A RADIO GUY BECOMES A POWER PLAYER IN CONGRESS

FORMER STATION OWNER WILL MOVE UP IN THE NEW CONGRESS

The Washington Post recently profiled Oregon Republican Congressman Greg Walden, calling him a conscientious lawmaker who plays well with others (I paraphrase). Regardless of your politics, that’s going to be critical when the new Congress sits down in January with an enormous influx of first-time representatives and senators.

More to the point as far as we’re concerned: Walden is a radio guy.

While he no longer owns his small station group in the Northwest, Walden has retained an interest in radio. And why not? Like many of us, he began his radio career taking out the trash and running the board, announcing and learning the ropes at his family’s stations. There’s no better background for a radio station manager and all that hard work and variety seems to have served him well as a lawmaker, too.

Walden has been tapped to head a subcommittee that will map out rules for the new Republican majority in the House. Look for him to move up to more public positions, too, including—according to the Post—the House Communications Subcommittee. He could do a lot of good for the radio industry in that seat, especially with so many key radio issues dangling out there.

What about YOUR representatives?

Which brings us to the people who were elected from your district(s). If you haven’t taken the trouble to establish relationships with them or their staffs, there is no more important time to do so than right now, before the new session begins.

How do you feel about HD? Let them know

What can be done about music performance and copyright payments? Tell them.

What about FM on cell phones?

Interference issues?

And that slew of new translators—are they killing you or curing you? All these and many more issues have either come into the sights of the Congress already or are about to. And if your idea of making yourself felt on Capital Hill is to let the NAB do the buttonholing, you’re missing a terrific opportunity.

Yes, “all politics is local”. And your local clout as the boss of a radio station or group is something your elected representatives cannot afford to ignore. The only way they will ignore it is if you don’t flex your muscle (or at least start firing off thoughtful emails) with them now.

Whenever you contact an elected representative, keep in mind the golden rules for turning your messages into action items:

• State the issue clearly and concisely—and don’t make political comments
• Tell the recipient who you are and why the issue is important not only to you but to the rest of your community
• Let them know exactly what you want them to do
• Above all: keep it brief, focused and professional

Radio—especially local-market radio—needs strong voices in Washington. The elevation of radio-friendly Congressmen like Greg Walden is important. So is your involvement with every representative who snagged votes in your market.

MONDAY SALES BLAST: WHAT'S WRONG WITH YOUR SALES MEETING?

This week's Monday Sales Blast is all about that good old standard,
the Monday morning sales meeting. How relevant are those meetings,
anyway? And what do your salespeople really think of them?

For some stations, a regular sales meeting is a valuable event that
leaves everyone rarin' to hit the streets. At many others, however, the
weekly sales meeting is a mind-numbing waste of time.

In this Sales Blast. I'd like to take the liberty of quoting from...myself.
The following is an excerpt from my new book, The Zero Turnover Sales
Force: How To Maximize Revenue By Keeping Your Sales Team Intact
(details follow this article).

And I quote...

WHY SALES PEOPLE REALLY HATE SALES MEETINGSNothing was ever sold at a sales meeting. Why then do so many of them blotch the agendas of the people who should be the most productive in the organization? And why do sales people hate them with such virulence?

When I talk to sales people (as opposed to sales managers) about sales meetings, here’s the opinion I almost universally receive: they’re a waste of time. Why? The reasons are many and varied. Take a look at this list of common gripes about sales meetings. Have you been part of a meeting any time recently where none of these occurred? If so, you are lucky, indeed:

Schedule hassles – “The meetings always seem to happen just when a hot prospect wants to see me”

Disorganization – “Why does it take an hour to cover something that’s worth maybe ten minutes?”

Irrelevance – “This has nothing to do with the reality of what I’m doing.”

Rambling – “The boss goes off on every tangent imaginable or gets into involved discussions with one or two people that have no bearing on the rest of us, who just sit there.”

The last three of which combine to form:

Preparation – “Did he know he was running a meeting this morning? If he has to shuffle through his papers or ask someone to go to his office to find something he forgot one more time, I’m outta here.”

And…

Importance – “If these meetings are so !@#$%^& important, why doesn’t she seem to have the time to put them together right?”

Interruptions – “Cell phones, texting, people interrupting other people and trying to dominate the meeting.”

Rah-rah sales meetings – “Don’t try to motivate me, help me sell more. I was motivated when I came here. Now, I’m just tired.”

And its companion…

Phony baloney fun and games – “Really, do grownups need to play these little ‘fun’ games to get motivated? The boss seems to think we do. Wrong.”

The Humor Factor 1 – “The sales manager thinks she’s funny. She isn’t. Boring.”

The Humor Factor 2 – “The sales manager is a too-serious, self-important dweeb. Lighten up!”

Why not just tape a target on my butt? – “They make everyone talk about their individual sales totals, which inevitably puts the spotlight on those who are struggling or
just going through a soft spell. Humiliation in front of my peers isn’t much of an incentive.”

Thank you, Mr./Ms Negative – “All we hear are complaints. You’d think the whole sales staff was a bunch of slackers. What a great way to start the week!”

