Learn more about your territory
OK, so you've just been given a territory, or most likely you'll be receiving one soon. So what do you do first as a new advertising representative?

Well, you might want to find out a little more about your territory. If you don't have one yet, you may want to keep this section in mind and come back to it once a territory is assigned. For those of you that have been assigned a territory, let's dive in.

Gathering reports
Ask your manager for a list of the accounts that are in your territory. If there is no list currently available (which does happen from time to time), ask around. Most newspapers have computerized billing systems, as well as a computerized system of ad reservation, that is, a computerized system to ensure that a space is reserved in the newspaper for your advertisers. Find the person who maintains these systems and see if they can print something out that would be similar to one or all of these reports:

Account list
An account list is a report that simply lists the names and addresses of any one billed in the last year (or longer if they have the information) who resides in your territory. Your territory probably already has a number assigned to it. Simply get that number and give it to the person who has agreed to print the report for you.

Activity report for your territory (past 3 months)
This is a report that lists who has advertised in your territory over a certain period of time, where they ran, and what size they ran. Ideally, I'd recom mend that you ask for a report on everyone in your territory who has adver- tised within the last couple of months as well as another report on just the last month of activity for reasons I'll explain later.

Contracts
Unless you've been put into a territory that is completely new, or if you've been assigned as a floater, that is, a rep that exclusively goes after accounts in other people's territories 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. The advertiser agrees to run a certain number of weeks or a set amount of space over a period of time. Ask for a report listing those accounts under contract. In almost all cases, the contract gives the advertiser a discounted rate and the billing department keeps a current list of these people so that they know how much to charge everybody. We'll talk more about contracts in the section about rate cards.