The #1 Topic This Past Year In Radio Boardrooms across the U.S. with management was the recession.
We researched over 50 business experts on how to not only hold your own in this economy, but how to prosper with your radio stations. In no particular order here are some of the best ideas.
We researched over 50 business experts on how to not only hold your own in this economy, but how to prosper with your radio stations. In no particular order here are some of the best ideas.
Stay positive. Remember, all recessions are cyclical. Take advantage of opportunities now so you’ll be in a great position when the economy improves. Make sure that any fear of being in business during the recession does not trickle out to your sales team, staff, or clients.
Take ownership. Taking ownership is about change and making the changes necessary to move forward, changing behaviors that are not working, and dealing with the world as it is and not as you want it to be. Stop living in a dream world. The marketplace is not what you want it to be, hope it to be, or wish it to be. It is what it is.
Don’t blame the sales team. When sales are slow, it is easy to blame the sales team. Revenue is a company responsibility -- not just the sales team. In an unstable economy, the true value of your product or service is tested and if there are no buyers, it may be that your offering strategy is wrong.
Hire slowly, terminate quickly. During a recession, you cannot afford to carry employees who are not winners. Former President and CEO of GE, Jack Welch said, “In most large organizations, 10% of the people can work unsupervised, 80% need to be managed, and 10% should be let go for a number of reasons. You are not doing your company or them a favor by keeping them on”.
Keep marketing. Are you thinking of cutting your marketing budget? Don’t. Businesses that maintain their marketing efforts during slow times come out of recessions healthier and with a larger market share than before the economy went downhill. Stay visible. It’s much easier and more efficient to capture market share when your competition stops marketing.
Hire great talent. A lot of great people are going to be getting pink slips or taking early retirement as large corporations cut back. You’ll be able to attract employees with a wealth of experience and terrific contacts for far less than their old market value.
Develop a loyalty program. It’s important to keep the customers you have. Set up a method to provide discounts or rewards to loyal customers.
Train your sales team better. Your sales team is part of your company assets and intellectual property. Invest in your sales team and help them sell more. A little training will return your investment many times over for years to come.
Successful people know they need people to help them implement their ideas. It’s all about people management, and getting them buy into the company’s goals. Your staff will work harder if they respect and like you.
Make “new” business a priority. Develop a “new business” incentive for your sales team. Develop a “new advertiser” package for new potential clients. Make “new business” important to your sales people and station.
Improve your cash flow. This is by far the most important thing to do for companies looking to survive and prosper in a recession. Increasing sales is not the only way to improve cash flow.
Here are some simple and effective ideas:
-Collect accounts receivable early and delay accounts payable without incurring penalties.
-Delay capital purchases.
-Review payroll and other large expenses and look for cutbacks as appropriate. -Negotiate favorable rates and payment terms from suppliers or switch suppliers.
-Charge customers upfront fees/payments where possible.
-Trade where possible the full amount, or try 50% cash/50% trade.
-Find places where you can combine services, keep older hardware, or postpone raises.
-Reduce things instead of reducing people if you can help it. If you do have to reduce people see if you can reduce salaries across the board temporarily so you don’t have to let people go.
Maintain a good cash position. Since no one really knows when a recession ends and the next growth cycle starts, it is imperative that companies maintain a good cash position through the down cycle.
Make salespeople cold call. To help increase sales success and reduce sales costs -- salespeople must cold call new prospects. It is the cheapest and most direct way to find buying prospects. Since most sales people hate cold calling, you should help them make cold calling a priority.
Get your finances in order. Clean up your credit as well as your financial records.
Consider acquisition. Your competitors may be in financial trouble want to throw in the towel. During a recession, there will be a lot of good opportunities to expend cash to invest in undervalued assets or businesses that provide strong cash flow.
Create new service offerings with recession pricing. To help maintain cash flow, re-name, re-package and re-price your offerings to give your targeted prospects multiple price options to buy from you. Make your prospects choose between your options rather than seek an alternative radio station.
Focus on what is important. Protect your time, energy, and money so you are only spending them on those things that will take you closer to your goals. Spend time on activities that benefit the company. Ask yourself “what is the best return for the investment? Is what I am doing taking me closer to my goal? If not, why am I doing it?”
Success is dependent on your people skills. All successful people understand that their success comes through other people. Understand who your best customers are and treat them like gods. Determine who will help you (employees, partners, business associates, clients). Then ask how you can help them.
Results equal hitting your goals. It’s all a matter of implementing the behaviors that will drive those results. When you don’t get the results you want, try something different.
