For more than a quarter of a century, the first few months of the year meant a Radio Advertising Bureau Managing Sales Conference. It was Woodstock for Radio’s sellers and managers, a real working conference, usually without traditional “convention” trappings. This year, as a result of our difficult economic climate, the RAB Conference has been merged with the NAB Fall Radio Show, to be held in late September in Washington, DC.

Yet for many Radio folks, this is RAB season. I've asked a number of what I consider to be among our industry’s best “thinkers” to join me looking forward, to mull over the future of the RAB: How stations can best use it, where the organization itself should be focusing, and what moves should be made to help RAB through its current struggles. As you read through the articles, I strongly encourage Radio-Info’s readers to join in the important conversation about this critical industry institution.

No one could be better positioned to speak to the situation at the Radio Advertising Bureau than its long-time President and CEO, Gary Fries. During his tenure, RAB reached great heights in membership, importance and influence, and level of service to the membership.

Here’s what Gary had to say:

“We have to build the radio industry back one market, one station, one individual at a time. This downturn is not unique in the history of radio, but we are trying to solve this problem from the top down, instead of the bottom up. It takes time to do it, and it is not an easy fix. But that’s the way we have to do it.

Having a great personality on the air will never be maximized until there’s someone who can translate to the consumer the value of the product.

The RAB has cut back on that, because the industry has cut back on that. Those are the symptoms, but they are not the dynamics of the illness. The illness is that the priority has not been the training of the individuals. The symptoms are the lack of facilities to train the people who want to use the radio industry as a career.

It is true that this is deeper than downturns have been in the past. When I took over the RAB in 1990, the first meeting I had was with the national reps, Interep and Katz, and it was announced by the leadership of those organizations that national business was down 15%. That was a wake-up call to me. The RAB membership was down to 1700. During my tenure we raised that number to close to 6,000 stations, and one person who kept me on the straight and narrow was a fellow named Radio Wayne Cornils, who supported me and the RAB.

One of the things that became obvious to us in the downturn of the early 1990s is that the national theme was important, but it was not the driving element. In order to recover at radio, you had to recover the confidence and skillset of the local salespeople who were selling radio – because that amounted to 80% of our revenue.

Today, there’s very little being done to train the leaders of tomorrow. Not only to train them how to sell, but how to believe in the industry that we have built, and to withstand the onslaught of the competition in an ever-changing environment. That means how radio is received, how it is used, how it is embraced by the consumer.

If you do not have the training or the confidence among the young people who enter the business, you will have a generation gap of non-performers and non-leaders in the industry we are all a part of. The emphasis has to be placed on the training of the people who are selling radio – so they feel they know how to get results for the mom and pop, the small advertisers of today. The local car dealer has only so many places to turn to, for advertising. True, it is easier to make a lot of waves in a larger environment if you’re a salesperson, but we need to pull the industry from the bottom up, rather than pushing it downward. It can’t be a top-down environment. There is more room to grow that way, rather than forcing the industry upon the advertisers. I know a lot of the major market operators, and they worked their way up.

One reason we built an academy at the RAB was to teach young people to have confidence. So much of selling is confidence – in fact, it’s all confidence. You know, most of us really don’t like a true salesperson. A true salesperson is over-confident, and we are envious of that person. We call them cocky. But that is the trait of a good salesperson. We have to not only teach the knowledge and skills and the tools, we have to give them the ability to communicate that to other people. You don’t just pluck somebody out of the crowd and say, you shall be a good salesperson or leader. It’s ongoing. You have to grow that in the individual and provide the environment for growth.

The industry is now being run by the stockholders and the values that lenders place upon the station. But that is a small part of the overall industry when you look at the number of radio stations, and the population that they serve. True, a city like New York, or Los Angeles or Chicago is important the complexion of the total country, but so is the small town in Iowa or South Dakota or Montana, where the people in radio get their teeth into the medium, and they grow into the larger markets. We are one of the few industries that can reach from pillar to post, from one side of the community to the other, and we must teach the salespeople how to have confidence in how to use radio to be successful – so that they can become the leaders of tomorrow.

National sales will not fix themselves until the local salesperson is trained and confident. But you cannot grow people in a day. We can fix this, but it has be one person at a time. And we must recognize that the small and medium markets are the incubators that will grow the leaders of tomorrow.

To sum up: To expect the rewards down the road, we must invest both time and dollars in our people. As for the role of Radio Advertising Bureau, it should lead sellers and managers to help them, not become irrelevant. That task is easy during good times but hard during tough times, and the RAB should be prepared for that."

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Reach out to Gary here by email: garyfries897@gmail.com

For more information on the RAB, please reach out to Jeff Haley, President and CEO of the RAB at JMHaley@rab.com

Read the next entry in the series, from respected South Dakota-based broadcaster Dean Sorenson.