Use your media sales CRM to plan and analyze, just in case you don't win the lottery!
Lucky Elephant. Irish Hospital Sweepstakes parade through Dublin, 1935. Before every draw of winning tickets there was a parade through the city with all of the tickets carried in the boxes you can see in this photo. National Library of Ireland.

Somebody finally won it. Can you believe someone is now about 600 million dollars richer? Sadly, that someone is not you.

I always watch lottery fever with interest. When it gets to a certain point, people who never buy tickets are standing in lines at the Jiffee Trip. There is another point at which office and work groups jump in. Even those who don’t buy think about how their lives would change, if only...

But you don’t hear of lottery ticket buyers quitting their jobs BEFORE the numbers have been drawn. We all know that, while there is always hope that we could be that somebody, we will be needing our jobs tomorrow.

It is also easy to get caught up in lottery fever in media sales.

• Don’t count on the big prize. If you put all your effort into that one big client, you stand the chance of holding a worthless proposal in the end. Like the lottery, you may have little to no control or influence over the client, especially if you are working with an agency. And if you're dealing with a massive budget, you may be a winner, but you will probably have to share with other winners. Go for it, but don’t quit your day job, which is developing new business and having a client portfolio made up of all sizes and types of accounts.
• Your chances increase if you play and play regularly. Your chances for developing new business will increase if you prospect regularly, not just when your sales funnel runs dry. If your bank account ran totally dry, you probably wouldn't count on paying your bills with the winnings from a lottery ticket. Keep prospecting and you will get medium and large clients on the road to (hopefully) getting that one mega-order.
• Your chances increase, but your exposure decreases if you play with a group. What’s the difference if you put $10 bucks into a pool, or spend the $10 on your own tickets? But you feel more excited with a group and you get a share of more tickets with the same expenditure. In media sales, the biggest sales come when the programming department has helped develop the promotion or event, when the production department has created a spec spot, and when the sales manager and general manager have also helped develop the relationship and are behind you. Share the wealth and the glory with your team.
• Don’t over think it. The lottery is a form of gambling. The odds are not with you. Don’t spend so much time analyzing which numbers are chosen more often, how to fill in the numbers when you buy your ticket, or what part of the country has the best chances, that you never buy the ticket! In media sales you have many CRM and prospecting tools, and you can sit at the computer for hours gathering information, but at some point, you have to face the odds of whether or not the prospect will interact with you. Use the tools to get direction and realize that it is always a gamble that this will be the big hit.
• Dreaming and planning are good things. Planning with your CRM and media sales analytics tools, and managing your account list so that you maximize your revenue will pay off.  Dreaming about what can be is great, as long as you don’t just count on that one big win. Many dreams can be fulfilled, but it is going to take more work for a longer time than simply buying a $2 lottery ticket.

I’ll see you all at work tomorrow.

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