Success is taking action. When in doubt, do something – do anything. Successful people understand that they can always correct something that is not working. They also understand they cannot correct an action that was not taken. Taking action is the only real way to achieve success.
Let the best ideas win. Many times people have a great idea, but they have no idea how to move forward. Or, they have so many ideas that they can’t make up their mind. Your job is to cherry pick the cream of the crop, and make very sure they get executed well.
Create a strategy. Create a marketing plan. Who are your best customers, what problems can you solve, and why they should buy from you. What is your strategy for new business?
Start networking for referrals. The fastest way to get new business is to ask for it; especially from your existing customers. They know your products and services so pick up the phone, take them out to lunch and ask them if they know anyone who they would introduce you to who could use your products or services.
Use electronic newsletters. Are you reaching your customers with e-mail marketing? Electronic newsletters are a great way to stay in touch with your clients. Your radio station needs to be top of mind when they need marketing. A monthly newsletter can do that for you. Don’t just use it to advertise your station. Give them news and articles that they can use to help build their business.
Focus on customer service. Catering to your customers is after all the focus of your business, and having good customer service does not have to be expensive. Like your employees, you want to build the trust, loyalty, and regard of your customers.
Develop creative, low-cost ways to advertise your business. Use the Internet to promote your business. Email, blogs and social media provide a cost-effective marketing option. Getting your name out there effectively does not have to break the bank.
Speaking before groups. Public speaking is one of the best approaches to generating new business. Provide value and get an opportunity to have 100 people listen to you talk about how your station can help them. Service clubs are a great way to meet your potential clients. Every sales rep, and every manager should belong to one service club in your market.
Create an event. I know a station that twice a year holds a client breakfast. The clients hear other business people’s success stories and “secrets” from other marketers and respected business leaders. The station traded the breakfast with the hotel. In the end, the station built credibility with hundreds of the largest advertisers in the market for very little money.
Develop strategies to get your competition's customers. If your station is going to prosper in these times, you need to continue to expand your customer/client base, and that means stealing customers from the competition. How? By offering something more or something different than the competition does. Target three clients a week. Buy them lunch, and let them talk about their business, listen to their problems, and their needs. See these meetings as opportunities to build relationships. If you can offer good solutions to client problems, you will be able to actually grow your business during a recession.
Make the most of the customers/clients you have. Here is an opportunity to make more sales without incurring the costs of finding a new customer. Keep in mind that attracting new customers is several times more expensive than retaining existing customers. Use the 80-20 rule. If 80 % of your business comes from 20 % of your customers, analyze your 20 %. What have you done lately for them?
Understand how customers determine value in tough times. The key is to provide more value to the customers without sacrificing margins. Look for extra value creative promotions and great service to enhance existing customer relationships. Do something nice for your top clients.
Build employee loyalty. Employees will remember you for sticking with them through the tough times. When tough decisions need to be made, solicit employee feedback. Use slow times to invest in employee training and developing compelling marketing and sales strategies and tactics. It will help to keep morale high.
Have a clear vision of where the company needs to be when the recession is over. Managing your business is a lot about allocation of resources and prioritizing where to prune and where to grow. Having a clear vision helps make tough choices that need to be made along the way.
Reactivate dormant accounts. Contact past clients, one you are not actively working with now and get them to do business with you again. Call them and say hello, and see what’s going on. Don’t make this a hard sell call. You don’t have to ask for work directly, but when you end the conversation, you might say something like, “Well, it’s been good talking with you. Keep in touch, and if there’s anything I can ever help you with, don’t hesitate to give me a call.” This lets them know you are interested in working with them, without putting the pressure on them to give you an order right then and there. What kind of results will you get? On average, expect one assignment for every 10 calls you make.
Reactivate old leads. A study by Thomas Publishing Company reveals that most salespeople, regardless of the industry, give up too early; 80 percent of sales to businesses are made on the fifth sales call, but only 10 percent of salespeople call beyond three times! The best way to reactivate these old sales leads is to call them. Ask whether they got your material, whether they have an immediate or future need, and what the status of that need is. The best prospects, however, would probably be those who contacted you within the past six months. One or two out of 10 will come through with an order.
Use low-cost “add-ons” to generate additional revenue. One way to generate some extra profitable business is to encourage clients to add on to–or expand–existing air time buys.
Postpone any planned rate increases. A soft economy is not the time to increase your rates. During such a period, defer any planned rate increase announcements until later, and instead keep your fees at their current levels.
Downgrade slightly your acceptable customer profile. You have guidelines to determine which clients are desirable and which are not. During a downturn, you may want to be more flexible in this area. Simply readjust your acceptable criteria during this lull to accommodate a wider range of clients.
