Here's something I uncovered at the end of 2024 that may play again in 2025 that sales management may find helpful regarding a possible potential breakdown in TV sales. To combat a sales fallout regardless of its origin, System 21 is a 40-year-old sales and marketing educational system that helps redefine sales and marketing success for local direct selling and management. The article below is an educational article managers may find useful in their daily activities.
Philip Jay LeNoble, Ph.D
Broadcast
TV Ad Sales is Broken
David
Buonfiglio, Certified Sales Leader
David Buonfiglio, Certified Sales Leader
Fractional
VP of Sales | Serving SMB Owners/CEOs Looking to Build and Grow Effective Sales
Teams
I love TV.
Always have. I’m still convinced it’s the single most effective branding medium
ever created. I worked in (or for) local broadcast TV for 35 years. Briefly in
news, but almost entirely in sales.
That ended
last year. And now that I have some distance and time between me and the medium
I’ve loved for so long, I realize a couple of stark and unnerving truths about
the business of local TV. Broadcast TV sales is broken.
It has
nothing to do with the declining ratings nor the viewership that continues to
fragment, time shift and stream.
Broadcast TV
sales is broken because it has failed to change with the times. It has ignored
the sales fundamentals followed by nearly every other business category and
continues to think that somehow, it’s immune from operational and
processes-oriented problems.
I’m not
talking about the work being done by the stalwart broadcast TV sales
consultants doing good work on behalf of their clients. I’m talking about the
structural flaws that exist in the way TV stations continue to manage their
salespeople and sales processes.
Here are
three examples of the how broadcast TV sales is failing.
First, TV
sellers are asked to spend a ridiculous amount of time on non-selling
activities. The worst offender of this is how they’re tied to traffic systems.
I’ve seen great TV sellers spend an entire day on placing makegoods. How can
that possibly be time well spent for sellers asked to focus on new business?
Those spots are already sold. The AEs did the job. That they are now forced to
spend significant time on finding homes for preempted spots is absurd.
These
traffic systems are not sales tools. That’s why TV sales consultants never talk
about them. Outside TV, they would be considered client service or operations.
But somehow, they’ve been rolled into the responsibilities of the salesperson.
Hand that task off to a sales assistant and let the sellers go sell something.
Second, TV
sellers are asked to find their own leads without adequate marketing resources.
In the world of sales outside of a TV station, marketing departments deliver
leads. Sellers close leads. Traditional (non-TV) marketing focuses on the Ideal
Customer Profile (ICP), the qualities and attributes that make a company most
likely to buy from you.
What’s the
ICP for your TV station? Have you ever discussed this in a sales meeting? More
importantly, do you have resources that help TV sellers find them? I’m talking
about actual identified customers with names, titles, phone numbers and emails.
A zero-share report doesn’t do that. Qualitative research that identifies high
indexing audiences doesn’t do that either. Leads are supposed to contain
contact information. As a result, new AEs spend way too much time prospecting
clients outside the station’s ICP.
Third, one
of the most effective new business tactics for TV sellers is, at best, barely
an afterthought. Outside of TV stations, there’s a phrase that described the
best source for new business for salespeople focused on medium-sized local
businesses. It’s called a referral partner.
Referral
partners are people who work with clients you’d want to work with but are not
competitors: business coaches, lawyers, IT companies, marketing freelancers, PR
firms, bankers and recruiters, to name a few. Eventually, referral partners
will run across clients who need what you do (great advertising), and if TV
sellers have done the work, they’ll get the referral.
Using
LinkedIn Navigator in the last three months, I’ve scheduled and conducted 175
separate referral partner meetings as I’ve ramped up my Fractional VP of Sales
practice. During 35 years in TV sales, I don’t think I conducted one.
TV
Broadcasters have enjoyed significant profitability for more than half century.
In a real sense, broadcasting invented the concept of “scale.” As another
round of political revenue comes screaming down the path in 2024, it’ll be
another crazy profitable year for the industry. So, I actually understand
why the corporate folks haven’t done anything significant to tackle these
systemic challenges. They haven’t really needed to, opting to manage profit
rather than growth.
But I hope
that some local station operators will rethink their sales processes and
strategies, take a page or two from other business categories and fix what is
essentially a broken sales system.