Hope the second half of the year is off to a great start for you. Hopefully you took what I said in our last sales meeting and looked back on the goals you had set for this year to see how you are doing against those. At the very least, I hope you have written down or thought of what your goals are now for the rest of 2024. Goals are great as they give you something to strive for and to check yourself against. You know what else is great? Best friends. That is our topic for this week’s meeting, and as much as I would love to hear about your current best friends, we are here to talk about your new best friends, the on-air staff.
No matter what format you are selling, the on-air team can be your best friends and frankly should be some of your best friends. No, you don’t have to hang out with them all the time and be up in all of their business outside of the station, however, you should know them like a best friend and while you have them at work, making them your best friend can help make you a lot of money.
One of the biggest things we don’t think about from being in the business, is how cool it is to other people. Most people go to a job that nobody would ever want to come visit them at. What are you going to do, show them your cubicle? Let them see the distance between your desk and the break room?
Your job is cool and the on-air staff at those jobs are really cool, even if you don’t think so. Take advantage of it.
I have written in this space before, the key to an on-air talent’s heart is through their wallets and their stomachs. If you bring a talent a new advertiser for endorsements, that puts money in the talent’s pocket. It also happens to be the best way to get results for your advertisers. Additionally, if you help build a relationship between the sponsor and the talent, now you really have something special.
Now, we all know that talent will do the best job of endorsing a client if they are talking about a product they use and/or like. There are a few ways you can find some of this information out such as listening to their show and following them on social media. However, become friends with them and you can learn more about their interests that will help you sell them as endorsers. Imagine the confidence you could go out and sell a category with if you knew you had a talent who really could speak well on it and make a big difference for a client in the space.
I highly recommend you do at least one meeting early on and bring the talent in on the conversation. Do that meeting at the radio station and let the client take in the atmosphere, see the studio, the action, and of course meet the people. Bring lunch in (remember to always feed talent!), let the talent get to know the client and vice versa.
Talent are entertainers by nature. Many of them are surprisingly great when you put them in front of the client. On air hosts are used to interviewing people and trying to make them comfortable and have fun. This works extremely well in a sales setting because it helps relax the client and you have them on your home turf.
If talent don’t mind, and I always talk to them about this first, I like to close with the talent in the room. I know for a lot of them the financial part of the discussion can be nerve wracking and something they don’t want to be a part of; however, it is the advantage over the client we are looking for in these situations and it is very difficult for a client to say no in front of the ‘cool talent’ they just met and hung out with.
Talent sells every day. They sell themselves on the air to the listening audience. They don’t think of it this way, but that is absolutely what they are doing, and they are good at it. Use this to your advantage. You can even learn from it if you pay attention closely enough to how the talent interacts with people when they are ‘on.’
So, let the talent do some of the work for you. Let their star shine in front of your clients and prospects and let them bring some energy to your meeting. Between their passion for what they do and your passion for what you sell, it is a no-brainer combination that is likely to work more times than not.
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.