And one of the most inexcusable management failures:

Time limit? Oh, THAT – “Bad enough that we have to carve out an hour every week for this drivel, now we’re way past that. I have calls to make and people to see!”

Unquote.

Think hard about your weekly sales meetings and how they're run. And if you come from sales, remember what you thought of sales meetings when you were working the streets.

My book, The Zero Turnover Sales Force: How To Maximize Revenue By Keeping Your Sales Team Intact is available in hard cover from AMACOM, the publishing wing of The American Management Association. It's at most Barnes & Noble and Borders locations. If they're sold out, you can find a copy (including for Kindle) at www.amazon.com.

IT'S TIME TO BRING BACK LOCAL RADIO NEWS

WHATEVER HAPPENED TO LOCAL RADIO NEWS?

Local radio news has undergone an astonishing metamorphosis over the last four decades—from too much to hardly any. Where Top 40 stations once routinely aired five-minute newscasts hourly, 24/7, and twice an hour during drive-times, they now air none at all. Where every major market station worthy of the name had a news department, now only the news-talk stations bother. And where local-market stations made news their bread-and-butter, many now don’t even bother to interrupt the satellite to talk about what happened at the city council meeting last night. (Many others, to their credit, do.)

It is not only time to stop this erosion of information—it’s also possible.

Why has local news disappeared from radio in many markets? General managers and program directors offer the same two excuses:

• budget restrictions
• changing listener tastes.

Let’s laser in on these oft-cited reasons.

“It’s the budget, stupid”

When the economy sours and sales budgets nosedive, managers who are looking to lop off a quick limb here and there to cut expenses almost always zero in on news. News is an expense, not a profit center, they say. One station owner actually said to me: “It’s like the engineer. I don’t know what he does but I know I need him. Can’t say the same for news.” Good lord.

A line like that points out an issue in common between engineering and news: unlike sales and programming, engineers and news people are not temperamentally wired to “sell” themselves to management. As far as most engineers and journalists are concerned, they exist to provide a specialized service which requires solid training and expertise.

My father, a mechanical engineer, once remarked, “My name is my resume”. He could have substituted the word “work” for “name”. That’s as far as many news and engineering professionals will go to self-promote.

Programming, on the other hand, can offer ratings as proof of its reason for being. At the very least, they provide the noise that’s heard on the air all day. Sales, of course, is the most easily quantifiable department in the building. Even the office staff produces obvious output such as logs, bookkeeping and tending the phones.

News doesn’t provide any of those “proofs of performance”. It provides the who-what-when-where-why and hopefully punches them up with sound. Good news writers turn even short news updates into sparklers of information. But they don’t play music, spout bombast or sell advertising.

That makes news fair game to many cost-desperate managers.

Here’s a two-pronged fix:

1.  Go back to selling news sponsorships, which were staples of radio advertising for decades. I’m not talking about Old School fifteen-minute newscasts with three :60s plus billboards. Even rookie news people can practice tight writing and conversational delivery while making room for a :30 within a three-minute news update. Or a :15 in a two-minute ‘cast. They can, that is, if you give them the opportunity.

News sponsorships aren’t hard to sell if you make up your mind that you’re going to consistently do so. When you do sell them, you’ve monetized your local news!

2.  View news as a loss leader.  You can also look at local news the way retailers view certain items: as “loss leaders” or “doorbusters” that lure shoppers inside, where they will presumably buy more stuff. Same with your local news: listeners tune in to find out what’s happening in their world and how it relates to them. If you’re the only station in town that actually provides that information—not who won Dancing With the Stars last night but actual news—then they’ve sampled your product and can stay for your entertainment offerings.

“Our listeners don’t want it, dude”

Forget the news-talk stations—focus only on the music stations in your market or nearby. What do they offer as news content? If they bother at all, you can bet it will come from the “morning show sidekick” (often a giggly female) spouting celebrity and entertainment shtick. Yes, Letterman had a funny monolog last night. Oh boy, that Charlie Sheen!

But why is my water bill skyrocketing? Why can’t I get a cop when I need one? Wait, they’re cutting the fire department’s budget?

If all politics is local, so is all news. Almost every national and world event has a local corollary—if you have a local newsperson to work the story. Most of your listeners live with at least one foot in the real world. They have jobs or are looking for them. They have relationships. They have money but not enough. They’re subject to local laws, regulations and taxes.

Their lives are about more than Lindsay Lohan’s rehab.

And here’s a shocker for some radio managers: Every listener does not acquire information from social media and word-of-mouth. Many, many of them want more. Where will they get it if you don’t provide it? The newspaper? Get serious. Social media for local news? Come on.

Here’s another bulletin: Every listener is not 22 years old (or 17). It’s hard for an adult to take seriously some local and cable TV news anchors who are essentially pretty people who sound like they’re 16 years old. You can uniquely provide information within your format that your core listeners will appreciate.

Unlike the younger crowd, these people listen to radio. A lot. In the car, at work, everywhere. As an industry, we've dug up piles of statistics that prove it beyond doubt. So what do you have to offer them in addition to yak about the latest YouTube video that’s gone viral?

When you approach news as something you can actually sell—and as a valuable commodity even if it isn’t entirely monetized—it becomes an attractive business investment.

