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Transcript

From Inventory to Impact: The Shift to Outcome-Driven Media Sales · Leading Local Insights

• 0:34
  Rick Ducey: Hello and welcome to BIA Advisories Leading Local Insights Podcast.
• 0:38
  Rick Ducey: I'm Rick Ducey, Managing Director at BIA Advisory Services, your source for local market media intelligence, insights, data, and strategies to grow your business.
• 0:48
  Rick Ducey: Today we're going to talk about building digital first sales teams at legacy media organizations and specifically how local TV sellers can expand their knowledge and skill set to get into developing digital revenue growth, leveraging the value they can deliver from local TV stations into campaign activations using all of the digital assets that advertisers and agencies are now looking for.
• 1:13
  Rick Ducey: So in local advertising, digital remains the growth engine for advertisers and media, and audiences for that matter.
• 1:20
  Rick Ducey: Marketers and agencies are leveraging the strength of digital with its ability to target, get performance data with the high volume attraction of audiences, and still brand trust in traditional linear media like broadcast TV, but now in cross-platform strategies, planning, and activations, and then optimizations and assessing outcomes.
• 1:43
  Rick Ducey: And outcomes is really what's um that's no longer the tail wigging the dog or whatever animal we should talk about.
• 1:49
  Rick Ducey: It's it's the thing.
• 1:50
  Rick Ducey: You know, we're really looking for outcomes now.
• 1:52
  Rick Ducey: And so how do we do that?
• 1:54
  Rick Ducey: Um that's one of the things we're going to be learning here.
• 1:56
  Rick Ducey: For example, BIA forecasts that about 20% of the $182 billion that will be spent in advertising this year in 2026 will be spent on local cross-platform video.
• 2:07
  Rick Ducey: Uh video is a particularly hot space, uh, audio is showing up.
• 2:12
  Rick Ducey: Um, but video, um, both the short form video like TikTok and threads and so on, but also long form video, both linear and digital, um, streaming um TV as well as broadcast TV, that video impression is super powerful on the TV set.
• 2:26
  Rick Ducey: And that's one of the things we'll be we'll be tracking today.
• 2:28
  Rick Ducey: And that get caught that gets complemented with other tools and the whole advertising arsenal of uh linear and digital.
• 2:35
  Rick Ducey: And and the challenge is really how do we put this together most effectively and compellingly, both to tell a client story and to deliver on that story in terms of what kind of customer or protective customer response we get back.
• 2:49
  Rick Ducey: So, how are we going to learn all about this?
• 2:51
  Rick Ducey: Well, luckily today we have Stephanie Slagle, who is VP CRO with Graham Media.
• 2:57
  Rick Ducey: Um, and Stephanie have been building, again, a digital first sales team to represent uh Graham now to better serve both your current and prospective client bases, um, looking for revenue growth, of course, in um their base and broadcast TV, but really looking for growth like the rest of the market is in digital.
• 3:15
  Rick Ducey: And um, you've built some formulas and some practices uh that provide leadership, um, support, and actual achievement in the marketplace.
• 3:24
  Rick Ducey: So I'm really excited to hear what you have to say.
• 3:27
  Rick Ducey: Uh what you've been doing at you know, your uh previous companies and now what you're doing at Graham.
• 3:31
  Rick Ducey: Um kind of um you're not even a ringside seed, you're in the ring, and we're watching you now.
• 3:36
  Rick Ducey: So really looking forward to this.
• 3:38
  Rick Ducey: Um before we jump into the hardcore substance, just be curious if you'd share a little bit about yourself, um, your background and and how you got into who you are now, leading digital first with legacy media companies.
• 3:51
  Stephanie Slagle: Thanks for having me.
• 3:52
  Stephanie Slagle: That was a wonderful introduction, Rick.
• 3:54
  Stephanie Slagle: Thank you for having me on the podcast today.
• 3:56
  Stephanie Slagle: Um, so a little background about me.
• 3:58
  Stephanie Slagle: I can I've been in the digital ring, so to speak, as you said, since 2010, which seems like a lifetime ago.
• 4:07
  Stephanie Slagle: Maybe in many ways it was.
• 4:08
  Stephanie Slagle: Um so, but I've actually been in in um broadcast my entire career since 1995 when I started at a TV station as the receptionist, because that was the only job you could get in the 90s.
