The “impossible sell” playbook

BRISBANE, Australia —  It was Feb. 14, 2014, when I stepped off the plane at Adelaide Airport to take on an amazing career opportunity as sales director for the top station in the market. I was just 27.

I quickly learned that the station’s dominant ratings position wouldn’t make my job any easier. Quite the contrary — I was about to embark on two of the most difficult years of my career. Aside from my lack of experience, Adelaide was a unique marketplace at the time and posed some significant challenges.

The challenges

First, two of Australia’s three biggest FM networks started in Adelaide. Both competitors, therefore, had a “head office feel” of sorts — they were extremely well-resourced, with several national executives residing in the local market.

Second, when I arrived, Adelaide’s economy was in dire shape. Manufacturing and auto were major industries and had been in sharp decline, leading to high unemployment. From an advertising standpoint, there were only a handful of major radio advertisers left in the market.

However, probably the most challenging was the station’s unjustifiable pricing disparity. While it held a strong lead in the ratings, the station was still priced at a 20–40% premium on its audience. This meant that an advertiser would be paying substantially more to access the same audience reach. I quickly realized why the previous sales director had lasted just 12 months!

Radio is a notoriously competitive industry; so how can we win when the market dynamics are against us?

The solutions

It became clear that if the station was going to prosper over the next few years, we needed a radical new plan and a different way of thinking about the marketplace. Here’s what we did:

1. Decommoditized the offering

In a commoditized market, the biggest challenge is differentiating your offering. Since we couldn’t differentiate on price or audience reach, we needed to reframe our proposition with an entirely new currency: audience quality. 

Everything linked back to a simple premise that “not all audiences are created equal.” In every sales conversation, brief, ratings and update, and every piece of collateral put to market, we would speak relentlessly about our audience’s spending power. Our theory was this: The size of their income, their purchase habits and the key purchases linked to their life stage were more relevant to an advertiser than the vanity metric of reach and frequency. In a tough economy, this positioning really resonated with advertisers looking to make their finite budgets work harder. 

2. Reengineered the sales philosophy

Rather than fighting for all radio revenue, we focused on clients with a high price-tolerance. Specifically, we targeted the 25 highest spending advertisers across all media. We used no hard sell or short-term tactics; instead, we just sought to understand their challenges and objectives over the long term. Armed with this knowledge, we would then pitch a proactive solution harnessing all relevant assets in the form of a longer-term strategic partnership. This strategy wasn’t easy; it took time and patience and required us to hold our nerve during some tough revenue months. However, having a laser focus on the largest advertisers in the market was something our competitors weren’t doing at the time. We forged ahead, knowing it would pay dividends over the long term. 

3. Optimized the inventory

Our inventory was priced at a 20–40% premium because the station had so much demand from interstate advertisers. National pricing teams could therefore drive up the rates based on total demand. Through deeper analysis, we uncovered that these advertisers were mostly looking to buy the same days, durations and parameters. 

Knowing this, we started looking at remnant inventory or lower-demand sessions that we could unlock as value-add or at a substantial discount. Finally, we engaged with programming and asked what additional on-air features or benchmarks we could create for local clients only. 

Through clever schedule building and creative packaging, clients could unlock a high-reaching media plan with a combination of premium inventory, strategic value-add and simple but effective integration. Individual spot rates were irrelevant because the overall value equation was strong.

The message

This was easily one of the most challenging periods of my career, humbling in many ways. However, after two years of pursuing these strategies, we had a leading market share position, grew revenues by 24.5% in a declining market and won the Commercial Radio Australia (now Commercial Radio & Audio) award for best metro sales team. 

To anyone selling radio and encountering what seems an impossible situation, the message here is simple: When you can’t win the game under the rules, change the game to one you can win. 

The author is a career media sales specialist with more than 13 years of experience spanning radio, digital, podcasting and out-of-home. His Media Sales Mastery is one of the world’s top-rated podcasts on media sales.