Education – A GREAT Investment

Without sounding too critical, let me make a bold statement. “Most business owners don’t know diddly about advertising”. The only things they know are what they have learned from trial and error. But the fact of the matter is that most have had very little education about HOW and WHY advertising works!

Understanding how and why advertising works isn’t a trait anyone is born with. It’s something that must be learned, and most business owners either don’t have the time to educate themselves or the desire.

This is where good media reps come in. Educate them and watch your sales grow!

Here’s the real test. Do you or your sales team know enough about HOW and WHY advertising works to teach your prospects and clients?

If we are simply talking to clients about OUR stations, OUR ratings, and why advertising on OUR stations is a good deal for them, they may buy, but chances are they will never buy as much as they can or should.

The more you educate your clients, the more they will buy from you.

Teach them…

What Strategy is and why it’s important
How to Create a Brand and WHY it’s important
How people consume media
The difference between good ads and bad ads
About frequency and consistency
About the strength and weakness of all medias
About emotion and logic and the role they play in purchasing
About the buying cycle and Marketing Funnel
About the Marketing Pyramid
The difference between direct response and branding ads
The Lifetime Customer Value formula

Most business owners don’t like advertising because they don’t understand HOW and WHY advertising works or what advertising can do for their business. It’s up to us as media professionals to teach them.

Education takes time and money. That’s why most people sidestep it and just take what they can get. If you have the courage to invest in your business, invest in educating your media reps and your clients.

Education is ALWAYS a good investment!

If you are considering a training session or program for your sales teams, give us a call at (605) 310-2062. We would honor the opportunity to visit with you about how we can help educate your team!

“It’s a consensus! You hit a ‘home run’! “I would recommend ENS Media to anyone out there trying to build a solid sales staff, rejuvenate an existing sales staff, or redesign and rebrand your marketing image. Rick Fink is a solid, energetic, and extremely creative trainer/motivator. I’ve worked with numerous sales consultants over many years in my career and I can tell you that you won’t go wrong calling ENS Media. They’re really good!”

-Jeffrey Parke, General Manager, KOLA-FM/KCAL-FM, Redlands, CA

“Rick is one of the few people I trust with our sales staff when I leave the room. He is an industry veteran that loves it and gets it. I would heartily endorse and recommend Rick for your next program or conference. He will bring his competitive winning attitude to your event with the enthusiasm that will make your attendees want to jump to their feet and begin immediately. I’ve been doing this for 37 years and I recommend Rick highly and without any hesitations. He is one of a few in that category.”

-Dave Beck, GM/GSM, MBC Grand Broadcasting Inc., Grand Junction CO

Creating Call-Ins

Ahhh, the good ole call-in. Are you receiving call-ins at your stations? A few, or a lot?

Good inbound leads today are hard to come by, especially if you don’t have a system in place to generate call-ins.

The one thing every station should have is a system to create call-ins. The best and most productive place to start… your own airwaves. And, it has to be more than just saying, “Hey, if you need to advertise, give us a call”. That won’t work. What’s your system?

On a daily basis, media reps suggest to their prospects and clients that they need to advertise and promote themselves in order to generate traffic. But here’s the funny thing… most stations do very little, if anything at all, to promote themselves on the sales side of the business. Huh – Why Not??? And the crazy part is… the inventory to promote your own stations, is FREE!

At ENS Media, we have a proven program to generate call-ins. In addition, it will train your media reps, and promote them AND your stations as professionals.

It seems like a formula for success, doesn’t it?

Are you doing what you are asking your clients and prospects to do every day?

If you would like to learn more about putting your stations on the path to getting more call-ins, click here to arrange a time to visit.

Zip the Lips

Every once in a while, I meet a salesperson who proudly proclaims, “I’ve got the gift of gab.” In sales, that “gift” is more aptly described as “the curse of chatter”.

Successful sales professionals know that sales are really more about listening than they are about talking.

Those with the curse more often engage in product or feature-speak than they do in providing customer-focused solutions or opportunities.

Customers don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care….and caring is demonstrated by listening.

Listening is by far the most important and difficult skill a sales professional can learn and practice. The salespeople who annoy and alienate prospects the most are those who claim to be good listeners but follow every customer objection with a “yah, but….”

There is no room for the word “but” in a good listener’s vocabulary. To be a professional listener you need to:

Earn the right to ask questions by learning something about the prospect’s business before you make a call. Prepare with open-ended questions that encourage the prospect to express their views and feelings.