• 4:21
  Stephanie Slagle: Uh and so, but but over the years I I found my way to the sales uh part of the organization and ultimately watching uh consumer needs change over my years in in sales has really inspired me to continually help to stay ahead of the needs for the for our consumers.
• 4:44
  Stephanie Slagle: Um we've always taken our our client, no matter where I've been, I've always taken our clients' needs uh to heart.
• 4:51
  Stephanie Slagle: And I've always been a solutions-oriented seller.
• 4:54
  Stephanie Slagle: I want to solve problems.
• 4:56
  Stephanie Slagle: Um and so we've kind of taken that over over the years.
• 5:00
  Stephanie Slagle: I I have been um at a number of television station groups.
• 5:06
  Stephanie Slagle: Most recently, uh before coming here to Graham, I was at the dispatch uh media group in Columbus, Ohio, working with the newspapers for a number of years and then also on the TV side, uh, and then moved on over to Graham when the dispatch company sold um the TV station to Tegna.
• 5:24
  Stephanie Slagle: So um it's been a it's been an amazing path of helping customers solve needs, but then also helping organizations uh stay current with the needs of their customers because we've all seen uh those needs evolve and the solutions to them evolve as well.
• 5:42
  Stephanie Slagle: So it's been it's been a wonderful path of starting, start again, starting in digital in 2010 when it was, you know, we were selling banner ads, banner ads, and we were reporting at the time on um clicks and impressions served.
• 5:58
  Stephanie Slagle: And I will never forget my very first digital call.
• 6:01
  Stephanie Slagle: And someone said, um, well, how did it do?
• 6:05
  Stephanie Slagle: Right?
• 6:05
  Stephanie Slagle: How did my how did my campaign do?
• 6:07
  Stephanie Slagle: And I, and again, it was a direct client, and largely I'd been in television most of my career.
• 6:13
  Stephanie Slagle: But in this case, we were speaking to a large direct client in Columbus, Ohio.
• 6:17
  Stephanie Slagle: And how did my campaign do?
• 6:19
  Stephanie Slagle: And and I had that moment, that human moment of looking at this person who just gave us a lot of money, and I'm looking at an impression and click report, and I'm going, good, I think.
• 6:30
  Stephanie Slagle: Good.
• 6:31
  Stephanie Slagle: You got a bunch of clicks.
• 6:32
  Stephanie Slagle: I don't know.
• 6:33
  Rick Ducey: Let's just say your campaign clicked.
• 6:36
  Stephanie Slagle: Exactly.
• 6:36
  Stephanie Slagle: It clicked.
• 6:37
  Stephanie Slagle: And it was it was kind of a seminal moment for me to say, um, I would like to be able to tell them more.
• 6:44
  Stephanie Slagle: I would like to be able to tell them what impact this had on their actual results.
• 6:48
  Stephanie Slagle: And so that launched the journey of the um the the obsession with actually providing results to our customers.
• 6:57
  Rick Ducey: That um that's really interesting.
• 6:59
  Rick Ducey: I mean, and that pivot point in your career, like you're saying, it was it was a different life.
• 7:03
  Rick Ducey: Um, so you kind of faced that and said, you know, I gotta change, which is rare.
• 7:08
  Rick Ducey: People don't do that.
• 7:10
  Rick Ducey: You know, they kind of live by the impression, die by the impression, let's go ahead and clicks.
• 7:16
  Rick Ducey: Um, you know, but you said, no, I mean, let me take this on, and I need to do differently.
• 7:20
  Rick Ducey: I need to do better for our clients and you know for my company.
• 7:23
  Rick Ducey: Um, so you kind of personally went through that transformation to go from you know, um king of linear, uh, so to speak, to our now I'm digital.
• 7:32
  Rick Ducey: You know, with digital, we can do more.
• 7:34
  Rick Ducey: I can answer that question better, I can perform better and I can deliver better uh for the client.
• 7:38
  Rick Ducey: So it's really interesting.
• 7:39
  Rick Ducey: So now you brought that um in your leadership role to a number of companies, as you were saying.
• 7:44
  Rick Ducey: Um, and I guess the challenge and opportunity is you've got a legacy sales team, not trying to be pejorative, but somebody who's you know in place, in market, they've got terrific relationships.
• 7:56
  Rick Ducey: You know, for the most part, they've demonstrated great success in selling advertising inventory of a certain type.
