Proofs, continued
If you have an account who wants to see the ad before he will agree to buy, then that would not be considered a proof. Instead it would be considered an ad for presentation also called a spec ad, which means an ad built on speculation. A spec ad is usually created by the artists and requires no space reservation because you're using it to convince the advertiser to actually buy the ad. It's a critical distinction to make.

Also, some of your advertisers might ask you for a proof as a matter of course for every ad they run. There's nothing wrong with bringing a proof out to your advertisers to make sure they're happy with the ad, but it becomes time consuming. You could easily spend a full day on the road dropping off (and in some cases, later picking up corrected) proofs. Now this might not be your fault. It might have been something that a previous rep in your territory encouraged and now your advertisers are in the habit of requesting them.

Try to train your advertisers to only request proofs occasionally. I used to say to my accounts, "Look, since we haven't really gotten to know each other all that well yet, how about I send this layout through to production, bring a proof back to you and we'll see if I communicated what you wanted properly. I'll keep bringing you proofs until we reach a point where you can trust me, hopefully after two or three ad runs. At that point, once I know how you like your ad, I'll check out the ads myself without bringing you a proof. If they come out wrong from that point on, I'll take responsibility." By approaching it this way, you'll be able to train your accounts to trust you and they'll stop pushing you into spending all your time dealing with proofs.

And it is a matter of training them. Whether they are constantly requesting proofs or requesting that you drop off a copy of a newspaper each time their ad runs (which could eat up another day if you did it for all your clients), your advertisers will take their cue from you. If you let them take advantage of you, they'll fill up your days doing things that don't really help either of you. Be firm with them. After all, you're much more than simply an order taker or a glorified messenger.

Let's just hope that the territory you're inheriting didn't have a salesperson who responded to their every whim. The one exception to this is if there have been previous problems. And the problems I'm talking about are not limited to incorrect ads constantly appearing in the newspaper. I'm also talking about an account who nitpicks, or refuses to pay for an ad for a very slight error, for example a spelling error or something not lining up right. Unfortunately, there are a few advertisers out there who try to find anything wrong just to get a discount off their ad. If an advertiser has a history of being difficult in this way, you might want to bring a proof out to him before each ad runs and perhaps even get him to sign it.