Repackage your services to accommodate smaller clients and reduced budgets. When things are slow, it pays to look for ways to generate revenue from smaller clients. This is best done by repackaging your radio stations to accommodate smaller clients and reduced budgets. When big companies are not giving you big orders at big prices, sell these alternatives to the less affluent market segment to put extra dollars in your pocket.
Commit to learning. Those who know everything have nothing to learn. In a recession, it’s a great time to look at things from a fresh perspective. How can you do things better? Serve clients smarter?
Embrace change. Embrace this time and you’ll weather the recession and do better than you think. Sales and marketing rule. A recession is the time when you really want to pull out the sales and marketing magic. The key here is to stick with what you know works.
Re-rationalize their ad budget. If someone tells you they are cutting back their ad budget because of a recession, ask why they advertise in the first place. Find out what the original rationale was and find a way to rethink it. The reasons to advertise during the good times may not be the same reasons to advertise during slow times.
Preset your media as being absolutely essential. Ask your advertisers to consider that all recessions end and this one will be no different. Remind them that over the past half-century, there have been nine recessions, lasting an average of 11 months each.
Celebrate success. Employees love to be appreciated! Celebrate the progress of individuals, teams and the company overall.
Survey your customers. Much can be uncovered by reaching out to your customers and asking them for feedback. Develop a short list of questions that include ratings on your station, services and staff. Ask specific questions such as, “How can we improve your experience with us?” Tools such as www.SurveyMonkey.com can help you accomplish this easily. Once you receive the survey results, evaluate them and take action to make improvements. You will undoubtedly find themes in the answers such as, “It takes too long to get a call back.” Let your customers know that you heard them and share what improvements you are making as a result of their survey responses.
Sell the web. The Internet revolution is the biggest change to happen to radio, ever. Some broadcasters are adding over $1,000,000 in a year in new Internet revenue by not only selling ads on their radio stations website, but by owning and promoting a community website. Someone in your city will be “the” local community website that advertisers use to promote their business’s locally. Radio’s advantage is that we can promote it free. If you are not sure what you are doing seek out an online marketing expert and evaluate the opportunities.
Offer financing. The world runs on financing. Some large furniture and electronic stores are doing a ton of business by offering “buy now, pay later” plans. When a client tells your rep that they have spent their current monthly budget, you now have an option. You can finance in house, or do what the retail stores do, and sell the paper and get your money now. Factoring is one way to get money for your business right now. A factor is a company that will purchase your aging accounts receivable. They’ll pay you cash for every invoice you sell them. Now, instead of having to wait 30, 60, or 90 days to get the money from a customer, you can get the money instantly.
Take ownership. Taking ownership is about change and making the changes necessary to move forward, changing behaviors that are not working, and dealing with the world as it is and not as you want it to be. Stop living in a dream world. The marketplace is not what you want it to be, hope it to be, or wish it to be. It is what it is.
Don’t blame the sales team. When sales are slow, it is easy to blame the sales team. Revenue is a company responsibility -- not just the sales team. In an unstable economy, the true value of your product or service is tested and if there are no buyers, it may be that your offering strategy is wrong.
Hire slowly, terminate quickly. During a recession, you cannot afford to carry employees who are not winners. Former President and CEO of GE, Jack Welch said, “In most large organizations, 10% of the people can work unsupervised, 80% need to be managed, and 10% should be let go for a number of reasons. You are not doing your company or them a favor by keeping them on”.
Keep marketing. Are you thinking of cutting your marketing budget? Don’t. Businesses that maintain their marketing efforts during slow times come out of recessions healthier and with a larger market share than before the economy went downhill. Stay visible. It’s much easier and more efficient to capture market share when your competition stops marketing.
Hire great talent. A lot of great people are going to be getting pink slips or taking early retirement as large corporations cut back. You’ll be able to attract employees with a wealth of experience and terrific contacts for far less than their old market value.
Develop a loyalty program. It’s important to keep the customers you have. Set up a method to provide discounts or rewards to loyal customers.
Train your sales team better. Your sales team is part of your company assets and intellectual property. Invest in your sales team and help them sell more. A little training will return your investment many times over for years to come.
Successful people know they need people to help them implement their ideas. It’s all about people management, and getting them buy into the company’s goals. Your staff will work harder if they respect and like you.
Make “new” business a priority. Develop a “new business” incentive for your sales team. Develop a “new advertiser” package for new potential clients. Make “new business” important to your sales people and station.
Improve your cash flow. This is by far the most important thing to do for companies looking to survive and prosper in a recession. Increasing sales is not the only way to improve cash flow.
Here are some simple and effective ideas:
-Collect accounts receivable early and delay accounts payable without incurring penalties.
