Persistence
My dad was an advertising space salesman for decades. He used to tell me a story about persistence. “If you contact 100 people a week and your entire sales pitch is ‘Do you want to buy advertising in my publication’ , some of these people will say YES. If, you then continually contact previously contacted people, with the same message, even more will say YES.”
While this might not be an intelligent way to sell advertipsing space it makes a good point. While persistence alone will garner some business, image what intelligent sales persistence will return?
The keys to success are both simple and complex.
- You need a system to track all your contacts to prospects. This system needs to inform you of the details of all sales attempts.
- You also need to separate the real prospects from the dead prospects, to maximize return.
- It helps to know as much as you can about your prospects because the old adage “Selling is mostly overcoming objections” still holds true.
- A game plan of letters (you remember those), emails, phone calls and on site visits adds variety to your persistence. Presenting the same material in a different format (except Power Point ) makes it seem fresh.
Of course there a more ways to sell and get creative. While the methods may change (when I started in ad sales there was no email and not even much fax), the basics remain consistent.
Glenn Abelson
Date: August 9, 2010
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