When you present meaningful information—not entertainment updates disguised as news—it makes a positive contribution to any format and jumps you way over the competition as a valued medium.

A VISIT TO A TOP TELEMARKETER: WHAT RADIO CAN LEARN ABOUT PHONE SALES

WHAT RADIO MANAGERS CAN LEARN FROM A GOOD TELEMARKETER

I spent part of the day recently in the sales office of a local telemarketer. The object was to see what a successful group of telephone sales professionals could teach radio station managers about making money on the phone. You probably have a stereotyped view of these operations and, for the most part, your conception would be accurate. Not in this case, though.

The reasons why give us valuable insight (and reinforcement) into how radio can be sold by phone.

This wasn’t the kind of boiler room operation where a hundred headset-wearing automatons pound the phones relentlessly cold-calling strangers who don’t want to talk to them. Those companies are a dime a dozen and virtually invented sales force turnover simply by their business models. Burnout comes fast and furious along with the caffeine drinks and blasting rock music.

This operation began with a basic way to avoid cold-calling that I’ve championed for years: create circumstances that compel customers to call you, rather than the other way around. I won’t go into exact details about this company but suffice to say they sell a reputable e-commerce service that attracts customers from English-speaking countries around the globe.

The way they attract those customers is through Facebook and Google ads. In the case of local radio, the same thing could be done with flyers, one-sheets, postcards, ads on local websites and, of course, on our own air.

The point is: in not one case did a telemarketer call a customer cold. In every case, the call went out in response to an individual who had first seen the ad, then clicked on the company’s website—and from there had purchased a very inexpensive (as little as $5.00) web template with a credit card. That prospect then immediately became a customer. And that customer agreed to take a call from the company to get set up to use that little website template.

That’s it.

Their customer will now speak with two people.

The “Pre-Qual” or Pre-Qualifier

This individual, in a very friendly and conversational way (even though the conversation is entirely scripted) asks for personal financial information: what credit cards the customer uses, what their credit limits are, what balances they’re carrying, whether they own a home or rent, any outstanding auto or student loans and so on.

Prospects willingly provide all that information, too.

Why? Because they really want the service. And remember, they’re already customers, even at the five dollar level.

If the customer has too much outstanding debt or little room on credit cards, he or she is told that perhaps when they’re in better financial shape they might like to subscribe to the packages of services being offered. Then the call is politely ended whenever that can be comfortably done.

In most cases, sufficient funds are available to make a business pitch worthwhile.

That’s where the second person comes into the conversation:

The “Closer”

For this company, three packages of services are pitched:       

• $6,000
• $4,000 and
• $2,000

In other words, about the size of modest-to-good radio advertising packages.

Before price is ever mentioned, however, the closer asks numerous questions about the customer’s dreams for that website, what they would like to sell, what their likes and dislikes are, perhaps something about their family if that seems appropriate.

Every answer gives the closer an opportunity to point out how his service uniquely and excitingly (without those hard-sell words) fulfills those needs and desires.

It’s only after many minutes of this (the pitch can take an hour at times, depending on how chatty the customer is—no one is ever hurried along) that the packages are offered, large to small. From there it’s a matter of dealing with price objections and questions, as with any sales proposal.

Rising Above the Pitch-Close Cycle

Radio salespeople are too often trapped in the pitch-close-pitch-close cycle, often preceded by endless days of cold-calling. My hours with these telemarketers convinced me of the wisdom of farming for customers rather than beating them over the head with cold calls.

And of being patient, establishing relationships and then making the money pitch. Top salespeople and managers already know this, of course.

Should your station make a serious stab at telemarketing? Depends on your market area. If you have a large, spread-out business community and a small sales staff, a well-thought-out and managed telephone sales effort could pay big dividends.

And no, this does NOT include phone blitzes with classics like “Back To School Safety Reminders”. Come on. Let’s sell meaningful dollars to clients who would like to speak with us again and again. That’s relationship selling. And we’ve now witnessed how it can be done with the right approach to selling by phone.

SALUTE A VET TODAY. IT’S VETERANS DAY IN THE U.S. AND REMEMBRANCE DAY IN CANADA AND GREAT BRITAIN. WE’RE  FREE BECAUSE THEY PUT IT ALL ON THE LINE FOR US.

IGNITING LOCAL HOLIDAY RETAIL ADVERTISING

CREATE AD-HOC MARKETING GROUPS OF LOCAL RETAILERS

FOR HOLIDAY SALES SUCCESS

The fourth quarter is well along and, in many markets, the traditional big bump in holiday sales is looking more like an ant hill. Fortunately, heavy campaign spending—almost all cash in advance—is helping Q4 look better than last year. But what can you do when local retail advertising lags and the holidays draw near? Create your own local groups of advertisers, that’s what. This gives more businesses the opportunity to reach holiday customers and drives up spending by retailers who might otherwise skip (again) holiday radio advertising.

Here’ how to create your own groups of retail advertisers right now:

1.  Pick a geographical area or trade group

The easiest groups to organize in a hurry are located in the same area. They could be located along a particular street, within a specific neighborhood or area of town, or in a known, easily-identifiable area.

