We do the hardest part of sales

If you’ve been leading local media sales teams over the past few decades like I have, you’ve watched the job get harder.

We need more local direct revenue than ever. National and regional dollars have shifted toward programmatic and digital platforms, and what’s left has to be built locally, one business at a time. At the same time, there are fewer people doing that work. More than half of broadcast sellers have left the industry over the last decade, and the sellers still here are carrying more accounts, more responsibility, and less time to go find new business.

The old junior AE model doesn’t work like it used to either. Hiring young sellers to pound the phones, build a book, and earn their way up used to help fill the top of the funnel. But that job isn’t as attractive as it once was. The people who would’ve taken those roles ten years ago now have better options in digital and tech sales, and they’re taking them.

So we’ve created a situation where the most important work in the building gets the least amount of time. And it also happens to be the hardest part of the job.

Prospecting is a full-time job

SaaS figured this out years ago. Software companies stopped pretending the same person should own every part of the sales process from cold prospecting to close. They broke the work apart. Prospecting became its own job. Closing became its own job. Customer growth became its own job.

That doesn’t mean those jobs stopped working together. It means each part got the focus, tools, systems, and daily discipline it needed to work well. Local media has been slower to make that shift. We’ve kept asking account executives to prospect, pitch, close, service, renew, and grow accounts at the same time, and then we wonder why prospecting is the first thing to slip.

But prospecting is a full-time job.

I ran the experiment

In my last corporate role, we tested both answers. We built an in-house prospecting team, and we hired an outsourced firm at the same time. Then we watched what actually happened.

The in-house team knew media. They spoke the language, understood the products, and could have real conversations with business owners. But they got pulled into meetings, projects, and internal priorities. Their time on the phones kept shrinking.

The outsourced team had discipline. They made the calls every day, consistently, without distraction. But they didn’t speak media. They sounded like an outside vendor, and you could feel the disconnect in the conversations and the handoffs.

Each model solved half the problem. The in-house team had the fluency. The outsourced team had the discipline. The answer was both.

That’s why I built OverDrive

OverDrive Group brings the discipline of a real outbound team together with the fluency of people trained to talk about media the way media actually sells. We don’t sell lists. We land first meetings.

We identify the right businesses, find the right decision-makers, call, email, follow up, track what’s happening, learn from what we’re hearing, and keep working until real meetings are on the calendar. And we do it under your brand.

That last part matters. We’re not trying to replace your sellers. We’re building the front end of your pipeline so your sellers can spend more time doing what they’re best at: building relationships, proving value, closing business, and growing accounts.

The old way depended on heroic effort. The new way depends on a system. That’s what we’ve built.

The bell still rings for the close. Our job is to make sure there’s a line of first meetings behind it.

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Chris Overby spent 25 years in local media before founding OverDrive Group in 2024. OverDrive Group books first meetings for radio, local TV, digital, out-of-home, publishing, and sports sellers, under their brand.