Radiosls Inc.

03/17/2023

…..dreaming of summer….

01/14/2022

Not all consultants are created equal!

A lite giggle for a snowy Friday-

~Last week, we took some friends out to a new restaurant, and noticed that the waiter who took our order carried a spoon in his shirt pocket. It seemed a little strange.
When the waiter brought our water and cutlery, I noticed he also had a spoon in his shirt pocket. Then I looked around and saw that all the staff had spoons in their pockets.
When the waiter came back to serve our soup I asked, "Why the spoon?" "Well, "he explained, "the restaurant’s owners hired Andersen Consulting to revamp all our processes. After several months of analysis, they concluded that the spoon was the most frequently dropped piece of cutlery. It represents a drop frequency of approximately 3 spoons per table per hour. If our staff are better prepared, we can reduce the number of trips back to the kitchen and save 15 man-hours per shift."
As luck would have it, I dropped my spoon and he was able to replace it with his spare. "I’ll get another spoon next time I go to the kitchen instead of making an extra trip to get it right now." I was impressed.
I also noticed that there was a string hanging out of the waiter’s zip on his trousers. Looking around, I noticed that all the waiters had the same string hanging from their flies. So before he walked off, I asked the waiter, "Excuse me, but can you tell me why you have that string right there?"
"Oh, certainly!" Then he lowered his voice. "Not everyone is so observant. That consulting firm I mentioned also found out that we can save time in the rest-room. By tying this string to the tip of you know what, we can pull it out without touching it and eliminate the need to wash our hands, shortening the time spent in the rest-room by 76.39 per cent."
I asked "After you get it out, how do you put it back?"
"Well," he whispered, "I don’t know about the others, but I use the spoon."~

09/20/2021

A life well lived!

Media mogul Allan Slaight, the former CEO of Standard Broadcasting and a past president of Global Television and Slaight Communications, has died. He passed away peacefully at his Toronto home. He was 90.

12/31/2020

2021 is fast approaching and with it comes a new year of sales opportunities.

If you are serious about growth, if you strive to be the best you can be, if you understand that even the best still require practice and coaching perhaps our team can assist you on "Your journey to the top"!

It only takes an email or call to discover if there is a fit for us to work together, one small step could lead to a big reward?

01/09/2019

This is a good read for a snowy Wednesday.

What or who do you need to ‘let go of’ in 2019?
January 9, 2019 Donald Cooper's Blog

Managing any business or department often calls for making tough decisions. Some of the toughest are about what and who to ‘let go of’. What and who do you need to ‘let go of’ to make 2019 your best year ever? The list could include…

Products or services that are out-of-date, losing you money or hurting your brand. Fix them, or pitch them.
Customers that are not making you money, taking too much of your time or are driving your staff nuts with unreasonable demands. It takes guts to ‘fire’ customers but sometimes it’s the right thing to do.
Suppliers who keep letting you down or making you look bad to your customers. Give them 3 months to get their act together and, if they don’t, give them the axe.
Branches or locations that no longer make sense…or never did. Shut them down. Just make sure you treat the staff who work there honestly, respectfully and fairly.
Employees who are toxic or non-productive. If you can’t ‘fix’ them, show them the door.
Policies that make you look uncaring, unreasonable, dishonest. Policies that tick off good customers or frustrate good employees.
Management practices that used to work…but don’t any more. Or, that never worked and you never noticed. Do you need to evolve from being the ‘boss as the cop’ to the ‘boss as the coach’? Do you need to move from ‘always knowing and telling’ to ‘always listening and learning’? Your employees know stuff and they hate it when you don’t ask.
Negative attitudes or incorrect assumptions about people, places or things that may be closing your mind, hardening your heart and hurting your business.
Maybe you need to let go of your entire business model. Perhaps you need to rethink what you do, for whom you do it, where you do it or how you do it. Perhaps you need to be the disruptor in your industry or market…rather being the one who gets disrupted by someone more innovative, more gutsy…or both. If your business model is fundamentally out-of-date or no longer profitable, fine-tuning and fiddling with it won’t solve the problem. It needs a rethink and a re-do.
So, what do you need to ‘let go of’ in your business to make 2019 your best year ever? What are the tough but necessary decisions that you’ve been putting off…and when will you make them?

06/25/2018

It is all about frequency in advertising?

(By Bob McCurdy) To some the following might come off as heresy.

Let’s peel back the onion on an ad metric that flows off our tongues daily. It’s an important metric in our industry as it guides commercial scheduling, as well as the way we position our medium to advertisers and agencies.

The metric is “frequency” and most of us in radio sales take for granted that we fully understand the role it plays in advertising success. But do we?

Frequency’s contribution to ad success has been passed down from generation to generation of radio salespeople, similar to the way folklore is passed down, which is often without a lot of introspection.

It’s actually not a bad thing to occasionally analyze what we know we know, as we might find out what we know is not all its cracked up to be. So let’s walk on the wild side the next few paragraphs and put frequency’s role in marketing success under the microscope.

