When selling a new prospect advertising on your station, how long should it take to make the sale?
The correct answer is… as long as it takes, to do it right! Too fast or too slow can both have negative effects. But in most cases, moving too fast can have greater long-term negative effects than moving too slow. Patience, more often than not, is a virtue!
Keep in mind that media sales are different than automotive, furniture, or insurance sales. In advertising sales, if we lose the sale to a competitor or don’t make the sale today, there will nearly always be another opportunity tomorrow or in the very near future. In the automotive, insurance and other like categories, the urgency is much greater. They know if they don’t get the sale today, that person may well be out of the market tomorrow. However, even with that said, the best salespeople regardless of what they are selling, nearly always have patience.
In media sales, there are two factors that determine how long you should take:
1) The value of the client. Is it a long-term client or short-term? The more potential value the client has, the more patience you should have. Don’t rush in with ideas and plans that aren’t well-thought-out. Make sure you play your cards correctly.
2) How much time does the client/prospect need to trust you? Trust, takes time and if they trust you at the point when they say yes to your plan, the chances are much greater that they will give your plan the time it needs to work.
Even if they don’t trust you, they may buy from you once or twice, but without trust, the chances of them being with you long-term are very slim.
In my experience, most of the medium to large, long-term contracts my team wrote took a minimum of 3 months to close, and more often than not it took 6 months or more. But once they bought into the ideas and plans that we had taken our time to create for them, they were committed and stayed with the program.
18th-century Swiss philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau said it best, “Patience is bitter, but its fruit is sweet”. It takes time to reap the rewards.
When you find a potential client that has value, be patient with them. Take the time to come up with great ideas. Ask deeper questions. Show a keener interest in their business and use that time to build trust and rapport. Once they say yes, you’ll have them for a lifetime.
Patience is a Virtue!
It seems simple, sales reps make sales calls, and we make sales calls for a variety of reasons.
At the beginning of the sales process, we make cold calls to introduce ourselves. Beyond cold calls, we make calls to conduct the interview or the Q&A or CNA. We make presentation calls, follow up calls and calls simply to keep in touch. Once the person becomes a client, we make service calls. The types of sales calls and reasons for calls go on and on.
Prior to every call we make, whether in-person, via the phone, email or text, we should ask ourselves this question, “What do I want to accomplish with this call?”.
Every call should have a clear objective. For some calls, the objective will simply be to set up a meeting or get them to say “yes” to considering radio or whatever else you might be offering. Other objectives might be to get them to agree to consider a promotion, adding another station, increasing their frequency, approving a script and starting the schedule. The reasons are endless, but your objective for each call should be to get you to your next step.
It seems obvious, after all, you know why you’re going on the call, but if you consciously (physically and mentally) ask yourself the question before EVERY call, “What do I want to accomplish with this call?”, I can assure you that you’ll have a better understanding of what you want to achieve and how to go about it. And, by doing so, every call from this day forward will be more productive.
Good Luck!
