Selling Electronic Media

Ed Shane

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 1999
• eBook ISBN: 9781136026256
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Communication Studies
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

"Selling is identifying and satisfying customer needs profitably. Profitable for you, profitable for them."
Diane Sutter, President and CEO of Shooting Star Broadcasting , owner of KTAB-TV, Abilene, Texas

This is the definition of sales used throughout Ed Shane's comprehensive and timely textbook Selling Electronic Media. This new definition reflects the customer-orientation of today's marketing environment as well as the product-orientation of selling. Today's selling is a win/win proposition, a win for the seller and a win for the customer.

Using interviews with industry leaders and reports of their selling experiences, Selling Electronic Media shares insight and practical advice in the basics of selling:

· prospecting
· qualifying
· needs analysis
· presentations
· answering objections
· closing
· relationship management



Focusing on the merging and converging of electronic media and the need for branding of media at all levels, this highly readable book offers complete coverage of advertising sales for radio, television and cable, plus the new and emerging mass communication technologies, primarily those generated by the Internet.

Selling Electronic Media is enhanced with review highlights and discussion points and illustrated throughout with visuals used by media outlets to market commercials and their audience reach.

Students pursuing sales and marketing careers in electronic media and professionals wishing to reinforce their understanding of the merging and converging media environment will find what they need in the pages of this book.

1

The Selling Environment

What Is Selling?

The first “sales training” I ever received came in 1968 when I was named program director of a radio station in Atlanta, Georgia. The general manager who hired me showed me a poster of “the man in the chair,” the grumpy old codger shown in Figure 1–1. The expressionless stare was chilling; the caption was as brutal as the man’s eyes.

“The man in the chair” began as an ad campaign for Business Week and other McGraw-Hill publications in 1958. It was named one of the top ten ads that year by Advertising Age. The campaign was updated in 1968, again in 1979, and yet again in 1996, with different people in the chair. Ultimately, it was translated into French, Russian, German, Italian, and Chinese.

In my 1968 experience, I heard the message in plain English. The problem with selling, my new boss explained, is that not every prospect makes it as easy as the “man in the chair.”

“Easy?” I asked.

Yes. The “man in the chair” ad could refer to any product. Further, it contained a straightforward litany of objections, ready to meet with information from a well-prepared seller.

Why did I need to hear that? I had just taken a job as a product guy at a radio station. I was not expected to sell advertising time, was I? Frankly, I hoped not. All of my exposure to selling anything prior to that day had been observing high pressure sales types who had tried to sell my parents something they didn’t need and couldn’t afford. In my mind, “sales” was charged with negative perceptions and evoked visions of diamond pinky rings and clouds of cigar smoke from overweight men who tricked people out of their savings.

My new boss called those salespeople “vultures” and said he didn’t think his sales staff acted that way. As I worked with them, I discovered that he was right. That staff cared about their customers and worked hard to make sure the clients got benefits from advertising on our station.

My boss told me that my job was to understand the challenges that my station’s salespeople were facing when they hit the streets every day. Also, I was to join the sales reps to meet with clients and talk about a product I knew better than the salespeople did.

Later, I would learn much more about sales—information that sellers in every field call “the basics,” but I didn’t know that then. Who knew then that prospecting and qualifying, analyzing needs and developing solutions, continuing service after the sale, and building relationships would be so important? Sure, the sellers did. Now the programming guy would know, too.

FIGURE 1-1 The Man in the Chair. A classic statement about sales and selling, originally an ad for Business Week magazine. © McGraw-Hill Companies. Used with permission.

I was fortunate to have been given a taste of the basics of selling early in my career. I felt I had been brought into an elite circle that gave me insight into the business. This insight led to my understanding of the way media works—not just radio, but media generally. It deepened my desire to be a student of media.

Ultimately, it also led to the opportunity to carry a list, to manage radio stations, and to found and manage my own company, Shane Media Services. Our core business is programming and research consultation, but we exist in the selling and marketing environment. Everybody does.

What Have You Sold Today?

You don’t have to be a professional sales person to answer the question above. If you have human interaction of any kind, then you’ll “sell” something every day.

Ask the boss for a raise, and you’re selling the company on what you think you’re worth.

Ask for a date, and you’re selling the idea of togetherness, creating a need for companionship, with you as the solution to that need.

Ask a friend to do you a favor, and you’re selling the benefits of friendship and reciprocity.

The answer to “What is selling?” is “Everything is selling.”

Almost every environment exists because somebody with sales skills matched a need with a product or a service that fulfilled that need. Vehicles, cosmetics, hospitals, roller coasters you name it—a sales person created or sold a certain product that provided a solution to a specific problem.

