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It's not uncommon that an advertising representative is hired to replace a salesperson who has recently left the company. If this is the situation you're in, then most likely the unattended territory, which is now your territory, is losing serious money, which means you're losing serious money.

In this chapter, you'll learn what to do to begin to stabilize your new territory. If you're reading this before you've been assigned a territory, you may want to keep this section in mind and come back to it once you get one.

Gathering reports
First, you need to find out a little more about your territory. Most likely, your publication has an ad reservation/billing system that can help.

With permission of your manager, find the person who can print something out that would be similar to one or all of these reports:

Account list
An account list is simply a report that lists the names and addresses of anyone based in your territory who has been billed in the last year (or longer).

Activity report
This report lists who has advertised in your territory over a certain period of time, where they ran, and what size they ran. Ideally, I'd recommend that you ask for a report on everyone in your territory who has advertised within the last year--including this time last year.

Contracts
Unless you've been put into a territory that is newly created, or if you've been assigned as a floater (a rep that goes into other people's territories to sell accounts who haven't run in the past few months), then most likely the territory you're taking over has some advertisers who have signed a contract.

A contract advertiser is any advertiser who has agreed to run an ad for a certain number of weeks (or a set amount of space over a period of time) in exchange for a discount. Ask for a report listing those accounts under contract. We'll talk more about contracts in the section about rate cards.

Next: Going where the money is