Alternatively, you could organize all the hair stylists you can grab into a holiday retail marketing group. It could be gas stations, muffler shops, women’s clothing stores,  a diverse group of family restaurants, whatever. They become a group because they have a type of business in common.

2.  Give your marketing group a unique name

It could be creative or corny. Anything from “West Side of the Square Radio Marketers” to “Home Cooking For the Holidays Restaurant Group”. It doesn’t

matter what you call it as long as the name says something about what or where the group is located and is not used by any other entity in town.

3.  Create 3 Competitive Advertising Packages

I normally don’t like packages. The consultative sell with spot schedules geared to specific customer needs is almost always preferable. BUT: we’re on short notice here and time won’t permit us to do specific needs analyses for every business in each of our new holiday retail marketing groups. SO...we create three ways for our customers to advertise:

Good, Better and Best.

You can name these packages as creatively as you wish. The tried-and-true Silver/Gold/ Platinum. Or Christmas-oriented monikers such as Santa’s Helpers/Mrs. Claus/Jolly Old Elf. Silly is okay for this one. You can name your packages to conform to your format, too: Blue Christmas/White Christmas/Jingle Bell Rock. Or Christmas classics: Sleighride/I’ll Be Home For Christmas/Chestnuts Roasting On An Open Fire. You get the idea. Have fun and be creative.

4.  Price aggressively but don’t give anything away

You want to create a one-call close if you can so don’t go in at the top of your rate card. Don’t give away the farm, either. And whatever you do, remember what makes radio advertising work: repetition over a short time span.

No two-spots-a-day-for-a-week plans. No sponsorships. And no individual bonus spots! Make sure everyone is on at least three to five times a day for three weeks. More often if you can. You not only want these packages to work right now but to give you good reasons for going back to those customers for Q1 business.

5.  Create a group benefit

Make your custom-named and special-priced group even more unique by doing things for all its members together.

Examples include:

• Airing as many spots as possible promoting the group. Who they are, where they are, why they’re unique, why customers should come in right now

• Remotes from the group’s geographical area, up to and including the morning show, coffee-with-the-coaches show or other high-visibility programs that really put the spotlight on your special group.,

• Giveaways or contests that only include the retailers in your groups.I don’t normally like “Register Here To Win” promotions, either, but when many retailers in a specific area contribute and participate, it really works. It also makes those who choose not to participate wish they had!

• Help organize a holiday-themed kiddie parade or similar activity for kids that’s just in your group’s geographical area—something that will compel adults to come to the area and shop

6.  Print up a one-sheet and get it out there

Make sure one or more are in every retail establishment in the area for which you

want to create your holiday marketing group. Then hit the phones. As you know,

I’m no fan of Old School cold calling but this is the exception to the rule.

Make your offer irresistible—and start closing.

Organizing ad-hoc retail advertising groups for the holidays shows local businesses that you understand the realities of retail in the current economic climate and that you’re going the extra mile to help them accomplish what radio advertising does best: bring customers through their doors.

This idea is not only great for flagging Q4 sales, it also creates a solid base of happy clients that you can call on again—right away—to pump up Q1!

NO ENGINEER? GET THEE TO THE TRANSMITTER SITE!

WHY YOU--NOT A CONTRACT ENGINEER--NEED TO VISIT YOUR TRANSMITTER SITES RIGHT NOW

Unless you’re part of a group operation that provides solid engineering support, you likely use a contract engineer for upgrades, monthly maintenance and when things go south in the night. That’s business reality for local-market radio today. But winter is upon us. You are the owner, GM or both of your radio station. You are responsible to the federal government—not to mention assorted local zoning boards, county supervisors and law enforcement—for paying a thorough, well-organized visit to your transmitter sites right now.

Depending on your location, you may already have experienced snow, freezing weather and high wind. Severe storms a couple of weeks ago heralded the arrival of what could be a season of nasty winter weather in some parts of the country. Whether you were stung by those tempests or not, you need to eyeball your transmitter plant and site before anything else happens.

Here are critical areas that you, the manager, should inspect right now before winter crawls into(or hammers) your area.

The front gate

When you drive up to your transmitter site, is the gate securely closed and locked? Do you have the right key or combination to open it? Any signs of attempted vandalism?

Remember that while it’s vital to secure your site, it’s also critical that you be able to get into it when you need to. Oil, paint, new chain or locks now will pay huge dividends when you need to get into the transmitter site in a hurry some dark and stormy night.

Fencing and signage

If your entire site can’t be fenced off, is your tower at least secure? FCC regulations and many county and municipal zoning rules require that physical access to your tower(s) be absolutely secure.

Also, are proper warning signs up, intact and readable? Just because you posted a sharp new RF warning sign five years ago doesn’t mean it’s survived the elements all this time.

How about your tower registration number? It needs to be clearly visible.

Plus, signage in rural areas just seems to be magnetic when it comes to attracting assorted redneck ammunition. How many bullet strikes does it take to make yours unreadable? Better check now.

Tower paint, guys and lights

BRING BINOCULARS, take a good honest look at your towers and answer these questions:

• Are all the lights working? If not, call the FAA first, then your engineer and arrange to have replacements installed immediately.

