Tag Archives: Advertising

“You Can’t Grow Without Radio”

(And He’s Got the Receipts)

There are a couple new clips making the rounds in radio land right now. And it’s not coming from anybody inside the radio industry.

It’s coming from one of the biggest advertisers in America. John Morgan, the founder of Morgan & Morgan – a law firm that’s grown into the largest personal injury firm in the country (probably the world) has a pretty blunt take on advertising:

“You can’t grow without radio.”

That quote comes from a recent article in Radio Ink titled “John Morgan’s Advertising Truth? You Can’t Grow Without Radio.”

This Isn’t Theory. He’s Walking the Walk.

Morgan has been using radio for over 35 years. And he’s willing to tell the world that Radio is a must-have if you want to grow.

His company spent an estimated $350 million on advertising in 2025 alone (Radio, TV, Billboards, Streaming TV, Streaming Audio, Google, Facebook, etc.) – with plans to go even higher.

That’s not dabbling. That’s commitment.

And when someone at that level says:

“I don’t spend money for no reason… I buy radio because it works.”
“I can tell my story… I can grow my business.”

…it should stop every advertiser (and you) in their tracks.

Morgan isn’t saying “radio is magic.” He’s saying something deeper – and more important:

Growth requires reach, repetition, and story.

Radio delivers all three:

Reach → You can touch a lot of people quickly
Repetition → You stay top-of-mind over time
Story → You can actually say something meaningful

Here’s another quote from John Morgan…

“Nothing’s about today… everything’s about tomorrow.”

That’s not a media statement. That’s a business philosophy. He knows what it takes. He’s proof that “getting famous” with broadcast advertising is about consistency and investing properly in it.

One Last Thought

When a local business owner pushes back on radio, it’s easy to get defensive. Don’t. Just remember:

You’re not arguing an opinion. You’re representing a medium that helped build a national brand spending hundreds of millions of dollars a year.

And sometimes the most powerful thing you can do is simply say:

“Hey… don’t take my word for it. Take his.”

******* Which is even more reason to record your team’s client success stories and use them in your presentations!

Starting right after you click the link on that John Morgan Radio Ink article.

NEVER Stop Learning – Get Better Every Day!
Duane Christensen & Rick Fink
ENS Media
www.ensmediausa.com

If you’d like to learn how our SoundADvice program can help your entire Radio sales team open more doors, protect more clients, and create more revenue, simply email [email protected] to request a pdf with all the details and pricing. And it costs LESS than 3 lattes a week.

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.

Some Things Are Better Left Unsaid

When you were growing up, you may have heard the expression, “Some things are just better left unsaid”. It was another way of saying hold your tongue because if you say it out loud, it could land you in trouble, or it may cause unpleasantness.

In advertising sales, one of those “things” better left unsaid until the appropriate time is…rates!

However, oftentimes it’s one of the first things new prospects want to talk about. When this happens, how we reply can set the stage and determine what type of relationship we will have with this client far into the future.

So, while we are better off not talking about rates, especially early in the relationship, the topic, especially when asked, needs to be addressed.

When one of your prospect’s first questions is, “What are your rates?”, you must be prepared. Answering the question directly and with as much confidence as possible is extremely important. The worst possible thing you can do is try to skirt the question and give them a song and dance reply!

Here is a suggested reply: “Our rates are great. I can assure you of one thing, we don’t gouge people and we don’t give it away.” Our rates are determined by several factors that include what station and/or how many stations you are on, the time frame in which your ads air, how much frequency you choose to run, the length of the agreement, and the length of the message. With that said, your rates will be somewhere between $ and $.”

If you choose to use something like this, make sure the rates you provide are fairly broad, allowing you room to explain the rates you present based on the reasons stated above, i.e. a 30-sec ROS schedule compared to 60-sec drive- times on one or multiple stations.

What we don’t want to have happen is to get into a discussion about our rates vs. the other radio station(s), or comparing the cost of radio to other mediums. The deeper you go with your reply, the more rate will be an issue.

As quickly as possible you want the conversation to turn to how we can help them grow their business with strategies, ideas, solutions, and results!

The right time to discuss rates is after you have presented your ideas and proven that you are there to help them, not just sell them. Then, regardless of what your rates are, they will always appear lower.

Do you want to be known as the media rep with the best rates or the media rep with the best ideas? Having a pre-planned and rehearsed response to this question can determine what your relationship will look like far into the future.

Some things are better left unsaid, or at least said in the appropriate manner, at the appropriate time!

The Sales Process – Your Opinion Please

Last week we suggested that there are nine steps in the advertising sales process and we provided our Media Rep Rating System.

Whether you are a manager or an individual media rep, we hope that you took the time to rate yourself or your sellers. If you did so in a very honest way, you discovered some areas that you or your reps are deficient in. You also learned that scoring enough points to be considered an excellent or elite media rep is difficult.

The goal of the process was not to show you that the reps you thought were “Excellent or Elite” are only “Above Average”. Instead, it was to get you to focus on the media sales process and areas where you can improve on.

We hope you did just that!

This week, we would like to look at the nine steps once again, only this time we would like you to rank them by order of importance. Understanding which steps are most important and giving additional attention and training to these areas will increase the rankings and ultimately help everyone become more successful.

Below are the 9 steps in the advertising sales process. Click here to take a quick survey to tell us how you would rank them by order of importance (1 being most important and 9 least important).

Advertising Sales Process

Step One: Prospecting

Step Two: Cold Calling / Asking for the Appointment

Step Three: 1st Meeting / CNA

Step Four: Strategy Session / Creating Ideas / Creative

Step Five: Creating the Proposal

Step Six: Making the Presentation to the Client

Step Seven: Closing

Step Eight: Service after the Sale

Step Nine: Upselling / Renewals

There is no right answer or right order, and the point of this topic was not to start a debate. However, some steps in the process have a greater impact on determining whether a media rep is successful or not.