Good is not almost as good as great

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Seth Godin on good salespeople and great salespeople. The best sales managers know in their guts this is good advice. They just don’t have the stomach for it.

“The great ones reach out. They work the phones when they’re not first in line. They understand what a customer wants. They’re not just better than good. They’re playing a totally different game.

My best advice: Fire half your sales force. Then, give the remainder, the top people, a big raise, and use the money left over to steal the best salespeople you can find from other industries or even from your competition. You’ll end up with fewer salespeople. But all of them will be great.

And the good guys? Have them go work for the competition.”

Google Audio Ads by the numbers

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Mark Ramsey (Hear 2.0) offers still more insight on Google Audio Ads, including some screenshots of pages where you specify the demographic and geographic details of your buy. For businesses that don’t need an “advertising consultant” to show up with a media kit and a coverage map, this might be an effective way to buy radio ads.

Radio Announcers (John Mays and Mr. Rudy)

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That’s what they called them when my father and Mr. Rudy (Pylant) were on the air at KBOA in Kennett, Missouri. Pop and Mr. Rudy have since made the transition to Pure Amplitude Modulation but the audio waves of their wonderful voices are still streaking through space.

I had never seen this photo of John and Rudy standing in front of the KBOA studio but, based on the automobiles behind them, it could have been as early as ’49 or ’50. The station went on the air in July of 1947 and my father started in 1949. Any of you car freaks able to ID the year of the car at the right edge of this photo?

What happened to the news?

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A scary little story in today’s USA Today about the findings of a study by the Project for Excellence in Journalism. According to Project Director Tom Rosenstiel,

“The dirty little secret of the information revolution is it has been more about repurposing or repackaging news than gathering it.”

In recent years, because of their own cutbacks, radio and television have increasingly been relying on newspapers and wire services to do their newsgathering for them.

If you think the news is thin on local radio and TV stations now, imagine what it would be if they didn’t have newspapers to rewrite. If,however, your local radio station long ago abandoned any pretense of news, you’ll be okay.

Halliburton hauling ass

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HalliburtonHalliburton, the big energy services company, said today that it would open a corporate headquarters in the United Arab Emirates city of Dubai and move its chairman and chief executive, David J. Lesar, there. The company will maintain its existing corporate office here as well as its incorporation in the United States.

Halliburton, which was led by Vice President Dick Cheney from 1995 to 2000, is currently in the process of spinning off KBR, its military-contracting unit, to focus on its business of drilling wells and maintaining fields for oil companies. The company did not say what implications the Dubai development might have for its Pentagon contracts. [New York Times]