-Delay capital purchases.
-Review payroll and other large expenses and look for cutbacks as appropriate. -Negotiate favorable rates and payment terms from suppliers or switch suppliers.
-Charge customers upfront fees/payments where possible.
-Trade where possible the full amount, or try 50% cash/50% trade.
-Find places where you can combine services, keep older hardware, or postpone raises.
-Reduce things instead of reducing people if you can help it. If you do have to reduce people see if you can reduce salaries across the board temporarily so you don’t have to let people go.
Maintain a good cash position. Since no one really knows when a recession ends and the next growth cycle starts, it is imperative that companies maintain a good cash position through the down cycle.
Make salespeople cold call. To help increase sales success and reduce sales costs -- salespeople must cold call new prospects. It is the cheapest and most direct way to find buying prospects. Since most sales people hate cold calling, you should help them make cold calling a priority.
Get your finances in order. Clean up your credit as well as your financial records.
Consider acquisition. Your competitors may be in financial trouble want to throw in the towel. During a recession, there will be a lot of good opportunities to expend cash to invest in undervalued assets or businesses that provide strong cash flow.
Create new service offerings with recession pricing. To help maintain cash flow, re-name, re-package and re-price your offerings to give your targeted prospects multiple price options to buy from you. Make your prospects choose between your options rather than seek an alternative radio station.
Focus on what is important. Protect your time, energy, and money so you are only spending them on those things that will take you closer to your goals. Spend time on activities that benefit the company. Ask yourself “what is the best return for the investment? Is what I am doing taking me closer to my goal? If not, why am I doing it?”
Success is dependent on your people skills. All successful people understand that their success comes through other people. Understand who your best customers are and treat them like gods. Determine who will help you (employees, partners, business associates, clients). Then ask how you can help them.
Results equal hitting your goals. It’s all a matter of implementing the behaviors that will drive those results. When you don’t get the results you want, try something different.
Success is taking action. When in doubt, do something – do anything. Successful people understand that they can always correct something that is not working. They also understand they cannot correct an action that was not taken. Taking action is the only real way to achieve success.
Let the best ideas win. Many times people have a great idea, but they have no idea how to move forward. Or, they have so many ideas that they can’t make up their mind. Your job is to cherry pick the cream of the crop, and make very sure they get executed well.
Create a strategy. Create a marketing plan. Who are your best customers, what problems can you solve, and why they should buy from you. What is your strategy for new business?
Start networking for referrals. The fastest way to get new business is to ask for it; especially from your existing customers. They know your products and services so pick up the phone, take them out to lunch and ask them if they know anyone who they would introduce you to who could use your products or services.
Use electronic newsletters. Are you reaching your customers with e-mail marketing? Electronic newsletters are a great way to stay in touch with your clients. Your radio station needs to be top of mind when they need marketing. A monthly newsletter can do that for you. Don’t just use it to advertise your station. Give them news and articles that they can use to help build their business.
Focus on customer service. Catering to your customers is after all the focus of your business, and having good customer service does not have to be expensive. Like your employees, you want to build the trust, loyalty, and regard of your customers.
Develop creative, low-cost ways to advertise your business. Use the Internet to promote your business. Email, blogs and social media provide a cost-effective marketing option. Getting your name out there effectively does not have to break the bank.
Speaking before groups. Public speaking is one of the best approaches to generating new business. Provide value and get an opportunity to have 100 people listen to you talk about how your station can help them. Service clubs are a great way to meet your potential clients. Every sales rep, and every manager should belong to one service club in your market.
Create an event. I know a station that twice a year holds a client breakfast. The clients hear other business people’s success stories and “secrets” from other marketers and respected business leaders. The station traded the breakfast with the hotel. In the end, the station built credibility with hundreds of the largest advertisers in the market for very little money.
Develop strategies to get your competition's customers. If your station is going to prosper in these times, you need to continue to expand your customer/client base, and that means stealing customers from the competition. How? By offering something more or something different than the competition does. Target three clients a week. Buy them lunch, and let them talk about their business, listen to their problems, and their needs. See these meetings as opportunities to build relationships. If you can offer good solutions to client problems, you will be able to actually grow your business during a recession.
Make the most of the customers/clients you have. Here is an opportunity to make more sales without incurring the costs of finding a new customer. Keep in mind that attracting new customers is several times more expensive than retaining existing customers. Use the 80-20 rule. If 80 % of your business comes from 20 % of your customers, analyze your 20 %. What have you done lately for them?
Understand how customers determine value in tough times. The key is to provide more value to the customers without sacrificing margins. Look for extra value creative promotions and great service to enhance existing customer relationships. Do something nice for your top clients.