• 8:02
  Rick Ducey: But the world shifted and you know, the market's pivoted, you pivoted, uh, and now you're leading sales teams that I'm doing what I used to do, but it's not happening as well or as fast.
• 8:13
  Rick Ducey: And I'm not sure what to do differently.
• 8:15
  Rick Ducey: What should I do differently?
• 8:16
  Rick Ducey: So so people see the need for change, but people pretty much don't like change.
• 8:21
  Rick Ducey: It's pain.
• 8:22
  Rick Ducey: I I have to learn, I have to do things differently, I have to take a risk.
• 8:26
  Rick Ducey: Um, you know, I don't know these people, I don't know these words I'm using.
• 8:30
  Rick Ducey: Um, help me.
• 8:32
  Rick Ducey: So I mean you face a room full of people, and um obviously there are people that are much better um adept at this, but I mean you know, you face a room full of people like that.
• 8:42
  Rick Ducey: It's like they're leaning on you to what can I do?
• 8:44
  Rick Ducey: You know, I don't want to, I don't want to lose my job, I don't want to not be successful.
• 8:47
  Rick Ducey: Um, I want to help the company.
• 8:48
  Rick Ducey: It's been good to me, I wanted to be good to the company, my clients, and so on.
• 8:51
  Rick Ducey: So it's there's a human element to this as well as the business element.
• 8:55
  Rick Ducey: It's like, oh my gosh, you know, look at our PLs, look at our margin, um, look at our budget.
• 8:59
  Rick Ducey: We need to get this machine in in higher gear yesterday.
• 9:03
  Rick Ducey: So that's you know a light set of challenges for you.
• 9:06
  Rick Ducey: Yeah.
• 9:07
  Rick Ducey: How have you taken those on?
• 9:09
  Stephanie Slagle: Very seriously.
• 9:11
  Stephanie Slagle: Um, because it you're you call out the human element of it, and that's absolutely the way we look at it, is um there will come a time, and you know, whether it's five years, 10 years, even 15, who knows?
• 9:25
  Stephanie Slagle: We, you know, everything is moving faster than it used to.
• 9:28
  Stephanie Slagle: Um, but there will come a time when, you know, what we think of as the legacy TV sellers of today, um, that role won't be the same.
• 9:38
  Stephanie Slagle: And so I I tell all of our leaders, you know, there will that time will come and your team will be looking at you and saying, why didn't you prepare us?
• 9:47
  Stephanie Slagle: And if you're not working to prepare them to have these types of conversations that we know are the future, the direct conversations, uh, which are the future of our organization and our industry, if you're not preparing them to have those conversations, you're letting them down.
• 10:04
  Stephanie Slagle: And and there's resistance, right?
• 10:07
  Stephanie Slagle: So it you, you as the leader uh have to push through the resistance of look, we've got to do this, we've got to try this, we've got to help these customers differently because they need it.
• 10:18
  Stephanie Slagle: They need the help and we're perfectly positioned to help them.
• 10:21
  Stephanie Slagle: We care about helping them, but it really is um, you know, Catherine Batalemente, our CEO and I often call it a labor of love because there is a lot of like, there's a lot of resistance to it, like, well, but we're doing okay and things are going fine now.
• 10:34
  Stephanie Slagle: But as you know, the leaders of the ship, you can see a little bit further down the road and you can see that this, the direction, the direction of the industry as we have it today is clearly changing.
• 10:47
  Stephanie Slagle: And so if we're not, if we're not preparing our teams for that change, even if it's uncomfortable and they don't want to, uh, then we're doing them disservice.
• 10:57
  Stephanie Slagle: And so we tackle that through Catherine and I are very transparent, right?
• 11:02
  Stephanie Slagle: We tackle it with this is this is some of the changes.
• 11:05
  Stephanie Slagle: These, this is how much um revenue, how much the revenue is to the company is declining through the retrans conversations, right?
• 11:13
  Stephanie Slagle: There's a lot of things happening that maybe those those sales teams on our orgs don't have purview into, but we want to make sure they do.
• 11:21
  Stephanie Slagle: We want to make sure they understand we're putting you through this for your own good.
• 11:24
  Stephanie Slagle: We're making you eat your vegetables for your own good, right?
• 11:26
  Stephanie Slagle: And so it's a lot of, it's a lot of um leading by example.