• Is the tower standing straight? Seriously, check it out. Settling at the base, loosening of guy wires or improper installation of spacers between tower segments can all cause a tower to develop a noticeable lean after awhile. It will be a lot cheaper to correct now than if a high wind load or big dump of ice cause the tower to collapse.

• How is the paint? This important requirement is often overlooked by managers who either don’t notice the deterioration of their required tower paint schemes or don’t want to spend the money on a tower crew. Remember: the FCC and FAA can show up at any time of year. An improperly lighted or painted tower could cost heavily in fines. It will be a lot worse if an aircraft strikes your tower because the pilot couldn’t see it! If you have a directional AM, perform this diligence with all of your towers in turn.

Satellite dishes and STL antennae

Bees and wasps love these handy structures for hive and nest purposes. Many a station has had its satellite or STL reception screwed up and discovered the presence of hives in critical places. Leaves, tree limbs and other debris blow into them, too, and right now is when you need to clean them out for winter.

Hoisting those binoculars again, check everything that’s hanging on your tower. Do all the STL dishes, two-way radio antennae and other stuff seem to be securely in pace, pointed the right direction and taking the wind without a problem? In addition, many stations realize added revenue by leasing tower space to outside entities for cell phone transmission, microwave dishes and two-way radio antennae. Check them, too, and if you have any doubts, grab your cell phone and contact their owners right from the site. It's their responsibility to fix but they'll rarely notice problems if you don't bring them up.

Transmitter building and tuning shacks

Check all locks and entry points for security. Replace anything that wobbles, is rusty or doesn’t work right now. The legal and regulatory consequences of failure to do so could put you out of business.

Inside the structures, change filters as necessary and do any other routine maintenance that you—and your engineer—feel is appropriate for your technical skills. At the very least, a set of eyeballs is a valuable thing to place in a transmitter building as often as possible.

Besides looking over the transmitter and rack gear, check thoroughly for any openings in ceilings, walls or floors where rodents, snakes and other critters can come in for warmth. An engineer once showed me the remains of a beautiful bull snake who had slithered into the back of a transmitter to get warm, became a highly efficient conductor and was barbecued in an instant. Results: station off the air and revenue lost.

A healthy dose of silicone caulk or other sealing compound and liberal distribution of mothballs works wonders in keeping transmitter buildings and tuning shacks off the must-stay lists for local critters.

Look and listen to your air circulation system, too, for any behavior that isn’t right. Change filters earlier rather than later.

Look over the real estate

Check every square foot and pay particular attention to these three things:

1. How's your copper? Many stations have been vandalized by thieves searching for pricey parts, especially the copper strips used in AM ground radials. Copper thieves are numerous and they aren’t subtle. You’ll know if they’ve been working at your site.

This is when good relations with local law enforcement really pay off. If your radials have been compromised the performance—and legality--of your AM station will be, too.

2. Is your generator juiced up? If you have an emergency generator, check with your contract engineer about maintenance. He/she may not want you to mess with it but make sure someone fires it up regularly and is on top of all fuel and filter needs. Otherwise, when the power goes out, it's nothing but dead iron.

3. Weed whacker time! The site should be mowed down for winter. Brush cleanup is important, too, especially near the base of your buildings, towers and guys. I once saw a photo of a site at which a tree had grown up around a guy anchor, bending the whole thing and loosening the wires. Nasty, expensive—and completely avoidable.

Every item I’ve suggested here is non-technical. You can do it yourself and you should. Don’t simply leave the physical maintenance of your transmitter site to your contract engineer or the nearby farmer with the big mower. Visit the site with your engineer once in awhile, too, especially in the fall and spring. It’s good to get to know your technical savior when things are nice and calm and it isn’t sleeting.

MONDAY SALES BLAST: IT'S 8:30 AM -- WHERE'S YOUR SALES TEAM?

IN RADIO SELLING, EARLY IS ON-TIME

When does your station open its business office for the day?

For most, it’s at either 8:00 or 8:30 AM, the same time the business world in general unlocks the front door. In most markets, retailers are rolling by 9:00. These are accepted opening hours for businesses that expect customers to come to them. In radio, starting general business activities at 8:00 or 8:30 is fine -- the receptionist, traffic director and bookkeeper.

But not for sales.

Some of the most-productive, cohesive and stable radio sales staffs I've had the pleasure to work with routinely hold their sales meetings at 7:00 AM. Whether it's sales meeting day or not, several of those salespeople routinely meet for breakfast at 6:00 AM, then head into the station. By 7:15 each weekday morning every single salesperson is in the station, including the sales manager.

And by 8:30 AM, those sales offices are empty. Their sales teams are all headed out to make sales calls—or are already there.

There are many benefits when every salesperson hits the job early, even socializes over breakfast before the workday officially begins:

• A strong “community” bond is built among the sales team
• Many opportunities and problems are hashed out and dealt with informally before they even hit the office.
• In radio more than any other industry, early is on time. When copy notes, paperwork, calendar updates and similar activities are taken care of first thing in the morning, the entire rest of the day is available for selling and servicing
• Many businesspeople—especially retailers and professionals such as lawyers, doctors and so on—have full days from the moment their businesses open up in the morning. They appreciate the value of being able to meet to discuss advertising before they are immersed in the day
• By the same token, salespeople can create more selling opportunities when they’re already out of the office and making calls at a time when most of their competitors are just staggering through the front doors of their stations, zigzagging toward the coffee pot.

