To sell more OOH faster we must understand what buyers, in this case professional buyers, want from sales reps. I interviewed Ali Broback, Chief Client Officer, Partner at ODN, and Matt B0rders VP of Media, at ODN to determine the things they wish OOH sales reps knew. Last week they talked about how to respond to an RFP. Today they talk about how to deal with difficult agency relationships.
Kevin
Agencies, like so many other categories, are on a spectrum. Some are collaborative; they want to give you a lot of information because they want to have the maximum solution you can provide, all the way down to the other end, which are, and I’ll use the word “angry.” They antagonize media. In fact, some of them I’ve worked with have denigrated into some pretty disparaging conversations. It’s just billboards. It’s not world peace. But when you’re faced with representing an agency who has what I’ll call, slash and burn mentality with the media, how do you bridge that? Do you decide not to do business with them because it’s not your culture?
Ali Broback
Well, that’s a very good question. We do run into that “angry” feel. At the end of the day, if we want to choose as a business to continue to work with them, it’s just something you learn to deal with. But also, we’re always fostering, breaking through that anger ceiling. As Chief Client Officer, I’ve often said, where it’s like you say, we’re not curing cancer here. This is out of home and things go wrong sometimes. We cannot expect perfection. As long as we’re making progress, we’re solving issues by bringing solutions to the table at all times, and we’re acting like a true partner on behalf of their agency and their brands you represent, that’s what matters at the end of the day. I’ve turned a lot of minds around on that. That’s something I’m really proud of as far as our client-facing team is concerned.
Kevin
Do you ever decline to work with a shop who has such an antagonistic attitude it’s hard for you to bridge between the media and them?
Matt Borders
I think there are times that we have maybe started a relationship with an agency and realized really quickly that it’s probably not going to work out, and just let it fizzle out and not pursue any further. I think that’s more common than just saying, “We’re going to completely walk away from this.” But it’s a balancing act. Anything you do, you’re going to have to deal with people who you don’t agree with or would normally not associate with outside of work.
Now, if it becomes a moral issue, that’s a different question. But if you’re just talking about working with grumpy people, that’s going to happen in any industry. You’re just going to have to learn to deal with it and work with them. We are lucky. We have a number of really good clients, but I would be lying if I said every client was easy to work with and peaceful. That’s not true for anybody.
Ali Broback
Sometimes, I’ll even help people on my team write email responses. If somebody receives an email that is getting under their skin a little bit, we help write a good response. I’ve taught a lot of our team how to write good response emails when somebody’s really mad about a mistake that happened. Over the last few years, we put a very large focus on how important our vendor relationships are. Our mantra at ODN is our vendor partners (all the media owners) are just as important to us as our clients are. Because without good relationships with the big three and beyond, we don’t have any clients. I think our vendors feel that. They’re willing to do a favor for us maybe more often. We don’t always ask for favors, but when we do, we really need it. I think this has spawned a beautiful relationship our clients then feel, and it brings more value to our clients too.
Kevin
I’m not talking necessarily about mistakes, because mistakes are going to happen. As long as we use humans instead of AI, there are going to be mistakes. I’m referring to media entities who, when they send out an RFP, when they have conversations about rates, placement, units, et cetera, it’s this angry tone. Your OOH company is trying to screw me over. They actually will use some fairly disparaging language. It’s not even a grumpy mood, because we can deal with grumpy.
Matt Borders
I don’t see that much. I think with the customers we work with, most of them really appreciate what we do because they can’t do it, and they know they don’t know how. Even the largest full-service agencies that we work with call themselves full-service, but they use us. Because out-of-home, to them, is too much time, it’s too many resources they have to commit. It’s taken us 25 years to get to where we are. They would rather just come to us and say, “Here.” We’re a relief to them, in a sense.
We do have tougher clients than some. We have more demanding (clients), but I don’t think they look down on us. We are in a unique position because there are people who, like us in a sense (out-of-home agencies) who maybe get more of that than we do.
We look at it more like our vendors. We want our vendors to be our partners. We look at our clients as our partners. It goes both ways. If we are solving problems for them, which we are, they tend to be a little more on the nice side and not disparaging.
Ali Broback
I think that’s mostly directed at the big three (OOH companies). I remember seeing those types of emails and dealing with that sort of feel in our RFP requests. I think the reason we’re hired sometimes is because they don’t like working with a certain rep. I’ve been hired before to be a middleman because they don’t want to work with so-and-so in certain markets.
Kevin
Wouldn’t they just request a different rep?
Ali Broback
Oh, Kevin, you know, if you request a different rep, management will say, don’t tell me how to run my business. We have tried that before, and we have settled into an amazing rep structure now. But there have been mishaps where somebody retires, we get assigned somebody new, and it takes a minute to onboard them to our ways, and sometimes it’s not a good fit, and we have to advocate for ourselves.
Next installment: “Who’s Problem is it Anyway?”
Gaining OOH sales insights is why the OOH Sales Academy was created.
Now is the time to allocate training dollars in your 2025 budget to secure a competitive advantage for your sales reps by enrolling them in the next session of the Academy. It begins January 15, 2025, and runs for 12 weeks. For more information, visit my website: https://oohsalesfaster.com/sales-academy/ or contact me at 612-387-5349. You can be invoiced in either December or January
To receive a free morning newsletter with each day’s Billboard insider articles email info@billboardinsider.com with the word “Subscribe” in the title. Our newsletter is free and we don’t sell our subscriber list.
Paid Advertisement