• 11:32
  Stephanie Slagle: Let's go do it, let's just figure it out, let's show people what we can do because we have a lot of faith in our sales teams that they also want our communities to thrive.
• 11:42
  Stephanie Slagle: And that's our vision statement at Graham is helping our communities thrive.
• 11:46
  Stephanie Slagle: And we mean our communities, and sales and businesses are a very large part of our community.
• 11:52
  Stephanie Slagle: And so helping our communities thrive is is key.
• 11:55
  Stephanie Slagle: And we we tell our salespeople that's really what we're about, and we hope that you are too.
• 12:00
  Rick Ducey: Right.
• 12:00
  Rick Ducey: Yeah, I always love a chance to use a tortured metaphor, uh, but but for change and resistance, it's like the frog and uh the boiling water kind of thing.
• 12:09
  Rick Ducey: So it's not so bad.
• 12:10
  Rick Ducey: It's not so bad.
• 12:11
  Stephanie Slagle: That's right.
• 12:12
  Rick Ducey: You can see where it's going though, right?
• 12:14
  Rick Ducey: So we need to do something differently here.
• 12:16
  Rick Ducey: And you're you point out some objective things, you know, budgets, um, the ability to sell competitively against other media, pure play, digital, and so on.
• 12:24
  Rick Ducey: It's like uh this is our game and it's changed.
• 12:26
  Rick Ducey: You know, there's new rules.
• 12:27
  Rick Ducey: And if you want to stay in the game, um, you have to play by the new rules.
• 12:31
  Rick Ducey: You have to learn the rules and learn how to be effective with them and use them to leverage your wins.
• 12:37
  Rick Ducey: So that makes a lot of sense.
• 12:39
  Rick Ducey: I mean, so some of that is um, I guess maybe going back to the human element a bit, but also that change in resistance and the mechanism of how you encourage, you know, hopefully most of the people to make that transition from what used to work so well to what doesn't work so well and need to do some new things.
• 12:56
  Rick Ducey: Um can you can have a top-selling TV uh performer?
• 13:01
  Rick Ducey: Then you say, well, now we've got you know social video, we've got our streaming um uh operations going on, um, you know, maybe fast, maybe direct-to-consumer, maybe some other distribution partnerships, uh, virtual MVPDs, um, you mentioned um some of those uh channels.
• 13:17
  Rick Ducey: So how how do we um sell that inventory?
• 13:20
  Rick Ducey: We sell it differently.
• 13:21
  Rick Ducey: You know, the data's different, the promises are different, um, the way we book it is different, it's programmatic, not IO kind of things.
• 13:28
  Rick Ducey: So it's a different business process, opening up new opportunities.
• 13:32
  Rick Ducey: Does everybody make that transition?
• 13:34
  Rick Ducey: Or who from the existing team, what kind of characteristics or training are they most responsive to to make that transition?
• 13:41
  Rick Ducey: And then just to make the question even more complicated, um where do you find new people?
• 13:46
  Rick Ducey: Um, so you start with your existing sales team, of course.
• 13:49
  Rick Ducey: Of course, their performers are trusted, but at some point not everyone's gonna make um that transition for their own personal reasons, maybe, um as well as their professional kind of aptitudes, whatever.
• 13:59
  Rick Ducey: And then you need to fill in with strong sellers that maybe come from pure play digital.
• 14:04
  Stephanie Slagle: Yeah, yeah.
• 14:05
  Stephanie Slagle: Wow, that is a that is a big question.
• 14:07
  Stephanie Slagle: Um, you know, who some we were very clear, some people um don't want to make the transition and and are pretty vocal about, you know, we've actually even over I've over the years, over all the years I've been doing this, have people come to me and say, this is not what I signed up for.
• 14:25
  Stephanie Slagle: And my answer is typically, I get that.
• 14:28
  Stephanie Slagle: And this, but this is where the company has to go.
• 14:31
  Stephanie Slagle: This is where we have to go.
• 14:32
  Stephanie Slagle: Um, what what we found is that good salespeople will are are smart and will figure it out and um care about their clients.
• 14:42
  Stephanie Slagle: And ultimately that's really it.
• 14:44
  Stephanie Slagle: So there's the two things, the two, the one main thing I look for in a in someone who I know is going to be successful in digital is they're a problem solver.
