Angela Betasso, President, and Billie Adkins, Senior Marketing Consultant.
Co-workers sitting at established home-work stations. Same information relayed in morning virtual meetings replayed again in the afternoon ones—hardly repackaged and not much new. Another day, another training zoom. Another day, another ______. You know the drill, you’re living it… it’s Ground Hog Day.
It’s time to shake it up and we all know it. PHASE 1 is done. PHASE 2 is here and has to look different than 1.
Here are our thoughts to help kick off Phase 2:
Have each member of the team create PHASE 2 Action Plans specific to them. A 60-day plan is a good place to start.
In helping each team member write their action plan, encourage self-reflection. What has worked for them over the past 6 weeks? Did they develop new knowledge or a good habit to build upon? Did they identify a bad one that needs to be eliminated as they move forward? How did client relationships shift? How did they manage themselves? How did they prioritize and what processes did they improve on or optimize? As we all know, the best plans have specificity, with actions and outcomes that can be measured.
Shake up your virtual daily schedules and meetings. Take a hard look at what’s a “must have” meeting vs. a “nice to have” one—or worse a “why are we having it?” one—and start editing now.
With the ones you keep, we encourage more interactivity, and with smaller sales teams, more role play. Get better at responding to objections, playing forward successes, and overall, dealing with real-world examples.
Pivot with clients. Move from (mostly) LISTEN mode to ACTION mode, encouraging advertisers to do the same. We’ve been talking about “the pivot” for 2 weeks—it’s time for Pivoting Priority.
If any business waits to plan, they’ll be too late. Bringing real-world solutions and examples to help their thinking in the pivot is a gift. Let’s not wait to share powerful platforms with engagement at high levels. We know advertisers are starting to come back, new categories have been found, even network advertisers are expected to shift to our local platforms with markets opening at various times. Inventory will be different as a result… and don’t even get us started on political:)
PHASE 2 is here. Let’s go.
(View more Prime Time Leadership posts on current happenings in media leadership here:)
We’re having lots of conversations with senior leaders about subjects like this. If we can be a sounding board for you or your company during this time, please reach out. jim@jimdoyle.com and angela@jimdoyle.com