Dave Greene is one of the General Sales Managers at Entercom St Louis. The 5-station cluster is handled by 2 GSM’s. Dave has a team of 8 account execs and handles all station events, title sponsorships and St Louis Cardinals play by play packages.
If the name sounds familiar it’s because Dave wrote about sales here at BSM until he moved to St Louis from Kansas City. I thought he would be a good person to speak to about the challenges of today’s sales department. Especially in digital.
It seems like there are sellers who will do it, won’t do it and everything in between. Dave doesn’t think those efforts will cut it. He compared it to a person interviewing to cook at McDonalds who says they will cook everything but chicken. They would not get hired.
“That just doesn’t work, you’ve got to cook it all.”
Greene sees selling digital elements as an obligation to his clients, “If I don’t try to sell you whoever and wherever your target market is, I am not doing my job.”
Dave can tell who the players are on his team by who jumps on the digital train and who does not.
“If the seasoned rep is fighting selling digital, you can see they are just waiting for the end, the other pros want to keep doing this for a while, so they dive in.”
One of the challenges of selling digital is that so much of it is not exclusive to a station. Anybody can sell geo fencing!
Greene instructs his sellers to incorporate the campaign into the digital elements, like having endorsement talent do Facebook ads. In the end, it’s the salesperson that makes the difference.
“Clients don’t have to use multiple vendors, they can use somebody they trust,” he says. “The first part of added value needs to be YOU.”
In the end, Greene has a simple philosophy for his account executives: DO YOUR JOB.
Your job is to sell digital, radio and whatever else you are asked to do. DO IT. There are six basic things he asks his sellers to do in order to be successful.
- Prospect
- Cold Call
- CNA
- Present
- Close
- Service
“You have to have people who want to do this every day, all day who want to be there and not people who can tell you every reason why they can’t find new business,” Greene says. “It’s always because they aren’t reaching out to enough people.”
Greene thinks most sellers fail because they are not prospecting and cold calling. There are a lot of options for making that first contact these days. Greene encourages his staff to cold email or hit folks up on various social media platforms. All that matters is that someone hits ‘em up!
Jeff Caves is a sales columnist for BSM working in radio and digital sales for Cumulus Media in Dallas, Texas and Boise, Idaho. He is credited with helping launch, build, and develop Sports Radio The Ticket in Boise, into the market’s top sports radio station. During his 26 year stay at KTIK, Caves hosted drive time, programmed the station, and excelled as a top seller. You can reach him by email at jeffcaves54@gmail.com or find him on LinkedIn.
