Happy Friday, everyone!
Here is this week's poll question:
How many people are on your station's sales team? Do all members do both phone sales and outside sales, or is there a division of labor, with certain individuals devoted to telemarketing and others to in-person calls?
Looking forward to reading your replies!
We are about 30 sales people and yea we do both phone sales and outside sales. We don't have individuals devoted to telemarketing nor i person calls. We do have Agency selling where by we get business through advertising agencies and direct sells where we go door-door selling
We own 3 commercial radio stations in our market with a population of approx. 100,000 within our signal ranges. We have 7 outside sales reps, 3 inside sales reps, a general sales manager and a digital account manager (website & texting advertising).Outside reps communicate with our customers via in-person, phone and email while the inside reps use telephone communication only.
We have four on our sales team. We all do some phone sales, along with outside sales; but we also are developing one additional part-time person that does only telemarketing.
We have 4 Full-time and 2 part-time (including GM/SM). A fifth full-timer will join our team as soon as he gets his college diploma at the end of May. No separate phone sales staff. GM/SM handles 95% of agency business. We have 5 stations all located in one facility in a city of 16,000 covering 4 counties and 145,000 people.
We have 2 Stations. 3 Local and 1 Regional/National on the team. We all share the tasks :-)
We have three stations in a town of 32,000 (of which 20,000 are college students), and a market of around 100,000.
We have three full-time salespeople and four part-time salespeople (people whose main jobs are not in sales, but who carry a few accounts each) - not enough to cover the market effectively, unfortunately.
I own 10 stations built in three clusters. Across the clusters I have 16 sales people which do both phone sales and outside sales. I've tried telemarketing sales and have found that difficult in our small markets. We are giving some consideration to telemarketers setting up appointments for our AE's to do CNA's. I've heard that is working well in some small markets..anyone else heard that? TK
Hey Gals & Guys; What Account Management Systems are you using?
RAB?
Paper Trail?
Something else?
Tom -
I know of some stations that have dedicated telemarketers (their titles include "Special Events Coordinator" or "Special Projects Manager"), who are comfortable making telephone calls all day long. Over time, they become well known to the folks they call on and, while they don't make a sale on every call, they do close enough business for the position to be rewarding both to the station and the salesperson.
Other stations have their regular sales force do periodic phone blitzes, dedicated sales efforts which might last a day or two and focus on selling specific campaigns. I'm familiar with a station group in Fergus Falls, MN that has great success with what they call "pit days" (they work from a basement call center in another building), with plenty of spiffs for hitting intermediate goals individually and as a department to keep things fun. (I can send you more info on this, if you're interested.)
Seems to me that telemarketers whose job is to set up appointments for regular AEs to do CNAs would be functioning more like sales assistants than salespeople. But salespeople doing a phone blitz with not only their own accounts but a large prospect list could well stumble across additional opportunities on the basis of making calls to businesses they don't normally call on.
