Neil Bell, host of The Bell Board Posdcast has a new show out featuring sales consultant extraordinaire Kevin Gephart.

You say we’re not selling out-of-home space, we’re selling ideas — but a lot of operators are still running their sales departments like order takers.

It’s a pervasive problem. In the ’60s and ’70s, radio stations were run by engineers — the guys who knew how to touch the wires together to make it work. I think the billboard business is in that same vein: companies are started and run by guys who know how to get the leases and put the steel on the ground, but who don’t embrace process. They get excited because they put a board out on I-35 and want everybody to go sell it. It is exciting, but only to the degree that it solves somebody’s marketing problem.  I came up in sales, but my first company was building signs, so I’ve got a foot in both camps — I can easily fall into that “get excited about the board, go sell it” mindset myself. I’d estimate maybe 15% of the people I start working with are genuinely solution-based sellers. A lot of operators read the stuff I write about sales fundamentals — qualifying prospects, compensation plans, cold calling — but don’t actually change.

You say cold calling isn’t dead — bad cold calling is dead. Walk me through what a good out of home cold call looks like.

 “Neil, the reason for my unexpected call today is I understand these HVAC dealers are really starting to light the market on fire. How is that affecting your bottom line, and how is that affecting your growth plans?” It’s a call built around a provocative question. People want cold calling to be dead — there are plenty of books that say so — but it’s one tool in the toolbox. If I have a way to get to you through an introduction, that’s obviously preferable, but the toolbox has all kinds of tools, and cold calling is just one of them.

Does AI improve any of this?

AI is the greatest thing to happen to our business since the highway. Somebody at the IBO stood up about a year ago and said AI isn’t going to replace sales reps — it’s going to replace sales reps who don’t use AI. I always ask for a show of hands on who’s using it, and everybody is to some degree; if someone isn’t, that’s a coachable moment. It’s not going to replace a salesperson discussing marketing plans with a prospect, but it streamlines prospecting, helps with writing emails, and helps with research — what problems is an industry having, and what are those problems locally, right down to market level. It can get even more granular — I’ve asked it about specific businesses and it pulls their social media, their website, news articles about them. What I like about AI is that it gets personal.

Why billboard campaigns fail

Every time a rep sits down with someone who says “I tried billboards, it didn’t work,” you can assume a rep sold them something that had little chance of working, and now every rep who walks in that door has to overcome it. My response has always been: blaming billboards for not working is like blaming the post office for a direct mail campaign not working.

Here is the LINK to the podcast.

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