Tag Archives: Advertiser

What’s Your BIG IDEA?

How do you get advertisers to invest more money with you or renew with a rate increase, and how do you get that hard to sell prospect to consider adding your station? Come up with and present a BIG IDEA!

Every day business owners and managers drive to and from work thinking, “How can I grow my business?”

They’re looking for IDEAS; small ideas, medium ideas and BIG IDEAS. Ideas that make sense for their business. The bigger and better the idea, the more they will invest.

If we are asking for more dollars (increased frequency) or asking for a rate increase (just because it’s renewal time) your chances for pushback and resistance are greatly increased. However, with a well thought out “BIG IDEA” you’ll increase your chances tenfold.

Your BIG IDEAS can be a campaign ad strategy, a musical image, an audio signature, a promotion, a new positioning statement or slogan. It can be anything that benefits THEM, and not you or your radio station. Your summer car giveaway may be your station’s biggest promotion of the year, but it must be presented from the advertiser’s perspective to increase your chances of selling them.

We suggest you view every proposal before it goes out the door to ensure it has a customer-focused “IDEA”. Selling “radio” can be challenging, selling ideas is easier, and selling BIG IDEAS, easier yet! After all, all business owners want are IDEAS on “How to GROW their business”.

If you are looking to GROW your business in 2018 and beyond, click here to arrange an online overview of how we can help grow your revenue and help train and brand your stations and your account executives as professional marketing consultants.

How to Walk In Your Customer’s Shoes

Most coaching and sales training programs highlight the importance of empathy in establishing solid customer relationships. Empathy is defined as “the capacity to participate in the thoughts or feelings of another”, or put more simply, “the ability to walk in another person’s shoes”.

But management guru Peter Drucker says, “You can’t manage what you can’t measure”. So how do you measure your empathy in an effort to take it to a higher level?

We recommend you use the Empathy Index to measure and improve your empathy.

Quite simply, review every oral or written presentation or communication to calculate your Empathy Index. Count the number of words or phrases that talk about your customer, and divide that figure by the number of times you’ve talked about yourself or your stations.

The figure is your Empathy Index, and your Empathy Index goals should be a minimum 1.5. In other words, you should be talking about your prospects a minimum of one and one-half times for every time you talk about how great you or your products are.

Don’t be discouraged if your first few attempts reveal a negative Empathy Index. It’s normal for salespeople who are excited about what they’re selling to talk too much about themselves, their ideas, and their products.

Improving your Empathy Index over time will strengthen your advertiser relationships in a world where your competitors continue to babble on about themselves and their offerings without empathy.