• 14:51
  Stephanie Slagle: If you have a problem solver, um problem solver with a nice mix of intellectual curiosity, those are my two uh traits that I look for in a digital seller, and mainly because the problem solver is is not obsessed with selling the product, they're obsessed with solving the problem, identifying and solving the problem.
• 15:12
  Stephanie Slagle: And if you can identify and solve a problem, you will be so successful in sales no matter what you sell, right?
• 15:18
  Stephanie Slagle: And and that's the big one.
• 15:20
  Stephanie Slagle: And then intellectual curiosity because um it's different.
• 15:24
  Stephanie Slagle: Every single sale you make is different than the last, exactly different.
• 15:31
  Stephanie Slagle: And so you have to be curious about it's not an assembly line sale, like like television potentially could be, right?
• 15:39
  Stephanie Slagle: If it's you're kind of selling the same ads to the same, but it's not an assembly line.
• 15:43
  Stephanie Slagle: There is a different nuance to every single one.
• 15:45
  Stephanie Slagle: There's different targeting, there's different um um analysis, different analytics on the back end.
• 15:51
  Stephanie Slagle: There's so many variables inside of a digital sale.
• 15:54
  Stephanie Slagle: And you as a seller have to be intellectually curious about why isn't that working?
• 16:00
  Stephanie Slagle: I'm not angry, I'm not angry and gonna like be nervous that it's not working, but instead I'm gonna go, oh my gosh, why isn't that working?
• 16:05
  Stephanie Slagle: And how can I make it work better?
• 16:07
  Stephanie Slagle: And so those are the things that I see in a successful seller.
• 16:10
  Stephanie Slagle: And we we are grateful to have so many of those on our teams, even on our, you know, typical legacy TV teams.
• 16:17
  Stephanie Slagle: Uh, it just has to be, it has to be um, they have to be comfortable with what that looks like on the digital space.
• 16:24
  Stephanie Slagle: As for how we get new people, that that is um that I I will tell you that has been more challenging over the last few years because um it's a it's an interesting thing with with a uh younger generation of people who don't who have kind of a bad taste in their mouth for sales.
• 16:44
  Stephanie Slagle: And so, and and I will tell you ironically, I was kind of the same.
• 16:48
  Stephanie Slagle: Here I am chief revenue officer of a company, but in the when I started selling, I was kind of the same.
• 16:52
  Stephanie Slagle: I thought I don't I don't know that I want to be in sales.
• 16:54
  Stephanie Slagle: But as soon as I realized and and flipped the script for myself and said, well, I'm not just selling something, I'm actually solving problems and helping people as soon as I did that.
• 17:04
  Stephanie Slagle: And so that's kind of what we do.
• 17:06
  Stephanie Slagle: Uh, we've also changed our comp plan so that we are not 100% commission based.
• 17:12
  Stephanie Slagle: And because we recognized a couple of years ago that that was a barrier for people who were not incredibly comfortable coming in on what their minds said it was 100% commission, like uh in the fear of you know, a lot of these younger sellers coming in was, well, I'm not gonna eat, right?
• 17:27
  Stephanie Slagle: If I don't make money, and so we kind of exactly so we switched up our comp plan to kind of account for that and make sure that they saw that we're we're valuing what you do here um with a with a different commission structure.
• 17:41
  Stephanie Slagle: So, but we're very we're very enthusiastic about our mission and how our salespeople can can help us um help our customers.
• 17:53
  Rick Ducey: Yeah, it's good.
• 17:53
  Rick Ducey: It's and I I love your concepts and the words you picked.
• 17:56
  Rick Ducey: As my two girls are growing up, um uh we would always have this conversation where I'd say there's two kinds of people in the world.
• 18:03
  Rick Ducey: People um one kind is a problem finder, the other kind is a problem solver.
• 18:07
  Rick Ducey: I said, trust me, you want to be in the problem solver group.
• 18:10
  Rick Ducey: And to solve a problem, if you run up something you don't know or can't fix, you don't give up.
• 18:15
  Rick Ducey: That's not the end of the journey, that's the beginning of the journey.
• 18:17
  Rick Ducey: Then you figure it out.
• 18:19
  unknown: Absolutely.
• 18:19
  Rick Ducey: And then you solve the problem.
