6-18-2014
I learned that Banff, Alberta, Canada is absolutely one of the most beautiful places on earth. Most of the time when you travel you get ?locked inside the room.? In this case I was able to get out and see how beautiful Banff is. If you are ever planning on going on a vacation to Canada, besides Kelowna, you?re going to have to visit Banff.
Lloyd Robertson -- there is nobody like him. For 41 years, until 2011, Lloyd Robertson co-anchored CBC and CTV. Lloyd started, believe it or not, in radio. For 15 years, as I?ve traveled to Canada on an extensive basis, Lloyd was the one I watched and he made me feel like I was home.
I think Lloyd is about 80 now. I spoke in the morning at the Western Association of Broadcasters last Thursday and Lloyd was also one of the speakers. To share the stage with this broadcasting icon was one of my dreams. Dream fulfilled! This is not an everyday thing. By the way, Lloyd was dead-on with his stories, and did something I respect greatly: He was in every session.
I spotted him right away in mine. He doesn?t have to attend every session and he even called me out during his session. Why? Because he was at my session first thing in the morning. Kind of reminds me of the late Radio Wayne Cornils. Radio Wayne was at all of the sessions at the RAB, even if it was just poking his head in to see you even after he introduced you.
I learned that I needed to make sure I hit the ?breaks??meaning not run over in the break for the next speaker. Rarely have I ever done that. (Sorry Lesa!) I typically finish right on time. I think all sales meetings should also end at the given time the sales manager says you will be out of there. I broke one of my cardinal rules that one time. Won?t happen again.
One of the top things people took away from my seminar -- and this was a management seminar called ?The Liquid Fire: The 10 Steps To Management Success? ? was the question a sales manager asks upon first seeing the applicant in the first five minutes of an interview. The credit for this one goes to one of my sales managers, Steve Sandman. You have to pick an unfamiliar sport that the candidate will probably not know. If you?re in Canada, you probably wouldn?t ask them who just won the Stanley Cup. Pick a non-traditional sport to ask the sales candidate about. What you are trying to do is find out if the candidate is listening. So you interrupt them somewhere in the first five minutes of conversation and ask them, ?Do you know who won the Stanley Cup last year?? Yes, the LA Kings just won the most recent one -- maybe you can ask who won a year ago. Most of them won?t know at least in most parts of the USA. When they don?t know, remind them it was the Chicago Blackhawks. At the end of the interview, the last question you want to ask the sales candidate is, ?Who won the Stanley Cup last year?? If they don?t know, they were not listening to you. The top skill of high-performing sales reps is?listening! In the cases where I?ve personally hired people who couldn?t answer that question, they didn?t make it. The ones who did, most always made it.
I learned, even after all of this time, my little Pomeranian Ajax still carries a lot of branding equity with his yellow-and-black reward-rescue sign. Top colors in the outdoors are? Yellow and black. Yes, Ajax is still alive today.
For some reason, 95 percent of that all-Canadian audience picked the circle of the three choices determining if you are, a) intelligent (those who chose the square), b) creative (those who chose the triangle), or c) your mind is constantly pre-occupied with booze and sex (those who chose the circle). Needless to say, we had a fun seminar with all the circles in the audience.
I found one Greek in the audience. It was the first time for me, speaking outside of Greece, that somebody actually recognized me speaking Greek: I throw a few words out in Greek to see if anybody understands Greek. I use this as an illustration of having the audience realize that if you are just speaking your language of broadcaster or digital maven, and you don?t know how to talk the retailer?s language of profit margins, mark-ups, forward buying, and accruals, and really understand the language of the retailer, you are speaking Greek and they are speaking retail. It?s pretty hard for your reps to gather good information to bring back to you and do a good Return On Investment calculation for them to see what the desire expectations are going to be for your campaign. Unfortunately, we rarely ever set up expectations, which is why we never have to go back and ask the question, ?Is it working??
Believe it or not, we did start out with everyone clapping and we did finish up by having all the broadcasters in Alberta holding hands and repeating the phrase ?Kiazen? at the end of the seminar. That was a very smart group of broadcasters and one of the toughest groups that I have ever spoken in front of -- they had so much experience. You can?t just drop a line on them and head to the door ? you?d better explain it. Since the competition is really outside the conference room, ?on the streets,? in terms of newspaper, direct mail, yellow pages -- anything but what we had in the room: radio, TV, and digital.
A special thank you to George Leith from Vendasta Technologies who put in a good five minutes explaining how broadcasters can help local businesses with their virtual doorway to their business. He even held their attention after I went long into the break. Truly a captivating speaker, that George Leith.
I love you Alberta! What a great group! That was my first time speaking in the Alberta province and I won?t forget it.
Sean Luce is the Head International Instructor for the Luce Performance Group International and can be reached at sean@luceperformancegroup.com or www.luceperformancegroup.com You can also find Sean?s new book The Liquid Fire on Amazon.com.
(6/19/2014 9:05:38 PM)
Thank you Ronald. I loved it there. They were very nice and receptive to me.
(6/18/2014 8:44:20 AM)
Glad you enjoyed Banffff, Sean. During the 30 years we were in Calgary, the locals had a saying: "There are no bad days to go to the mountains."
We also said to newcomers: "Hope you can enjoy 9 months of winter and 3 months of hard sledding." :)
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