DAN O’DAY TALKS ABOUT RADIO

If you could ask one of the world’s biggest experts on Sales for advice on handling a specific sales challenge — one that you’re facing right now, or one that regularly stymies you — would would that question be?

Seriously.

I’ve scheduled an exclusive teleseminar with Chet Holmes for July 22. Chet is a sales legend.

He gets interviewed a lot, but instead of asking the same generic questions he usually gets, I want every question to be about a specific challenge that radio account execs face in the real world. (Trust me, he’ll be able to help you. Chet lives and breathes sales.)

So…Seriously…What questions would you like to have answered?

The other day I received an email from a client in India — someone for whom I conducted a week of seminars fairly recently. He said:

Recently saw a video of you on YouTube, you were much younger then… could barely recognize you…

Well, the guy on YouTube does look younger than I. But it ain’t me.

It’s a jock in the Phillipines (and, I believe, a reader of this blog) who for some reason decided to mime to a recording of my Morning Show Ratings Explosion.

He gives a very convincing performance. But I’m pretty sure I don’t look quite that goofy when I conduct a seminar….

That’s what a blogging “expert” friend told me.

If he’s correct, then either you are:

Lost

or

Really, really lonely right now.

If you’re a real radio guy (that term applies to women and men equally), here’s something to entertain and, I hope, inspire you.

It won’t be here on Monday, though.

(Sorry, it’s gone now. Maybe next weekend there’ll be another surprise gift.)

There are some things they don’t prepare you for in radio school.

I traveled from Los Angeles to a tiny town in Virginia for my first radio job.

My first day on the air was a Saturday.

The jock before me split as soon as I cracked the mic, and I was alone in the building.

The first hour went pretty well. Didn’t “wow” any records, no noticeable dead air.

And then, from inside the studio, I began to hear a competing radio station.

I’m not talking about some annoying RF interference. I mean another radio station was blaring from a speaker in the on-air studio.

You see, in the U.S. we had something called the Emergency Broadcast System. Within each county, one station was designated the EBS station. In case of emergency, everyone was supposed to tune to that one station while the others suspended their regular programming.

Actually, it was kind of cool. We had a sealed envelope with the secret authorization password and everything. (Just like in FAIL-SAFE.) It was begun during the Cold War, and fortunately it never needed to be employed.

Our studio (and I guess all stations’ studios) was equipped with an EBS monitor. I was hearing our local EBS station through the monitor.

Four things you need to know about that EBS monitor:

1. It had no “off” switch.

2. It had no volume control.

3. It was hard-wired into the circuitry.

And most importantly:

4. It did not mute when I opened the studio microphone.

So for the rest of my show, every time I cracked the mic to read a live commercial, spot tag, PSA, news, etc….My audience heard a tinny version of the “big” station 15 miles away, through the EBS speaker and into my microphone.

A less than glorious start to my career.

As I write this, suddenly I’m visited by the long-buried memory of returning to my new apartment in that tiny town, filled with despair and thinking, “I’ve made a terrible mistake. I’ll never be able to do this.”

But tomorrow was going to be another working day, so I tried to get some rest.