As it pertains to advertising, “reach and frequency” are bound together the way Lennon and McCartney or Rogers and Hammerstein are bound together musically. The importance of reach is pretty straightforward and has been receiving a lot of positive press of late, particularly as the marketing landscape continues to fragment.

But frequency, defined by Nielsen as, “the average number of times households or persons viewed/heard a given program, station or advertisement during a specific time period,” might not be quite as important as reach in contributing to ad campaign success, and in fact might simply be a byproduct of something else that matches reach in importance/impact. I am referring to affordable “presence,” as radio, more so than many other media options, due to its efficiency, enables advertisers to ensure their product/service is always “on the shelf,” in the forefront and “visible” to the consumer when the product/service is needed. Frequency is a byproduct of this affordable presence.

Does the number of times a consumer is exposed to a commercial automatically increase the likelihood of the product being purchased? Is advertising success that linear, simple, and predictable where purchases are directly correlated to the number of times someone is exposed to a message? Is someone exposed to a commercial three times, three times more likely to buy a product than someone exposed once? Is consumer purchasing behavior that malleable? Obviously not. Is it possible that for all these years we’ve wrongly been giving “frequency” marquee billing along with reach when it played more of a supporting role when it comes to driving advertising success?

What makes radio such a powerful advertising medium is its ability to generate large reach efficiently, with radio’s efficiency contributing to an advertiser’s continued presence, i.e. keeping an offer in front of the public. Frequency, the piling up of impressions against consumers, happens to be a by-product of this efficiency and presence, but it is “presence” brought about by radio’s efficiency that is the success driver and not the fact that someone simply heard a message multiple times.

It is continued presence which enables advertisers to deliver their message when it’s most relevant that drives results. To believe that frequency was the real success driver would require us to believe that consumers “learn” advertising the way they “learned” their ABCs or multiplication tables — via repetition. This is simply not the case. Repetition was necessary to learn that 5 x 7 = 35, but when a commercial is relevant it’s relevant, a single exposure can make the sale.

So it is actually reach x relevance (brought about by affordable ad presence) = advertising success, not reach x frequency. Splitting hairs, maybe. A subtle difference? Yes. But a difference nonetheless. Something to think about.

06/22/2018

My clients

06/22/2018

Very true, "Your sales and customer service teams may exceed management’s performance expectations, but that doesn’t mean they’re achieving their full potential"!

01/20/2017

Great article and well timed as I "scan" through my many emails today!

DEATH OF A SALESMAN: Email Is Not Your Friend

Ari Kaufman

What happened to sales people? When did email become perceived as the only highly effective form of selling? What happened to the scrappy days of pounding phones, networking relationships and getting creative? Remember the VITO letter? Ever get one of those anymore?

You’re sorely mistaken if you believe that flooding an executive’s inbox with rote solicitations will escape the DELETE key. If you want to be noticed, it’s time you go old-school and pick up the phone. And don’t expect success after the first or second attempt. That’s just silly.

There once was a time when sales people promoted their President Club achievements and sales training certifications on their resumes: Certified in Solution Selling Methodology; SNAP; Dale Carnegie; The Challenger Sale.… Is Email Badgering a program that I missed?

A quick glimpse at my inbox and I’m met with a deluge of subject lines like: … Conference call? … I want to be your first call? … Meeting request? … Do you have 15 minutes to connect? … Can I buy you a cup of coffee? … I am writing to request 30 minutes of your time …

My favorite one – or should I say—my favorite annoying one, is the I-Happen-To-Be-In-Town Email. Because every executive likes to hear, “I’ve got nothing better to do and since I’m in the area, I I could swing by and sell you something.” The absurd thing is that this approach is a sad evolution of the following, which was highly effective:

I’m going to be in town for a very important meeting with an existing client and it certainly would be worth extending my trip if you can afford me some time.

Email has become such an abused form of communication by sales people today that executives no longer look, let alone respond to anything. I don’t care if someone hopes that I am well. I’m not interested in just being updated. Are you delusional? Do you really think pretending that we have an existing email correspondence by starting the first email to me with “RE:” in your subject line will fool me?

I‘ve sent you a few emails already … I am following up on my previous email … Wondering if you’ve had a chance to review my previous emails … I’ve sent you a few notes and could use a response … I’m not sure if you’ve received my previous emails….

Here’s a secret: seasoned sales people are successful because they DON’T rely on email alone. They don’t expect it to warm up their prospects and develop their opportunities. They do not expect a sale to just jump out of the water and hook itself on the line of an email passively placed in the water. Sure, they use it, but they certainly don’t use it as a crutch like new sales people today.

I’m a salesman at heart. I grew up in sales and believe that part of what makes me a successful CEO is that I continue to be a salesman. I admire aggressive hunters and when I see it, I respond. My assistant knows to let some calls go through, if they are creative, if they impress her too. Most of all, if they are relentless. If a sales person wants to get to me, and they’re not afraid to get out from behind the veil of email, they will find me. Most people in leadership roles still respect scrappy. Unfortunately, scrappy has become a stand-out today.

