The pain points radio sellers face are multiplying as the industry and advertisers needs change. One major evolution is that stations sell multiple ads — airtime, O&O and digital. As a result, the sales life cycle has become chaotic. Sales, traffic staff, leadership and finance need a better way to manage the end-to-end process of local radio selling. Operations and workflows need a refresh that takes advantage of modern technology and automation.
The key to overcoming them and streamlining operations is a connected revenue ecosystem that integrates traffic, digital and payments. With this trifecta, you can overcome operational challenges, improve sales efficiency and reduce costs.
Let’s examine these operational roadblocks and how to clear them out of your processes.
Too Many Manual Processes Create Challenges
Your sellers don’t want to spend time manually inputting proposals and orders. If the campaign includes radio and digital spots, duplication of efforts is inevitable, and that’s inefficient and prone to error.
If your sellers are busy doing this, they aren’t out there selling. Automating parts of the sales process and connecting traffic and digital reduce manual work and speed up processes. What once took hours can now be completed in minutes.
Doing More with Less Isn’t Sustainable
Every radio station lives by the “do more with less” mantra. As operating costs balloon, staff cuts occur. Those left have multiple hats to wear and no time for inefficiency. It’s not sustainable in the long term, as employees burn out and processes falter.
The only true way to fill the gap and give sales and other teams the support they need is with modern, optimized technology. When traffic, digital and payments all live in the same environment, everything runs smoother, eliminating a lot of manual work and bloated processes. If you want your station to thrive, not merely survive, in today’s competitive landscape, you must provide them with a tech stack that works today and into tomorrow.
Disconnected Processes Create Too Much Work for Your Sellers
The big picture of operational challenges includes highly fragmented and disjointed workflows. It’s often a combination of manual work, pulling information from multiple systems and some learned tricks to get what you need.
With disconnected processes being the norm, they are ripe for mistakes and waste time. They also cause issues downstream for finance. That’s why an integrated workflow is an absolute must for operational efficiency of revenue management! Using multiple platforms leads to broken workflows fragmented attention.
Local radio selling management shouldn’t be a burden, but most legacy platforms don’t align with the process. Ideally, your sellers should be able to do all these things in one system:
- Generate proposals.
- Automate order creation.
- Traffic airtime and digital ads.
- Create accurate campaign reports.
- Consolidate billing and invoicing.
Reporting on Campaigns and Seller Performance Is Elusive
Other operational challenges for local radio selling are reporting and analytics. If you use multiple systems, you must manually aggregate this data or turn to integration. Some software won’t let you retrieve your data without a hefty price tag. Further, most only provide one type of reporting — at either the campaign level or by seller.
The reality is that you need both report types to gain the business intelligence necessary to make better decisions regarding performance. Don’t let restrictions around data access prevent you from managing pipelines and campaigns more effectively.
Marketron Is Revolutionizing Local Radio Selling
With over 50 years of supporting the radio industry, we understand its roots and future. We’re building solutions that deliver on operational efficiency now and prepare you for what’s ahead.
Let’s talk about how we can ignite the revenue spark for radio!