Tag Archives: Revenue
A Different Route… to Prospecting
Prospecting is a never-ending process in sales and it’s the one step, for several reasons, that it often gets moved to the back-burner.
Here is an easy way to make prospecting part of your daily commute to and from the office… Simply take a different route!
If you are like most, the route you take to work is the same, day after day, week after week. It’s easy, you know exactly how long it will take, and unless a new business sprouts up, the view is the same.
Starting this week, dedicate yourself to finding a few different routes to or from work and take these routes once a week now through the end of the year. Travel it in both directions. You’ll see things differently.
On your new journey, you’ll potentially see a variety of things that may land you a new suspect or prospect. You’ll see businesses that you may have never heard of before. In addition, you may notice things like Grand-Openings, Going Out of Business signs, Open to the Public on Saturdays, Factory Liquidation, New Store Hours, Special Events, Help Wanted, etc.
As Robert Frost so eloquently wrote, “Two roads diverged in a wood and I – I took the one less traveled by, and that has made all the difference”.
By taking a “different route” to the office, and to your prospecting, you may just stumble onto someone who has passion for their business, and it could make all the difference!
If you’re planning on taking a different direction to achieving success in 2020 and beyond, we would like to visit with you about our revenue-generating programs and services that will brand your stations and your media reps as “THE” advertising professionals in your market.
Contact me to arrange a time to visit.
Your Internal Marketing Plan
The radio station marketing model is unique in that we serve three distinctly different target customers. Most other businesses only target those who can spend money with them.
But in radio, we have three target groups that affect that “spend” and we need a strategic marketing plan for each of those target customers.
One, of course, is our audience. Most stations do have promotional and marketing plans to attract and maintain audiences.
Our second target group is our paying customers…our advertisers. Most stations are fairly effective at reaching and influencing this group as well.
It is important to calculate the per capita value of each of your target customers. If a station has annual revenue of $2 million with a listening audience of 50,000 people, then each listener is worth $40. Using that same revenue base and a total of 250 advertisers, each advertiser is worth an average of $8,000.
But it is our third target that is by far the most valuable per capita and yet we often have no marketing plan to attract, motivate, and keep these customers.
The third target is our internal customers; our staffs. If that same $2 million station has a staff of 20 who sell, create, administer and invoice the $2 million in revenue, then each staff member is worth an average of $100,000.
When the lights go off, your biggest assets go home!
Do you have a marketing budget and plan to attract and create customer satisfaction for your most valuable customers…your internal customers?
Are You Too Busy?
Here is what I have noticed working with hundreds of sales managers and thousands of salespeople in more than 100 markets over the years; there is a marked difference between being busy and being productive.
On the “busy” scale, I feel your pain. Computers that were supposed to make our lives easier generate so much valuable data that it’s hard to keep up. You have more reports to fill out, and less resources to pursue sales, and more competition every year. I get it.
But here’s what I’ve noticed. Markets where managers or salespeople apologize for not implementing our revenue development systems to their full potential, always blame it on being too busy or having too much on their plates.
But the sales teams that pick up the ball and run with it always seem to find the time to do so…even if they are working for the same company as the “too busy” folks.
Part of the problem seems to be in losing sight of our goals. Paying attention to the merely urgent every day instead of what we know needs to be done to reach our goals is a recipe for disaster.
Roy Williams often poses the question, “Have you allowed the merely urgent to replace the truly important?”
So, before you start putting out fires or solving the merely urgent, accomplish one productive task each morning that focuses on your long-term goal. Doing so will turn a busy day into a productive one. The irony is that “busy” usually means you’re putting out fires, while “productive” often results in preventing those fires.
Happy 2018!
Allan Waters, the founder of what was once one of Canada’s most successful broadcast empires said, “Our problem is not that we aim too high and miss our targets. Our problem is that we aim too low and hit our targets.”
With all the ‘bad news’ facing broadcasters today, it’s easy to get sucked into a negative-thinking trap.
We hear about the enormous debt burdens resulting from broadcast consolidation, and radio that once was branded as ‘live and local’ is now often voice-tracked with little local content to appeal to consumers.
Advertising’s share of marketing budgets continues to shrink, as does traditional media’s share of that shrinking share. Online shopping is hurting many of our traditional retail advertisers, and broadcast radio is no longer the only audio media choice our advertisers have.
And misery appears to love company. When we see fellow broadcasters with flat or faltering sales, we tell ourselves it’s okay to aim low and hit our targets.
The list of problems we face goes on and on, but I’m still from the Allan Waters school of broadcasting…our problem is we aim too low!
It’s pretty easy to fall into a ‘woe is me’ way of thinking, but virtually every business and every media is experiencing disruption, fragmentation, low-price competition, and various other problems that could be described as a crisis.
I believe the Chinese understand how to manage and succeed during an alleged crisis. They spell crisis with these two symbols.
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The symbol on the left stands for ‘danger’, and there is danger in every crisis. But what makes the difference when they spell crisis is the symbol on the right. It stands for ‘opportunity.’