ALWAYS BE CREATING

When I was in radio, the general manager of my station was a great dude named John Maguire. When John talked about closing business, he would say, “It’s our job to be the Money Zamboni and clean up all the cash on the table.” In order to do that, you can’t just sell people what you have; you have to be the conduit for what your customers need. Radio stations and media have the ability to be creative and assist clients in ways that go well beyond selling them radio commercials. While the same is true for sports teams, creating opportunities for your clients to do more business with you, really cleaning up all the cash on the table, is more than possible for any company that’s not just focused on the inventory it has.

One night Joe Mariani, the director of sales at the Patriots, and I were having dinner with one of our partners, John O’Connor from GlaxoSmithKline. We had created a number of hospitality programs with John to help him achieve his goals, and he was spending a few hundred thousand with us, but we knew that his budget was deeper and that there was real potential for growth. Again, it was our job to be the Zamboni, which is not a bad thing, by the way. We were charged with generating more revenue for the team, so it was our job to extract as much money as possible from a client’s budget. Don’t lose sight of the point: generating revenue and cleaning up the money is great. Focusing on it and trying to “sell” just isn’t the way to do so. We kne....