Three Ways the Data You Already Have Can Increase Corporate Support Prospects

As a salesperson, you probably don’t analyze data like your manager does. You may not know how to access data easily and wonder what you’d want to do that for anyway. After all, that’s not your job, right?

I beg to differ. Having been “on the streets” for most of my career, I know how hard it is to get new clients on the air. I know how time-consuming it can be to find good prospects, and how frustrating it can be to fall short of an annual goal at the end of the year; there goes my bonus!

Well, data can help you! There are several things you can analyze on your own throughout the year to help you find new prospects and stay on-track.

1. Examine your biggest categories.

Have you ever analyzed your clients by category? This is a report easily generated by your traffic system. See which category is the biggest for you. For instance, is it one of the big four categories of corporate support: arts, education, health care or entertainment? If not, perhaps you should do more work in that area. If so, you might want to work harder in those categories by attending networking events, asking for referrals, or perhaps initiating a station promotion that helps your clients in that area. What books and trade magazines do they read? If you learn as much as you can about their industry and make yourself a true resource, you can capitalize on your success in a big way.

2. Decode your most lucrative categories.

Then look at which individual clients spend the most money. Do they have anything in common? I did an account analysis after my first year leading the underwriting department at a dance-music-format station in Seattle and realized that my biggest category was government agencies. I was shocked. I hadn’t intentionally tried to do that!

But the next year I was intentional about it. What the data was telling me was that my audience was very desirable for government agencies to reach with messages like “Drive sober or get pulled over,” and campaigns about distracted driving, prevention of the spread of STDs, etc. (ours was a young, mostly male audience). So, I tried to think of all the bad decisions young people are prone to make and discovered who was trying to get them to make better choices! I made a lot of money that way. It was all thanks to data.

3. Do more of what you love.

One other thing to think about is which clients you enjoy working with the most. I always loved working with business owners and entrepreneurs, probably because we salespeople are entrepreneurs in our own way. I loved their stories of how they got started in business and found it easy to establish a strong business relationship with them. They could feel my genuine interest and trusted me because of it. Do you have a certain type of person you get along with particularly well? If so, look for more of them!

In today’s media environment, corporate support reps have to do more. We have to be more self-aware, read more books, learn more about our prospects and clients, and share what we know to establish ourselves as someone who brings value to a business or organization. Mining the data you have at your fingertips can be an easy way to generate great new prospects.