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.

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.

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.