Grow Your Sales

Grow Your Sales; Fire Your Retail Sales Manager!

&mmp;nbsp; In one of our revenue development workshops we begin the conversation by suggesting, “If you want to increase sales, fire your retail sales manager and your entire retail sales force.” It’s a great way to wake up all of the retail salespeople in the room.

We follow up with, “Then rehire your retail sales manager as a local sales manager and lose the word ’retail’ on your account executives business cards.”

The reality is that Main Street is shrinking in every market. Markets that had eight or nine retailers selling home electronics a few years ago, for example, now have two or three, and they’re probably big box stores where your ‘retail’ salespeople can’t connect with the decision-maker.

Look around your market. The growth is not in local retail establishments. The largest and fastest growing sector of your economy is the service sector; services like law firms, plumbers, financial advisors, electricians etc.

Not only is the number of retail prospects in your market shrinking, more importantly, online shopping, smart phones, a global economy and big box stores, are dramatically squeezing retail profit margins, which in turn, puts the squeeze on ad budgets.

Why should we be pursuing the service sector?

· Margins are excellent! Once the dentist’s first few customers have covered their fixed costs (chair, rent, equipment and receptionist) the profit on the additional two patients you attract for them is nearly 100%! Service sector doesn’t have to buy what they sell. If a retailer sells 200 units his cost is twice as high as selling one hundred units because she has to buy everything she sells.

· Services Don’t Need Volume One roofing job for a local roofer can pay for a sizable campaign on your station and a cosmetic surgeon doesn’t need to line patients up around the block to make a huge buck.

· No Global Competition. When you have a tooth ache or a leaky faucet, you don’t go online to look for service from Hong Kong or Pakistan. The service must be performed locally and the decision-maker lives in your market.

· Less Haggling. Retailers, by definition, buy low and sell high. Most local professionals or service providers have never seen a radio account executive, and seldom do they know what your competitor’s rates are. With higher profits per sale, rate is not as important and usually one or two new sales make them happy advertisers.

We don’t have time in your short weekly ENS on Sales to explore all of the reasons the stations we consult are capturing huge increases from service sector clients, but I think you get the point; your most lucrative growth opportunities in 2012 and beyond, are in the services and professions. So as you plan for a ‘Happy New Year’, plan to fire your retail people in favor of training a local marketing team.

One final word: You can’t sell services or professionals if you are still speaking retail. Lawyers, for example, don’t want and can’t handle ‘traffic’….they want ‘billable hours.’

Click here if you would like to arrange a no-obligation demo of our, Selling the Service Sector, workshops.

The 80/20 Rule in 2012

The 80/20 Rule in 2012

You are about to hear and read a lot of predictions for 2012. Predictions about the future are entertaining, but seldom accurate.

I recall attending a cable convention in the late 1970s where it was ‘predicted’ that supermarkets would not exist past 1990. The keynote speaker suggested we would be shopping virtually on our TVs as robotic cameras scanned the grocery warehouse aisles and we clicked on desired items for home delivery.

I once archived a tape of a speech from ‘futurist’ Faith Popcorn (what a great promotional name!) only to check back on it ten years later and discover that less than 5% of her forecasts became reality.

I’d like to entertain you with my predictions for 2012. No rocket science here, as these wheels are already in motion so my ‘predictions’ are pretty safe;

1.) Everything will fragment. And I mean ‘everything’; from media to the number of business competitors in every field; from technologies to audiences; and from political parties to arts and entertainment. The subsequent difference between number one and number two in a cluttered more-competitive world will be insignificant. Having the best salespeople will trump any minor product differences.

2.) Mass audiences will be replaced by smaller tribes or gangs as marketers’ targets. The account executives who learn how to capture the highest per capita results from smaller audiences will be the winners.

3.) Big box stores, online shopping, mobile technology, social media and daily deal sites will put downward pressure on profit margins and subsequently reduce advertising’s share of marketing budgets.

4.) Faced with more choices and tighter budgets, consumers and business decision-makers will resist being ‘sold’ anything. Instead, they will seek tools, resources and salespeople who help them learn to buy more intelligently.

5.) Advertisers will gradually change their accountability frames-of-reference, as campaigns like the Pepsi Refresh social media effort create a lot of online ‘noise’ but fail to increase market share. Measuring hits, page views, likes, responses and click-throughs, will be replaced with targeting profitable sales increases.

6.) Some discounters will discount themselves into bankruptcy.

7.) The focus on CSR (corporate social responsibility) as a competitive tie-breaker will grow. Successful marketers will pay more than lip service to being socially responsible and will engage in measurably improving the environment, the economies, and the general health and welfare of the communities they serve.

8.) Cherishing values and experiences will become more prominent than cherishing ownership and consumption.

9.) The 80/20 rule will hit all salespeople. Eighty percent of salespeople will see their incomes stagnate or shrink or they will switch careers. All of the growth and lucrative incomes will go to the twenty percent who learn how to strategically target in the new world I’ve predicted.

10.) Radio and TV will be ‘old news’ and all of the ‘new’ media will continue to take the spot light at advertisers’ trade conferences, in their trade publications and in the business news they hear and read. Decision-makers overwhelmed by ever-increasing choices will favor account executives who can help them sort through the new media/traditional media mix.