Demonstrate you are listening by taking notes. (Always ask permission to take notes, “Your input is important to me; do you mind if I take a few notes?”)

Paraphrase and summarize what you hear. Don’t start a debate.

Use the language and needs you hear the customer express when you make your presentation.
Make certain that every benefit you present relates to a need you heard the prospect express.

There’s a lot more money to be made being interested than there is in being interesting. So why not, shut your trap, bite your lip, zip the lips, and make some money!

Subtle vs To the Point

I like quotes and use them often to make a point, whether to one person or a group.

Recently, as I was preparing for a presentation, I decided to use one of my favorite quotes by Brian Herbert…

“The Capacity to Learn is a Gift… The Ability to Learn is a Skill…
The Willingness to Learn is a Choice!”

To me, this quote simply states that we are all born with the ability to learn. Whether we choose to use that gift to learn and try new things is up to us. It’s subtle!

For this particular presentation, I wanted to be a little more direct and make the case that if you aren’t willing to learn and try new ideas, failure is inevitable. So, I chose this quote by Zig Ziglar to use along with the previous one:

“If you are NOT willing to learn, no one can help you!
If you ARE determined to learn, NO ONE can stop you!”

If you’re trying to make a point to someone or a group of people, try using quotes. Hang them around the office… or even hang one in your office to remind those that visit… or to remind yourself.

I hope that wasn’t too subtle!

We’ve created a clean, more presentable version of these two quotes together. If you would like a copy, click here and we will share them with you!

Last week’s ENS on Sales was titled, Warning Label and User Manuals. I may have been too subtle in what I was trying to get across, so let me be more direct.

If you aren’t having much success with selling recruitment advertising or with its effectiveness, give me a call. I know how to make it work for you and your clients. It’s a proven system that will help you sell mega loads of recruitment advertising.

Your investment is tiny, peanuts, crumbs, compared to the potential return for your stations. We will teach you how to present it, prepare it, and execute it!

If you want to make your clients happy, make your stations look like heroes, and create a ton of billing, contact us to arrange a conversation. Oh, and also let us know if you want us to send the quotes.

I hope I wasn’t too subtle this time!

Warning Label and User Manuals

Warning: Failure to understand how to present and execute recruitment advertising could lead to financial injury to you and your clients and cause severe harm (or worse) to your reputation as a media rep.

Many products we purchase come with some sort of a user manual. In addition, when there is potential for injury (or even worse), warning labels are required by law.

Recruitment Advertising should not only come with a user manual but with warning labels as well! Why? Because when recruitment advertising is not executed correctly your clients stand to lose money, and you, stand to lose a client, forever!

While recruitment advertising is a form of “direct response” advertising, it does have a different set of rules that need to be followed to achieve success. Most “direct response” advertising needs to address the who, what, when, where, and what else. With recruitment advertising, you MUST answer the WHY! Why would someone consider working for this company?

Understanding “How” effective recruitment works, then presenting this to your prospects and clients, and ultimately executing it correctly, is key to achieving success.

As states start to eliminate unemployment benefits and we get closer to September when the U.S. Government plans to eliminate the extra unemployment benefit, more of the population will go back to work. As this happens, we need to be prepared to reap the rewards.

If you want your piece of this huge, ongoing, recruitment pie, we have a system that is proven to work.

I learned this system from someone much smarter than I over 20 years ago. Since then, with some fine-tuning, it has generated millions of dollars in ad revenue, and more importantly, helped hundreds and hundreds of business owners and H.R. coordinators successfully recruit qualified job applicants.

This system not only trains your sales team on how to present and sell recruitment advertising, but they’ll learn how to execute it from beginning to end so that it has the best chance of success.

Once your team understands how to present, sell, and execute this system, you’ll reap the rewards, not only in ad revenue for years and years to come but also in your reputation as an advertising professional. Once they know it works and they’re looking to hire, they will simply call you and say, “we need to run that recruitment campaign again!”

Warning: Proceed with Caution – Failure to understand how to present and execute recruitment advertising could lead to financial injury to you and your clients and cause severe harm (or worse) to your reputation as a media rep. Proceed with caution!

If you would like to learn how you can implement this system and how our Return-On-Investment guarantee works, call Rick at (605) 310-2062 or click here to request information.