• 18:21
  Stephanie Slagle: Yeah, I tell my nieces, my nieces and nephews are all in different fields, but I tell them when they ask for advice, career advice, I always tell them find problems and solve them, and you will not have any problem with your career.
• 18:34
  Stephanie Slagle: Just find problems and help solve them.
• 18:36
  Rick Ducey: Positive.
• 18:37
  Rick Ducey: Let me switch to um, if I could, a couple um, I guess more nuts and bolts kind of things.
• 18:42
  Rick Ducey: So um people have to learn, they have to change while they're doing their main job.
• 18:46
  Rick Ducey: I mean, they have to keep bringing in revenue.
• 18:48
  Rick Ducey: Um and it is different, the whole workflow uh and what data tech um and processes and you know how you build stories and deliver the success results uh to clients.
• 19:01
  Rick Ducey: Uh so there's a lot of work, uh, and there are technology tools uh that people can use, but I know that you've been active in leveraging um, you know, AI kind of uh platforms, automation platforms, the idea being, you know, if there's you know, I I think you had just done a webinar where somebody said there were, I forget, 27 workflow steps, or uh, I know other people have said there's 35 workflow steps, it's like you you're killing me smalls.
• 19:25
  Rick Ducey: Um if there's some way we can reduce the workflow steps and have people do actual intellectual curiosity and you know do actual problem problem solving and following up with the client.
• 19:36
  Rick Ducey: So how how are you, and I know you've tried several different solutions trying to find the best fit, but there are, and we don't need to be specific with vendors unless you feel you want to, but I mean what would how do you arming yourself, the company, and your and your sellers with technology and and tools and uh kind of resources to be successful?
• 19:56
  Stephanie Slagle: Oh, that's a that's a great question, Rick, because I am obsessed with uh streamlining because we have so many things to do now uh that that we've got to get to a point where we're streamlining some of these processes.
• 20:10
  Stephanie Slagle: And so we have we have taken a lot of our standard processes and and my my famous my team says this to me all the time, but the fame, my famous quote is, if we build it today, is this how we would build it?
• 20:24
  Stephanie Slagle: And the answer is almost always no.
• 20:27
  Stephanie Slagle: And so then my second question is, okay, well, how would you build it if build it if you built it today?
• 20:32
  Stephanie Slagle: And so let's investigate that.
• 20:34
  Stephanie Slagle: And so as we as we look through our workflows, every single person, and I asked them because they're the ones that are on the ground doing it, every single one of them would say, Oh my goodness, no.
• 20:43
  Stephanie Slagle: I mean, if we had to build this today, it would be completely different.
• 20:45
  Stephanie Slagle: And so that's the beginning of it is how would we build it?
• 20:49
  Stephanie Slagle: And um, we don't always have the ability to bring in the things that that we would like to because the connections aren't there.
• 20:55
  Stephanie Slagle: But boy, I will tell you that of late with with you know the the speeding up of AI, we've had a lot more opportunities to streamline things than we would have five years ago.
• 21:06
  Stephanie Slagle: And so we've done some pretty radical things.
• 21:10
  Stephanie Slagle: Um, and this is radical on a TV sales force.
• 21:13
  Stephanie Slagle: Like we have taken make goods completely out of the hands of our sales reps.
• 21:19
  Stephanie Slagle: Because when we looked at it, we thought, man, that's a that's a big old, big old time suck for them is doing reselling the spot that they sold already, and now they've got to resell it five times.
• 21:31
  Stephanie Slagle: And so figuring out and with our partners, and it really is, we have we have wonderful, wonderful technology partners who help us.
• 21:40
  Stephanie Slagle: As you can imagine, I'm pretty mouthy, right, about what we need and how how we can help.
• 21:46
  Stephanie Slagle: And so, but they're always so wonderful to uh visualize with us because Graham is a company that is, we have large markets, um, we don't have a ton of stations.
• 21:57
  Stephanie Slagle: So there, but that's kind of the perfect match for partnership with these technology companies because we can actually make something real in Houston, Texas, um, that could actually really impact the industry.
• 22:11
  Stephanie Slagle: And so we were very fortunate to have wonderful technology partners who will help play along with us and say, this is nuts.
• 22:18
  Stephanie Slagle: How can we fix this?
• 22:19
  Stephanie Slagle: Now, a larger company may not have that luxury because it's a lot more, it's a lot more difficult for them to move 85 stations forward than it is for us to move six forward.
