly facing your weekly sales meetings. Focus on a rotating variety of business leaders in specific categories and their competitors as targets for your team of individuals weekly. Become absorbed with creating a consistent specific set of leads for individual sellers to run each week in addition to their regular pipeline and requiring them to “run those leads” assigned each week. This will place a premium on generating more face-to-face visits and relationship building and it will impact your sales.
2. Zero-in on quality leads for your team. You know that every sales call is not the same and all potential clients are not equal either. Create a lead culture that focuses on the systematic development of improving sales activities designed to support consistently expanding sales influence. We all understand that to reach higher revenue goals you must have activity underneath to support the goals.
3. It’s beyond time to recharge local radio with creativity on-air and in sales departments so potential clients can see solutions they cannot unsee. This includes radio/sales management’s responsibility to create experiences that advertisers love and that make others jealous when they are not a part of those experiences. We must create a love culture again for the creativity that separates radio from all other media and advertising choices. 
4. Develop a consistent and aggressive continuous recruitment strategy for sellers that gives almost certainty to your always knowing where the best sales talent in your market is and what motivates them for when you have openings or need to create one. The days of recruiting only when you have an opening are for losers. This is the 21st Century and only continuous networking and recruitment can help you uncover consistent revenue engines (best human capital) for your efforts.
5. Create a sales meeting culture that encourages collaborative positive team feedback, especially around active proposals and increasing the likelihood of better closing ratio results. This centers around having a weekly system for assigning individual sellers to “present” each week at your sales meeting on a rotating basis. Critical is to keep the feedback positive so it becomes a culture of positive learning and confidence building. You get bonus points if you make standing mandatory in all sales meetings so everyone understands that sales meetings are for accomplishing things and rapidly moving to sales activity.
6. Make mastering lead generation a key focus. This is about constantly encouraging individual sellers to build and execute their own strategy to develop leads consistently and unrelentingly. Keep your focus on strategies to gain the attention of and create relationships with potential advertisers and those who want to attach their business to critical targets and local communities.
7. Create consistent training focused on understanding individual advertisers’ needs and worries about their self-interests and their consumer attraction. This centers around your CNAs (customer needs analysis). You can’t solve problems if you don’t know what they are and how potential clients are motivated to make decisions in your favor.
8. Sales managers should consistently keep an active eye and feedback on individual seller pipeline activities and focus on helping each seller maximize their consistent efforts and make adjustments to constantly maximize results from their personal pipeline. No week should pass without your management focus settling on who sellers are targeting, their activity to seek out and gain appointments, how they perform their CNAs, and where they are vs. presenting solutions for the decision maker over and over again weekly. Encouraging consistent progress and movement in these areas is critical to covering enough ground to develop sellers into superstars.
9. Relentlessly commit to consistently developing a referral system that each of your sellers “farms” regularly. Like asking for the order, you want to create an environment of expectation that each seller will consistently ask for referrals to strengthen the hunt for new clients like your best clients.
10. I believe that radio sales departments should have a written strategy for the above 8 things and a sales brand strategy that includes an image that suggests that individuals on your team are committed to helping local businesses and communities grow. No one wants to be sold. They want the opportunity to review their problems, get the help they need, and make the decision themselves on what they want to buy. We should want to help advertisers in the decision-making process, including setting up consumer attraction blogs (how to), free marketing events to help further educate customers and potential customers and constantly stoking our own momentum in the marketplace.

If it looks like I am attempting to encourage you to become much more aggressive in your own generation of leads and consistent individual seller pipeline activity, that’s because I am.

Sales is the constant meeting of what you have done to prepare your sellers with training, confidence, encouragement, and accountability as they meet constant challenges and rejections of the open market. Only the highest supported sellers will elevate their success across time and this is what radio needs more than ever.

Most people don’t plan and prep for success. They react. Imagine your advantage if you begin to put the above 10 things into consistent practice in your market.