Seriously, though: can you require salespeople to start their days at 7:00 instead of 8:30?

You sure can. Whether they elect to meet for breakfast beforehand is up to them. If it happens, you’ll know a lot about their esprit de corps.

During the hiring process, I hope you specify that radio sales is not an iron-clad 40-hour week. You expect your salespeople to be present at remotes and other functions, even on weekends.

Making it clear that the selling day starts early is another way to get everyone focused and to maximize every minute of every business day.

AVOIDING HOLIDAY MUSIC TUNEOUTS

WALL-TO-WALL CHRISTMAS MUSIC? LET’S THINK ABOUT THIS...

It’s time to re-think wall-to-wall Christmas music. Not the concept—the execution. That’s because the annual switchover to an all-holiday music format is creeping earlier and earlier every year. Like the so-called Black Friday day-after-Thanksgiving sales, some stations are even now jumping into 24/7 Christmas music. Even more than the early start date,  there’s a real issue with the size of the holiday music library most stations will program. That issue is a tune-out factor every year and it’s worse when the same limited list of songs is played ad nauseum for an even longer period of time.

You know the suspects. A couple of years ago, ASCAP revealed the top holiday songs in terms of radio airplay. The top ten:

1.  The Christmas Song (Chestnuts Roasting On An Open Fire)

     Nat “King” Cole

2.  Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas—The Pretenders

3.  Winter Wonderland—Eurythmics

4.  Santa Claus Is Coming To Town—Bruce Springsteen

5.  White Christmas—Bing Crosby

6.  Let It Snow! Let It Snow! Let It Snow!—Andy Williams

7.  Jingle Bell Rock—Bobby Helms

8.   Little Drummer Boy—Harry Simeone Chorale

9.  Sleighride—The Ronettes

10. Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer—Gene Autry

Now, if you (or your listeners) are inclined to say, “Awwwww, I love those songs!”, that’s fine. Nostalgia is important to many people over the holidays. And if you’re running a soft A/C station that programs all-Christmas songs every year, you probably clean up from a sales standpoint. But like everything else Americans seem to do, stretching a good thing until it’s too much is easy to do.

Think about it: there are over 500 recorded versions of White Christmas. Whose do you expect to hear on the radio? Right.

No matter how tight your playlist usually is, no matter how much your station has bought into the Christmas music franchise for your market, you will drive listeners away with too much of the same old stuff.

This is Radio 101, folks. Yet every year, managers and program directors throw basic programming sense out the window around (and now considerably before) Thanksgiving.

True, many stations have tried to make their holiday playlists a little more hip. Thus the inclusion of Springsteen, The Pretenders and the Eurythmics in the above list. But one thing is certain: almost every Christmas album that comes out, whether it’s rock, country, jazz or anything else, is likely to contain a dozen or so songs from the same list of about fifty holiday standards. Lack of fresh content is a serious concern to holiday programmers. Even with new artists, it’s still the same old songs. There are exceptions, of course. Welcome, Katy Perry and a few others and thank you very much.

For the same reason that short-playlist oldies stations—and some rotate among fewer than 400 songs—can become stale very quickly, a short and too-familiar holiday playlist can  turn listeners and advertisers away. The classics age all too soon when only one or two versions are aired. For novelty songs, it’s even worse. I mean, how much nostalgia do listeners really have for I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus? I Yust Go Nuts At Christmas? Grandma Got Run Over By A Reindeer? Please.

You can apply a personal litmus test to holiday music to gain some perspective on what your listeners will have to endure over the coming weeks. Simply ask yourself: What Christmas songs make me lunge for the “off” button?

My top two are Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree and Jungle Bell Rock. Yours might be different but I’ll bet they’re on or near the above list of top ten holiday  radio songs. What does that say?

Playing familiar music is the backbone of many radio formats. Playing a tight (in some cases, fewer than 150 songs) list of holiday songs, some of which aren’t even good, over and over for weeks is a yearly tradition at some stations.  But starting holiday sales at Halloween instead of Thanksgiving Friday smacks of desperation in the retail community. Doesn’t converting to all-holiday music earlier and earlier every year say much the same thing about the radio stations that do it?

If you’re going to do that, fatten up the playlist with new artists, different titles, unusual takes on familiar standards. Anything fresh. The longer you plan to air holiday songs, the fresher—and bigger—the playlist should be.

This year, take a stand. Vow to avoid holiday music tuneouts. And whatever you do, play another version of White Christmas!

A STATION WHERE EVERYBODY SELLS

WHEN LOCAL RADIO REALLY DID IT RIGHT

What did you learn at your first station? Hopefully, like me, you were a sponge and soaked up every sight, sound, smell and experience you could. My baptism in local-market radio (I’ve always liked that phrase better than “small market”) came at the impressionable age of 16, near the end of my sophomore year in high school. The first thing I learned after one night on the air was that, at school, I was an instant celebrity. At the station, however, I was in an instant minority. Not simply because of my youth and inexperience—but because I didn’t sell. Everyone else did.