• 22:31
  Stephanie Slagle: And so we kind of provide a little bit of a petri dish for that.
• 22:33
  Stephanie Slagle: But um automation on things that need to be automated is really important to me because it's important to our large agency partners.
• 22:42
  Stephanie Slagle: And so that's something we really have to lean into and help figure out for them.
• 22:46
  Stephanie Slagle: So it's been, that has been a a project, a really fun project of mine because um I think we need it.
• 22:54
  Stephanie Slagle: I because to your point, this is different.
• 22:56
  Stephanie Slagle: The digital sale is wildly different and there's more to it.
• 23:00
  Stephanie Slagle: And so, in order for me to task these salespeople with that extra amount of work, I really need to remove some of the day-to-day work that they have.
• 23:09
  Stephanie Slagle: And so we're making investments to do that.
• 23:11
  Rick Ducey: That's fantastic.
• 23:12
  Rick Ducey: Um, I have um two more questions, if I could.
• 23:15
  Rick Ducey: One um is of all the different things that you could be selling, um, obviously you've got your TV station and you've got a you know a whole range of digital kind of video, um, audio, um, social, interactive kind of things you could do.
• 23:31
  Rick Ducey: Um what do you have sellers that know how to sell?
• 23:35
  Rick Ducey: At some point, it's like, well, it's not it's not a sales problem, it's a product problem.
• 23:38
  Rick Ducey: Or, you know, the product has really helped me get the leverage and and growth I want.
• 23:44
  Rick Ducey: Um how do you, you know, what do you go to market with?
• 23:46
  Rick Ducey: What's your product set that you think is like this is a competitive differentiator?
• 23:51
  Rick Ducey: Um obviously you can bring TV uh to the market, which uh I guess more people can these days as if it becomes adjustable through programmatic channels.
• 24:00
  Rick Ducey: But I mean, um you've got the uh feet on the ground, you've got a lot of relationships with the TV station over the years, and you can bring in the digital kind of solutions so the people can can bring in integrated cross-platform measurement, targeting, optimization, and then performance.
• 24:16
  Rick Ducey: Um, which kind of your favorite products to go to market with to really get the growth you're looking for?
• 24:22
  Stephanie Slagle: I love that question.
• 24:23
  Stephanie Slagle: And I'm smiling and smirking because um, if anyone who works for me would know, oh my god, he did not ask about products because I get because I always say the difference maker is how we look at things.
• 24:35
  Stephanie Slagle: And so it's it's not actually so much the product that we bring, it's it's the the analysis.
• 24:43
  Stephanie Slagle: Because I this is my true belief.
• 24:44
  Stephanie Slagle: A client who places their buy in your hands does not care about the product, they only care about the outcome.
• 24:52
  Stephanie Slagle: So hence our our our uh motto for this year, which is driven by outcomes.
• 24:57
  Stephanie Slagle: Because I always tell them, I always tell my teams, if you're leading with the right types of conversations, the product is a secondary conversation.
• 25:06
  Stephanie Slagle: The outcomes are the first conversation.
• 25:08
  Stephanie Slagle: And so the the that product set is wildly different depending on the needs of the customer and um and the outcomes they need to achieve.
• 25:18
  Stephanie Slagle: And so the outcomes will actually that would answer your question, depending on the outcomes of client would answer what kind of product set I would bring.
• 25:27
  Stephanie Slagle: And that nuance right there is the hardest thing to teach somebody.
• 25:31
  Rick Ducey: It really is because it is because yeah, it goes back to being Glenn, I'm sorry.
• 25:35
  Stephanie Slagle: We even had a training session yesterday with digital.
• 25:38
  Stephanie Slagle: And we're, you know, I tell I told people, we are, we you need to learn marketing.
• 25:45
  Stephanie Slagle: That you need to be able to have a marketing conversation with your customer about solving their needs.
• 25:50
  Stephanie Slagle: And the product is an is almost in the background because here's the other thing as we optimize, that product set will change significantly.
• 25:58
  Stephanie Slagle: As we optimize the campaign, I may start you with a CTV and a geofence targeting video campaign, and then some, you know, all kinds of email and all these different things that I think are going to work, but within four to six weeks, that will change drastically once I start learning the behavior of your customer.
• 26:17
  Stephanie Slagle: And so our difference maker is the way we optimize and the way we think about your campaign.
