Tag Archives: Relationships

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.

It’s About Respect!

Salespeople often talk about the importance of establishing great customer relationships, but often drive a wedge between themselves and their ‘internal customers.’

What’s an internal customer?

An internal customer is anyone in your station who can have an impact upon your sales and your advertisers. It’s the creative, production, programming, promotions and traffic people whom you depend upon to deliver the promises and the results that you promised your external customers.

One of the most common disrupters to harmonious internal customer relationships is deadlines that are too tight, or worse yet, deadlines that are not adhered to.

I hate to say it, but with few exceptions, there are no “emergency” broadcast orders.

Broadcast entities are not a hospital or accident scene, and no one dies if the order starts Tuesday instead of Monday.

Our ’emergencies’ are self-created when we don’t educate the client about the necessity of our deadlines, or when we’re just plain negligent and simply wait until the deadline to get our butts in gear.

Short or missed deadlines increase your margin for error, show a total lack of respect for the work of others. If you can’t say ‘no’ to late orders you are not really an account ‘manager’ at all.

Some clients will push the envelope as far as you have educated them that they can get away with. The irony is, they’ll get better creative, fewer errors, and better results if you managed their campaigns further in advance.

The most productive sales forces I see across the continent are the ones where sales is not a ‘department’ but is a harmonious part of the entire station team where everyone has fun and fosters respect for each other.

As we near the Christmas season, I’m reminded of stations I’ve seen where traffic and production people had to work late into the afternoon of Christmas Eve to process ‘late’ orders, while the sales people are out doing their last-minute shopping.

If you are one of those stations, I can promise you your sales are suffering because you’re fighting an uphill battle with your internal customers all year long. On the other hand, creating longer, firmer, deadlines will produce better internal customer relationships, which in turn produce better campaigns, better results and merrier Christmases and happier weekends for everyone.

Leveraging Your Biggest Assets

You have probably seen various event producers, from bridal fairs to home shows, make a good living in your market.

And you’ve seen your clients spend extraordinary budgets to participate in local trade shows, fairs and events that give them the opportunity to go face to face with new prospects. There is no question that event and/or experiential marketing works.

But you have huge assets that traditional event producers can only wish they had;

1.)  You have several sales people in the market. Most event producers cannot afford the numbers of ‘feet on the street’ that you have to attract sponsors and participants.

2.)  You have local contacts and relationships. Most event producers only see their sponsors once or twice a year as they try to sell and manage the event. You have relationships and credibility that makes it easier for you to sell event participants and sponsorships.

3.)  You have an audience…on-air and online. All event producers have to buy media to promote their event. In fact, promotion is usually their biggest expense. The ‘promotion budget’ for your event is yours to place as you see fit.

4.)  You understand your local clients’ branding and marketing objectives and how to dovetail those goals with an event. Most event producers are simply selling space and traffic, with no view towards making their event an integral part of the advertiser’s over-all marketing plans.

5.)  You have a 24/7 website that can have a sponsored theme page to give your event sponsors 52-week exposure.

Most of the traditional event opportunities are probably already scheduled annually in your market.

But you have the opportunity to create a unique proprietary event that fits your audience demographics, and becomes an annual profitable tradition for you. Events from ‘Toys for Big Boys’ to ‘Healthy Living Shows’ can attract countless sponsor categories over and above the obvious natural sponsors.

Generic sponsors from banks to insurance companies, and from car dealers to real estate agents can benefit from the traffic you generate for your themed event.

At ENS Media Inc, we have a motto; “Extraordinary revenues require extraordinary effort and extraordinary creativity.” If you want to generate extraordinary revenues in 2017 and beyond, consider creating your own annual event. Facilitating a successful event in your market will also validate the traffic your stations are capable of producing.

Downside of Relationships

If you have been on our website you know our motto is “Helping media companies and advertisers to establish stronger more profitable relationships.”

    But there can be a downside to ‘relationships’.

    I talked to a radio salesperson last week who had left the competition’s cluster to join my client’s station cluster.  Upon arriving at the stations we consult, he was shocked to learn that a client, who had spent $1,000 a month with him at his previous stations, had been spending $4,000 a month at our stations. When he asked the client why he hadn’t been spending $4,000 a month with him at the other stations, the client said “You never asked me to.”

    Many account executives confuse ‘relationship’ with ‘friendship’ or become protective of their relationships and fear asking for more. Often they become ‘too close to the forest to see the trees’.

    Your clients are all adults. They are perfectly capable of saying ‘No’ when you’ve reached their budget threshold.  Your clients are in sales too, and they respect salespeople who have enough confidence in their product to ask for more.

    I’m not proposing you gouge or over-sell your good clients.  But your relationship can be more damaged by accepting token buys than it would be by presenting solid plans to increase reach and frequency to help improve your clients’ R.O.I. (Return on Investment).

 

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