Alright everyone, welcome to our sales meeting. For this one, I want you to put all of your pens, paper, iPads, laptops and phones away, I just want you to listen. This is not going to be like our regular meetings, this one is more of a dedication to someone who taught me more than anyone else about media sales.
Back in the early 2000’s I had the chance to work for Simmons Media Group out of Salt Lake City. They had just purchased a signal in St. Louis to be a new ESPN station and I was hired to run it. One of the great things that came out of that job was that my boss, Daryl O’Neal, was a big fan of noted radio consultant and Radio Ink sales columnist Dave Gifford. I was fortunate to attend two different training sessions with ‘Giff’ and I can promise you that I learned more in those two sessions than maybe any other time in my life.
Sadly, I read a few weeks ago that Dave Gifford passed away at the age of 90. Gifford had lived in Santa Fe, New Mexico and ran Dave Gifford International and The Graduate School for Sales Management.
So, today’s meeting is simply talking to you about the things I heard from ‘Giff’ twenty years ago that still stick with me today. I actually still have the workbooks we were given at the two sessions and when I was running stations and sales teams, I would often refer to them.
Gifford had a way of making everything sound so simple. “There isn’t a sales problem in the world that can’t be cured by making more presentations. More presentations equal more sales. Period. Ask and I get, don’t and I won’t.”
So simple, right? Sales is a numbers game, we have all heard that before. Gifford was a big believer in tracking everything and if you do that as a salesperson, you can figure out that the more presentations you make, the more sales you will close. Gifford would ask, “Are you in a funk? Do you need a raise? Is your boss getting on you? Just had a big cancellation? Market is down? Corporate flipped the format? Co-workers driving you nuts?” The answer to all of these problems, Gifford would tell you, is to make more sales presentations and the problem will eventually go away or you won’t care about it because you would be counting your money.
“Business goes where it is invited.” This is a ‘Giff’ line I have used all the time because I always thought it had a double meaning to it. First, for advertisers and prospects. If your business is not inviting people to come do business with you, how are you going to grow your business? You can try word of mouth, but we all know while it is the best form of marketing, it is also the slowest. The same thing can be said about starting social media accounts or email marketing. Both are great to do, but you are really just talking to your same customers who have already done business with you or liked your page because they are your friend or relative. But what are you doing to invite NEW business in? Also, I always thought this was a good message for the radio stations themselves. What are we as a station doing to invite people to do business with us? We can’t just preach the message to other businesses and ignore that same advice.
“You are not in the sales business, you are a marketing consultant who sells ideas and solutions.” Another great line from ‘Giff’ that really did a great job of summing up what our job is supposed to be. Too many times, sellers are just waiting for the ‘Package Du Jour’ to send out to a bunch of businesses to tell them why this would be great for them. But that is how someone in sales would do it, not someone who is truly a marketing consultant who sells ideas and solutions. First of all, to offer a solution, you need to know what the problem is, and you can only find that out by asking the right questions. And, in order to be really successful at this job, you need to be creative enough to come up with unique ideas or ways to integrate that business into your station’s programming to make the advertising message stick out.
“What you say, times how many times you say it, is the only thing that works in advertising.” This was Gifford’s message to small and medium sized businesses about advertising. It is what you say, meaning having the right copy, tagline, jingle, etc and then how many times you say it, or the frequency of the message. I would later add “and who you say it to” to this line as I do think it is important for the business to be speaking to the right audience, or else it may not exactly matter what you say no matter how many times you say it. Find your audience and get that perfect message to them over and over so you are who they think of when the time is right.
These are all very simple things, yet they are things a lot of us tend to forget about or forget to remind our sales teams about. This is the ‘blocking and tackling’ of media sales. Make more presentations, because that is what leads to more sales. Are you tracking your number of presentations and the percent of those which you close? People go do business with places that invite them to do so. What a great line to those businesses who are not spending money on advertising. If not advertising, what is the plan to grow? You are not in sales, but rather are a marketing consultant who has a solution for a problem. Find the problem, offer the solution. And then it comes down to the right message and frequency.
This was my experience with Dave Gifford in a nutshell. Simple, yet so smart and so effective.
Many who attended his sessions would tell you that nobody cared about or knew more about media sales and media sales management than Dave Gifford did. And I loved his style of delivery which often came out more like “C’mon people, you know this stuff, now go live it!”
We lost a great sales mind when Dave Gifford passed away, but hopefully those that were trained under his tutelage will keep spreading his teachings and continue to make media salespeople better.
Dave Greene is the Chief Media Officer for Barrett Media. His background includes over 25 years in media and content creation. A former sports talk host and play-by-play broadcaster, Dave transitioned to station and sales management, co-founded and created a monthly sports publication and led an ownership group as the operating partner. He has managed stations and sales teams for Townsquare Media, Cumulus Media and Audacy. Upon leaving broadcast media he co-founded Podcast Heat, a sports and entertainment podcasting network specializing in pro wrestling nostalgia. To interact, find him on Twitter @mr_podcasting. You can also reach him by email at Dave@BarrettMedia.com.
