7-18-2012
By Wayne Ens
Early in my career as a media sales consultant, I asked my friend and consultant Jim Tazarek, who worked with stations on both sides of the Canada-U.S. border, "What do you see as the difference between the way Canadians sell and the way Americans sell?" "Taz" as he's known, said, "Canadians build strong customer relationships. My American friends only talk about building customer relationships."
Having since helped stations north and south of the Canadian border to increase their local sales, I now understand what Taz meant. And today, being a Canadian myself, I can tell you that many Canadians have also learned the art of paying lip service to being customer-focused while doggedly chasing this month's budget without considering what that pursuit might do for their brand and their customer relationships.
The irony is that solid customer-relationships have never been so important or profitable. With virtually every media, traditional and "new," evolving and fragmenting daily, advertisers have never been so confused.
Never in my 42 years in media sales have I seen local advertisers so desperate to find someone they can trust and rely on to help them make sound advertising decisions amidst all of the hype from new media reps every week.
But for those who want to learn the art of simply talking about being customer-focused, I've developed my Top 10 list of How to Talk It Without Walking It.
1. Center all of your incentives and recognition around this month's sales.
2. Don't conduct customer satisfaction surveys or measure the customer satisfaction indexes for each of your salespeople.
3. Use "relationship" and "friendship" as if they were synonymous terms. Your customers don't want a relationship with an expert who can help them improve their return on advertising investment. They just want to play golf with their media reps.
4. Tell yourself customer loyalty is a thing of the past. Even satisfied customers will always do business with the lowest bidder, with no consideration for results or return on investment.
5. Have no rewards or incentives for account executive's high renewal rates or organic growth.
6. Only recognize and reward "new business." You can take your existing business for granted.
7. Don't train your account executives how to position radio's strategic fit in the new media landscape.
8. You don't need to differentiate yourself and the way you do business. You don't need quality of calls, you need quantity of calls.
9. Tell your salespeople, "Sales is a numbers game." Simply hustle discount or promotional packages door-to-door. Eventually someone will buy.
10. Never let your top salespeople out-earn your sales manager. The guy with the bigger title deserves the biggest paycheck regardless of performance.
11. Pick the low hanging fruit. Only call on advertisers whom you know will use radio. It's way too tough to convert non-radio advertisers to use radio.
12. If you're having a bad month or have lots of inventory, offer a one-time advertiser, or tough negotiator, a better rate than your best 52-week advertiser.
13. Sell spots, rankers, packages, and ratings. Let the customer figure out what to say in her ads. It's not your job to develop a creative campaign or big idea for your clients.
14. Use snappy comebacks and tricky closing techniques like the "assumptive close," the "alternate choice close," or the "sneak up behind them and whack 'em" close. Your customers have never been exposed to those ploys from other reps so they're bound to work for you.
15. Only talk to "the decision-maker." They never invite input from their staff or talk to their suppliers or customers, so you can simply by-pass or be rude to everyone else the decision-maker meets.
16. Measure your own success by quarterly EBITDA or revenues. Customer satisfaction and results don't really matter because there are enough fish in the sea to replace dissatisfied customers.
17. Salespeople should never invest in themselves. They should only use the training and tools that the company pays for. After all the company benefits from their successful use of training and tools too.
18. If you do decide to invest in training, make it sales training. You don't need to know anything about marketing, advertising, or what works and does not work in the new-media environment.
19. Only pursue revenue development programs that produce instant results. "Branding" and long-term results are for your clients, not for you.
20. Never say "no" to a client even if you know the campaign they want to book will not work for them.
21. Rankers and research always win. Your clients will never believe other media's claims to be "number one" but they'll always believe your number one claim. And they'll never buy a medium that isn't number one regardless of the brand or relationship they build.
Sorry, I promised you 10 ways to talk the customer-relationship talk without walking the walk, but I was on a roll and stopped at 21. I'm sure there are more. If you have some to add to this list, I'd appreciate hearing from you at wayne@wensmedia.com
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