Live from the Local Media Association Classified Conference
By Al Cupo, vice president, Local Media Association
Keynote Presentation: Leading Through Change
Presented by: Bill Cummings, former Senior Director of Advertising, Freedom Communications
Bill Cummings began day one of the conference with a fast paced look at how newspapers can embrace the kind of change that will immediately impact their bottom line. As his first slide said: If you change nothing, nothing will change.
Bill covered a great deal of information during his one-hour presentation. The following list represents a snap-shot of the many suggestions he shared with the conference participants:
Creating a Culture of Change
- Become a purpose driven sales organization
- Equip all sales people to be able to see value and communicate the purpose to their advertiser for choosing to engage your services.
- Understand the purpose of a specific advertising product or feature and seek out new advertisers that could benefit from similar results.
- Take back and own segments where we deliver results and become addictive to our customers with these results.
- Self-promote and merchandise our success with our current customers while at the same time reconnect with our past advertisers.
- Attract new customers with excellent products, services and pricing and provide compelling ROI analysis on how our campaigns deliver qualified buyers.
- Strengthen our competitive advantage by developing and revisiting how we can differentiate ourselves from other options.
“Romance the Customer”
- Deliver a better customer experience through core competency, simple processes, details and strategy.
- Continue to simplify our selling propositions, rates, and products.
- Manage customer expectations and over deliver results.
- Develop a love of service to our customers and our internal audience.
- Develop a checklist of good customer service habits.
- Retire newspaper legacy thinking and make meaningful changes in the print products. They account for 80% of our revenue and voice, yet many pay little attention to how they look, feel or are utilized by our audience.
- Take a fresh, crisp creative approach to self-promotion.
- Coach and train local reps and leaders to employ repeatable processes and routines rather than reinventing the process every day.
- Coach, mentor, lead by example, and then transfers the responsibility to the local leadership to experience sustainable success.
Expand our Knowledge
- Become closer to our advertisers to become more relevant.
- Participate in local, regional and national opportunities within the groups we serve.
- Host open conversations to find out what we can change or improve that holds purpose in the advertiser’s mind.
Final Thoughts
- Keep perfecting and enhancing your products, making them easy to use.
- Understand and improve how you are socializing.
- Create and maintain relationships.
- Have purpose.
- Be the SMART MEDIA choice.