To Attract Sales Talent, Inbound Marketing Is Key

Heather Monahan

Most publishers and broadcasters know too well that good digital sales help is really hard to find. For Beasley Broadcast Group’s Chief Revenue Officer Heather Monahan, the problem gets a lot worse when they go about hiring the wrong way.

According to netnewscheck.com, when she lost five of her own top sales talent, Monahan says open houses and job fairs yielded only dead weight. Other tactics like referral incentives, recruiters, past employees and house ads yielded somewhat better results, though largely came up short.

Speaking to Borrell Associates’ Local Online Advertising Conference here on Monday, Monahan says the Eureka moment came when she thought of when she ran into actress Kate Upton in a bar. “She doesn’t chase anyone down,” Monahan says. “People come to her.”

That strategy – known as inbound marketing when extrapolated out of Upton’s world – is all about attracting talent to a company by shifting away from the hard sell and moving on to the desirable talent’s timeline. That might consist of identifying the talent and then constantly interfacing in a long, slow recruitment process or just creating attractive content about the company and publishing it across relevant social platforms, waiting for the talent to come to you, Monahan says.

“Give people a glimpse into who you are,” she says, noting that if it’s the right vibe, authenticity- and uniqueness-wise, the candidates will eventually find their way around.

Matt Sunshine, managing partner for the Center for Sales Strategy, is equally emphatic about the need for inbound marketing, echoing Monahan’s emphasis on the platform Glassdoor as an important one for more ambitious hires (it enables employees to assess their experience with the company).

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Nancy Lane

Another takeaway from the Borrell Ad Confab, the average profit margin for a separately operated events division run by a media company is 40%, and those divisions hit that number within as little as 2 years.

Calling events “the third leg of the media stool,” Local Media Association (LMA) president Nancy Lane said the key to events success is treating it as a separate business unit and allocating resources toward it, as if it were a startup.

InsideRadio reports the research is based on data from a recent LMA Events Summit that included such companies as Emmis Communications, the Utah Media Group, the Chicago Tribune, St. Louis Post-Dispatch and the Cedar Rapids Gazette. All but one of the companies reported events revenue in the seven-figure range along with significant growth.

“Events are where the money is,” Lane said.

The Utah Media Group and the Tribune Events Group booked $12 million in events revenue between the two of them, Lane said, noting that they use separate staffs to sell and service their clients.

Weaving cause marketing into its events helped Emmis increase tickets sales, Lane said, with as much as one-third of the company’s events revenue coming from the non-profit community.