How easy is it for you to measure seller performance? Sometimes, the granular insights for this and the forecasts aren’t clear or accessible. It can be more complex when trying to combine airtime and digital sales. You may also be dealing with systems that lack reporting and consolidation capabilities, leaving you reactive versus proactive. Accurate, reliable data can make all the difference in gauging local radio sales efforts.
What Kind of Performance and Pipeline Reporting Do You Need in Local Radio Sales?
When evaluating your current technology or seeking a new platform, you want to ensure you have performance and pipeline data functionality. Reporting is much more efficient and accurate if the data is within one solution. Without this, you’ll be chasing the information, which means you can’t forecast or have a true picture of seller performance.
You’ll gain this visibility with these seller performance and pipeline reporting capabilities:
- Committed orders
- How numbers compare to targets
- Forecasting reports that analyze sales
- Exception reporting to ensure sales activities occur within mandated criteria
- Monitoring salesperson performance
Having access to this data and reporting is critical for sales managers, but not all technology makes it easy. You should have this readily available, but sales managers spend a lot of time on reporting, up to 16.7%, according to a media sales survey.
If reporting is inefficient, you’ll devote too much energy here that you don’t have. Instead, you want to do more important things — like take action based on the data!
Empowered by Data, You Can Make Better Decisions
Data is only valuable if it’s actionable. It must be accurate, accessible and available in real time. You must expect that your sales technology delivers this; otherwise, it’s meaningless. So, how can it help you with local radio sales decision-making?
Seller Performance Data Insights to Action
Tracking seller performance is crucial to meeting budgets and knowing how to support each individual. You can deduce who is on pace to hit their numbers and who isn’t. You may also find other information helpful, like the size of deals and types of advertisers. With this information, you can make both acknowledgments and interventions.
First, it allows you to acknowledge your high performers. This matters because it’s something employees want from their managers. It can improve their job satisfaction and keep them loyal.
Second, you can address those who are struggling to hit numbers. It would enable you to discuss your concerns early and build a plan together to get them back on track.
Deal Performance Data Insights to Action
Another component of performance reporting is having a holistic view of past and current deals. You can identify gaps in programming for airtime and tactics for digital. It would be useful on the digital side if you’re actively trying to sell more of something like CTV/OTT, which is a premium ad type.
Additionally, you can see who is spending (and isn’t). For example, you can look into which companies bought advertising in the past quarter or year but haven’t renewed. Visibility on deals also lets you know which ones you must close to meet budget.
Pipeline Data Insights to Action
The other part of this reporting is having clarity around your sales pipeline by seeing deals at all stages. With this, you can forecast the upcoming quarters with data, not assumptions or rough estimates. It can help you determine where you are falling short so you can pivot and adjust as necessary. Your finance team will appreciate that forecasting is more precise.
Having accessible and actionable data is key to making more informed decisions. If it’s all in one ecosystem, you don’t have to go back and forth, and you can view everything from a dashboard. So, where can you find all these features?
Local Radio Sales Performance Reporting Solutions
Our solutions have a foundational approach to data – it’s yours and should be available, accurate and actionable. Our traffic systems have numerous management reporting capabilities. These traffic reports include many options for monitoring revenue and sales activity. You can also build custom reports.
Marketron NXT also has seller performance and forecasting capabilities. The most granular and powerful reporting comes from Insight reporting. Sales managers find it flexible and like the functionality of roll-up reporting for many markets. They can view sales projections for the entire company or by station.
Insight is a powerful tool that helps understand seller performance, gaps and pipelines in local radio sales. Learn more about its features in this post.
