WHEN YOU HIRE THE SALESPERSON YOU HIRE THE HOME LIFE
The single most important factor in creating a Zero Turnover Sales Force for your radio stations is hiring the right person in the first place. That means that you have to find out not only about the person but about his or her home life.
Does this seem intrusive? What business is it of a radio station manager how an employee lives or how their family dynamic plays out? Plenty.
Here’s why: radio selling is not an eight-hour-a-day job. Plenty of salespeople try to make it so and too many managers put up with that attitude because they don’t know what else to do. But a salesperson who tries to do the job within the confines of the classic forty-hour-a-week work schedule is very unlikely to prosper. Which means: you hired the wrong person.
I’ll share an example from my own career of how knowing a person’s home and family life could have prevented a bad hire. I didn’t hire this individual. But I did fire her, and not long after I took over as general manager.
Here’s the story. (And a special message to female readers: No, we don’t have to have a little talk about women’s issues. This is about business policies—to which all the other women on the sales team enthusiastically adhered.) In a way, this situation was too bad because part of the problem wasn’t really this woman’s fault. The situation didn’t work because the person who originally hired her didn’t understand the significant ramifications of her personal life.
Our business office opened at 8:00 in the morning. All the other salespeople were there early or on time. The idea, of course, was to get the day set then hit the streets for appointments and service calls early. This particular individual, however, always seemed to have a problem being on time. Or even close to it. When I asked why, she was annoyed at me for intruding into her personal life.
She was a mother, she informed me, and her mornings were busy. I wouldn’t understand that, she said, as I was then only recently married and as yet had no children. Her kids had to be dressed and fed and taken to school but her husband often had to leave early for his job and no one else was available to help. She tried to take them to school early and this sometimes worked. But then one of the kids would get sick and, of course, someone had to be available. Or her husband got sick. Or one of their vehicles stopped running. And so on.
Mind you, I never doubted her word. These things happen to every couple with children. It’s even harder for single moms. I am not a male ogre without feelings.
But I do run a business. Everyone else abides by the rules. I talked the situation over at length with the other women on the staff and while no one wanted to harm another woman’s chances to make a good career, they all agreed that if they—with their own families and spouses and vehicle issues—could get themselves launched every day and be productive, so could she.
In an attempt to be an enlightened despot, I talked things over with this person. What, I asked, could she suggest that might make the situation work? Her only response was that this was simply how it was and it was none of my business how her family life played out. She suggested that it was my responsibility to adapt to her needs.
Wrong. And here’s why:
1. We had a workable system in place with a set of rules that everyone else followed
2. It wasn’t her fault that she had the kids and the husband and the car thing but it wasn’t my fault, either. I had a business to run.
3. I would gladly have made accommodations for her if she could have offered a work plan that made sense. But her mornings, she admitted, were anything but quiet. The kids made noise, the dog barked, the husband needed things and she was fully occupied. Entirely understandable. But when, in the middle of all that home business, was she going to be able to conduct station business? Calling clients or prospects with all that going on would have been a dependable disaster.
Waiting until later in the day clearly wouldn’t have worked because...
4. She wasn’t especially productive when she did get her selling day going.
In the end, the only thing I could do was let her seek out a job that was more compatible with her personal situation. I actually offered her another position at the station but she declined. And no, there was nothing discriminatory about any of it.
Nobody was in line to get sued.
Nobody was in line to get sued.
As I said, I didn’t make this hire in the first place. But it was a strong lesson to me that whenever you interview someone for any position—especially in sales—it’s absolutely critical to learn early in the process how their personal lives will (or won’t) fit in with your professional expectations.
