I’ve known Jed Williams for years and I can tell you this without hesitation. In any given week, Jed talks to more media sales teams, sales managers, and chief revenue officers than almost anyone in our industry. As Chief Innovation Officer at the Local Media Association, his job is to help traditional media companies discover and develop new, sustainable business models. Which means he sees what is actually working, and what is falling apart, inside real sales organizations every day.
That made him an obvious early guest on the Conquer Local Podcast. What he shared about proving performance, the death of the product peddler, and CNA 2.0 is still some of the most relevant advice in the show archive.
89 Phone Calls A Month And Why It Changes Everything
Jed shared a number that reframes every conversation sellers have with local businesses. The Dallas Morning News asked several auto dealer partners how many phone calls they receive in a month about advertising and marketing. The answer was 89. Not 40, not 50. Eighty nine calls a month asking for their attention.
If you are a traditional media rep walking in with a handshake and a capabilities deck, you are one of 89 voices that week. Jed’s take was blunt:
“If you can’t actually solve specific problems for them, in the long term you’re gonna lose because you’re going up against organizations that understand products and solutions that can do that.”
CNA 1.0 vs CNA 2.0
The customer needs analysis has to evolve. The old CNA is showing up with a form and asking a business 30 minutes of questions that every other rep is asking too. No business owner has that kind of time to give 89 people.
CNA 2.0 flips the script. You arrive with data and insights about the business, you help further their thinking in the first touch, and you earn the right to ask deeper questions later. That shift requires three things:
- Pre-call research built on real data, not just a website glance
- A point of view on what the business should be considering next
- Permission to come back with a plan rooted in what they actually need
Proof Of Performance Is The Competitive Moat
Jed and I lined up on when proof of performance should enter the conversation. It starts early, not at the month three reporting meeting. You set the expectations in the first solution discussion. Here is how the reporting works, here is when you will see the first results, here is how we are going to calibrate together.
If you skip that step, the client draws their own conclusions. That is a fast track to churn, especially on products like SEO where results unfold over weeks, not days.
Then you have to actually show up. Not with a dashboard link or a PDF emailed at 5pm. Jed is emphatic on this:
“You are constantly coming back and delivering results, but you’re not just showing ’em a dashboard. You are doing real analysis, putting it in context, creating prescription on what’s happening next.”
That is the exact muscle I try to build in every sales organization I work with. For more on how to operationalize it, read my piece on leveraging your online reputation to increase sales.
The Four Week Rule
One of Jed’s best stories came from a mid-size radio group that launched its own digital agency. They measured client retention against touchpoint frequency. Four weeks or less, retention held strong. Go to six weeks and churn started climbing. Go to eight and the bucket leaked badly.
I’ll admit something here. Twenty some years ago, the month I started hitting budget as a rookie was the month I started seeing my customers more than once every eight weeks. The math has not changed. Cadence drives retention.
A monthly cadence also surfaces every cross sell and upsell opportunity you could ask for. The reps who skip the monthly meeting miss both the renewal and the expansion.
Who Owns The Customer After The Sale
Jed made a critical point that often gets blurred. Bringing in digital specialists is not a substitute for training your legacy reps in digital. Too often the digital specialist becomes a crutch. The rep says “I’ll bring Brent along” and never actually learns the platform.
What Jed was really pushing on is the post-sale role. Who owns the reporting? Who pulls data from the social, SEM, and website teams into one story? Who hands that story back to the AE with enough context that they can walk into the client with confidence?
If that role does not exist, your sales process has a hole in it. Fill it. I get into this in more detail in what makes a great sales team.
Where To Go From Here
If you sell for a local media company, start with one question. What does your CNA 2.0 look like, and can every rep deliver it? If you can’t answer that, you are competing on handshake equity while 88 other reps are competing on data. Then lock in a four week cadence with your top accounts, and build a real post-sale reporting role that takes the burden off the AE. That is the path from product peddler to trusted local expert.