My message to today’s sales people? Those who are listening but failing because of your dependency on email. Pay attention. I had a mentor once tell me, and he was right, EMAIL IS NOT YOUR FRIEND. Pick up the phone. Call outside of normal hours – not when you know you will get voicemail. Send a hand-written letter. Network hard. Walk into the office and sit for hours until someone will see you. Hunt people down at shows. Do not give up after one attempt, after 3 attempts or even 5. It can take 10 or 15 consecutive attempts over a short period of time for someone to turn around and say “ok, what do you want to say to me?!?” Develop a shark’s mentality and a thrill for the hunt. Those skills will pay off for the rest of your career. Over time, sales people that develop all of their skills and don’t hide behind email will truly succeed. They will earn the fat commission checks, be met with new opportunities, build future sales teams and become tomorrow’s leaders. Or, at least I sure hope so.

01/19/2017

http://www.cnbc.com/2016/12/21/former-google-career-coach-shares-a-useful-visual-trick.html

01/16/2017

If you can't trust your employees to work flexibly, why hire them in the first place?

Adam Henderson

When I conducted some research with Millennials I found that flexible working was vital for any modern employee, with 91% saying flexible working was important and 92% saying they wanted the option to work from home. Interestingly however, 66% said they would prefer to work more in the office than at home and 0% saying they would want to work exclusively from home.

As someone who has worked 100% in the office, 100% at home, a mixture of both and on the road travelling round the country, I have had a fair amount of experience of the various ways of working. Sadly there is no utopian way of working as each scenario has its positives and negatives.

However, the important thing to note is that flexible working does not simply refer to where you work (i.e. Home or office) but also when and how you work. Flexible working should mean that you have the flexibility to manage your time and resources in a way that is most effective to you. This allows you to be the most productive so that the work is not only done, but gets done to best quality possible whilst maintaining a better work life balance.

Flexible working does not simply refer to where you work but also when and how you work
For example, when working in advertising agencies, it seemed that the more creative people did not like early mornings and preferred to work later. As such I would rarely see members of the creative team in the morning but a few hours later they would be in, full of life and energy, ready for the day ahead. Come 6pm they would often go for a drink with everyone else who were finishing work, before heading back to the office to craft their next masterpiece late into the evening (often with empty pizza boxes and beer bottles as evidence on their desks the following morning). What I learnt from this experience was that being ‘creative’ and applying yourself does not just happen in the office between the specified hours of 9-5, so trying to force it was counterproductive. In such a competitive marketplace where these creative and innovative thoughts are the things that move businesses forward and set them apart, it is vital to allow employees to work in a way that is best for them as it ensures motivation and creativity remain high and the best work is delivered time and again.

This flexible approach to work also helps businesses retain their best talent as they are giving their employees an option to do great work, but in a way that fits their lifestyle providing a win-win scenario for all.

All this being said, the practicalities of business mean that you do need to have team meetings and be face to face at times, but this can easily be solved by having a few fixed days and times when everyone has to be in the office – for example, every Monday and Wednesday between 10 and 2 everyone has to be in. This means all core meetings and department meetings could be held between these times, but then the staff have the ability to work flexibly for the rest of the week in order to deliver the work required. On the odd occasion when key meetings do need to happen outside of these allotted times, video calling and fast connectivity has improved so much that you can easily get on a video call or share your screen from anywhere.

For all the benefits that flexible working brings and the new ways of working offered by technology, none of it can happen without trust
However, for all the benefits that flexible working brings and the new ways of working offered by technology, none of it can happen without trust. Sadly many companies have the mentality of ‘out of sight, out of mind’, i.e. if they cannot see you they do not think you are working. This is why the CEO of Yahoo, Marissa Mayer's decision in 2013 to ban all remote working was so controversial, as many saw the decision as her saying she didn't trust her staff to work properly if they were not present in the office.

Also, statistics show that people who do work away from the office overcompensate with their communication and work longer to show their colleagues they are in fact working. This is in response to the negative view many have that those working remotely are just having a day off (hence the Dr.Evil image at the top of this article!). This mentality and lack of trust defeats the point of working flexibly in the first place as you end up working more hours and feel guilty, meaning working the set hours in the office would have been the better option.

Modern businesses need to remove the old habits ingrained from the industrial era where you went to a single place of work between 9 and 5 every day to perform standardised tasks
Modern businesses need to remove the old habits ingrained from the industrial era where you went to a single place of work between 9 and 5 every day to perform standardised tasks. Instead they need to recognise that the world has moved on, modern service based jobs are significantly different to the manufacturing jobs of the past, technology has improved and become widely available and people work differently. They need to trust their employees to take accountability of their own workload and time management to get things done, whether this is at 9am in the office or 9pm at home. If businesses cannot trust their employees to work flexibly then surely they cannot trust them with anything else such as confidential business information and financial details? And if businesses do not trust their employees, then it begs the question of why they hired them in the first place?

About Millennial Mindset

Adam Henderson is the founder of Millennial Mindset, a website dedicated to understanding modern employees and changing corporate culture to be relevant to these evolving needs. Find out more at: www.millennialmindset.co.uk