Let me be specific: we part-time kid announcers kept the place running at night and on weekends and holidays. The rest of the staff—everyone except the bookkeeper and the midday jock, who handled production—sold. And this was no mom-and-pop shop.

I’ll break it down:

The sign-on guy ended his show at 8:00—then went out to sell.

The news director did the morning news updates until 9:00—then hit the street to call on accounts. His journalistic integrity was never questioned and as the voice of news in the community, he had a good entree into local businesses.

The afternoon guy sold all day, then came in at 3:00 and did his show.

Then there were the station president, general manager, sales manager and one fulltime salesperson. They all sold all day long. Even the receptionist made calls from her desk to accounts in outlying areas, which bumped her income nicely. She had absolutely no sales experience. But she loved talking to people—and listening. So she did very well.

If you’ve been counting, that’s eight people, each of whom spent at least part of their day selling.

What kind of monster operation was this? A 500 watt day/250 watt night non-directional stand-alone AM in a county seat town of six thousand. With a daily newspaper. No other stations in the home county or adjacent counties, either, which helped a lot.

What did they sell? Everything that moved. Flights of spots, naturally. Also play-by-play sports, a LOT of it. Sometimes three games a night, two of them tape-delayed. Every time anything moved in town, we did a remote. If it was even vaguely newsworthy, the news director fired up the Marti from the station car and went on the air—sponsored. We also sold remotes from stores, area fairs, opening day at the local swimming pool, parades, many high school chorus Christmas concerts and basically anything else where more than two people were involved.

In short, our microphones (and signage) were everywhere they could possibly be—and almost every minute of every remote was sold. That’s doable when you have an everybody-sells policy and the whole staff buys into it.

Of course, the station’s ownership (two of whom sold, the other owned a station in a distant market–and sold) hired people with this concept plainly stated. The fulltime announcers knew that a solid part of their incomes depended on sales. Their shows were to come second, although they were good professionals and you would never know.

A selling policy like that works just like any other policy:

• You have to want to do it
• You have to decide to do it
• You have to implement it and keep it in place
• You have to get your entire staff to buy into it

I’m amazed that very few stations operate this way today. Now more than ever, it makes perfect business sense. When everyone is out in the community every day, it creates lots of astonishingly good LOCAL RADIO, too.

(My enduring thanks for a terrific two-year introduction to professional radio back then go out to my first broadcast bosses—R.K. “Red” Faust, President, and John Carl, General Manager—of Chariton Valley Broadcasting and good old KCOG-AM, Centerville, Iowa. Nice guys and thorough professionals.)

WHEN A SALESPERSON'S HOME LIFE AFFECTS BUSINESS

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.

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.

ELECTION DAY REMINDS US: ANNOUNCERS TALK -- BUT CAN THEY SAY ANYTHING?

IF YOU DON’T TEACH AD-LIB SKILLS, WHO WILL?

Now, this may be a challenge to you, especially if your stations employ only one or two announcers—more so if you don’t come from programming. But you’re a radio station manager, it’s 2010, and this has been overlooked for too long:

Ad-libbing is becoming a lost art.

I don’t mean yocking around on the morning show; I’m talking about the ability to take something interesting and wing it, anytime, anywhere. If your talent can’t do that, your station loses much of the “pop” that makes radio vital. Regardless of how much or little local programming you broadcast, your talent must be able to ad-lib intelligently. If it can’t, you can’t truly sell and you can’t generate immediacy, excitement, everything that makes great radio happen.

Before I reveal why ad-libbing matters, consider how more than a generation of announcers on America’s radio stations comes to the mike with few or no abilities to speak “off the cuff”:

• After decades of liner-reading, many music format jocks can’t ad-lib because they’ve never had to. In fact, they’ve rarely been allowed to say anything that wasn’t carefully scripted as liners;
• With jobs so hard to find, few want to ripple the waters by sharing an original observation;
• Diminishing local news coverage has removed on-the-spot live descriptions of spot news from the workdays of all except the few remaining field reporters at large market news stations;
• When even major market stations permit commercial remotes to be conducted entirely from bullet points or even scripts (don’t even get me started on the fact that many are just babbled into a cell phone), there’s nowhere for talent to polish ad-libbing skills
• And the biggest reason of all why so few local announcers can ad-lib their way out of a paper bag: there are so few local announcers. Sure, the talent on your station is ad-libbing away day and night—from studios in New York or L.A. But not in your town.

Why does ad-libbing even matter? As long as the format is tight and your brand is properly presented, who cares? Does it even matter to the average listener?

It sure does. We’re all so bombarded with packaged sales messages that anything original, spontaneous, fresh and interesting explodes off the dial. Everything else is just blah-blah-blah.

The early guys got it right.

Could your announcers manage this?

When Calvin Coolidge was sworn in as President in 1925, it was the first inaugural broadcast by radio. Both CBS and NBC were on hand and an ad-libbing legend was created.

