Wendy Hickey spent 18 years selling out of home before founding ArtPop Street Gallery. Wendy had some great insights into selling out of home on last wednesday’s Billboard Insider Podcast.
You spent 18 years in out of home sales. What did you learn about selling out of home?
I really love it. What I loved about it was…the creative process. With Adams alone I worked in five different markets and my role changed 13 different times. I’ve been a sales manager, a general manager…a national account executive…what I’ve learned is to serve your clients well, to be honest with your clients, to listen to your clients and push back if you know the creative is not on point with the message and if it’s not going to be effective don’t let the sales process mess that up. Be honest with the client…I think that comes from rapport, that comes from a trust…Over time if you’ve built the right relationship and they trust you and you have their best interests at heart and you’re truly trying to grow their business and not just get a contract – that’s where the magic begins…I always pushed my clients to do outstanding creative. There seems to be a lot of talk about that now. Can you imagine if every single billboard was executed well how that would effect our entire universe?
What traits are necessary to succeed in out of home sales.
Curiosity. Because you have to ask a lot of questions to get to what what clients service or product is…Why did you go into business? What keeps you up at night? What’s the one thing you really want people to know about your product or service…
No fear. In the out of home world…it is a place where you have to hunt to eat. If you have no fear and will call on the biggest company and go straight to the CEO and have got some moxie. That’s who I’d want to have on my team.
What out of home sale are you proudest of?
A client that I had in the younger days of my career known as Cramers Hardware. A client of mine in Pennsylvania. They were pretty adamant that they weren’t interested in doing out of home. And we had many meetings with them. And in one brave moment I brought three signs with me. One was a quote from Mother Theresa. One was from music, “Should I stay or should I go now?. And one was “Show me the money”. I got very brave and walked out with a contract and enjoyed doing three dimensional creative for this client like a saw cutting through the billboard, a three dimensional tool belt, we built a spec house on one of the billboards. They became a household name. Our whole sales team – they couldn’t go anywhere on a cold call without saying “We’re the ones that do the Cramer billboard.” To this day that client is still a dear friend.
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