Happy Friday, everyone!
A recent Radio Ink magazine article was discussing the pros and cons of a radio station hiring more salespeople versus working with the existing salespeople to set more appointments; you can read the article here. At one point, the writer commented, "We could talk about the increasingly unbalanced ratio of sales managers to salespeople; it should be about 1:6 but is often closer to 1:12."
So for this week's poll question, we'd like to hear from you:
How many people are on your radio station's sales team? Is your station seeking to hire more sales staff? What do you feel is the ideal ratio of sales managers to salespeople?
Looking forward to reading your replies!
Having worked as a sales manager and as a sales person, the answer isn't as simple as hiring more feet on the street.
There needs to be a balance of productivity by each sales person and the available inventory that a station has to sell in the equation too.
I currently work as the 4th salesperson on a 5 member team. We also have a part time salesperson who does on air work and an agency salesperson who handles most of our agency business for our group.
Our focus is to grow each account to their maximum potential. This is very different from the last placed I worked where the goal was to build a huge list of accounts that spent minimum amounts each year.
You don't need more salespeople, you just need good salespeople. The GSM's in our company are not selling managers. They are actively recruiting sales talent for our group of 5 stations, each of which has their own GSM and sales staff.
Those station sales staffs range from 2 to 5.
Now there may come a time when you do need to add more salespeople but that should be because your current staff is operating at their peak comfort level (and at an acceptable level for the station) but there is more inventory to sell.
Due to retirements and illness, we currently have only 4 on our Team. We have the position of "Ear Renters" posted, but not much response at this point (It is soon wintertime in Bemidji). We are ready to hire two more as soon as we can find the right people and two more by this time next year.
A good teaching, training, selling Sales Manager should be working with no more than 4 Salespeople; 3 would be better.
Two and that is not enough so we let the newspaper thrive, (well they are not exactly thriving). The owner does not know how to hire another. He comes from real estate.
So it goes.
Bill Wayland
We are a small team of two right now (with me doing sales and mgmt..... in addition to MANY other things)
Ideally we would have three (we did a year ago, but one moved on)
At one time we had FIVE people, but that was too many... I spent more time dealing with problems and not doing any sales myself... our sales were actually LOWER... so we went back to me plus two and that's been a great number for us!
John Small - Sunny Radio (and www.CloudcastRadio.com providing voice-tracking on barter)
The short answer is - everybody in the Station works on the Sales Team! As Director of Sales, that is the culture I have promoted and one which all staff have bought into. As far as the people out writing revenue, we have three dedicated Marketing Consultants, myself as Director (and I also run a list which accounts for around 40% of our total local revenue), two Marketing Assistants and a dedicated Creative Writer. We choose and train up Marketing Assistants who could and can step into the Consultants role should they leave or go on holidays. Our commission structure recognises the Assistants and the Creative Writer with a little of each list bonus going to these guys. It's a formula that works really well for us.
Sounds like you have an organized station and a sales department, unlike ours. I was a sales manager at two Boston stations and had a system like yours. Now I am semi-retired and lose sleep over the errors of our owner. But his ego rejects any advise.
Bill Wayland
We are always recruiting. It is myself, and I just hired one individual selling part time (he does car sales full time, and does well). I am always looking for that next superstar. Send me your resume
I have attached a little shameless self promotion.
We are always recruiting as well. We never use the newspaper, but our own stations and of course the appropriate EEO places. The attached runs on Mondays.
