Why We Think YOU Should Be in Control of Your Rate Card

ShareBuilders has always given you the ability to customize the setup of your rate cards, but did you know that now you can edit them before you download? This ability comes thanks to ShareBuilder Pricing, our new, web-based version of ShareBuilder.

Are we crazy to give you that much control over your rates? No, not at all.

Does that mean we don’t believe in the science behind the rates we give you? Absolutely not. We’ve been doing this for over 20 years and we know that our approach works.

Giving you this flexibility is simply the next step in the evolution of our partnership with clients.

ShareBuilders learned long ago that the most successful way for sales managers to use our product was to do so in consultation with our forecasting experts. By creating a realistic forecast every week through a productive discussion of current market conditions and past historical trends, we could give our clients rates that would get them to those forecast numbers.

Those weekly conversations are the secret sauce that sets ShareBuilders apart from other pricing tools. It’s one thing to plug in budget or a corporate forecast and let a system do some math and spit out some numbers. Sure, those rates should get you to goal, but how does a system like that account for the fact that Kroger just canceled the rest of Q2, or that your market experienced several days of severe weather and now you have to make good all those spots that got preempted during live coverage? At ShareBuilders, your consultant has many ways to help you tweak your rates to adjust for those situations.

That being said, we recognize our clients aren’t going to love every rate we give them, even if we preemptively make adjustments. ShareBuilder Pricing is designed to give you the lowest rate that supply and demand will allow. We are the floor, and we stand by our promise that using these rates will get you to forecast. However, our clients understand better than we ever could that sometimes there are reasons that those rates won’t work, even if math says they will. Here are some examples:

• The show’s demand may be inelastic. No matter how low you go, you’re not going to increase sell out. In that case, why go for the floor? Set the rate as high as you can without affecting the number of units they’ll buy.
• You’re the big dog in town and you need to keep your rates higher to bring in the market. We see this sometimes in our smaller markets and we get it. Your strategy has to be different when you’re commanding a significantly larger share of the market.
• You simply won’t go below a certain rate on local news programs. Your consultant may argue with you on this one, but at the end of the day, you’re the one responsible for bringing money into the station. We know that you got yourself in the manager's seat by being a good salesperson and sometimes your gut does win over data.

Our ultimate goal is to save you time on your rate card by allowing you to edit rates in Pricing before sending them out to your team or uploading them to a system like WOMS. We know that almost every client uses our rates cards a little differently. Some treat our cards as the absolute authority and send it straight to their team without changing a thing. Others might use us as a guideline to create their own rate card. We know some never look at them at all because they value a different aspect of our service. Whatever the scenario, we want to be your partner in putting out a rate card that works for you and your team.