Pat O’Donnell just retired as President of YESCO Outdoor Media after a 40 year career in out of home.  Today he talks about the key to sales and how to thrive in a down market.

OOH Sales.

I don’t think it’s any different than when I started in the business.  I worked in local sales.  Understanding the customers business – their goals and aspirations – and investing yourself in their success is the key to sales. You’ve got to be a partner.  Not a sales person.  The other thing you have to do is to force them to do quality creative.  It they won’t then don’t do it at all.  There’s nothing worse than putting up really lousy copy that’s not going to work for them.  You have to have the integrity to say no.  We’re not going to do this.  We’ve done that with agencies.  We’ve sent them a letter saying “listen, we think the creative you sent us is not going to work.”  You’ve got to have the guts to say this isn’t going to work for you or for us because when this contract is done you aren’t going to renew.

The things I’m proudest of are when we get together with a client and we do something unique – the kind of ad where we get phone calls from people saying “that ad is incredible.”  It can be extensions, 3D, or just great copy.  Rick Robinson has been a friend for years.  He says you’re adding to the environment or your subtracting from it.  The value is always in the creative.

Thriving in a down market.

YESCO has seen ups and downs in the business but we’ve never had an unprofitable year at YESCO outdoor media.  Earnings have had highs and lows.  We’ve been able to keep our core advertisers on board.  During the pandemic we actually were one of the few companies that actually showed growth.  It had a lot to do with the fact that we work hard at training our sales people to be effective working remotely.  We had a plan to reach out to every single one of our core customers about what was going on and what we could do.  In some cases we made concessions to them during the pandemic but we didn’t lose them.  We have a great sales team.  We used the idea that we’ll take a little less but in the end we’ll get a little more.  We’re still a local company.  We have a lot of rural locations through 8 states.   It was important for us to maintain relationships with folks who have been our bread and butter for over 40 years.

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