It's important to keep your sales pipeline full of prospects. If they don't enter your funnel, they won't come out as sales. This first step is vitally important to growing our business.

Many salespeople dread and avoid prospecting.  While there is no "secret formula" to make it easy, I've listed some rules that can help make prospecting successful. 

1. Make an appointment with yourself.  Discipline is required for successful prospecting.  Since it is so easy to put it off, set aside time to prospect for one hour each and every day.
2. Make as many calls as possible.  Research your target to be sure you reach the best prospects. This will insure that each call will be a high-quality call; and when you are dealing with quality, more is always better than less.
3. Make your calls brief.  It is your objective to introduce yourself and to get an appointment.  It should just take two or three minutes to do so. 
4. Be prepared with a list of names.  Don't waste your prospecting hour attempting to find out the names you need.  That might make you feel busy, but you won't be as productive.
5. Work without interruption.  Prospecting, just as with any repetitive task, improves the more you do it. Take advantage of your momentum.
6. Call during off-peak hours. Conventional wisdom says, "call between 9 AM-5 PM". That doesn't always work. Switch or supplement your calling hours and try calling between 7:30 AM and 9 AM or between 5 PM and 6 PM.
7. Vary your call times.  Everyone is a creature of habit, so prospects probably attend the same meetings every week.  If you cannot reach a prospect, learn from your lack of success and call at some other time or on another day. 
8. Be organized.  Keep a record of whom you have called and when, and the subject you discussed. It will help when you finally get an appointment, and it will also help keep track of whom you're supposed to call back and when.
9. Establish your goals, then develop a plan to get there. If your goal is to set the appointment, your cold-call script should be designed and redesigned to help you achieve your goal.
10. Don't stop. Persistence is the key skill every successful salesperson shares. Remember that most sales are closed after the fifth call. Most salespeople quit after the first call!

A new study from Adobe shows that 28% of website traffic exhibits strong "non-human signals". The Wall Street Journal says that this suggests that the traffic came from bots or click farms. This requires understanding your traffic in terms other than, "I got this many hits". Were those "hits" people or bots? These questions have caused some of the largest advertisers, including Procter and Gamble, to rethink their digital strategy. 

 It's more important than ever that we provide a guide through this increasingly complex advertising universe. Digital advertising has become an important part of many of our clients' marketing strategies. Evidence continues to surface as to how radio accelerates other forms of advertising, including digital. The more we understand how to integrate multiple mediums, the better we can assist our clients in creating successful campaigns.