• 26:24
  Stephanie Slagle: And so I often tell our teams the reporting call is the most important sales call because that's the call where I'm telling you if my hypothesis worked and if it didn't, what we're gonna do next time and how we're gonna continue to iterate on your campaign.
• 26:39
  Stephanie Slagle: And that's our difference maker.
• 26:40
  Stephanie Slagle: And it's funny, it's funny because over the years, I answer this question so many times for our sales people.
• 26:45
  Stephanie Slagle: There's nothing different about us.
• 26:47
  Stephanie Slagle: Like we don't have, we don't have anything that anybody across the street is selling.
• 26:51
  Stephanie Slagle: And I was like, absolutely, and get used to that.
• 26:54
  Stephanie Slagle: But what we do have is we think about things differently, we approach the campaigns differently, and uh we deliver on results.
• 27:02
  Stephanie Slagle: And what we find is when we do that right, our clients don't leave.
• 27:06
  Stephanie Slagle: When we're doing that right, the clients don't leave.
• 27:09
  Rick Ducey: Yeah, I mean, and I like your um angle on the marketing aspect too, because it it sort of brings to mind um selling um features of a product versus selling benefits, and so it's uh you know, it's like sell me this pen.
• 27:24
  Rick Ducey: It's like, well, it's got blue ink and it's made out of plastic.
• 27:27
  Rick Ducey: It's like I actually couldn't care less.
• 27:29
  Rick Ducey: Well, you can write the great American novel with this, you know, you may be selling exactly yes, and so you know, let's focus on the benefits, let's focus on what your business needs are, and we'll assemble the right solution set to deliver on those benefits, you know, the the um the uh benefits, not the features.
• 27:47
  Rick Ducey: What do you you know, why do you care how that video engagement is happening, if it's streaming or if it's linear, if it drives somebody to your tier three auto lot, that's what we're that's what we're looking for.
• 27:58
  Rick Ducey: So that's great.
• 27:59
  Rick Ducey: Um thank you so much for for your generous um sharing of time here and your um and I love your insights and your all the programs that you're doing and the change you're doing for your company, but also you know, it percolates out into the industry, of course.
• 28:12
  Rick Ducey: Is there anything that um I I didn't touch on that you'd like to bring up before we close out?
• 28:19
  Stephanie Slagle: Uh I think one thing I I really like to impress upon people is um is focusing on our customers.
• 28:29
  Stephanie Slagle: This is what I focus on with my salespeople all the time.
• 28:31
  Stephanie Slagle: If you focus on the customer success, success, not just they bought us and they and we we did a transaction.
• 28:38
  Stephanie Slagle: But if you focus on your customer success, that's that's where winning happens for everybody.
• 28:45
  Stephanie Slagle: It happens for you as a seller, it happens for your client, it happens for your company, ultimately the industry.
• 28:52
  Stephanie Slagle: Um, that's where the win is.
• 28:54
  Stephanie Slagle: And it's just really focusing on the customer success and genuinely, genuinely driving to that.
• 28:59
  Stephanie Slagle: That's what that's what the success of all of it is.
• 29:03
  Rick Ducey: Hard to question that.
• 29:04
  Rick Ducey: It sounds like a beautiful thing.
• 29:06
  Rick Ducey: And you're doing it.
• 29:06
  Rick Ducey: It's exciting.
• 29:07
  Rick Ducey: Congratulations.
• 29:08
  Rick Ducey: I know it's not easy.
• 29:10
  Stephanie Slagle: This was fun.
• 29:11
  Rick Ducey: Yeah, absolutely.
• 29:12
  Rick Ducey: Stephanie, thank you so much for being with us here today.
• 29:14
  Rick Ducey: Um, sharing your experiences and insights, you know, your leadership, and you know, um on behalf of the industry, we need more people like you uh getting this done uh to help everybody in the whole mix here.
• 29:25
  Rick Ducey: Um, if you have any questions, don't um hesitate to reach out to either us here at BIA or or Stephanie.
• 29:31
  Rick Ducey: Um I know you have an active speaking um calendar, so that that's great to see you out there and sharing this all the time.
• 29:38
  Rick Ducey: Um we look forward to having you join us again at our next podcast, and we'll have another exciting speaker talking about leading and local.
• 29:45
  Rick Ducey: Thanks so much for joining us today.