In its typical definition, selling connotes economic exchange, not day-to-day human interaction. For sellers in electronic media, for example, the exchange is dollars for advertising time or message space.

“Selling is the mechanism that drives the economy,” said Charles Futrell, professor of marketing at Texas A & M University, to the Houston Chronicle.¹ “It’s matching what you’re selling to a customer’s needs in a professional manner.” Futrell teaches selling at A & M’s Lowry Mays College and Graduate School of Business. The name of the school speaks volumes. Mays, founder and chairman of Clear Channel Communications, a media company that spans the globe, funded a business school, not a media school.

Mays talks about various forms of media as conduits from the advertiser to the viewer or listener. As sellers of advertising in electronic media, we’re sellers of the advertiser’s product. Mays explains: “We view ourselves as being in the business of selling automobiles, tamales, toothpaste, or whatever our customers want to move off their shelves. That culture, whether in radio or television, has served us well and keeps our focus where it should be, and that’s on the customer.”²

Zig Ziglar calls selling “a transference of feeling. If I (the salesman) can make you (the prospect) feel about my product the way I feel about my product, you are going to buy my product.” In Secrets of Closing the Sale,³ Ziglar added: “In order to transfer a feeling, you’ve got to have that feeling.” This is a very positive definition of selling, because it assumes that the seller is so enthusiastic about the product that the prospective buyer catches the euphoria.

There is a “process” to selling that guides behavior in a desired direction, culminating in the purchase. “The path to a sale is through uncovering client needs and satisfying those needs with product benefits,” say Charles Warner and Joseph Buchman in the classic textbook, Broadcast and Cable Selling.⁴ Warner and Buchman divided buyers into two groups—customers and prospects. “Customers” have already bought what you have to sell, and they need to be nurtured or resold. “Prospects” require information about your product, explanation of benefits, and evidence about expected results.

The last thing a prospect wants to be is “a prospect.” That makes him or her sound like a target, not a person. Sales trainer Tom Hopkins reminds us that not everyone wants to be sold. Negative perceptions about selling are a reality to millions of people. “It arises from the actions of the minority of salespeople who believe that selling is purely and simply aggression,” Hopkins writes in How to Master the Art of Selling.⁵

“Eventually all such vultures will be driven out of sales by the new breed of enlightened salespeople who qualify their prospects, care about their customers, and make sure their clients get benefit from their purchases that outweigh the prices paid.” In that statement, Hopkins gives us his definition of “sales.”

“Selling never changes,” says Mark McCormack, author of What They Don’t Teach You at Harvard Business School. “There are no fads in selling, only basics,” he wrote.⁶ There are tools that become fads—cell phones, palmtop computers, a fax machine in the car, software to make your computer’s memory sharper, your client information more accessible, and your presentation more powerful. But tools don’t persuade the customer to commit. That’s the seller’s job.

Are You Selling or Are You Marketing?

Selling is trying to get someone to buy something. It’s the successful presentation of your product or service in such a way that your client sees the benefit of the purchase. The best salespeople make selling an art.

Marketing is also an art. Marketing means creating conditions by which the buyer is convinced to make a purchase without outside persuasion. Marketing involves developing a product or service that is perceived by customers to fit their needs so precisely that they want to buy it.

While this book has the word “selling” in its title, you’ll necessarily read a lot about marketing and its big-picture, long-term view of moving people toward making their own decisions. In relation, selling is the day-to-day, shorter-term concept of moving goods and services. You can see they’re dependent upon each other.

There is a difference between sales and marketing, and I’ve heard the differences expressed a hundred ways. Let’s start with just a few:

“Marketing is strategy; selling is tactics.”

“Selling is finding a need and filling it; marketing is finding a perceived need and filling it.”

“Selling is product-focused; marketing is customer-focused.”

“Marketing differs from sales in the sense that it involves creating a desire for the product that is related to emotion, image, or desire rather than practical need,” says Allen Shaw, President of Centennial Communications.

Gary Fries, President of the Radio Advertising Bureau, told me,⁷ “When I use the marketing approach, I save all the great reasons to advertise on my station and start right off focusing on the client. I spend my time asking clients about their industries, their specific businesses, their competitive advantages and disadvantages.”

The effective seller moves from marketing to selling and back again, often in the course of a few minutes. Depending on where you are in the sales process, you might find yourself either in a very customer-focused needs analysis (marketi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Foreword by Michael C. Keith
• Preface
• 1 The Selling Environment
• 2 The Sales Process
• 3 Research and Ratings
• 4 Sales Management
• 5 Casting the Net
• 6 Selling Television Advertising
• 7 Selling Cable Advertising
• 8 Selling Radio Advertising
• 9 The Interactive Interim
• Epilogue
• Appendix A
• Appendix B
• Appendix C
• Glossary
• Index