11.) Media sales ‘relationships’ and ‘value added’ won’t win in a highly fragmented, competitive world cluttered with critical and bewildering choices. In 2012 and beyond, selling will be teaching. The wins will go to knowledgeable marketing and communications professionals who understand and can teach advertisers why their particular media deserve a strategic place in advertisers’ 2013 marketing plans. (Yes, I said ‘2013’…the horse is almost out of the barn for 2012.)

12.) Regardless what happens to the economy, the brightest and hardest- working among us will have our best year ever.

Are you committed to being in the top twenty percent to benefit from teaching your clients why your stations are a perfect strategic fit with their plans for 2012 and beyond?

Click here to arrange a free online demo of how our SoundADvice and Guided Discovery Selling can help your salespeople master the eight core elements of teaching as selling in 2012.

Commitment

Commitment

Some words are very predictive of outcome. The word ‘try’ for example has always told me the outcome has a 50/50 chance of success, at best.

When I had two teenage daughters and asked them to be home by midnight, I knew the outcome would not be favorable if they said, “We’ll try our best, Dad.” I could only be assured they’d be home on time if they said, “Yes, we’ll do that.”

John F. Kennedy didn’t say, “We’ll try to go to the moon” and if he had, failure might have been acceptable….at least they ‘tried’.

Kennedy said, “We choose to go to the moon.” He made a commitment. And America did land a man on the moon.

The dictionary says to ‘try’ is “to taste, sample, test or make an effort”.

Testing and trying often fail where commitment succeeds. Commitment causes us to do all of the ancillary things necessary to see a project or effort succeed.

Trying simply becomes a self full-filling prophecy when it fails. Commitment makes the occasional failure a valuable learning experience.

Watch your words, for your words become your thoughts and your thoughts become your actions.

Randy’s What If

What if you committed today to implementing that new revenue idea you’ve been sitting on? Can we help? ENS Media always holds each consulting project in strictest confidence.

The New Learning

The ‘New’ Learning

It’s been said that, “The ability to learn faster than your competitor is your only sustainable competitive advantage.”

But ‘learning’ has come under the knife in recent years. Many conferences and face-to-face sales training events have been replaced by less costly and less time consuming virtual learning events.

As a trainer myself, I personally prefer virtual events to live on-location events. Why? They are much less costly in terms of down time for travel in airports and hotels, and frankly, all hotels and airports start to smell the same after a while.

I can also squeeze a lot more live virtual training events into a six day week than in-person on-location events.

But I also recognize the difference in companies that have ‘training’ as an expedient budget line versus training as a strategy to stay ahead of their competition.

In the training world, there are basically two learning models; Inductive Learning and Deductive Learning.

In the Deductive or ‘direct instruction’ model, information and knowledge is passed from teacher to student through telling, showing, reading or lecturing usually in a seminar-style setting or webinar.

The Inductive Learning model or ‘guided discovery’ model,is an inquiry-based method where the teacher creates a motivational environment that generates creative problem solving situations.

In this workshop environment, students draw on their experience and existing knowledge to debate and discover facts, relationships and new truths through interaction with their peers and creative thinking.

Workshops require skilled facilitators who can read and interact with the participants and manoeuvre through the various experience and interest levels to motivate ‘take-home’ learning.

There is no doubt that students who discover the answers in a workshop with their peers, take ownership of their answers and use what they’ve learned in a more sustainable fashion than those who have had to listen to the instructions of others.

Online seminars/webinars, are more efficient than hands-on workshops. But efficiency and effectiveness are not synonymous terms.

If companies are serious about sustainable learning as their competitive advantage, I guess I’ll have to keep smelling airports and hotel rooms.

Randy’s

What If you had a hybrid learning solution, with a combination of live face-to-face workshops and ongoing webinars to keep new concepts relevant and sustainable?

And, what if training was not an expense, but rather a guaranteed investment? ENS Media Inc. guarantees a minimum ten to one return on all of our workshops in new and lift business or we refund your investment in full!!

Like Fries with That?

Would you Like Fries with That?

You have invested a lot of time, money and effort to get that sale. There is wear and tear on your vehicle, gas and parking money, the usual time consuming activities of research, pre-call planning, prospecting, presenting and more.

Now you finally got the sale and you can’t wait to fly out the door; maybe because you’re afraid the buyer will change their mind, or you can’t wait to get back to the station and celebrate.

In either case, many account executives forget the most profitable sale can be in the ‘fries’. The fast food folks understand the effect and efficiency of simply asking,“Would you like fries with that?” There is little extra time and no additional expense in making small up-sells during every sale.

I learned that very early in my career when I was in newspaper sales. Yes,before I saw the light, I sold newspaper advertising. And I quickly learned the power of selling the fries during every transaction. Once the advertiser had agreed to the size, theme, layout and content of a full page or half page ad, I’d simply ask,“Do you want to direct more readers to see your ad with a small teaser in the classified section?”

I consistently had the equivalent of one full page of advertising every month, made up of small classified teaser ads!

Do you know how to add fries to every sale you make? It’s easy to get a ‘yes’ on the heals of a larger sale, with no additional costs of time or money on your part.

Perhaps you can sell a link to the client’s web site on your web site for $2 a day. That’s only $730 a year, but if half of the accounts on your station bought those ‘fries’, it could easily add up to over six figures for your station annually.

Look around for the fries you might add to every sale you make.

Randy’s What If