CBS announcer Norman Brokenshire decided to take the air earlier than scheduled to steal a march on NBC’s Graham McNamee and informed New York of this on his broadcast line. Trouble was, that line was owned by AT&T, which also owned NBC! Needless to say, everything Brokenshire or his engineer (that was the entire CBS crew) said, whether on the air or not, was monitored by someone at NBC. So NBC decided to get the jump and begin its coverage early. When CBS discovered that plan, it simply began its broadcast—with no further notice to Brokenshire. Three hours early.

Fortunately, Brokenshire had done his prep beforehand, was armed with trivia of all kinds—AND had a wonderful ability to ad-lib. For three hours, he spoke “live” on network radio, with only the engineer to ride gain. He described the gathering crowd, the weather, what Washington had looked like the previous evening, the talk in the hotel lobby that morning, what the local newspapers were saying, the Marine Band, the little skull cap that Supreme Court Chief Justice William Taft, himself a former president, wore. He spoke of all things Coolidge and kept going right up until the inauguration began. Three hours of intelligent, interesting commentary. By himself.

How about this?

General manager Bernice Judis—the first powerful woman in radio management, GM of New York’s legendary WNEW in the 1930’s and 40’s—had the habit of auditioning prospective announcers personally. She would put each hopeful in a studio, give him a pencil and ask him to describe that pencil for as long as he could. Martin Block supposedly went twenty straight minutes describing his pencil in fascinating detail. He got the job.

Would you DARE try this?

Advertisers who really trust top talent to get their messages across effectively will sometimes provide a cheat sheet of phrases, selling hits or bullet points instead of scripts. The idea is that the talent then ad-libs the spot, working in all the important highlights in his/her own style to create a potent selling message. One of the best I ever heard at this was Steve Cannon of WCCO, Minneapolis-St. Paul, who did it for three hours every day and was always sold out.

Three Easy Ways To Improve Your Talent’s Ad-Libbing Skills

Even if you don’t come from programming, here’s how you can dramatically increase your talent’s ability to ad-lib intelligently:

1.  Let it happen. Your listeners, advertisers and the PPM won’t mind if your announcers make brief, interesting remarks instead of reading canned lines. Come on...this is radio.

2.  Create ad-libbing exercises and have everyone practice as much as possible. Use Bernice Judis’ pencil trick or something like it. Do NOT permit the utterance of a single “Uh”! I guarantee, your announcers want to ad-lib and will work to improve their skills. If they won’t do that, you have a serious hiring issue!

3.  Make remotes sizzle. Don’t just sign the contract, collect the dough and send someone to an event with a cell phone. Plan, prepare, coach (or provide coaching). Meet with talent beforehand and  spitball ways to ad-lib a meaningful broadcast segment instead of just another call-in.

Hey, if the play-by-play guy on your AM is the only person on the staff who can ad-lib, crank it up a few notches. Now more than ever, radio needs to “pop”. Quality ad-libbing skills are how to make that happen.

MONDAY SALES BLAST: NO MORE OLD-SCHOOL COLD CALLING!

COLD CALLING PUTS THE PROSPECT IN CHARGE

How do you drum up new business? If you’re like many radio stations (and businesses of all kinds) you do it the Old School way: by cold calling. This can take the form of a simple walk-in when a salesperson sees a likely-looking business. Or it can be that time-worn favorite, pounding the phones.

Either way, there is NO less-productive way of finding new business.

Since this runs counter to a great deal of Old School practice, let me put it like this: traditional cold calling is expensive, wastes time and—worst of all—puts your prospect in charge of the business relationship. And that is absolutely the last thing you want.

In my book, The Zero Turnover Sales Force: How To Maximize Revenue By Keeping Your Sales Team Intact (AMACOM Books, 2010—see order link on the right side of this page), I share that you want a salesperson who is:

• A valued business partner, someone who is at least as important in the business relationship as the prospect
• Irreplaceable as a business asset, someone with specialized knowledge to offer
• A knowledgeable professional who already knows and understands many of the prospect’s issues
• Solution-oriented, an answer-provider who can uniquely benefit the prospect’s bottom line

Early in my career selling radio, I learned that any time I appeared in a prospect’s life, whether by an unexpected phone call or an unscheduled visit, I might as well have placed a cardboard sign around my neck that read

Here is a desperate person. He doesn’t know you

but he wants your money.

What will almost every prospect’s response to that be? “WHATEVER IT IS, GO AWAY!”

Why put the customer in charge of the selling process? That’s exactly what happens with traditional cold calling.

Fine, you say. How DO we get a new prospect’s attention, with a marching band?

A little over the top, I think, but fun if you can pull it off.

YOUR Zero Turnover Sales Force can mine for new business without traditional cold calling by presenting your salespeople as invaluable business tools. And you establish the policy that you’re going to compel prospects to call YOU rather than the other way around.

I’ll explore ways to do this in future Monday Sales Memos.

For now, make this a focus of discussion with your sales team: How would YOU get prospects to call US? What if I said, “You may not make a single telephone cold call or drop in anywhere without an appointment?” How would you bring in new business?

You should receive a number of helpful ideas. Everyone should be excited at the prospect. If either of those things doesn’t happen, maybe we need to talk about sales force hiring!