Build employee loyalty. Employees will remember you for sticking with them through the tough times. When tough decisions need to be made, solicit employee feedback. Use slow times to invest in employee training and developing compelling marketing and sales strategies and tactics. It will help to keep morale high.
Have a clear vision of where the company needs to be when the recession is over. Managing your business is a lot about allocation of resources and prioritizing where to prune and where to grow. Having a clear vision helps make tough choices that need to be made along the way.
Reactivate dormant accounts. Contact past clients, one you are not actively working with now and get them to do business with you again. Call them and say hello, and see what’s going on. Don’t make this a hard sell call. You don’t have to ask for work directly, but when you end the conversation, you might say something like, “Well, it’s been good talking with you. Keep in touch, and if there’s anything I can ever help you with, don’t hesitate to give me a call.” This lets them know you are interested in working with them, without putting the pressure on them to give you an order right then and there. What kind of results will you get? On average, expect one assignment for every 10 calls you make.
Reactivate old leads. A study by Thomas Publishing Company reveals that most salespeople, regardless of the industry, give up too early; 80 percent of sales to businesses are made on the fifth sales call, but only 10 percent of salespeople call beyond three times! The best way to reactivate these old sales leads is to call them. Ask whether they got your material, whether they have an immediate or future need, and what the status of that need is. The best prospects, however, would probably be those who contacted you within the past six months. One or two out of 10 will come through with an order.
Use low-cost “add-ons” to generate additional revenue. One way to generate some extra profitable business is to encourage clients to add on to–or expand–existing air time buys.
Postpone any planned rate increases. A soft economy is not the time to increase your rates. During such a period, defer any planned rate increase announcements until later, and instead keep your fees at their current levels.
Downgrade slightly your acceptable customer profile. You have guidelines to determine which clients are desirable and which are not. During a downturn, you may want to be more flexible in this area. Simply readjust your acceptable criteria during this lull to accommodate a wider range of clients.
Repackage your services to accommodate smaller clients and reduced budgets. When things are slow, it pays to look for ways to generate revenue from smaller clients. This is best done by repackaging your radio stations to accommodate smaller clients and reduced budgets. When big companies are not giving you big orders at big prices, sell these alternatives to the less affluent market segment to put extra dollars in your pocket.
Commit to learning. Those who know everything have nothing to learn. In a recession, it’s a great time to look at things from a fresh perspective. How can you do things better? Serve clients smarter?
Embrace change. Embrace this time and you’ll weather the recession and do better than you think. Sales and marketing rule. A recession is the time when you really want to pull out the sales and marketing magic. The key here is to stick with what you know works.
Re-rationalize their ad budget. If someone tells you they are cutting back their ad budget because of a recession, ask why they advertise in the first place. Find out what the original rationale was and find a way to rethink it. The reasons to advertise during the good times may not be the same reasons to advertise during slow times.
Preset your media as being absolutely essential. Ask your advertisers to consider that all recessions end and this one will be no different. Remind them that over the past half-century, there have been nine recessions, lasting an average of 11 months each.
Celebrate success. Employees love to be appreciated! Celebrate the progress of individuals, teams and the company overall.
Survey your customers. Much can be uncovered by reaching out to your customers and asking them for feedback. Develop a short list of questions that include ratings on your station, services and staff. Ask specific questions such as, “How can we improve your experience with us?” Tools such as www.SurveyMonkey.com can help you accomplish this easily. Once you receive the survey results, evaluate them and take action to make improvements. You will undoubtedly find themes in the answers such as, “It takes too long to get a call back.” Let your customers know that you heard them and share what improvements you are making as a result of their survey responses.
Sell the web. The Internet revolution is the biggest change to happen to radio, ever. Some broadcasters are adding over $1,000,000 in a year in new Internet revenue by not only selling ads on their radio stations website, but by owning and promoting a community website. Someone in your city will be “the” local community website that advertisers use to promote their business’s locally. Radio’s advantage is that we can promote it free. If you are not sure what you are doing seek out an online marketing expert and evaluate the opportunities.
Offer financing. The world runs on financing. Some large furniture and electronic stores are doing a ton of business by offering “buy now, pay later” plans. When a client tells your rep that they have spent their current monthly budget, you now have an option. You can finance in house, or do what the retail stores do, and sell the paper and get your money now. Factoring is one way to get money for your business right now. A factor is a company that will purchase your aging accounts receivable. They’ll pay you cash for every invoice you sell them. Now, instead of having to wait 30, 60, or 90 days to get the money from a customer, you can get the money instantly.
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