We tend to grab pages from the Media Kit without thinking much about the information we’re passing along. Before your next sales call, take a cold hard look at what’s in the folder. How much value is it really providing?

A few weeks ago, I was working with a television station sales department in a Midwest market. We’d had a great week of needs analysis calls, and I had finished the first drafts of all the proposals. It was up to the account executives to add the television and digital advertising plans, along with information about why their television station was the best choice for the client.

I opened a revision from salesperson, and in the “Why Our Station ” section was a page that said, “WXXX was recently chosen the Best Local TV Station by the readers of Springfield Magazine.” (Call letters and market name have been changed to protect the guilty).

I’m going to go out on a limb here and state that nobody cares what the readers of Springfield Magazine think of the TV station.

The viewers don’t care.

The employees of Springfield Magazine don’t care.

The customers weren’t going to care, either. This information was not going to move anyone any closer to spending money on the station.

And yet, there it was… in that proposal and four or five others from the same staff. It was in there because someone in the station marketing department had made that page and put in the media kit. The path of least resistance was to copy that page and paste it into the proposal.

HUGE MISTAKE

Slapping media kit pages into your presentation is the easiest thing to do, and it’s a huge mistake. Media kits are often written by somebody who’s never met your station’s clients, and has no idea what customers really want to know. Without major modification, media kit pages do not belong in your proposals.

Here are some common media kit subjects that your clients don’t care about:

·       The “Award-Winning News Department.” News awards are like youth soccer trophies: everybody gets one. All of your competitors have “award winning news”, too.

·        The station’s share of adults 25 to 54… when the client’s customers are all 55+.

·        A pie chart showing that 56% of some survey’s respondents believe that your medium is “the most influential”.

Here’s what the clients will care about: bringing new customers to their businesses and making more money.  Your clients and prospects care about themselves. 

When it comes time to do an important presentation for major dollars, burn the media kit. Take the extra time to write each page from scratch — make it about your customer, not about you.

Before including any piece of information in the proposal, ask yourself: “If I were the client, would this information cause me to want to buy the plan we’re proposing?”

Be ruthless about this. If the answer is no, leave it out.

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