“The story of success in the pandemic time”
Increase developing strategies in the past 6 months has been a confusing task. The COVID-19 pandemic has brought unexpected elements to many companies, some of them had an existing crisis plan, and others weren’t prepared to handle it. But there are some experts in the sales world who knew how to adapt with the changes that are happing in the current market.
My post will spot the highlight on a very successful, creative, and self-motivated salesperson: Melanie Matuszak, she has around 25+ years in sales experience, she succeed in media sales because she supported her passion with an educational background in radio broadcasting at BCIT. In the early days of her career she worked with CFMI Vancouver as a promo person, she enjoyed it until a sales position with Rogers in late 1990 was open in Calgary, AB.
Melanie decided she would move and start a career in sales, she felt that sales will give her more power in the business and she wanted to be the agent of everything. Her support for the sales team always been there, with her creative writing skills and her wide understanding of the domain, as I can say she decided that these will be her strong selling strategies and she said:
“I felt, I don’t want to be a superstar, I want to sell the superstar”.
Good communication skills can be one of the most important characters in a salesperson; her confidence was reflected on her work by feeling like home at the domain, and by starting an easy and natural sales conversation with clients.
Melanie works as Account Executive at Bell Media, she is a part of a team who are selling solutions on CTV, Virgin 98.5 FM, CJAY 92, 1060 AM and iHeart Radio. Enjoying the work at the radio atmosphere was clear in our conversation. She believes that radio is one of the traditional media who still have an important presence nowadays, especially in crises or pandemic. The radio stations played a huge role in the 2013 flood in Calgary, as all effected areas were out of electricity, and the only source of spreading information was through radio stations.
As for the Covid-19 pandemic, Melanie was in shock with all the closures and restrictions that happened to almost everyone who works in a business or runs a business. She shared that on March 12th she was half-way through her budget of the year and the excitement is rocking her sky, but Covid-19 hits, she spent almost 4 weeks just cancelling pre-booked campaigns, she said that she lost almost 50% of the stuff she had already booked. As a team, they worked on a recovery mode, not on reacting mode to help their clients.
However, the team and Melanie started to think about how do they need to work around this pandemic? They came up with a campaign called “Frontline Heros” where lots of business wanted to be involved to sponsor that campaign to support and to spot the lights on the people who are risking their lives to help the community from (doctors, nurses, firemen, and supermarket employees). She managed to book one sale for a local manufacture, she felt so grateful for getting that single sales, and she agreed it was one to many other sales later on. The market in the pandemic took a different route, new companies, as well as, new industries now are interesting in advertising. Melanie shift her sales interest at this time from the entertainments and events campaign to telecare, law firms, insurance and so many other things that were not in the domain before. Now she is seeing the opportunity and she is here to help them.
Another success story she shared with me, that she started working with a client just before Covid-19 hits, in the business of the bankruptcy and insolvency sector, this booking transformed to a very successful segments on CTV, they designed a financial advice segment for handling finances and what to do to avoid any money situations during the pandemic, these segments were great for the credibility for this company because it worked in tandem with the current time and they end up renewing 10 more bookings with her in the near future.
Melanie working day and working leads are usually comes to her through reading news or knowing about a new business that will open in the city, she keeps her self-up-to-date with the latest information where she transform it into sales opportunity.
As for her daily responsibilities, they are to advice clients where and when to book advertising for them to guarantee the best benefit. Her motivation is renewed daily to discover new opportunities, her schedule is planned annually, as she shared that’s one of the best interest for any advertiser is to plan ahead of time, instead of doing it one by one. Her commitment to her client is full of positivity; she scaled it from a salesperson to a trusted person who works for them to benefit herself and her clients with the best advice for a great exposures opportunity, also she said:
“I don’t have a commission breath, if they will not make money, I don’t want to sell it”
Our conversation also covered how she deals with competitors at the market place; she mentioned that being part of Bell Media and their multiple platforms helped her to offer confidently multiple products to the clients. She always works under the 10% attrition rate, where she measures her customers consistently to keep them longer periods of time. She works so hard to keep her clients close to her heart, she super-serve them and follow with them regularly as she quotes:
“Losing business is unpleasant because you are already trying so hard to build one.”
However, she will orchestrate and reaches out for her clients’ benefits, she always asks about the product objective, the demographics, and the timing. She builds her search around what they want to achieve from the campaign and then she suggests where they should advertise on TV, Radio, website, or on their newest and popular online platform Bell Mobile.
Maleine‘s advice to everyone who works in sales that they always need to ask their clients; what is their unique selling proposition is? The client needs to really understand what makes their business different from others, and if they don’t know how to answer that, they don’t need advertisement they need to go back and work on their business plans. Because the only way for any business to be successful is, they have to have a point of differentiation.
Ultimately, the key in sales is to be organized and always planning ahead, if you need to hit your target you need to pitch it by three times what your sales is with proposals and presentation in the markets to be close to achieving your target.
Leen Alsaffarini.
Reference:
DeVries, Henry (2020). How To Find New Clients During Pandemic. Retrieved from: https://www.forbes.com/sites/henrydevries/2020/07/28/how-to-find-new-clients-during-pandemic/?subId3=xid:fr1595999649017acc#7f8f5b7545a6
PWC Global. (n.d). PWC Global: Six key areas of focus for organisations. Retrieved from: https://www.pwc.com/gx/en/issues/crisis-solutions/covid-19.html
Bell Media. (n.d). Bell Media home page. Retrieved from: https://www.bellmedia.ca/
