Thoughts On Advertising Sales

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.

1. You need a system to track all your contacts to prospects.  This system needs to inform you of the details of all sales attempts.
2. You also need to separate the real prospects from the dead prospects, to maximize return.
3. It helps to know as much as you can about your prospects because the old adage “Selling is mostly overcoming objections”  still holds true.
4. 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

Anyone remember the letter?

• Not an email letter.
• Not a letter as part of a media kit in a large envelop and folder.
• Not faxed letter.

An actual, personal, typed letter, three folded, in a #10 envelop, with a personalize address.*

The letter will be one page or less with margins of 1/2″ or more all around.

It will be personally signed, not stamped or computer signed.

It will be concise, to the point, with no spellings errors AND grammatically correct.

What used to be the norm has become the new way to get your prospect’s attention.

What clever idea!

Glenn

* With a little power end user knowledge you can generate a hundred of these letters and the envelops.  All you need to do manually is sign, stuff and seal.

One thought about selling ad space, be it for print ro web media is “Sales is mostly overcoming objections.”

After you make your presentation and ASK FOR THE SALE, anything other than a yes is an objection of some sort.
Discovering what the real objection is, however, is often much deeper than asking. When people say no to a sales pitch the reason(s) they give may or may not have anything to do with their real objection.

So, how do you discover what the real issue is?

1. I always start with knowing as much about my prospect and the company as I can possibly gather. Sometimes it is a lot.  Sometimes not.  I keep this information in my sales system and open on the screen.   Reading and re reading it can give me some thoughts on how to get what the objection is and how to counter it.
2. I ask questions.  Even the old hat ones like “How do  feel most comfortable keeping your name in front of customers and prospects?” often gives me all the information I need to understand the objection.  This is often “We know who our prospects are?”, “We email the industry regularly.” or “We get 1,000 hits a week on our website so we know the market is aware of us.”  My job is to have the right response to any and all the above objections.
3. Despite years of selling ad space, then selling computer systems and having heard all the objections unlimited times, I know I cannot always have the right answer at the tip of my tongue.  One way I used to deal with this was an internal website with a list of objections…each one linking to a list of replies.  The latter was not text to read back, but ideas to elaborate on.  At one point the list of replies had further links to handle sub objections.
4. As an ad space salesman I was tenacious.  I did not let go unless the prospect specifically told me to leave them alone.  My touch was light but consistent.

And, for the blatant commercial message I used SM4 or a similar program to remind me who to contact, when to contact them and what happened in the past.

Glenn

We’ve seen a dramatic upheaval in the publishing industry these past few years.  Hundreds of magazines have been folded.  Tens of thousands of industry jobs have been eliminated.  Advertising budgets have been slashed.  And there is greater accountability for every publisher than ever before.

This is a time to rethink your core business model.  Outsourcing your ad sales, which might have been unthinkable only a few years ago, may be your best possible business model in the year and years to come.  Outsourcing is increasingly more prevalent in every aspect of publishing.  Circulation, marketing, editorial content, and production are all being outsourced on a regular basis.

Conservatively, we estimate that the savings to your bottom line could be 40% by utilizing independent  advertising sales representation over an in-house staff.  And remember, too, that publishers’ representatives are highly motivated to sell the maximum amount of ad revenue—they get paid on results.  They will also bring you countless innovative ideas and strategic thinking based on years of experience.   They’re also experts at selling integrated programs that encompass all media assets.

[OK, OK.  I know I work for a rep firm--one of the best, but I am passionate about what we can accomplish when we work together!  ]

And with half the year closed, are your ad sales where you need them to be?  How is the rest of 2010 shaping up?

Steve Schwanz
Executive Vice President
Fox Associates, Inc.

I sold ad spece in most of the 1970s and 1980s.   My company also wrote and maintains SM4.
Because I do have not sold ad space for many years and never sold internet advertising my contributions to this blog will be limited.
Except for me, all the contributors will be people with a long history and current day to day involvement in advertising space sales.

Despite my shift into the computer world, there are some universal truths that still apply to advertising space sales, be it for print media or the internet.

Selling of all kinds is still overcoming objections, on one level or another. And, one of the objections I constantly got from prospects was that they had other ways of reaching their targeted market.  When this came up I went for the two promotions I carried from McGraw Hill.

The first one showed a picture of a businessman in an office chair with his back toward the reader. The following quote was attached:

“You don’t know who I am.
You don’t know my title.
You don’t know where I work.
You don’t know what I do.
You don’t call on me.
You don’t mail things to me.
You don’t even know that I exist.
But — I can make or break your sale.”

The second promotion had the man facing forward, with the quotes starting with “I don’t know you you are.” etc.

The point was, even today (since most mass email is trashed) advertising is one the least expensive ways for your client to get the message out to everyone, whether they are in a buying mood or not.

I was a great sales tool then, and I suspect it still is.

Glenn Abelson