By Nick Coston
Imagine if two weeks before the next OOH yearly conference all the salespeople at each of the attending companies stopped selling. No more new sales, no renewals, no customer services, no prospecting, no one-on-one attention. No contracts.
What do you think the tone would be like? Or at the conferences after that?
A mess, that’s what.
As the saying goes, nothing happens until someone sells something.
Then why do most of the OOH related conferences continue not to have any of the long-time, successful and some rich salespeople, on stage, speaking or on panels? While many attend, in fact most OOH conferences are populated by over seventy-five percent salespeople, be them programmatic or direct, hardly any are invited to be on stage, asked to share their OOH experiences and expertise, telling us how they make sales.
Do you ever see “Account Executive” or “VP Ad Sales” or “Head Biz Dev” next to the panelists or speakers’ names? It’s mostly “Brand Manager”, “Creative Director” “CEO”, “Thought Leader”, “CMO”, “Head of Client Partnerships”, “Co-Founder” and “Content Marketing” to name a few titles. All accomplished, all well-spoken, all prepared to engage and speak. They are all impressive individuals from impressive companies.
However, do any of them directly create revenue? Do they facilitate transactions? Do they call daily on agencies, brands, and buyers? Are they answering to their CRM’s such as Salesforce or HubSpot for hours, do they have low base salaries, making big money only off their sales commissions and bonuses only? You know the answers.
Most have never executed a sales contract, never had their sales quota’s changed mid-year, have never managed a sales negotiation and even closed a deal.
That’s who I’d like to see on stage. I’d pay to hear how the big shots make their budgets, woo their clients from zero to sixty in two calls, make themselves better than the other salespeople out there. I’d pay to see a successful, well known account salesperson be the moderator when the four CEOs of the top OOH companies take the stage, not moderated by someone we’ve never heard of. I’d pay to hear from Ned, Bill and Dave at Clear Channel, or Paul, Nadia and Derek at Outfront, maybe from Marty, JJ, or Suzy at Lamar, or Karen at Adams, Leslie at Interstate or Catherine at Vector and Alexis at NRS Digital, stars all of them, pitching OOH daily. A whole lot of knowledge for them to share.
Insider’s Note: Nick Coston has been writing opinion pieces for the OOH industry for 10 years now. His weekly pieces also appear on Substack where you can view the last 2 years worth. Full-time, Nick is the VP, Sales and Sales Strategies for Moving Walls, the Singapore based media and ad tech giant, here in The America’s.
If you are interested, here is Nick’s Substack LINK
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