Week of June 23, 2008

Friday 6/27, 2008

Your GSM just came in and informed you that your top salesperson is going across the street for a huge list and a pile of stock options. The worst part about her leaving is 35% of her billing was direct clients that will be impossible to replace. The direct clients always follow the relationship across the street. What was your relationship with this A/E? If you were doing your job, you would realize that the top billing A/E is no different than a big morning show. Each do basically the same thing -- they bring in lots of revenue! Don't take your largest revenue producers for granted; just because they make more money than you doesn't mean they don't need some recognition once in a while.

Thursday 6/26, 2008

You notice that pacing is not moving at all. You decide to have a meeting with your sales managers to see why they can't even hit their re-projected June revenue forecast. You ask to see the direct percentage of all business written for month and find out the average is less than 10% of total business written. You ask the sales managers what is the consequence if the sellers don't hit their direct goals? The sales managers tell you there is no consequence. You immediately implement a consequence, which deducts 1% of their commission if they don't hit direct budgets. Do you think your sellers will get the message that direct business is important?

Wednesday 6/25, 2008

The 1st phase of the Spring book is out, your competition from across the street just put out a propaganda piece against your Rock station that shows you have had dour down trends in a row. You were the format leader until they flipped and beat you in the Winter book. Along with a 300 GRP per week TV campaign, running commercial-free, no jocks and very creative imaging, they are now positioning themselves as the format leader. The sales department is panicking, cutting rate as fast as the avails come out. Are you executing the plan you put together when they initially launched against you ... or are you simply reacting?

Tuesday 6/24, 2008

You just got a page over the intercom that your Regional is on hold ... you tell the receptionist to tell the Regional that you're out on a sales calls...(always works). Here is a hint ... your Regional has had lots of time to prepare for the call and they have very specific items that they want to cover. Most of the items will be P&L questions with a lot of emphasis paid to comps from the year before regarding cost of sales, A&P, programming and G&A. If you don't know the answer, don't bu@%llsh#t ... tell them you are going to research it and get right back to them. You did do a preliminary P&L with suggested expense cuts when you received your soft June forecast, right?

Monday 6/23, 2008

With July 4th weekend approaching, have you been in the traffic department lately? These people handle millions of dollars of transactions and have more client knowledge than most of your sales managers. Have you ever calculated what you pay them as a percentage of the business they input? Take them out to lunch; give them some trade. Treat them like gold! If the cluster across the street offers them another 6k per year, will they take it or be loyal to you?