(SALES) Building "Relationships"

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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SOCIAL)- 6 Keys To Building Listener Relationships

2-9-2012
There's a lot of hype involved with social media, and there are a lot of radio pros that have not yet awakened to the idea that systemic shift can ?get you? if you don?t move now to protect your best relationships. If you are not using social media to expand contact, encourage loyalty with real value-based content and grow listening occasions for your brands, you are setting up future critical failure of your brand. 

Since about 81% of your listeners would be more likely to try friends? suggestions (such as a new station, music or an on-air feature), social media offers an essential way for you to really make a difference in your ratings?.if you do it right.  So, the question remains:  How do you best build a strategy that your limited staff and resources can execute to strengthen your brand for the future?

Here are 6 Key Ingredients To Build Listener Relationships thru Social Media:

1. Dismiss social media apathy.  Don?t just let your competitor take all your listeners and listeners on the fringe because you are not active.  Many radio stations don?t have active real social media strategies.  If your competitor does and you don?t, you are on the road to lower ratings.  Social media is being used

by select radio stations to strengthen relationships and actually grow new ones. 

2. Have a specific social media strategy that very frequently leads listeners back to the broadcast signal.  While radio companies would never allow DJ?s  to show up and play whatever they want, this is often their total social media strategy.  What are the details in your strategy for social media that focus on getting  listeners to spend more of their loyalty with your broadcast brand?  If you can?t think of any, you don?t have a plan.

3. Learn the posting patterns on social media sites.  Some of this is social media science (7 a.m., 5 p.m., 10 a.m.).   Some of this is also basic listener  science.  Look at the drive-time patterns in your market.  Getting in a groove with your listeners and potential listeners is important.

4. Use video and marry it with usable content that is important to the listeners you want to attract.  Have you ever used YouTube to look up ?How To?  do something?  Your listeners have done this a lot.  Try it.  Then, think about ways you can create content based upon local questions or lifestyle-based  opportunities with the listeners you want to attract.

5. Focus your social media on how and why listeners choose your brand and what makes you special.  With an eye on attracting more listeners like the  ones you already have, focus on bringing the message of why and how people connect with you on your social media.

6. Bring your social media into your other forms of contact marketing (such as listener email, website, direct mail and more).  Make it easy for listeners  to make the choice to use your brand. 

If you?re lucky, you have a competitor who doesn?t believe in social media. So, use social media with a real strategy to cut their throat.  Don?t be quick to judge  your social media negatively.  It isn?t advertising (so don?t treat it like advertising).  It?s a relationship building opportunity.  Judge your social media work by  your strategy and stay focused on relationship building based upon what is important to the listeners you want to attract.  Spend your time building the proper  strategy and focus on what you know is right for your radio brand. Over time you will feel real impact based upon your filters (from the strategy) and leave your  competitor puzzled.   

Loyd Ford is the direct marketing, ratings and social media strategist for Americalist and programmed very successful radio brands in markets of all sizes for years, including KRMD AM & FM in Shreveport, WSSL and WMYI in Greenville, WKKT in Charlotte and WBEE in Rochester, NY. Learn more about Loyd here: http://about.me/loydford. Reach out to Loyd via e-mail HERE Visit his Facebook radio social media page HERE

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